Major Industrial Sectors

Major Industrial Sectors

Apart from the London dockyards, five major types of industries employed large numbers: clothing and footwear, wood and furniture, metals and engineering, printing and stationery, and precision products such as surgical instruments, watches, and objects of precious metal. During the First World War (1914-18) London began manufacturing motor cars and electrical goods, and the number of large factories increased until they accounted for nearly one-third of all jobs in the city.

MARGINAL GROUPS:

•  As London grew, crime flourished, it is said that 20,000 criminals were living in London in the 1870s. We know a great deal about criminal activities in this period, for crime became an object of widespread concern. The police were worried about law and order and industrialists wanted a hard-working and orderly labour force.
• In the mid-nineteenth century, Henry Mayhew wrote several volumes on the London labour, and compiled long lists of those who made a living from crime.
• Many of whom he listed as ‘criminals’ were in fact poor people who lived by stealing lead from roofs, food from shops lump of coal, and clothes drying on hedges.
• There were the cheats and tricksters, pickpockets and petty thieves crowding the streets of London. In an attempt to discipline the population, the authorities imposed high penalties for crime and offered work to those who were considered the ‘deserving poor’

EMPLOYMENT AMONG WOMEN:

Factories employed large numbers of women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With technological developments, women gradually lost their industrial jobs, and were forced to work within households. The 1861 census recorded a quarter of a million domestic servants in London, of whom the vast majority were women, many of them recent migrants. A large number of women used their homes to increase family income by taking in lodgers or through such activities as tailoring, washing or matchbox making. However, there was a change once again in the twentieth century. As women got employment in wartime industries and offices, they withdrew from domestic service.

Apart from them large number of children were pushed into low-paid work, often by their parents. It was only after the passage of the Compulsory Elementary Education Act in 1870, and the factory acts beginning from 1902, that children were kept out of industrial work.

INDUSTRIALISATION AND CHILDREN:

• Large numbers of children were pushed into low-paid work, often by their parents.
• Andrew, Mearns, a clergyman who writes the bitter Cry of Outcast London in 1880s, showed why crime was more profitable than labouring in small underpaid factories. ‘A child seven years old is easily known to make 10 shillings 6 pence a week from thieving. Before he can gain as much as the young thief [a boy] must make 56 gross of matchboxes a week or 1296 a day.
• It was only after the passage of the compulsory elementary education act in 1870, and the factory acts beginning from 1902, that children were kept out of industrial work.