William Dodd Fights the Factories

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

I'm Bluff, and you're in California, which means you can play on my favorite social casino, SpinQuest.com.

They have over a thousand slots and table games available to play from the comfort of your own phone with instant cash prize redemptions.

And new users that sign up today get a $30 coin package for only $10.

That's S-P-I-N-Q-U-E-S-T.com.

I'll see you there.

SpinQuest is a free-to-play social casino.

Voidwear Prohibited.

Visit spinquest.com for more details.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of CFOA motor treatment.

C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with C-Foam.

Available everywhere.

Automotive products are sold.

Seafoam!

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

1811, the market town of Kendall in the north of England.

Smog filled the air as a seven-year-old boy hobbled into the wall mill.

It would have been sensory overload.

The factory floor would have been a really noisy, dusty environment.

There's lots of people milling around machines, doing different tasks.

The boy's name was William Dodd.

He dragged himself past other boys and girls his age, some making the coarse woolen cloth known as Kendall Green.

There's also a kind of human machinery surfacing this as well.

So you'll see young children diving underneath machines to clean up under them.

You'll see operatives standing by their machines watching the processes taking place, whether that's spinning the thread or weaving it into cloth.

William took up his position by the slubbing billy, a machine used as part of the process of spinning wool.

He lent over the machine to clean out residual fibers.

Some of the accounts of him describe him as barely looking like a human being because his body was so bent and damaged.

He described his joints as being like rusty hinges.

The spinner told William to keep up, but the little boy struggled to do so.

He could see the anger in his spinner's eyes as he took up the notorious billy roller.

The billy roller looks a bit like a leather strap, and this image becomes very evocative for campaigners against child labour in factories because it evokes the image of the overseer on the slave plantations.

William pleaded for mercy, but it was no use.

As a punishment for his slowness, he was thrashed.

By this point, he'd been working for two years since he was just five years old.

Children as young as William could be made to perform hard physical labor for up to 18 hours a day.

His back, arms and legs were covered with the scars of beatings.

But William Dodd wouldn't take the beatings forever.

When he grew up, he'd he'd challenge the brutal system that had consumed his childhood.

For BBC Radio 4, this is history's heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

I'm Alex von Tunselmann.

I'm a historian, and today's episode is about William Dodd.

A former child labourer with a heart for justice, he sought an education and demanded a better deal for factory workers and for people disabled by industrial accidents.

August 1820.

The sun set over Kendall on a clammy Sunday evening in his family's cottage.

William Dodd was now 16 years old.

He was weeping.

Sunday seems to be a really important day of the week.

On Sunday evenings, you know, he gets really anxious, feelings of dread about having to endure yet another week in the factory.

And he has to psych himself up mentally.

He also has to prepare himself physically to get back because stopping work kind of makes his joints seize up.

The early 19th century factory system was harsh.

Workers had little by way of rights and conditions were often dangerous.

Really noisy workshops, cruel overseers, beating young workers.

There were some absolutely dreadful places.

David Turner is professor of history at Swansea University.

Concern about conditions of work in factories emerged in the early 1830s at the same time that there was widespread public campaigning against slavery in Britain's colonies.

The image of the cruel master in the factory wielding his billy roller is designed to evoke those kind of images of cruelty towards enslaved workers in the Caribbean.

For decades, Britain had been in the throes of the Industrial Revolution.

The invention of steam power and new industrial machinery transformed ordinary life.

Previously in the cloth industry, everything had to be made by hand.

Now, spinning and weaving could be done much more quickly by machines, though the machines had to be operated by human workers.

Cloth was now much cheaper to make and buy.

Industrialization had a huge impact on people's jobs and livelihoods.

While mill owners began to make fortunes out of machined cloth, workers found new opportunities.

But they also faced new insecurities.

Many working-class people moved away from agriculture, where they'd worked and lived with their families, to towns and cities where they might be paid to make textiles.

It's a very regional process.

