Photo does not show genuine child chimney sweep

Published on August 28, 2024 at 06:35
2 min read
By Celine SEO, AFP Australia

A photo of a child dressed as a chimney sweep has circulated repeatedly online with a false claim that it was taken before child labour laws "were put into effect in 1934". The posts did not specify in which country the child was purportedly employed. The image -- taken in 1980 -- in fact shows a four-year-old boy at a fancy dress competition in the British capital London, where labour laws were enacted more than a century earlier.

"A 6-year-old Chimney Sweep photographed before child labor laws were put into effect in 1934," read the caption of a Facebook post from an Australia-based account on August 14.

It included a monochrome photo of a barefoot boy covered in soot holding a chimney brush.

Screenshot of the false Facebook post taken on August 26, 2024

The image was also shared with a similar false claim on Facebook in the United Kingdom and the Philippines, and on X.

The posts did not specify where the boy was pictured.

The claim has previously been debunked by the Fake History Hunter fact-checking site (archived link).

Photo from 1980

Reverse image searches on Google found the photo on Getty Images, which said it was taken in August 1980 by photographer David Levenson (archived link).

Screenshot comparison of the false Facebook post (left) and the original photo from Getty Images (right)

The photograph was published by the BBC alongside the Getty Images caption (archived link).

The caption read: "Four-year-old Tommy Stafford dressed as a chimney-sweep for the fancy-dress competition at the East Street Market centenary celebrations, London, 18 August 1980".

Photographer Levenson lists himself as based near London on his Facebook profile (archived link).

He confirmed in an email to AFP that he took the picture at the 1980 fancy dress competition in London.

The East Street Market centenary celebrations also featured in an image licensed by Mirrorpix, an archive owned by UK-based media company Reach PLC (archived link).

Child protection laws

According to the UK Parliament website, there was increasing concern in the 19th century over child labour, which initially focused on 'climbing boys' recruited by chimney sweeps or apprenticed by parish authorities (archived link).

Parliament outlawed child labour for those under the age of eight in 1788, but it was not enforced, the website says.

The Chimney Sweeps Act passed in 1834 outlawed the apprenticing of any child below the age of ten, but it was also not enforced.

In 1875, parliament passed bills requiring sweeps to be licensed and made it the duty of the police to enforce all previous legislation.

And in 1933, the Children and Young Persons Act set a new minimum working age of 14 and consolidated existing child protection legislation (archived link).

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