It is widely believed that the employment of children underground in coal mines ended with the establishment in 1840 of the Children?s Employment Commission, which exposed dangerous working conditions and sparked the adoption of a law that prevented children under the age of ten from working underground.? What Ceri Thompson reveals in his richly illustrated From the Cradle to the Coalmine, however, is that the lack of inspectors made the law difficult to enforce, and many children continued to work illegally until Parliament made school attendance compulsory in the 1860s.