Child Labour Committee

At a conference in Zurich in 1912, the International Association of Labour Legislation requested that the national sections of the organisation should draw up reports on the subject of child labour in their respective countries, for presentation to an international Commission specially appointed to discuss the problem. The British section of the IALL appointed a sub-committee to draw up a report on child labour in the United Kingdom, consisting of Lord Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, Constance Smith, Mary Phillips, Sophy Sanger, and Frederick Keeling, who acted as Chairman of the sub-committee and drafted the report. This collection contains the material from which the report was drafted. It was gathered by the committee members specially for the report, and consists of correspondence, memoranda, transcriptions of personal interviews, newspaper cuttings, and questionnaires circulated by the committee to local authorities responsible for the administration of the Employment of Children Act (1903). It also contains various official documents, including a collection of all bye-laws regarding street trading and/or child labour made by UK local authorities. The scope of the Report was limited to the examination of the regulation of child labour in relation to the Employment of Children Act (1903), in occupations which were not covered by the Factory and Mines Acts, and its aim was to suggest practical ways of dealing with the problem, rather than studying its effects. Consideration was also given to the definition of 'juvenile' labour, and to the administration of the law as it stood at the time, with particular reference to the inadequacies of the Education Act as a means of restricting the employment of children. In the years immediately preceding the drafting of the Report, there had been several unsuccessful attempts by campaigners to amend the Employment of Children Act (1903), along the lines recommended by a Departmental Committee on street trading set up by the Government in 1909. Organised opposition from the Press helped to block the first private member's Bill to amend the Act, introduced into the House of Lords in 1911 by Lord Shaftesbury, and the following year, another Bill proposed by Beck and Denman was similarly unsuccessful. In 1913, the Government itself introduced a watered-down version of Beck and Denman's Bill, but again, the difficulty of securing its passage led to its abandonment. The report of the IALL's sub-committee on child labour was one of many investigations into the subject by local authorities, private societies and individuals, but it is distinguished by the amount of fresh information gathered by committee members, particularly the statistics on the condition of wage-earning children in occupations which had been hitherto ignored by other studies. The report was published in 1914, with the hope that it would be 'a means of bringing to the notice both of Parliament and of local authorities the urgent necessity of raising the standard of protection' of working children.

From the guide to the Child Labour Committee, c1885-1914, (British Library of Political and Economic Science)