My grandfather was 12 in 1912. At that time, schoolkids worked half a day in the mill and had half a day at school, until they were 14, when they worked full time. The shift alternated, one week it would be school first, and then the mill and the following week it was the other way around.
He'd get up at 4.30 get washed and walk with his Dad to the pub where he and his mates all had breakfast, coffee, pickled eggs, ham sandwiches, beer etc. The mill horn would go and they'd all start work at 6am. One of the young lad's duties was to take the milk churn to the pub and get it filled with beer for the cotton workers to drink, a practice which was stopped by Lloyd George, in 1916. Grandad finished at 12 midday and had to start school at 1pm. The teacher said he
"felt sorry for the poor buggers, they're all dead beat". After school, he walk 2 miles to the allotments north of Manchester and get the cart and donkey ready and set off on his round, collecting the potato peelings from the fish and chip shops which were to be used for feeding the pigs back at the allotment. When he got back, he had to tend to the donkey, put the car away and then light a fire to boil up the potato peelings to sterilise them. When they were cool, he could feed the pigs. Then he'd walk the two miles back home and have something to eat and go to bed.
My wife's grandfather used to tell how he would walk, with his friends, over the moors from Huddersfield to Oldham, along with a couple of thousand of others, to watch the football match. Then they'd all walk back. An old bloke I knew used to tell me that, as a lad, hee would accompany his mother as they walked from a village near Barnsley, every Saturday, to Huddersfield, because they had better shops there. They spent the day shopping and then carried all the bags back. People simply required more food for energy in those days.
Here's
a clip of a different, but similar, mill scene from 1900.