One of my studies, Starbotton in Wharfedale, focuses on the Early Modern period – roughly 1500-1750, although depending on the records available, it may end up homing in on just part of that period. Starbotton is part of the parish of Kettlewell and importantly, no parish registers for the period before 1698/ 1700 have survived. Although there are some Bishop’s Transcripts for the seventeenth century, survival of these records too is limited and patchy. This means I have no continuous register of any kind to use as a foundation for rebuilding the community of people in Starbotton before the last fifty years of my period of interest. The primary challenge will be to locate as many alternative sources as possible and then find ways to make them work together.
Prior to the Local History course my research in Starbotton had focused on my Simondson family. I already had Wills for three of the Simondson men who died between 1693/4 and 1712/13, plus the Probate register entry only for another, John, who died in 1705 and named Anthony as his executor. Christopher’s was a holographic Will, meaning a group of trusted family and friends gathered at his deathbed, helped him to organise his thoughts, and wrote up the document after his death, all of them signing to verify that the contents were the wishes of the deceased. The Wills of Lister and Christopher are accompanied by Inventories, which are also signed by everyone involved in that process.
Something I had previously noticed – both here and in another small village where I’ve accessed quite a few Wills – was the sense of community evoked through all the people involved in the Probate process – witnesses, executors, the men doing the inventory, bondsmen and so on – and that’s in addition to the named beneficiaries. They all pulled together to help each other at this time of need, and to ensure the wives and children were properly cared for.
With this in mind I decided to ‘map’ the network created by the three Simondson Wills, plus John’s Probate Register entry. Every fact, and every single person shown on the network chart at the top of this post came from a close reading of these Probate documents. I do have some additional information about some of the people, gained from other records. For example, it is Thomas Simondson who is my direct ancestor, and I have more information about him and his family, but his Will does not seem to have survived. I was surprised to find that, excluding beneficiaries, there were twenty people involved in this network-mapping process: nineteen men and one woman. Adding in the named beneficiaries brings the total to thirty-seven: eleven women/ girls and six men/ boys are named beneficiaries. This younger generation will make my job a bit easier since most of them undergo some religious rite or other that brings them into the period of the surviving parish registers.
Homing in on householders though – which in itself would be a great step forward – these Wills have given me a LOT of information about the village community. I do recognise most of the surnames and in some cases the first names too. Comparison with a transcript of the 1672 Lady Day Hearth Tax return, and also with a list of churchwardens from all available Bishop’s Transcripts indicates that most are from the parish. However, the parish includes Kettlewell as well as Starbotton, so there is still work to do in trying to separate out the two.
A person’s ‘community’ is not necessarily restricted to his or her village. In addition to the village community there will be wider networks too, based on friendships, marriages, worship (e.g. Nonconformists in rural locations would have a geographically wider network), business, market days, and so on. Based just on my Simondson family, I know that they had family connections throughout Wharfedale and into what is now Lancashire too. This also seems to me to be part of the history of a Place: where were the wider networks and connections? What were the reasons for this? And was it different for people from different social levels?
I’ve now located about ten more Wills for the same period for other testators living in Starbotton and will gradually collect and transcribe these, looking for overlaps, and comparing the findings to other records known to be for residents of Starbotton.
It has become my tradition to focus on military ancestors for my mid-November post. Today’s post continues that with the topic of trench warfare, which has become almost synonymous for us with The Great War and the Western Front. Not all our military ancestors and family members were killed in action, and the topic of trench warfare gives us an opportunity to broaden our gaze and think of others who, although they returned home safely, suffered unimaginable terrors that often blighted the rest of their lives.
By 1914, advancements in ammunitions and artillery meant the mass infantry assaults of former grand battles were no longer an option. Although field works and trenches had been used for centuries in military campaigns, they now came to the fore as a means of defence. They became longer, stretching out along entire fronts, and deeper – ideally about twelve feet deep. Their zig-zag construction prevented the enemy, should they access the trench, from firing along for more than a few yards. Typically, there would be several trench lines, each running parallel to the next, and connected by communications trenches. Hence the ‘front’ could extend up to a mile behind the first, or ‘outpost’ trench. It was through the communications trenches that food, ammunition, orders and indeed troops were delivered; also letters to and from home.
