Just Jobs: The Effect of Occupations On British Family Life

Article by Elizabeth Simpson in World Conference on Records, 1980

Born in England. Resides in Nottingham, England. Lecturer in family history. Adult and Further Education Centers for County Authorities, East Midlands Region. Writer, editor, genealogist.

How many people collect their ancestors like bubble gum cards? With the definite aim of "collecting the set," they happily  fill in the kind of pedigree forms which  haunt some of us. To each is added the three magic dates: "born, married,  died," but they haven't ever wondered  what any of these people did to earn a  living while they were here on this  earth.

Put this another way. Imagine yourself as an ancestor written up on one of these  forms. There will be your name and beside it those three magic dates: the  day you were born, the date you married,  and the day you died  —  nothing else at  all. Is this really all the mark that you will make? Will none of your descendants care what life was actually  like for you?

The occupation of the breadwinner of any family governs the way that family lives. It always has and still does today. You only have to look around you to see ample  evidence of this fact. In your mind's eye, stand up two contrasting families  whom you know well. Think of the occu­ pation of the breadwinner of each of these families. Now think of their homes. How does each family live? Now think of their children. What is it like for them simply to have been born into  either of these families? If the child­ ren of these families changed places, what difference would this make  —  to all  of them? Remember to choose two  contrasting   families.

To a very large extent we are, each of us, a product not just genetically of our  father and mother, but of the place in society into which we were born and the  environment in which we were raised, and this "place in society" has a very real importance in the context of life in  Britain. Add to this the opportunities which life itself offers and each indi­vidual's own personal make up, and you have the progression from infant to adult. These are the "ifs" and "buts" of life. We are all governed by them. Each of us in our own time can either succeed  or fail when it is our turn to choose. But the occupation of our parent or guardian will make all the difference in  how we start.

The study of occupations therefore is all important. Those three magic dates —  "born, married, died"  —  beside an ances­tor's name tell us only the framework  upon which his life was built. What did this person do during his life? How long did he do it? How well did he do it? What did it mean to do it? These are the questions we must ask if we are to have any real understanding.

So often we cannot explain why we do certain things. It seems we cannot help ourselves sometimes. As we were raised, we may have been told as an explanation of a particular action, "Your grandfather  used to screw his eyes up like that, turn  his left foot out, and get all worked up over nothing just like you do." We know now that these are genetic traits, because the science of genetics has  explained all this for us.

But let us turn this around and say: "Knowing myself and how I react to  certain situations, then perhaps I know how my ancestors felt and reacted." To do this properly we must put our ances­ tors into the correct environment in which their occupations and time placed  them.

First of all then, how can we find out what each of our ancestors actually did?

Throughout the nineteenth century, occu­ pations were given on civil certificates,  that is, birth, marriage, and death  certificates; on census returns; in trade  directories, in newspapers, and probably  in a wide variety of family memorabilia.

To discover an occupation earlier than this, that is, before the nineteenth cen­ tury, is a bit harder. Parish registers rarely give a complete description of an occupation, but even a hint can be help­ ful. Other parish chest material is often much more helpful. Settlement cer­tificates, examination orders, removals, militia returns   —  these may all state a  person's occupation.

But knowledge of an occupation is one thing; the understanding of it is quite  another. Sometimes the description can be unintelligible. Perhaps an old dialect word is used; perhaps the word no  longer exists, and we cannot even begin to work out what the job could have en­tailed. Sometimes we might jump entirely to the wrong conclusion simply because we  think we know what the word means.

To give you an example; an advertisement for a milkman in a Nottinghamshire news­  paper dated May 1878 says, "Milkman  wanted, single, one used to milking,"  meaning, of course, that he had to milk the cows, and be on his own, no wife or family living with him. An advertisement in one of today's papers beginning "Milk­  man wanted. . . ." would require the applicant to be able to drive a motor vehicle. It is highly unlikely that the milkman of today will ever even see a  cow, much less be asked to milk one! But in both these cases the occupation is described as "Milkman."

We can even extend this example to reach back to the first half of the nineteenth  century and consider the milkman in  London  then. Milk was sold in St. James Park, straight from the cow![1 ] The milk­ man  —   milkseller   to be more exact  —  was the  servant of the cow keeper. He walked the cow to the park, set up a stand, and sold  milk by the cupful.

Here then we have three completely dif­ ferent jobs, but all of them described as  "Milkmen." In about 1825, the milkman sat in the park in London beside his cow  and sold milk by the cupful. In 1878, about fifty years later, he was employed  as a live-in servant to attend to the  cows in a farm situation. One hundred years after that, he is now totally divorced from the cow, driving around in  a truck, delivering milk to the doorstep  of his customers. (That is to say, in Britain  he does this.) Using only a  little imagination, one can easily  picture the family situation for each of  these men engaged as milkmen in their own  time.

