C is for Chimney Sweep: Victorian England's Most Dangerous Jobs
C is for
Chimney Sweep
The chimney sweep was an indispensable figure in
Victorian society. Dubbed the great
"fire-defender," the chimney sweep's day began as early as 3 a.m. He swept out the nation's chimneys, making sure that the
Victorian home was a warm, comfortable and safe place to be. Despite the
continued and widespread need for their services, however, chimney sweeping was
not a well-paid occupation. In 1867, for example, the typical sweep earned
between 21 and 23 shillings per week, a figure comparable to postmen, tailors
and miners. In this same year, England had around 4300 chimney sweeps, serving
a population of almost 20 million people.
To work in this profession, a chimney sweep was
first apprenticed to an older, more experienced man, called a master sweep.
This process generally began in childhood, with many apprentices still in
single figures when they entered the workforce. It was only in 1834, just three
years before Queen Victoria's accession, that the government made it illegal
for children under the age of ten to be apprenticed. This same Act forbade any
child under the age of 14 to physically enter a chimney and clean it. While this
legislation brought about some improvements, it did not prevent child
apprentices from being injured, or even killed. Moreover, the law was routinely
broken by master sweeps. In Blackburn, in 1853, for example, an apprentice
called George Whittaker was scalded while cleaning the chimneys of a local
mill. It was reported that George had been warning himself in an ash-pit when
he accidentally knocked the tap of a boiler above. It took a full five minutes
for workers to turn off the tap but poor George was already dead. It later
emerged that George was only nine years old, one full year below the legal
limit for working as an apprentice chimney sweep.
But neither age nor experience could not prevent
the chimney sweep from falling prey to the many hazards of his occupation. In
fact, Victorian newspapers were filled with stories of tragic accidents in
which adult sweeps were suffocated, burned and generally brutalised by their
work. At Huddersfield, in January 1891, for instance, an experienced sweep
called Frederick Smith was killed when he fell from the roof of a house.
Frederick was clearing soot from an external chimney pot when a sudden gust of
wind caused him to lose his balance. According to The Star, he plummeted 60 feet to the ground and fell with such force that one-half of his
left arm "entered the earth with a considerable depth." Frederick was taken to Huddersfield Infirmary but died soon
after.
In another case from 1869, a sweep called William
Mitchell died in a "frightful manner" in Dundee when he accidentally
pushed his cleaning brush into the wrong chimney vent, causing the brush to
suddenly catch fire. Rather foolishly, William put his foot into the vent, as a
means of stamping out the flames, but the fire spread up his body so quickly
that his clothes were immediately reduced to cinders. Within minutes, William was rescued by two
men who extinguished the flames on his body with a blanket before taking him
down to the ground. Despite their efforts, the damage was already done: poor William died less
than fifteen minutes later. In a tragic twist, it was later revealed in the
local press that William's brother, also a chimney sweep, had recently died
after falling from the roof of a four-storey building.
Accidents like these, however, were not the primary
cause of death among Victorian chimney sweeps. That rather macabre honour goes
to cancer, a disease which killed around one in eight Victorian chimney sweeps.
This figure is notable because it is the highest of any profession in Victorian
England. Interestingly, the majority of these deaths were the result of cancer
of the skin of the scrotum, a form almost unique among these men and, as a result,
was nicknamed Chimney Sweep Carcinoma.
The link between chimney sweeping and cancer was
first made in 1775 by Percivall Pott, a surgeon at St Bartholomew's Hospital in
London, who described this affliction in detail:
It (Chimney Sweeps' Carcinoma) is a disease which
always makes its first attack on, and its first appearance in, the inferior
part of the scrotum; where it produces a superficial, painful, ragged,
ill-looking sore, with hard and rising edges. The trade call it the soot-wart.
Because this "soot-wart" often appeared
in adult males, and never in child apprentices, doctors routinely mistook it for a
form of venereal disease, like syphilis, and (unsuccessfully) treated it with
mercury.
As Pott acknowledged, mercury treatment was
completely ineffective and, in fact, allowed the cancer to spread further inside the
body. For Pott, the only way to successfully treat Chimney Sweeps' Carcinoma
was to surgically remove the tumour as early as possible. In some cases, he
even advocated total castration but acknowledged that this did not guarantee
complete cure:
I have many times made the experiment; but though
the sores, after such operation, have, in some instances, healed kindly, and
the patients have gone from the hospital seemingly well, yet, in the spaces of
a few months, it has generally happened, that they have returned either with
the same disease in the other testicle, or in the glands of the groin.
While Pott had little success in treating Chimney
Sweep Carcinoma, he fared much better in understanding its causes. He correctly
identified soot as having carcinogenic qualities but lacked the scientific
tools to prove it. His observations, however, did encourage better standards of
hygiene among chimney sweeps, though their dirty clothes were viewed as the
cause of cancer well into the nineteenth century. In 1890, W. G. Spencer,
proposed that chimney sweeps developed this type of cancer when soot-soaked
sweat running down the body and collecting in the folds of skin on the scrotum.
This skin and soot contact caused a local irritation which would later develop
into cancer. This idea was still under consideration in 1901 when the Dangerous
Trades Committee studied the relationship between chimney sweeps and scrotal
cancer. Like Spencer, the Committee recognised that the constant application of
soot to the skin could permanently alter its structure, thereby encouraging the
growth of cancer, but they could not identify the specific compounds in the
soot which were carcinogenic. This breakthrough would not come until the 1930s.
Moreover, the incidence of cancer among chimney sweeps would see no significant
decline until the 1950s when alternative methods of heating and improved
methods of cleaning chimneys were finally introduced.
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