(The Surrey Comet UK) Scientists have uncovered the first direct, grisly evidence of the harrowing lives of children known as “pauper apprentices” who were forced into labour during industrialization in England:
“Lead author Rebecca Gowland, a professor in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University, said: “This is the first bio-archaeological evidence for pauper apprentices in the past and it unequivocally highlights the toll placed on their developing bodies.
“To see direct evidence, written in the bones, of the hardships these children had faced was very moving.
“It was important to the scientists and the local community that these findings could provide a testimony of their short lives.”
While the use of children as a cheap source of labour during industrialisation in 18th and 19th century England is well-documented, there is little direct evidence of their struggles.
For the study, the experts performed chemical analysis of the teeth remains.
They were able to identify the sex of the children as well as determine that they were not local to the area and were probably from London.
Examination of the bones and teeth also highlighted the conditions that affected the children, including tuberculosis, respiratory disease, rickets and delayed growth.
Professor Michelle Alexander, from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, who was a senior author of the study, said: “We undertook chemical analysis of the bones to study diet and found that the apprentices had a lack of animal protein in the diet compared to the locals, more on a level with the victims of the Great Irish Famine.”
The remains have since been reburied in a ceremony that involved contributions from the local community.
Sally Robinson, from the Washburn Heritage Centre, Yorkshire, who led the team of local volunteers, said: “It’s easy to forget that the Washburn valley had an industrial past given the beauty of the reservoirs that visitors see today…
“They were overlooked in life and treated as a commodity – but we hope we have done them some justice by telling their stories and creating a lasting commemoration.”
If these remains were of black or “indigenous” children, we’d never hear the end of the worldwide outrage — and demands that some sort of “reparations” be paid to their fellow minorities.
When hundreds of unmarked graves of presumed “indigenous” children were found in Canada in 2021, the Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, used the occasion to shame White people and accuse them of “racism” — calling the discovery,
“….a shameful reminder of the systemic racism, discrimination, and injustice that Indigenous peoples have faced.”
Rest assured, whatever the conditions were at this Catholic school for indigenous children, compared to what White children had to endure in England, America and Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were relatively luxurious in comparison.
Poor White children during early Industrialization Era were literally disposable — they were either orphans put in workhouses — such as depicted in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist — or their families couldn’t afford to feed them and were sent out to work and fend for themselves.
The article mentions how these children discovered in Surrey were actually from London — where tens of thousands of unwanted orphans were shipped off to factories and millworks all over England and literally starved and worked to death — dying anonymously.
Young boys and girls, as young as four years old, were put to work in mines — and given some of the most dangerous jobs — again, because they were completely expendable and the owners of these mines and factories had no accountability whatsoever.
The 1941 Hollywood movie, How Green Was My Valley, about the plight of Welsh miners in Victorian England could not have been made had it not romanticized the lives of these miners — and their children who worked the mines along side the adults.
And much of this exploitation of children was done under the guise of “Christian charity” — the brutality of which is inconceivable by today’s standards.
By comparison, Black slaves in the American South were treated much better — for the simple reason that their owners had paid a lot of money for them, and it was in their best interests to keep them relatively healthy in order to work — and live long enough to reproduce to create more slave labor.
On the other hand, White slaves and their children — euphemistically called “indentured servants” — were treated far more brutally than their Black counterparts because they were far cheaper to buy and exploit — as Michael Hoffman shows in his book They Were White and They Were Slaves.
No doubt more White children died under these horrific conditions than ever died in the so-called Holocaust™ — yet all we ever hear about is the “plight” of Anne Frank — a “spoiled” Jewish girl who lived a life of wealth and privilege in Amsterdam before she was sent to work camps during World War II where she eventually died of typhus caused by the relentless Allied bombing of Germany.
Yet there are no museums all across the West dedicated to remembering these lost children — simply because their horrific deaths cannot be used to promote an anti-White agenda that portrays them and their kindred as evil exploiters only of “innocent” racial “minorities.”
In fact, the anti-slavery northern abolitionists turned a blind eye to the plight of poor White children in England — instead focusing on — and exaggerating the poor treatment of the Black slaves in the American South — a hypocrisy which prompted the following scathing editorial published in the New York Herald in 1861:
“…And what is the actual condition of the slaves over which these rampant abolitionists are howling so insanely? Let them go down to the Southern States and look at the four millions of negroes they will find there, and see whether they are the ill cared for, abject creatures that they would make the Northerners believe.
Let them remember that, at the time of the Revolution, the colored population of the same States amounted to less than an eighth part of what it is at present. The very fact of the immense increase of numbers within so short a time speaks for the good treatment and happy, contented lot of the slaves. They are comfortably fed, housed and clothed, and seldom or never overworked.
They present in their condition a favorable contrast to the white slaves of Europe, who live in the utmost squalor, and are at once half-starved and overworked, and who only find rest in premature graves. Their condition is a far happier one than that of many of the white poor of the North, who are driven to seek refuge from want in the workhouses, or yet of many even outside of their walls, who vegetate in filth and hunger in the obscure parts of our cities.
The heartrending accounts which are occasionally given to the English public of the miseries endured by the London poor show a far more deplorable state of things than could ever exist under slavery in America; and English travelers who have taken the trouble of inquiring, by personal observation, into the state of the slaves in the South, have acknowledged in print the superior comforts enjoyed by the latter over the white slaves of England.”
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