This is a two-way theme: a man is what he does; he does what he does because of  where he is at the time. Variations on this theme are the result of his age, ability, opportunity, and time in his­ tory, the government of the day, even by  the weather.

It is all too easy too fall into the trap of putting today's standards on yester­  day's conditions, especially if the word  used to describe the job is still the  same  —  like the milkman for instance.

Let's take another example —   converter.&lt;u&gt; [2 &lt;/u&gt;]    Suppose that you had found "converter in  H. M. dockyard" given as the occupation  of an ancestor on a civil certificate  dated 1856. Webster's dictionary defines converter as "one that converts: as the  furnace used in the Bessemer process  ... or ... a device employing mech­  anical rotation for changing electrical  energy from one form to another; also   ... a device for adapting a television  receiver to receive channels for which it  was not originally designed."

You are left now asking yourself what on earth this man could have been doing in  this dockyard in 1856. For a start you know that he wasn't tuning his TV set to seme foreign station. You may spend some time wondering whether electricity could have been used in a dockyard in 1856,  then stumble upon the fact that Sir Henry  Bessemer's converter was introduced into  the steel industry in 1856, and ask  yourself; "Did they actually make steel  in a dockyard?"

What you have to understand here is that this word is being used in the context of  1856. If you turn to the full Oxford English Dictionary,  there you will find another definition: "One whose business  it is to 'convert' rough timber," to  reduce it from the rough state to pieces  of nearly the required shape and size. This is now more likely. Is a converter in a dockyard one who is working on rough  timber to produce planks? In other words, is he a sawyer? Now if they had used that word to describe his job you may have understood right away.

Sometimes it might be necessary to go even further than the full Oxford English    Dictionary   —  to a dialect dictionary.

If you are lucky enough to find an ancestor's occupation mentioned, then you  should spend some time working out what it meant. Books on specialist subjects might help a lot, as might books of fic­  tional stories. The film industry and TV companies produce some very good examples  of what life might have been like as  lived yesterday  —  whenever "yesterday"  was. The industry takes itself very seriously nowadays. Researchers are employed specially to "get it right."

Basically there are two main kinds of workers  —  the man who works for himself,  and the man who works for someone else.

In the first category we will find all those who have managed, somehow, to  collect the wherewithal to work on their  own, be this a piece of land, a horse and  cart, some tools, machinery or whatever. All kinds of tradesmen will come into this category, too, and those who are  described as "masters": master bakers, master millers, master hatters, and so  on. These will have reached a pinnacle of expertise; they will, if you like, have mastered their own trade and now be  in a position to teach it to others. They will take on apprentices to train, and employ others to work for them. These are what we would call today the middle class, so you can reckon that their families lived comparatively better  off than those of the workers in the  other category, those who worked for the  masters.

Let's have a look then at a few of yesterday's jobs and try to understand  for ourselves what they meant within the  context of the life of the family con­  cerned. Let us remember though that con­ditions give rise to customs and customs dictate fashions. Let's take hats as our first example:

Evidence of hat making can be found throughout history.[3 ] If you find an ancestor described as a "hatter," your first question is, when was he a hatter?

With all industries, the government of the day can yield an enormous control by  tariffs and taxes. During the seven­ teenth century, foreign-made hats began  to trickle into the United Kingdom. This depressed the industry, so the government  placed a heavy tariff on these imported  hats, pushing up their sale price. This boosted the home trade and made the job of hatmaker more viable.

By the eighteenth century, the hat indus­ try was booming and had even developed a  flourishing export trade to the Conti­  nent. Trade with Canada, then a part of the British Empire, was bringing the best  quality beaver skins to England. A master hat maker would probably employ eight to ten workers, who would work together in what was described as a  "cottage industry." A small workshop would be attached to his house, in the  same way as a dwelling house and shop are  often combined premises. Newspaper advertisements during the nineteenth   century often described combined premises  for sale, for example, "dwelling house and hatter's workshop."

By the nineteenth century, the felt hat trade began to decline. Fashion was changing. The gentry now began to favor silk hats, and the workingman chose the  cloth cap. The occupation of hatter was, however, still there, but it was dif­  ferent, for times and fashions had  changed. So, depending on when your ancestor was a hatter, you can work out  which type of hat he might have made. Unlike the milkman, the hatter is a hatter is a hatter. Where time can change his job is in the kind of hat he  makes.

