From the seventeenth century, we know that chimneys became more widespread and well constructed in houses, and coal grew in popularity as a domestic fuel alongside the traditional use of wood. Coal makes a sticky soot which does not all come loose with the use of a brush; chimney edges need scraping where soot builds up. Master sweeps employed young boys who were small enough to climb the chimneys as apprentices. Some of you may have fireplaces in your homes, but in grand country houses there would be many chimneys since almost every room would need a fireplace for heating, and these would connect together in a complicated maze of completely dark tunnels. Cleaning the chimneys of a large house would be a long and tiring job. Master sweeps could earn considerable amounts of money for the work, but their apprentices did not earn much if anything, just receiving ‘bed’ (often a sack of soot on which to sleep) and ‘board’ (bread and sometimes a little beer) for their labour. Children were sold to sweeps for training, but many died before they could run their own sweeping business, from lung disease or from cancers caused by the soot. Most parents would be reluctant to sell their children into such a dangerous trade. Orphans however would be under the care of their parish workhouse, and this was where master sweeps usually found new apprentices when their climbing boys grew too big or too ill to work. The working conditions were known to be harsh: boys who got scared and did not want to climb, or who got stuck in a chimney, would sometimes be flushed out by lighting a fire underneath them, forcing them to climb higher. The working day was typically long, the pay very poor, and beatings not uncommon. There were only about 4000 boys working as sweeps at any one time, a small number compared with numbers of young children working in agriculture or factories.
From Charles Kingsley´s The Water Babies.
So now, read and listen to the poem The Chimney Boy´s Story (not the archive) and spot facts in it from the info you read above.
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