Boy life & labour : the manufacture of inefficiency / by Arnold Freeman.

  • Arnold Freeman
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Boy life & labour : the manufacture of inefficiency / by Arnold Freeman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    14/276
    in four or more posts since leaving school. This method of selection intentionally excluded those boys of special merit or exceptional opportunity who, with their faces steadily set towards the more highly paid kinds of manual work, remain as a rule in one place of employment. The nomad type of boy, on the other hand, was for the most part excluded by the adopted method of selection, because such boys do not as a rule use the Labour Exchange. Mr. Freeman secured in this way the names of 134 boys. Of these, 63 dropped out of the inquiry, either because it was found that they had given the wrong age at the Exchange, or because they were untraceable in consequence of the disappearance of their family from the last known address. It was possible, however, to follow up in detail the records of 71 boys, and it is upon the carefully analysed summaries of their experience that the main argument of the book is based. Though relatively few in number, the 71 boys about whom precise inquiry was made are believed to be typical of the mass of uneduca- tive boy labour in Birmingham. Some of them indeed proved to be exceptional and to belong rather to the wastrel class ; but the rest of them may, in Mr. Freeman’s judgment, be taken as representative of well above a half of the juvenile population of the city. He was supplied by the Labour Exchange with particulars of each boy’s name, address, last school, and industrial career.