Another example of a master was hag gler[4 ] —  aheavy carter, a man who probably  owned his own horse and cart, a cart of  enormous proportions and a big heavy  horse. This combination would cart heavy loads: building materials, bricks,  timber, scaffolding, and, most likely of  all, stones direct from the quarry. While he and his horse were fit and able, they worked, and the money came in; but  if either of them ailed, particularly the  horse, then times might be hard. Above all, the horse had to be kept fit. It was more important to find food for the  horse than for the man's family, for the  livelihood of them all depended on the  horse  —  and second only to it, the good  repair of the cart. Being the family of a haggler could mean that life literally  revolved around the horse and cart.

A carter&lt;u&gt; [5  &lt;/u&gt;] was similar to a haggler, but everything about him was smaller and  perhaps cleaner, too. The carter might work with a pony and trap, even a donkey. Many carters worked carrying produce from the country into the towns on market  days. Many stood outside auction houses, markets  —  anyplace where produce was being sold  —  and then touted for business as the  home-going purchasers left. Sometimes a carter worked in conjunction with his wife, fitting her work in with his. They formed a team.

In parts of the country where there were many large hotels or colleges or  schools  —  places where a lot of people  used a lot of linen  —  then there was a  need for washer-women or laundresses.[6 ] Oxford  and Cambridge obviously were two  such places. College washing was a steady business. If a woman lived within reach of these colleges and her husband  had a cart, then they could form a  business partnership. You can find these couples listed in census returns for  districts like these  —  his occupation,  carter; hers, laundress. At first sight they look like two separate jobs, but  together the couple formed a team. On Monday he would take his cart into the town, hoping to have something to carry  there as he went. He would call at the college and collect the washing. His wife would then spend Tuesday, Wednesday,  and Thursday washing, starching, and  ironing the linen. This she might have to do against heavy odds: Suppose it were simply pouring rain all week. She didn't have a washing machine remember! Suppose some of her children were ill. Just picture for a moment the clothesline breaking! Remember, she had to heat all her water in a big copper tub and probably make her own soap! She had to work to the very highest standards, or she could be quickly replaced by a rival. On Friday he would make the return journey, carrying the clean linen back to  the college in town. During the other days of the week the carter would work for hire wherever he could and carry  anything he could manage with his smaller  team   —  market produce, messages. He might even be asked to help people move. During the sunnier months he might hire out himself and his horse to help a local  farmer. Local newspapers would often carry advertisements from both carters  and laundresses: "Man and horse for  hire." "Cart going to and from Oxford each week, able to carry small loads." "Laundry work wanted. Will collect Monday and return Friday."

If you look up the word carter in a modern dictionary, you will not be con­ fused by the definition: "One who car­  ries or conveys in a cart." But if you  look up the word haggler, you will run straight into difficulties.

Webster's says, "Haggle. . . .: to cut roughly or clumsily. ... to annoy or exhaust with wrangling." "Haggler. . .: one who haggles."

Chamber's gives: "Haggle—to cut unskillfully; to bargain contentiously or wranglingly."

These books would leave you with the impression that your haggler ancestor was either a clodhopping lumberman or a tiresome, price-arguing trader.

But if you use a dialect dictionary, the definition will be quite different.

Wright's Dialect Dictionary says: "Haggle-cart—a horse and cart let out on hire to do rough work or odd jobs." "Haggler—a haggle-cart owner."

Nobblers,[7 ] had another colorful occupa­tion. These were not men who "incapaci­tated a racehorse" (Webster's defini­tion), nor were they "men who cheated or swindled" (the Oxford English Dictionary definition). A nobbler was something be­tween a laborer and a quarrier. He had mastered the knack of cutting stone to produce the right shaped piece for the job. He was very good at dry stone wall­ing, for instance. There are a great many dry stone walls in Britain. They divide all those pocket-handkerchief-sized fields there. Some have stood for hundreds of years already. They are just stones placed one on top of the other in such a way that they will actually stay there. High winds, cattle scratching their hides, even carts accidently run­ning into them, do not easily dislodge them.

The nobbler was a man who usually worked alone, both for himself and by himself. He sorted the stones out actually on the job, especially when building dry stone walls. There are parts of Ireland where the fields are so stony, still, in spite of the miles and miles of dry stone walls snaking across the countryside, that you could still collect enough rough stone on the job to start building the walls over again!

