| For the inhabitants of Swansea
being part of the Industrial Revolution was something of a mixed blessing.
The working environment was harsh despite copper-masters, like the Vivians
and the Grenfells, having a social conscience. A twelve-year-old boy could
expect to work a fourteen-hour day. Furnace-men would work twenty-four hour
shifts. Women and girls undertook unsavoury jobs, like collecting urine
from neighbouring houses to clean the copper sheets. In conditions like
these health problems were rife, consumption, typhus, bronchitis and asthma
were endemic, the average life expectancy of a Swansea inhabitant in 1883
was twenty-four years. While the copper-smoke generated by the smelting
process gave off toxic fumes containing arsenic and sulphur that killed
trees and crops and poisoned pastureland. However the copper-masters, aware
that a literate and numerate workforce would increase efficiency, provided
schools, Sunday schools, reading-rooms and mechanics institutes. The expanding
number of industries was accompanied by a comparative number of breweries
as the workforce sought relief from the daily grind. |