Change happens at different paces in different parts of the country.

And there's real concerns about the morality of these places.

Some industrial towns and cities have a kind of lawless frontier-like identity due to them being melting pots where people are coming in not just from the surrounding rural areas but to some extent other parts of the British Empire.

The newly built Lancaster Canal brought many more people to Kendall in search of work.

Not just adults, children were often employed in the mills too.

William Dodd's first job at the age of five had been carding, separating out the fibres from wool so they can be spun into thread.

After a year, he became a piecer, repairing broken threads on the spinning machine.

By the age of 16, he'd racked up a decade as a factory worker.

We don't have any pictures of him, so we don't know exactly what he looked like.

He comes across as very earnest, hardworking, quite hard done to in certain aspects of his life, but also quite a proud person.

For all the optimism of the new industrial age, the reality for labourers like William Dodd was grim.

William's body endured a lot in these years when he was working in a factory.

So his back was scarred by being flogged.

He would have had cuts and bruises to other parts of his body caused by things getting caught in the machinery and spraying out debris over the workers.

He talks about having to do what he calls drill in the morning before he goes off to work.

He uses sort of makeshift crutch, he uses a brush and he uses that to do sort of physical exercises to try and loosen himself so he can trudge back to the textile mill and do another day's work.

His sisters were put to work too.

One of them suffered a horrifying injury.

She got her hand crushed in a machine accident.

He talks about her hand being crushed to atoms.

The machine could have been made safer if it was boxed off, but taking steps to alter machines cost the mill owners money.

Safety was expensive, but labour was cheap.

Even when the machines caused a life-changing injury, it wasn't expensive to pay a child off.

Because she was unable to go back to work in the factory, she was given a paltry payoff of 10 shillings and then just left to fare for herself.

For William Dodd, this crystallised the injustices factory workers faced.

This seems to have been a catalyst for him him in terms of his own activist journey.

He needed to tell people what was happening.

And in order to do that, he had to learn to read and write.

14 years later, 1834.

William Dodd, now 30 years old, was a clerk in Isaac and William Wilson's textile mill in Kendall.

And he's very pleased with that because it shows that his employer trusts him and has got faith in him.

Dodd found physical work challenging.

His limbs were bent by his early years of hard labour.

But he had spent his evenings learning to read and write.

Those skills allowed him to rise to a more senior position.

Now he was in charge of other workers, including children.

He was known to be serious and caring.

Recent changes in the law affected factory labour.

The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act set up a system of workhouses.

These were designed to separate families and to limit the control poor people had over what wages they accepted and where they worked.

On the other hand, the Factory Act improved conditions for child labourers.

It banned labour entirely for those aged under nine years.

Children aged nine to thirteen could be put to work for eight hours a day, but had to receive two hours of schooling as well.

Older children of 13 to 18 could work for up to 12 hours a day.

Suddenly, Dodd heard a scream, then another.

One of the young workers gets caught up in a machine.

Horrifyingly, there was no way to save the little boy's life.

As news of the child's death spread quickly through the factory, many broke out sobbing.

Dodd fought back his own tears as he sent the workers home, but his work was not yet done.

As a supervisor, essentially it's William's job to clean up afterwards, to pull out this mangled sinew from the cogs of the machine.

And this is an absolutely traumatising

event.

That night, Dodd remained at his desk.

Sitting there in the dark and the candlelight, all alone, and just reflecting on this absolutely awful thing that he's witnessed.

He made up his mind he couldn't work in the factory any longer.

So Dodd leaves the factories in the end and he describes spending a bit of time wandering around doing different jobs and repeatedly he finds the doors closed on him because of his so-called deformity.

He yearned to return to the agrarian life of his young childhood before the factories.

A kind of idyllic escape from the drudgery.

When his mother died, he tried to find a wife.

He talked about dating an older woman and he took her to an alehouse and he plucked up enough courage to ask her to marry him.

