However, the board had no direct power over the local authorities except to reduce its money grants when the number of children in attendance decreased. The number of children excused, according to the statistics just quoted, reached its highest point in May, 1916, which would indicate that the circular had little influence with local officials in reducing the number of country children deprived of schooling to work on the farms.
In 1917 the board again became more favorable to a modification of school requirements. On February 2, in answer to a question in the House of Commons, the president of the Board of Education stated that “greater elasticity” was to be allowed in the school vacations, so that boys over twelve might engage in farm work. For this purpose the Board of Education would give money grants for 320 school sessions annually instead of 400, as usual, provided vacation classes for the younger children were organized.
Fewer children seem to have been released from school for industry or miscellaneous work than for agriculture. Between September, 1914, and February, 1915, only thirty-one children were officially reported excused from school attendance for factory work and 147 for miscellaneous occupations. None of these was less than twelve years old. On account of the small numbers excused the Board of Education did not repeat the inquiry.
Efforts were made, indeed, as early as 1915 to secure exemptions for factory work similar to those in agriculture. Employers’ associations urged that children of twelve and thirteen be excused from school. The cotton spinners’ and employers’ associations sent a joint petition to the Home Secretary asking that children be allowed to begin work in the cotton mills at thirteen instead of fourteen years. The spinners’ union preferred such a lowering of child labor standards to allowing women to become “piecers.” Certain government contractors also asked the local education authorities for permission to employ boys of thirteen.
But at the time the official attitude was much less encouraging in regard to exemptions for factory work than for agriculture. The Home Office refused to consent to any relaxation unless the Admiralty or War Office certified that the observance of child labor laws was delaying work necessary to the war.[231] The annual report of the factory inspectors for 1915 mentioned an important prosecution for illegal child labor. The Board of Education was a little more lenient, allowing the local authorities to excuse boys of thirteen under certain prescribed conditions, which included the restriction that the work must be within the boys’ physical capacity.[232] But during at least the earlier months of war “generally in urban areas, the information furnished appears to show that there has been no great variation from the usual practice in the matter. At all times children have been granted exemption in very special circumstances, and the only effect of the war has been that such special circumstances have arisen a little more frequently than they did in normal times.”[233] The statements as to increases in the number of children under fourteen leaving school would suggest, however, that these comparatively rigid standards were not maintained in the later months of the war.
In addition, it is probable that there has been more than the usual amount of illegal child labor. A note in The Woman Worker of January, 1917,[234] said that the “attention of the Secretary of State has been directed to the prevalence of illegal employment, in factories ... of children under 12 ... and children who have not obtained exemption from school attendance.... It is not countenanced by any of the departments concerned, nor can it be justified by any pretext of war emergency.” It was stated that official action against these conditions had been secured. In several cases penalties had already been imposed. “The inspectors of factories are instructed to take rigorous action in respect of any similar offences in future, and without further warning.”
Changes in Occupations
of Boys and Girls
Certain effects of the war on boys’ work were noted very early. By the end of 1914 it was observed that in factories strong boys, who had been apprentices or helpers, were being pushed ahead to the work of skilled men, while women and girls were taking their places. Such “indirect” substitution continued frequently to be the first change made when women were introduced into new lines of work.[235] The Ministry of Munitions made some effort to keep boys away from shell and fuse making and other forms of purely repetitive work, and to encourage them to take up lines which would make them skilled artisans.[236] But on the whole the number of boys entering skilled trades and starting apprenticeships greatly declined, for unskilled work at high wages was offered by munitions plants and other forms of war equipment, and many parents, under the unsettled conditions of war, were unwilling to have their sons bind themselves for a term of years.
Girls, like adult women, entered many new lines of work for the first time during the war, and there are but few facts to distinguish between the two groups of workers. The girls were used in boys’ places for running errands, on wagons and other forms of delivery work—which had been much complained of as a “blind alley” for boys—in banks, and in retail shops. The tendency to transfer boys to men’s work and girls to boys’ work was also noted in textile mills, boot and shoe and tobacco factories, iron foundries and some parts of the engineering trade. In nearly every instance such employment was uneducative. There appeared to be also a greatly increased demand for girls in some cities in clerical work. In the new openings on munitions work and other forms of army equipment their work has not been clearly marked off from that done by adult women. Complaints were made in March, 1917, that it was difficult to induce young girls to enter anything but the munitions industry.[237] The glamor and excitement of direct assistance to the war undoubtedly made its strongest appeal to girls of this impressionable age.
A feature almost unknown previous to the war was the movement of boys and girls under seventeen years of age from their homes to work at a distance. The Labour Gazette stated of the movement: