like-minded social reformers voluntarily forming and financing an organisation dedicated to procuring a specific benefit in people’s lives.
Penal reform and working conditions
One campaign that got under way at about the same time as the drive against slavery was led by John Howard, who was appointed lord lieutenant of Bedfordshire in 1773. He was shocked by conditions in the county jail and other prisons he visited, and went on to promote new laws to end the system in which jailers were not salaried and made their living by charging prisoners for food and bedding. He also went on journeys through Europe in search of a humane model for English prisons, publishing his findings in two substantial volumes. When he died of typhus in 1790, he was busy inspecting Russian military hospitals.
Howard’s work led to the separation of men and women in jails, a better diet for prisoners and a reduction in the range of crimes that carried the death penalty. But by the middle of the 19th century concern was growing in the government that prisons were getting too soft, and new legislation led to a harsher system based on what the assistant director of prisons, Sir Edmund du Cane, called ‘hard labour, hard fare and hard board’. A new charity named after John Howard, the Howard Association, was formed in 1865 to try to soften the regime.
The Association campaigned for better independent inspection of prisons, more effective management and staffing, improved diet, the end of capital and corporal punishment, and useful employment in place of the punitive but unproductive time prisoners were made to spend on the treadmill. In 1921 the Association merged with the Penal Reform League to become the Howard League for Penal Reform and, as such, it has remained active and vocal, although the Prison Reform Trust was also formed in 1981 by people who wanted to emphasise different concerns. The League played a significant role in the abolition of the death penalty in 1965, and its most successful campaigns have included improvements in the treatment of young people in custody, the removal of restrictions on the books prisoners are allowed to have and the abolition of the fee that people convicted of offences formerly had to pay to the court.
The humanitarian concerns that came to the fore in the 19th century went far beyond slavery and the treatment of prisoners. Growing industrialisation entailed punishingly long shifts for factory workers, which gave rise to the campaign to restrict working hours. The Factories Act of 1833 laid down that children between 9 and 13 years of age should not work longer than 8 hours a day in the cotton mills, and those between 14 and 18 no longer than 12 hours. But pressure was growing to restrict the working day to 10 hours for everyone in factories of all kinds. The campaign was a collaboration involving ‘short time committees’ formed by millworkers themselves, members of the Church of England, a few mill owners such as John Fielden, and Lord Shaftesbury, leader of the Factory Reform Movement in Parliament.
This movement was given impetus by the fiery pamphleteering and oratory of Richard Oastler, who wrote of ‘Yorkshire slavery’ in the textile mills of the industrial North, and of streets ‘wet by the tears of innocent victims at the accursed shrine of avarice, who are compelled (not by the cart-whip of the negro slave-driver) but by the dread of the equally appalling thong or strap of the over-looker’.26
Success for the campaign came in the form of the Factories Act 1847, which was perceived by some MPs as revenge by landowners in Parliament for the repeal of the corn laws earlier that year: the relaxation of restrictions on importing corn was going to hit their profits, and the shortened working day would hit the profits of the mercantile class in turn.27
Shaftesbury, an evangelical Christian who had had an unhappy childhood, was an inveterate reformer whose campaigns earned him the nickname of ‘The Poor Man’s Earl’. Among other things, he led campaigns to improve care of the insane, spare women and children from working underground in mines and prevent ‘climbing boys’ being employed as chimney sweeps. In 1885, shortly before his death, he also founded the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (‘London’ was in due course changed to ‘National’), which succeeded five years later in persuading Parliament to pass a law to protect children from abuse and neglect. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) is now part of the social fabric in the UK; it has statutory powers under the Children Act 1989 to apply for care and supervision orders for children at risk. The charity also incorporates ChildLine, which children can phone for help if they are frightened or being mistreated. The Howard League and the NSPCC are examples of how some campaigns of the 19th century have lived on, with changing emphases, into the 20th and 21st centuries; and Shaftesbury’s concerns about the condition of asylums and people with mental illness are also still being pursued by charities, as discussed in the previous chapter.
Other rights campaigns
Other examples of charities succeeding in changing the law are happening all the time, although their role is not always widely noticed. In December 2017, for example, the High Court ruled that the government’s changes to a benefit called the Personal Independence Payment were ‘blatantly discriminatory’ against people with mental health problems.28 The case was brought on behalf of a single complainant by the Public Law Project, a legal charity, using evidence supplied by the National Autistic Society, Disability Rights UK, Revolving Doors and Inclusion London – all of them charities. Mind, as the country’s best-known mental health charity, also took part in the case, on the grounds that the rights of people not directly involved could also be affected. Early in 2018, the government decided not to challenge the court ruling and said it would pay some people the allowances that had been denied them.
Human rights and equality have clearly been high on the agenda for voluntary organisations and charities. There is little doubt that they have played a crucial part, by conducting research and campaigning, in changing the law, changing social attitudes and improving life for disadvantaged groups in society, including racial and other minorities. ‘Moments’ in history, such as the killing of George Floyd, will give a fresh focus and impetus to long-standing campaigns, but charities were there before and will still be there afterwards, for the long haul. Charities have also been deeply involved in the liberation of women, who, until relatively recently, were treated as the property of their husbands, excluded from education and most professions and denied the right to vote: this is the first subject of the next chapter.
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