Sometimes a man is an absentee bread­winner. Take the sailor, for instance. His children grow up "mother reared." This large, hairy, masculine creature will come and go intermittently through­out their lives. His huge presence will disrupt their tranquil, nurserylike life from time to time, and his going away again will allow them to fall back into the simple pattern of their life, which will now revolve around the arrival of another baby in their midst! This kind of household not only has to cope with the economic problems caused by the absence of its breadwinner, but also social family dilemmas. Lighthouse keepers are another group of workers who are more often away than at home. De­scendants of men of both these occupa­tions will try to explain to us how their young, formative years were different from those of the family living next door to them whose father was the local baker, for instance.

Brick making,[8 ] at the right time and in the right location, was a trade at which a man might prosper. But this prosperity was often almost entirely related to the speed at which he could produce these bricks. If something is being built, bricks are wanted now. Very few brick makers had property on which they could store vast loads of ready-made bricks. When the pressure was on, the brick maker's entire family worked alongside him. Look at the census returns, and see there a man described as a brick maker. His wife and many of his children will be described as "brick maker's laborers."

One of the stages of brick making was the pugging of the clay. This was a process by which the clay was thoroughly worked, until the mixture was smooth and even and pliable. To achieve this, the mass of clay was trodden: over and over again feet trudged and pounded the great mass. Small stones and pebbles, if left in the clay, would cause the brick to crack as it dried. So, as one trudged and pounded, he removed any of these he  found. Bare feet could find these pebbles easier than booted feet. Besides, boots cost money. Why wear them out treading clay?

Quite little children were used as pug gers. They had perfect little puggers' feet. Collect a party of children now and set them to pug clay in their bare  feet. For an afternoon they will have a marvelous time, but set them to do this day after day, in all kinds of weather, being driven by the necessity of produc­  ing several hundred bricks by a certain time, and they will soon become disen­  chanted by the whole idea. But in the nineteenth century, children worked  alongside their parents for twelve hours  a day in the brick fields. Had you been a brick maker's child, in no way could you have escaped this pugging!

One of the great dangers for brick makers was gangrene. Any small wound in the feet or legs, if neglected, could so  easily become poisoned. If there was no means or time to treat it, gangrene was  the worst result. A one-legged man was often recognized as a former brick maker.

You might expect that a brick maker's job was a fairly static one, that he and his  family worked together in the local brick field, beside the nearest kiln; but think  for a moment about the difficulties of  transporting bricks, in that haggler's  cart. Bricks are heavy, so this would have been the best way to move them. They are also quite brittle, so if it were possible, bricks would be best made  as near to the job as possible. If you come across a brick maker, chances are you will find that he moves about quite a  lot. The birthplaces of his children, as listed on the census returns, will pro­  bably confirm this. When most people rented their homes, a person could as  well rent this one as that one, so the  whole family would often move house. The carter and perhaps the haggler, too,  helped out. But think about this for a moment. If a brick maker moved his family from A to B, then it must be  because he had finished making bricks for something being built at A and had now gone to help build something else at B. Perhaps you can discover what. Read something of the local history of these  locations. Perhaps it can provide an answer.

Locations have an important influence on the occupations of the men and women who live there. The whole lives of children born by the edge of the sea, whose parents get their living from it, for instance, revolve around such events as the coming and going of boats and the tides. Any shoreside scavenging was considered suitable work for women and children together. Shrimping at some parts of the coast and gathering cockle  and mussel[9  ] from the rocks uncovered by the tide at other parts, were common occupations. A child of this environment hardly ever had his feet out of water. But at least it was water with healing properties, or so we are led to believe. No real fear of gangrene here, for in­ stance. But what of rheumatic complaints in later life? How did long hours' immersion in stone-cold water take its  toll?

Families living in the shadow of a pit,[10 ] or mill, will totally depend upon this, the major local industry. Take a pit, for instance. A huge proportion of the total male population will work there, most of them down at the coal face. The lives of their womenfolk will revolve round the hours that their men come and go   —  shift workers from early days, for  when you work in the dark, it matters not  whether it is day or night on the sur­ face. Because things like pithead baths are facilities of modern life, our ances­  tral coal miners came home filthy   —  to  houses without bathrooms or running  water. Imagine for a moment the lot of the women who had to cope with all that  this entailed. Boy children born in this place, to families in this occupation, followed their fathers as a matter of course into the pit. Much has been writ­ ten about the employment of small boys in the mines, carried there on the shoulders of their fathers or older brothers before  dawn and returning home after dusk, thus  even, deprived of daylight as they grew  up.[11  ]

The dangers of working in a mine are obvious, but when going down and coming  back up again meant ladders, only the  fittest of all could cope; and falls  —  deep falls  —  were a very real danger.

