The problems of boy labour and blind-alley occupations within the context of the labour markets of Brighton and Portsmouth, 1870-1939

Abstract

Whatever the arguments over the extent of economic decline after 1870, there was undoubtedly increasing concern with the performance of the economy in an international context. Such concern has caused historians to continue with the efforts of contemporaries in seeking a valid explanation of the changing economic performance in these years. The role of labour features strongly, with the central concern being whether or not the most efficient use possible was being made of scarce human resources. Within this context there was increasing debate over the treatment of the adolescent.

Views on what exactly needed to be done on the labour question have become complicated by the alleged trend towards 'de-skilling' so fervently debated in recent years. Within this debate there seems to have been too little recognition given to the economy's changing requirements of those entering the labour force: the growth of new industries and of the tertiary sector requiring new skills, while older industries demanded skilled labour of a more traditional nature. Education and training provision needed to reflect these changes as did trade union policies.

The towns of Brighton and Portsmouth have been chosen for analysis of adolescent labour. One factor common to these towns is the existence of a dominant employer: the railway in Brighton, the Royal Dockyard in Portsmouth. These were, of course, other opportunities for youth and reference will be made to these as well as to the local education systems and to the role of a trade union movement still in its infancy. Such local studies sometimes serve to confirm, at times question, generalisations made from a national perspective.

No claim can realistically be made that the problems of Boy Labour and blind-alley employment could have been entirely eradicated. Equally, there can be little doubt that a more efficient use of this human resource was possible in order that it might made a more effective contribution to the economy, alongside other members of the labour force, as problems became more evident in the decades after 1870. The thesis intends to highlight the problem as exemplified locally and the ways in which progress was furthered or impeded in the two towns in these years.

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