And then he said that he saw her eyes slowly going down, noticing his knees and how bent they were.

And at that moment, he says, I wish the earth could have swallowed me up because she saw him as a poor prospect that he wouldn't be able to provide for the family and so she rejects him.

Resigned to single life, he drifted towards London in search of employment and direction.

One night he stretched out his limbs in the recesses of Westminster Bridge.

He fell asleep until he was woken aggressively by a policeman.

Dodd considered throwing himself into the dark waters of the Thames, but the low moment passed and he carried on.

He made contact with the Oddfellows, a friendly society which doled out funds to its members during periods of sickness and hardship.

He's elected as branch secretary for the Order of Odd Fellows.

Dodd befriended other former factory workers.

Many of them too had suffered industrial accidents.

He starts to think about disabled people or certain kind of group of disabled people, people who had experience of working in factories, as having a kind of collective identity.

At the time, he's actually seeing them as a class, as a distinctive part of the working class, having a distinctive identity and having their own ideas, their own needs that had to be recognised by others.

He took work for a tailor, which at least allowed him to sit down for much of the day.

Soon, though, his right wrist began to seize up and swell.

He attributes this to poor circulation that has sort of developed through this many years of factory work.

What's going on, California?

It's Bluff here.

You know what's better than a relaxing day at the beach?

A relaxing day at the beach with SpinQuest.com, America's number one social casino with over a thousand slots and table games available to the comfort of your own phone, with instant cash prize redemptions, and new users get a $30 coin package for only $10.

That's S-P-I-N-Q-U-E-S-T.com.

I'll see you there.

SpinQuest is a free-to-play social casino.

Voidwear Prohibited.

Visit SpendQuest.com for more details.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of C-Foam Motor Treatment.

C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with C-Foam.

Available everywhere.

Automotive products are sold.

See foam!

Had stopped the blood from circulating properly through his body.

1840.

In the operating theatre of St.

Thomas's Hospital, London, the surgeon's assistant wiped down a tray of scalpels, knives, and sores.

He smiled reassuringly at Dodd, who was lying on the table.

Doctors tried to do what they could, but eventually they decided that there's no other choice but to amputate his arm.

Surgery was dangerous and excruciatingly painful.

With little pain relief available, Dodd steeled himself as the surgeon cut into his lower arm.

A curious look crossed the doctor's face.

Dodd's bones were like nothing he'd seen before.

He describes the bone being like a honeycomb, something dry and brittle.

The marrow had wasted away.

Dodd lost his arm and his job, but he didn't let it get him down.

This was a turning point in his activist life.

He knew his experiences might help others, so he set about writing a book.

His memoir was titled, A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd, a Factory Cripple.

He lays claim to that label and it gives him an authority in his mind to go out and talk to other people who've endured similar things themselves.

He wouldn't necessarily have considered himself as disabled.

In the 19th century, disabled had a more narrow meaning and it tends to be used to describe people who are incapable of doing any kind of paid work.

But he clearly saw himself as belonging to what he calls a particular class of people.

He sent the manuscript to the campaigning MP Lord Ashley, who ensured it was published.

Ashley had been pushing for legislation that would reduce the labour of factory workers to 10 hours a day.

As a result of his book, Dodd became something of a celebrity in the campaign for factory reform.

And the leading figure behind this parliamentary campaign is Lord Ashley, future 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, a very famous social reformer.

And

Dodd is employed by Ashley

to

go on a journey around the north of England in the autumn of 1841.

Ashley was looking for evidence that despite recent efforts to improve conditions, factories were still dangerous places.

He provided funding for Dodd to undertake research on factory workers around the country.

He seems to turn to activism as a way of making a living.

Smog filled the air in Leeds as Dodd hobbled through the streets in September 1841.

The old market town had evolved into a major industrial city.

But Dodd was heartbroken by the people he saw.

These worn-out, run-down, emaciated, badly nourished individuals who he thinks works in factories.