If a mine went on short time, or even closed altogether, the miner was left  looking for another mining job, the work  he knew best. Suppose he had been a tin miner in Cornwall. Many men thrown out of work there in times of depression set  sail for America. But many others, less willing, or perhaps less able to take  such a brave chance, simply looked for a  job in mining not quite so far away. This could easily turn out to be a lead mine in the Midlands, and if in turn this  too left him stranded later on, he might  continue northwards to end up as a coal  miner in Northumberland. Thus, he, and his family with him, would have traversed  the length of England during his working  life. Not a big thing to do, it is true  —  not as big as going to America  —  but it will be harder to find him than his  brother tin miner who stayed in Cornwall and simply changed his job. The moral of this case is that once you know a man's  job, it just could help you track him down.

The capacity of the local mill to devour the entire neighborhood as its work  force, gives little individual choice to  members of the community. Worse! It even acts as a magnet for all the work-less who can wander in so that soon the people who once lived what they might remember as a peaceful, easygoing rural  life, now find themselves in the tread­mill of the machine, fighting to keep a  place for themselves in their own  village, competing with outsiders drawn  by the chance of work.

Some industries can have a positively devasting effect on the locality. I mean by this a physical effect. Take those places where iron was made  —  the great  furnaces of Coalbrookdale, for instance. Their ever-burning fires dominated the entire countryside, belched great clouds  of muck into the atmosphere. Many hundreds of people lived out their lives  under such a cloud, the chemical proper­  ties of which could strip paint, corrode,  blacken, and decay. Think what this did to their lungs. Read the census returns there, and see how many were widowed early in life. Take a survey of the ages at death and of the causes of these  deaths, if you can. You will soon realize the devastation this environment wreaked on the lungs of its inhabitants.

Coke burning was another such industry. Gasses given off from the coke ovens could affect vegetation up to a distance  of half a mile, depending on the prevail­  ing wind. Not only the men working at the ovens, but also their families living  under this permanent cloud of gas, could  also be affected by really disabling pul­  monary diseases.

The salt towns, too, presented much the same kind of problems. Salt was obtained by boiling huge pans at brine till the  salt crystallized out.[12 ] Really cheap quality coal was used. This produced great clouds of evil-smelling smoke. When this mixed with the steam from the salt pans, it produced an almost perma­ nent, and certainly dangerous, fog.

The words coke burner, salt maker and  furnaceman,   therefore, describing an  occupation, tell you much more than what  these men did. They tell you also what it was like for their families to live in  the shadow of that particular industry.

When communities are dominated by a single major local industry, they are  terribly vulnerable. If trade slumps, the mills go on short time, or the pit closes   —  even temporarily  —  families have a  terrible struggle to survive. In a way, then, bringing one's industry indoors with him, working in one's own home,  seemed to offer an answer. Whole communities fell for this idea, or were trapped by it. Frame work knitters are a perfect example. F.W.K. is the accepted abbreviation to describe this occupation. This has fooled all at some time or other. It does not mean farm worker!

I say "trapped" because this is exactly what happened to these operatives. In the first place, the cost of the frame was huge for the ordinary worker, so most  of them gladly accepted the offer of one  on loan. "You work on my machine. I'll buy what you make. I'll even provide the  materials for you to use. You can buy  them direct from me." Too late, the poor fellow realized he was trapped. He had no control at all over the price of his raw materials, and no redress when the master lowered the purchasing price of  his finished goods. Great armies of men and women sat hunched over these frames,  knitting stockings with an urgency which proved that their very lives depended on  them. Their children were set to seam these stockings together just as soon as  they could hold a needle and learn to  sew. If they progressed to chevening,  embroidering "clocks" or designs on them,  so much the better. Look at the census returns again. See there the eight- and nine-year-old girls described as  "seamers," and the nine- and ten-year-  olds as "cheveners."

Although many such workers had frames in their own homes, there were plenty who  worked in cramped and often unsanitary  conditions in workshops  —  cottage indus­  tries again  —  containing as many frames as  could be fitted into the space available. Ultimately, most of these operatives ended up with one or more disabilities.

First of all, the work was a very great strain on their eyesight  —  and this in an age when the kind of spectacles which are  prescribed today were undreamed of. If they could afford to buy any at all, they  probably had them off a market stall,  trying them all on till they found a pair  which suited them best. Woolworths used to sell them for six pence a pair well into the twentieth century!

Next, it was, if anything, an even greater strain on their patience, as anyone who has ever tried to use a modern knitting machine and had it keep dropping all its stitches can attest.

