Margaret McMillan

Margaret mcMillan worked in Bradford for several years. She campaigned for improved conditions for children and her work included research into the conditions faced by children. In Bradford she became a member of the schools board and was highly influential, leading to the cities education system being much improved as a result.

Source 1

The condition of the poorer children was worse than anything that was described or painted. It was a thing that this generation is glad to forget. The neglect of infants, the utter neglect almost of toddlers and older children, the blight of early labour, all combined to make of a once vigorous people a race of undergrown and spoiled adolescents; and just as people looked on at the torture two hundred years ago and less, without any great indignation, so in the 1890s people saw the misery of poor children without perturbation.

Margaret McMillan

Source 2

Margaret McMillan is a figure closely associated with Bradford's pioneering contribution to child welfare and education, with whom Fred Jowett worked closely and revered. Her coming to Bradford was characteristic. Accompanied by her sister Rachel, she travelled from London to lecture at the Labour Church in 1893, and they found themselves among men and women whom they recognised at once as their natural comrades.

Margaret McMillan remained in Bradford, devoting her whole time to the ILP, addressing meetings tirelessly in schoolrooms and at street corners, travelling all over the North to spread the socialist gospel. A year after coming to Bradford Margaret was elected to the School Board and began the educational work for which she is famed. Among other things, school baths and medical treatment were introduced, a physical care unknown in schools at that time, and for which, indeed no legal provision existed.

Fenner Brockway

Source 3

"The half-timers' school is a forlorn Hope - or, at best, it is a place where Hope becomes so very moderate that Ambition dies."

Margaret McMillan in the report, "Child Labour and the Half Time System." The 'Half-Time' system was a system in which children went to schoo for half the day, and worked in the mills for the other half of the day.