Following the Threads: pinning down child workers in the Chiltern lace making industry

Chiltern Young Archaeologists' Club have been partaking in the CBA's From Ordinary to Extraordinary project, part of Shout Out Loud funded by the NHLF
The Hidden Story of Child Workers
Our focus has been on an aspect of the forgotten rural heritage of Buckinghamshire and the Chilterns - the children working in the bobbin lace making industry. We have tried in this project to recall a sense of their life and world.
Chiltern YAC members learnt about Victorian rural living, looked at cottage industries and working conditions. We visited Little Missenden church and the Chiltern Open Air Museum.
A local lace historian visited us to tell us all about the Victorian lace making industry in the Chilterns and then everyone tried their hands at making lace. We baked (and enjoyed eating) traditional Cattern cakes, played traditional games, researched Census records and made Victorian peg-doll ‘avatars’.
The lives of thousands of poor children employed from as young as 4 to produce fine lace, a luxury product for the wealthy, are largely untold and undocumented. Rural cottage industries have been poorly researched, compared to the living and working conditions of child labour in Victorian factories. The 1862 Royal Commission defined children as being under 13 and young persons being of age 13 and under 18.
Bobbin Lace Schools and child lace makers feature in rural folk memory but not often in the written record. In the Census records we have to assume that children locally recorded as ‘Scholars’ before the advent of formal schools are most likely to have been learning bobbin lace.
The mechanisation of lace making led to the decline of the Cottage bobbin lace industry as prices fell but it was the Education Act of 1870 that really sealed its demise. For a few years afterwards parents fought against compulsory education so that their children could earn “pin money” (economic necessity versus child exploitation?) but the pen gradually replaced the pin in Buckinghamshire schools.
Lace making remains a hobby craft but there are no more child lace makers.
Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to the musicians Jacquie Oates and John Spiers for allowing us to use a Lace Tell from Jacquie’s radio ballad about the lives of Victorian child lacemakers in the Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire area. The children and adults used songs or Tells to pass the time and count their stitches. For more information please visit:
jackieoates.bandcamp.com/albu...
We have also had help, encouragement and training from the Woodlanders’ Lives and Landscapes Project, which is investigating the lives of people who worked in the rural and domestic industries of the Central Chilterns. To find out more visit:
www.chilternsaonb.org/woodlan...