Next, the huddled way that they were forced to sit, gave their spines a lot of  trouble. If they were not yet fully grown when they began to work at this  trade, then they grew round-shouldered,  even humpbacked. Sitting long hours in one position did awful things to the  blood supply to their legs, not to  mention the effect it had upon their  bowels. Their lungs too were physically cramped. Add to this the probability that they had to breathe air anything but fresh, and you get a sorry picture of people stunted in growth and poor in  general health.

It is hard for us now really to decide what trade might have been the best to work at then, whenever "then" was. If a man went to sea, it was a dangerous,  often lonely life, with great physical  hardships. But at least he had fresh air to breathe. Would he willingly have traded with his brother in the pit? For all the strenuous and often dirty, wet, and cold work a laborer in the field might have been called upon to perform, would he have traded with his brother hunched over a knitting frame?

The laboring man had a tough, hard struggle to survive. He had to be able to turn his hand to anything. The description laborer can cover dozens of different jobs. Sometimes you might find some of these described. Because the job of a laborer varies throughout the year, it could all depend on when you ask him,  what he will reply. Suppose you find a man described as a "drainer" when he baptized a child in February one year. What you have to ask yourself is, did he do this draining all the year round? Was this his permanent job   —  once a drainer  always a drainer? Finding the baptism of another child of his next year —  this time  in April, when he is described as a "well  digger"  —  will confirm for you that his  laboring job certainly did alter through  the seasons. For the laborer it was a constant struggle to find work. Thus, when the railways or canals were being  built, suddenly it looked like prosperity  for the laborer. Here was a steady job. There was work as far as the line was going. Men were drawn to these sites as if by a magnet. As these projects passed through an area, they created wealth for  all sorts of folk. The local innkeeper, for instance, victuallers, boot and shoe  makers and repairers, blacksmiths   —  all  these and many more enjoyed an unexpected  prosperity.

Because of the very nature of these jobs, the men lived rough. The camp sites, at best, were collections of sheds and  hovels, quite unsuitable for families to  tag along with their menfolk. It would be naive of us to suppose that all men  working away from home for long periods  could remain celibate and 100 percent  faithful. There are reports of over-the-   bush   marriages taking place between men from these work gangs and local girls.[13 ] It is very hard indeed to decide one way  or the other, whether these were perma­  nent or only temporary marriages. They amounted to what we call today common-law  marriages. There was nothing written down, nothing left for us to check, except perhaps contemporary writings,  sometimes with dubious credibility. Some of these marriages could well have proved  to be permanent alliances; but if there  was already a legal wife, and possibly  children waiting at home somewhere, then  these had to be temporary alliances. Sadly, a trail of innocent babies was often left behind. Parish registers of those churches fringing the area would record the baptisms of children to local  girls the requisite number of months  after the team has moved on, chance  children in every sense of the word. Many of these little children found their way into the local workhouse, abandoned  even by their mothers, and who can  possibly say, at this distance, whether  they could be blamed for this or not?

Almost any workhouse census return will show many young children as inmates  alone  —  that is, without any other person  there with the same surname as them­ selves. The 1841 census for Stockport Workhouse, for instance, shows that 35  percent of the children there were alone  like this. Because men, women, and children were housed separately then in workhouses, they are listed apart from each other, so it is hard to try to work out family relationships. If some of the surnames are common in that area, then there could easily be even more of these children alone. Another point: because workhouse children were expected to work to support themselves as soon as they possibly could, many of them would have been put out as apprentices already, thus decreasing the real numbers. They were often forced onto unwilling masters and cruelly used. The mills literally devoured them. The burial registers for Linby Parish in Nottinghamshire read like a trail of disasters as they list the  dying children, sent there as a seemingly  endless supply from the city workhouses, from even as far away as London, to work in the mills which stretched along the river Leen.[14  ]

The seasons of the year, besides changing the laborer's job, offered the chance of  work to all sorts of people who might not  work right through the year. Tradition­ ally, harvest time was the one important time of the year when everyone was busy. Whole families worked together harvest­ ing, in a race against time and weather. There were three major types of harvest­ ers: (1)home based.[15  ] (2)individual traveling harvesters.[16] and (3)family traveling harvesters.[17 ]

For the home-based harvesters, it was a case of everyone into the fields to help. Farmers and landowners alike needed extra help at this time and relied upon it; the workers in turn looked upon the harvest time as a bonus time and relied upon the extra money earned to make special pur­  chases against the coming winter   —  shoes  and food, for instance. Men, women, and children all worked together in whatever capacity each of them could manage. This work force moved from farm to farm in the  area till all the crops were gathered in. It was the one time in the year when the laboring man had some bargaining power!