And so he tries to interview them.

So he uses this journey to gather testimony.

He spoke to people in factories.

He also stops people in the street and asks if they're willing to tell their stories.

And not everyone is by any means.

People were really fearful about their employment prospects if they spoke out against their employers.

It's very difficult to get women to talk to him.

It would damage their future marriage prospects.

Even so, many did speak.

It's his own

disability, his own impairment, his own status as what he describes himself as being a factory cripple that enables people to trust him.

Dodd met hundreds of people on his journey and his pile of evidence grew.

In Bradford, home of the booming worsted wool industry, he met a man who expressed complete despair.

He says that he'd often wished he could have been born a horse or a cow or a dog or anything but what he is.

The stories Dodd heard began to take a toll.

Two months in, and it's getting harder and harder for him to hear this.

He writes about this in his letters about becoming really

affected by the stories that he's hearing, but also by things that he's witnessing when he visits Stockport.

And he is actually standing outside a factory when a woman is brought out on a stretcher.

She's had her arm torn off by a machine and he describes blood dripping from her shoes.

Dodd went to visit the woman in hospital.

He tries to find out a bit about her and her husband and he talks about the devastating impact this has had on the family because her husband has to look after her and his pay gets docked for that.

In Bolton, he met a factory owner, Edmund Ashworth.

Ashworth says, well,

disabled workers, they've always got the poor law to fall back on.

They're okay.

But then William turns back to him and says, yes, but we deserve something better.

He is introducing quite a radical idea that their employers should be legally liable to compensate workers who are injured in their place of work.

Driven by righteous anger, Dodd wrote his findings in a series of letters to Lord Ashley.

He finished his investigations at the end of 1841.

The following year, his book, The Factory System Illustrated, was published.

1844.

The House of Commons, London.

It would have been candlelit, it would have been smoky, dark atmosphere, politicians facing off against each other from either side of the chamber.

A parliamentary debate on new legislation to limit the hours of factory workers was underway.

Dodd's evidence formed part of the motion proposal.

Then an MP called John Bright took the floor.

Bright was a Quaker and a proponent of free trade.

He was a strong voice for factory owners, and the speech he gave was designed to trash Dodd's reputation.

I do not wish to go into the particulars of the character of this man, for it is not necessary to my case, but I can demonstrate that his books and statements are wholly unworthy of credit.

Dodd states that from the hardships he endured in a factory, he was done up at the age of 32, whereas I can prove that he was treated with uniform kindness, which he repaid by gross immorality of conduct, and for which he was discharged from his employment.

There would have been members of the public present.

We don't know if William Dodd was one of those.

I kind of hope he wasn't there to hear him being discredited in this way.

Bright claimed Dodd had been egged on by Lord Ashley to paint a deceitfully bleak picture of his experiences.

This is quite damning.

It suggests that because William was paid to go and do this research, he could essentially be bribed to say whatever people wanted him to say.

And this was used to discredit him publicly.

Reading this evidence does make you wonder how reliable some of Dodd's words were, but the kind of accusations that were made against William Dodd were made against other disabled people who stood up against the factory

at this time.

Years before William Dodd wrote his memoir in 1832, dozens of workers were called to Parliament to testify before a committee on the 10-hour bill.

Some of the stories they told were strikingly similar to Dodd's.

And in that case, there's also attempts to discredit witnesses by casting doubts on how they became disabled, by trying to find holes in their arguments.

The factory reform movement gives a platform, not just to William Dodd, but for other disabled people to talk about their experiences.

And there's a real sense that having personal experiences is very valuable politically.

And that if you can get people to stand up and testify or even just be at a meeting and be visual proof of the horrors of the factory system, then this is really, really powerful.

But John Bright's discrediting of William Dodd was effective.

Lord Ashley sacked him.

He leaves the country around this time, and it might be that this is a factor causing him to go.

Dodd crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the United States.

There he published another book, The Labouring Class of England.

