TAKE TWO GIRLS .... ‘When I go home mother sends me for water so I have no time to play’. Thomas Booker’s Iron works on the Lesser Garth was supplied with coal by the Lan Colliery. The process of iron working was continuous. The workforce, including young people, was fatiguing and involved day and night shifts. There were a variety of occupations involved in the production of bar iron, some worked by girls and young women. Born in 1827, Ann Davies was 15 years old when Robert Hugh Franks made his report to the Royal Commission. She worked at wheeling iron. She tells Robert Franks that she has been just one week at wheeling iron. ‘Father sent me to the work,’ she says. ‘He is a carpenter to the forges.’ She has two sisters younger than herself. ‘None have been to school except me,’ she says, ‘and that only for one quarter at the day and afterwards at the Sunday School. Father can read,’ she says, ‘but mother does not know the letters. I learned English the quarter I went to school where only English is taught,’ she explains. Robert Franks notes that she reads well ‘in the Testament’, but that ‘she cannot say who Moses was’. She tells Franks that Jesus Christ is God but that she is not aware if mother knows who God is and never talks about such things at home. She says she can sew and knit - that she was taught by lodgers. Franks concludes, ‘She is a very intelligent girl, who speaks English very well . She knows Five time six is 30 and three times 20 is 60, 12 months in a year, 30 pence in half-a-crown. Franks also interviewed 12 year old Sophia Lewis, a labourer in the iron yard. ‘I have been wheeling and carrying iron more than two years,’ she says. ‘Father is dead. Mother sent three of us to work here. I work day and night as others do, 12 hours reach, alternate weeks. I do not dislike the work nor have I ever got hurt. I have tea for breakfast, and bacon and potatoes, or mutton for dinner, not every day, always meat on Sundays. We have no holidays. Sometimes we stop away after the pay which is once a month but we are always allowed to draw money weekly. I earn 12s. monthly, my sister, who is two years older, 14s. and my brother who is 19 years of age, takes 40s.every month. We give the money to mother who keeps house. We have never been to any day school but sister and I go to the Welsh Sunday School to learn letters’. Franks notes that she can scarcely tell one letter from the others in the Welsh primer. ‘Mr. Jones tells us that Jesus is our Lord’, Sophia adds, but says she does not know what he means by Lord nor who is God. ‘There may be Commandments but I never heard of any’, she says. ‘When I go home mother sends me for water so have no time to play’.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 06:20:09 +0000
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