The individual traveling harvester was a person prepared to work hard, really  hard, specifically to earn as much as he  could during this special time of year. It was possible to work out a scheme whereby one could travel from one part of  the country to another, harvesting vari­  ous crops as he went. Young men formed themselves into teams and planned their routes out very carefully. It was impor­ tant to be in the right place at the  right time. Once they had worked out a good route and made their contacts, they  would repeat this journey each year. When a member of this team had to fall out for any reason —  maybe he had married by now; maybe he was so employed that he couldn't get away or had simply become too old   —  then his place would be eagerly  filled by another growing lad. These harvest journeys could entail many hun­dreds of miles of walking and cover the  months of June to September. The men walked between the jobs, usually on a  Sunday, for they hoped to be able to work  on all the working days while they were  away from home, both going and coming back. The jobs they did included hay making, corn cutting, grass mowing, fruit  picking  —  even hoeing and weeding for  market gardeners. One big advantage of this system for the men was that they could form a working team, coupling those who worked best together, who could match each other for speed and reach, for  instance. They lived rough, sleeping wherever they could, and carried with  them their own scythes, of which they  were duly proud, each one balanced and honed to suit the worker's own prefer­  ence. A strange and unique combination that some of these teams practiced was to  dance a$, well as harvest. Morris   dancing,&lt;u&gt; [18 &lt;/u&gt;   ]    an old English custom, a dance always performed by a team of men, fitted  the bill nicely. Some of these teams perfected the dance and could earn good money giving exhibitions as they went,  particularly if they reached London,  where this would be a real novelty. They went as far as London if they could  —  to  cut the grass in the big parks there! It is reported that the last such harvest  journey took place in 1912.

If you have been wondering perhaps how an ancestor of yours met and married a girl  some hundreds of miles from his own  village, could it have been because he  was a member of such a harvest team? Had he met this girl before as he had gone through this village where she lived, the  previous year perhaps, possible even the  year before that as well? Now, as he passed through again, she agreed, at long last, to marry him and he carried her off back to his own village. Perhaps they started their married life together with the nest egg he had earned on this  harvest trip. For him this might have been the last of such trips, for I doubt  she would let him go again the next year!

Family traveling teams really did take the whole family, right down to the  smallest child. Perhaps the best example of these teams was the hop pickers. Londoners traditionally migrated en masse to the hop fields of Kent for the pick­ing. It was even referred to as the hop holiday. Since the size of the job was such that the local labor force could never have coped alone, these migrant  workers were welcomed, especially by the  hop farmers. Payment was by the weight picked, so even the smallest child could  contribute to the family bag. Grandma came along too and had her own special  jobs, minding the littlest ones and pre­  paring food for the family of pickers. The job could take as long as five weeks, from the end of August through September. This harvest followed directly upon the corn harvest in Kent, so there was a good long stint of harvesting if you had a mind to work it all. This colorful hop holiday for Londoners lasted well into the twentieth century, right up until someone at last worked out how a machine could replace all those willing little  hands.

When you consider how city-based people lived then, even though they worked hard  right through the hours of daylight,  endlessly picking in order to earn as  much as possible, these hop holidays were  indeed looked upon as holidays. Living conditions in the towns and cities were often truly terrible. Small four-roomed houses, two rooms up and two down, could contain as many as fifty people, and, what is much worse, these houses could have been so built that it was intended that ten of them, ten houses that is,  should share one privy or necessary  between them. A page of the 1851 census for Nottingham shows a lodging house of only four rooms in which fifteen people slept the night. A man, his wife, and three children  —  girls aged twenty-one and  thirteen and a boy of sixteen  —  formed the  lodging house keeper's family, and they  shared the house with another ten people. This kind of gross overcrowding was not uncommon in places where large numbers of  people were gathered and there just  weren't enough houses to go around. In stone and slate quarries in North Wales,  rural areas if ever there were any, it is  reported that people even slept in  shifts. As the day workers rose, the night workers retired, and the beds were never really allowed to go cold![19 ]

Is it any wonder then that men and women alike would look towards the open spaces reported to abound in those lands beyond  the seas? Migratory workers would even cross the Atlantic.[20 ] Stone quarriers from Scotland regularly spent the summer in America working, crossing over in the  spring and returning for the winter.