It brought together his thoughts on factories and the situation of the working class more generally.

But then he goes quiet.

We don't know when he dies.

We don't know what happens in the future, and he remains virtually unknown until the present.

David Turner has written about disability in the Industrial Revolution, along with his fellow disability historian Daniel Blackie.

They write about William Dodd as a pioneer of disability activism.

Disability is absolutely everywhere you look in the industrial period, and William Dodd is a really important guide to that world.

And

I love the fact that it brings these stories to light, which for me as a historian of disability is absolutely wonderful because I get to find out about people who would leave no records of their own, who wouldn't have the opportunity to tell their stories were it not for William Dodd recording their experiences.

Over the following decade, legislation did lower working hours for children and women and improve working conditions in England's factories, but they remained dangerous places to work.

On the question of compensation, the consensus at this time was that if people went off to work in a dangerous environment, like a factory or down a coal mine, then they accepted that risk, that

employers didn't really have a legal obligation to compensate them if they became injured at work.

Dodd's call for workers' rights was ahead of his time.

Dodd was probably the first person to publicly talk about the higher cost of living associated with being disabled.

This is a time before the National Health Service, so people had to pay for their medical care.

He also raised questions about disabled people's right to work.

He talks about having a job for 15 minutes at an ironmonger's, but within the space of a quarter of an hour, hour, his employer takes a view that he's incapable of this labour and he's turned out.

Again, these are issues which still face disabled people.

That's something we call the disability employment gap.

He proposed a scheme to allow working-class disabled people to be trained as teachers so they could continue to work in their communities.

The word disabled and the concept of disability as we now understand it would not have been familiar to Dodd, who described himself in the language of his time as a factory cripple.

So, as historians, we have to be really careful about how we use words like disabled and disability when we're talking about the past.

I don't think we can avoid them altogether.

William Dodd forces us to think about disabled people as having a meaningful history, which goes back much further than the modern disability rights movement.

It's actually very rare to find any discussion of disability in the sense that we understand that word before the First World War.

Dodd wouldn't have seen himself as a campaigner on disability issues.

There's really no such thing as disability issues at the time.

Whatever the language he used, Dodd's passion for justice shone through.

There is a kind of moral truth, I think, that comes through in Williams' writing.

A real

feeling of sincerity about

the bigger cause that he's involved with, and a real sense of empathy and a desire to tell the stories and be faithful to the people that he's writing about.

It takes a lot of courage to do that, and especially in the age where he lived.

next time on History's Heroes, when Sarah Breedlove begins to lose her hair, she starts a business that will make her one of the wealthiest African-American women of her time.

The Marvels of Madam C.J.

Walker.

Look, we found this.

Nikki's never seen this before.

Oh, wow.

This was him.

In homes across Britain, children and grandchildren are discovering stories about their families in the Second World War.

I've never noticed it before.

It's a battered old suitcase.

Do you want to open it?

I'd love to open it.

Not the war you're thinking of.

The fight against the Nazis.

the other story of World War II, the one on the Asian front against Japan.

The better was a gun better, really, and kept on pounding them, pounding them, pounding them.

I'm Kavita Puri.

From BBC Radio 4, The World Service and the History Podcast, this is the second map.

80 years after the end of that war, why don't we remember it as well as we should?

Listen to the second map first on BBC Sounds.

The Mercedes-Benz Dream Days are back with offers on vehicles like the 2025 E-Class, CLE Coupe, C-Class, and EQE sedan.

Hurry in now through July 31st.

Visit your local authorized dealer or learn more at mbusa.com/slash dream.

From Australia to San Francisco, Cullen Jewelry brings timeless craftsmanship and modern lab-grown diamond engagement rings to the U.S.

Explore solitaire, trilogy, halo, and bezel settings, or design a custom ring that tells your love story.

With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewelers behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

Visit our new Union Street showroom or explore the range at cullenjewelry.com.

Your ring, your way.