Shaftesbury and the Ten Hours Act

Some reforms arrive by revolution, brought in on the shoulders of the men they will serve. Others arrive by a slower and stranger route: carried for fifteen years through the lobbies of a parliament by a man whose class interest lies in the other direction, and who keeps walking back to the dispatch box after each defeat because he believes, in a register the new political economy can no longer quite hear, that the question is a moral one and not an economic one.

THE MEMBER FOR BATH

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Lord Ashley, eldest son of the sixth Earl of Shaftesbury, was born at Grosvenor Square on the twenty-eighth of April 1801, schooled at Harrow and Christ Church, returned to the Commons in 1826 and never broke ranks with the Tory benches. He was not a popular man among his own. The Lancashire press called him an aristocratic busybody; the Whigs found his Evangelical seriousness tedious; the manufacturers thought him a sentimentalist who had never costed a shilling. He had taken up the factory question in 1832, when Michael Sadler lost his seat and handed him the chair of the standing committee on child labour in the textile mills. From that moment the matter was his. He had marched the Ten Hours principle into the chamber in 1833 and seen it gutted by Lord Althorp's relay clauses, which let adult shifts run double so the mill day stayed at fourteen hours. He had marched it back in 1844 with Graham, and lost. He had marched it back in 1846 with Fielden, and lost by twenty votes. He had read the Sadler Report and the inspectors' reports and the testimony of the children themselves, and he had written in his diary, plainly, that the condition of the operative children of the north was, in his words, a national sin.

THE EVENING OF THE EIGHTH OF JUNE

On the evening of the eighth of June 1847 the temporary Commons chamber was hot. The old House had burned in 1834 and Barry's rebuilding was still in scaffolding along the river; members sat in a borrowed room, the west windows full of late summer light that did not fade until past nine. The Bill on the order paper was Fielden's: John Fielden of Todmorden, the Quaker cotton-master who had stood against the interest of his own trade through five defeats, had carried it as a private member in Ashley's place because Ashley himself, after the failure of 1846, had given up his seat for Dorset on a matter of conscience over the Corn Laws and was not in the House for its earlier readings. He had been returned for Bath at a by-election and was back on the benches in time for the third reading. The division bell rang. The tellers stood at the bar. The numbers came back: one hundred and forty-five for, sixty-six against. A Tory-Radical majority over the Whig-manufacturing interest. The Bill had passed.

THE PAUSE BEHIND THE SPEAKER'S CHAIR

He did not at once go down to the lobby. He stood for a moment behind the Speaker's chair, where the light from the west windows reached only as a long bar across the floor, and held the thing in his mind. Fifteen years. The standing committee of 1832 with Sadler gone and the children come up from Bradford to give evidence in the corridor. Althorp's relay clause that had broken the 1833 Act before its ink was dry. Graham in 1844 explaining, with that careful Peelite courtesy, why the principle was sound and the figure impracticable. Fielden last year, by twenty votes. He thought of the cotton-masters of Manchester and what they would do tomorrow morning, which was to put the women and the young persons on staggered shifts and keep the engines running their fourteen hours regardless, and he thought, with the cold clarity that came to him sometimes in the chamber, that the Act as it stood would be evaded within the year and would have to be amended, and that an amending Act would come, because the principle was now in statute and the principle was what mattered. The political economists had taught for thirty years that the hours of labour were not a matter for the legislature, that the contract between employer and operative was a private contract and that the state had no standing in it. The Bill that had just passed said otherwise. It said that a child of thirteen and a woman of twenty were not free contracting parties in a Lancashire weaving shed; that the state had standing; that the question was a moral question after all. Once that was conceded, in any country, in any chamber, it could not be unconceded. The eight-hour day was not in the Bill. The weekend was not in the Bill. The trades unions of the 1870s were not in the Bill. But the ground was in the Bill, and everything that would be built later would be built on it. He had been called paternalist, and he was. The Liberal manufacturers were not going to take the industrial working class as a moral subject. The Chartists would, but the Chartists had no seats. Tory paternalism was the only vehicle in the Westminster system that would carry the question, and he had loaded the question onto it and walked it for fifteen years.

THE LOBBY

He went down into the Members' Lobby a little after ten. Fielden was waiting, the Quaker plain coat unbuttoned in the heat, his face flushed. They shook hands. By the diary entry Ashley wrote the next morning at Grosvenor Square, Fielden said to him, my Lord, the day is yours; and he replied, no, sir, the day is the country's. Then he went home and wrote, in the same hand and the same ink, that he had received from God's hand a great deliverance, and that he was not equal to it, and that he thanked Him.

THE COUNTING-HOUSE IN MANCHESTER

In Manchester the next morning the news came up the line on the early train and the counting-houses of Mosley Street opened their ledgers and began to calculate. Mr Bright in Rochdale was reported displeased. The relay system was already drawn up in principle by the larger firms; it would be in operation by August. The inspectors of factories, Horner and Saunders and the rest, would spend the next three years documenting evasions in detail, mill by mill, shift by shift. By 1850 the Act would be amended to close the worst of them, and by 1853 the children's hours would be brought inside the same fence. The mill-owners did not know, that morning in Mosley Street, that they had already lost the larger argument. They thought they had lost a clause. They had lost the century.

THE SEVENTH EARL

His father died on the second of June 1851 and he became the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury. He carried the title for thirty-four years and used it. The Lunacy Commission, on which he had sat since 1828, became under his chairmanship the instrument of the 1845 Act and the slow opening of the county asylums to inspection. The Ragged Schools Union, of which he was president from 1844, schooled the children the National and British societies would not take. The Climbing Boys Act of 1875 closed at last the door he had first tried to close in 1840, when small boys were still being sent up domestic chimneys and dying of soot cancer at twenty. He was offered the Garter and took it; he was offered cabinet office repeatedly and refused. He wrote in 1882 that he could not bear to think of the working classes without something to do for them, and that when he could no longer do, he would prefer not to be. He died at Folkestone on the first of October 1885, in his eighty-fifth year, and was buried at Wimborne St Giles in Dorset under a plain slab.

ANTEROS

At Piccadilly Circus, eight years after his death, the public subscription that had been raised in his name set up a fountain. Alfred Gilbert cast it in aluminium, then a new metal and a difficult one, and topped it with a winged archer. The Londoners called the figure Eros and have called him Eros ever since, but Gilbert had been precise, and his letters say so: the figure is Anteros, the twin of Eros, the god whose name means not-Eros, the god of selfless love returned. It is the right statue for the wrong reason, which is perhaps the most English memorial possible. The fifteen-year campaign behind it is not legible to the tourists who photograph it. The mill children of the West Riding are not legible. The relay clause is not legible. What is legible is a winged figure in a soft grey metal, drawing an arrow that has already been loosed, above a city whose working week he set the first stone of, on an evening in June 1847, in a borrowed chamber, in heavy summer light.