The bizarre catalog of jobs done by the poor and hopeless of any city, particu­  larly London, makes strange and pitiful  reading: the cigar finders[21 ] who sold the butts to a "master" who put these  horrible cigar ends together again to  make new cigars! The finders and restorers of dogs[22 ] who more often than not enticed dogs into custody regularly  and ransomed them back to t  h  eir owners;  the child crossing-sweepers,[23 ] who often worked in gangs, the most powerful of  which could reap good rewards in places  like Trafalgar Square in London in an age  when horse manure lay on the roads and  women's skirts trailed on the ground! Perhaps the most bizarre of all was the pure finders[24 ] —  those whose days were  spent searching for and collecting, dog  dirt, the alkaline qualities of which  made it suitable to use to cure, or  purify leather! These unfortunates would keep this in a bucket in their noisome garret until it was full and then carry  it to Bermondsey to sell to the tanners  there.

How can we even contemplate this situa­ tion today  —  the hopelessness of it all,  the poverty and despair and consequent  dreadful ill health? In 1899, when Britain  was looking for men to go to  fight in the Boer War, of eleven thousand  men who volunteered in Manchester, eight  thousand were found to be unfit and  rejected![25 ] If some of them lived like this, and many of them must have done, was it any wonder they were unfit? Both men and women finding themselves in this  kind of situation will volunteer for  anything  —  anything at all which will  offer an escape, be this the chance of a  back-breaking hop holiday, foreign  service in the army, or even emigration. Surely there is something somewhere which can offer them some hope for the future.

Many of you are the living proof that some at least found this El Dorado. Folk who were prepared to try, and willing to  work hard, flocked to these shores, faced  the great unknown, were willing to take the risks that this huge step entailed, and withstood the hardships which went with this decision. Many of them suc­ ceeded. To their great credit and per­ sonal joy, they succeeded. To them is owed an enormous debt, which you cannot  even begin to contemplate unless you have  tried to understand something of what it  was like for them as they struggled to  make a living.

Look at your pedigree forms again. What have you written there? Great-grandpapa was born in 1820, he married in 1850, and  all his children were born between then  and 1870. All right, then, so what? What was he doing to earn a living to support them all? Did his wife earn too? Are all the birthplaces of the children the same? If not, why not? What caused him to move his family around? Ask your­ selves these kinds of questions, and set  about finding the answers. When you have found some of these, then begin asking  more questions: What was it like to work   at this occupation? Was the family involved? How did they fare for things like food, clothes, and living quarters? Would there have been any chance of an education for the children, that is,  apart from an apprenticeship straight  into some job? How did they cope with illness, and did their job expose them to  much of this? Would they ever have managed to take a rest, never mind a full  holiday? If they traveled, then how? Could it have been by train or canal, by horse and cart, horseback, or just plain  walking.

In time you will find that you can put together something much more valuable than that sterile string of beads which  those three magic dates and a name  signify. You will find yourselves telling the story of your own background. You are what you are today because of what your ancestor was yesterday. Under­ standing him will greatly help you to  understand yourself.

It would be impertinent of us to look back on our ancestors with pity, to be  sorry for them. Of course times were often hard for them. But each of us in our own time learns how to cope with life. Let us do them the courtesy of at least trying to understand what life was  like for them, for it is because of their strength and determination that we are all where we are today.

[1] Henry Mayhew, Mayhew’s London (Pilot Press, London, 1949), p. 127. [2] Don Steel, Discovering Your Family History (BBC, London, 1980), p. 15. [3] John Briggs ed. Newcastle Under Lyne 1173-1973 (North Staffordshire Polytechnic, 1973), p. 86. [4] Raphael Samuel, ed. Village Life and Labour, History Workshop Series (Routledge &amp; Kegan Paul, London, 1975), p. 176. [5] Ibid., pp. 42-43. [6] Ibid., p. 177. [7] Ibid., pp. 167, 176. [8] Ibid., pp. 168, 113. [9] Ibid., p. 104. [10] Raphael Samuel d. Miners, Quarrymen and Saltworkers, History Workshop Series (Routledge &amp; Kegan Paul, London, 1977), p. 205. [11] Eric Forster, The Pit Children, Northern History Booklet no. 83 (Frank Grahm, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1978), p.5. [12] See Samuel ed., Miners, Quarrymen and Saltworkers, p. 141. [13] Terry Coleman, The Railway Navvies (Hutchinson, 1965), p. 21. [14] John Brown, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe (Caliban, Sussex, 1977). [15] See Samuel ed., Village Life and Labor, p.45. [16] Ibid., p. 50. [17] Ibid., p. 82. [18] Ibid., p. 51. [19] See Samuel ed., Miners, Quarrymen and Saltworkers, p. 72. [20] Ibid., p. 72. [21] See Mayhew’s, London, p. 304. [22] Ibid., p. 223. [23] Ibid., p. 366. [24] Ibid., p. 296. [25] “Going for a Soldier” BBC TV program – screened 1980.