The distance between the opposing sides could be surprisingly narrow – sometimes as little as about thirty yards, but it could be as much as 250 yards. Between them was ‘No Man’s Land’, where coils of barbed wire were positioned as a means of slowing down the enemy, should they attack. If you’ve watched War Horse, you may remember that Joey the horse becomes tangled and seriously injured in the barbed wire as he runs to escape from the explosions and noise.
Although trenches gave cover for both sides, they also made for a long, gruelling war of attrition. The point was to push forward your own front by gaining control of the enemy’s trench system. This meant daring and deadly attacks, forcing men to go ‘over the top’ of their own trench’s parapet, and run across No Man’s Land towards the opposing trench. An element of surprise was preferable, but the intense artillery bombardments generally preceding such raids gave the heads-up to the enemy that attack was imminent. This gave them time to bring up reinforcements and increased the likelihood of heavy losses for the attackers. What’s more, land gained in an attack could be lost again in future enemy raids. The hundred days of the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) for example, resulted in a gain for the British front line of just five miles. The cost of those five miles was almost six hundred thousand lives, between the two sides.
These photographs were taken in 2014 at Sanctuary Wood Trench Museum (Hill 62) near Ypres, Belgium. The trenches are original, just as the farmer found them when he returned to reclaim his land at the end of the First World War, although there has more recently been work to preserve them. This is just one section of the trenches on the land – there were more. The photos show the zig-zag layout and the depth of the trenches. Visitors can walk in them – although I can guarantee that the experience of doing so will bear no comparison with that endured by our ancestors more than a hundred years earlier.
Reading through the Battalion War Diary for the Prince of Wales´s Own (West Yorkshire) Regiment: 49th Division, in which one of my great uncles was serving, the routine seems to have been roughly one week on the front line, one week off. Away from the front, days were spent cleaning, drilling and training, relaxing, playing sport, and marching to new positions as required. In the trenches it was a different matter. Dysentry, cholera and typhoid fever were common, and trench conditions also attracted rats which got into the men’s food and nibbled at them when they were sleeping. Lice were prevalent, and constant scratching increased the likelihood of contamination of skin abrasions by lice faeces, resulting in trench fever. Also common was trench foot, caused by constant immersion of the feet in the dank, muddy water in the bottom of the trenches during and after heavy rainfall. While painful, this is preventable and treatable today, but during the conditions in the trenches in 1914-1918, the dead tissue often spread across one or both feet, sometimes requiring amputation. Similarly, frostbite could result in the loss of fingers or toes.
Even without enemy action, there was always the possibility of it, and the stress caused what we now know as PTSD but was then called ‘shell shock’, as well as a type of gum infection called trench mouth. In his War Diary entry for 29th July 1917, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Harold Tetley (again, West Yorks Regiment, 49th Division) wrote ‘Nothing to report – Steady shelling all day by both sides’. I have tried to imagine how far from ‘normality’ conditions must stray for the one to equate to the other.
That same great uncle had a narrow escape when, following German deployment of mustard gas shells, men in his counterpart Battalion suffered such severe mustard gas effects that hundreds were evacuated to England and the land itself was rendered too dangerous for further activity. The goal of a mustard gas attack was not generally to kill but to harass and disorientate; only 2-3% of victims actually died. However, many who didn’t die were nevertheless scarred for life. Respiratory disease and failing eyesight were common post-war afflictions, and many eventually died of tuberculosis.
It almost makes one feel that those whose lives were taken were the ‘lucky’ ones – luck being a relative concept in this scenario. I think we owe it to those who returned and were ‘changed’, to try to understand what they experienced. I know I would not have been one of the brave ones.
Sources
Kirk, Andrew, Leeds Rifles: The Prince of Wales’s Own (West Yorkshire Regiment) 7th and 8th Territorial Battalions 1914-1918: Written in Letters of Gold. 1917. Pen & Sword, Barnsley.
UK, WWI War Diaries (France, Belgium and Germany), 1914-1920: Prince of Wales´s Own (West Yorkshire) Regiment: 49th Division: Piece 2795/1: 1/7 Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment (1915 Apr-1919 May)
I will admit that Stoke-on-Trent was largely a closed book to me until quite recently. I have The Great Pottery Throwdown (initially BBC, later Channel 4) to thank for piquing my interest, and in September I visited one of the potteries where the programme has been filmed.
From ‘Six Towns’ to ‘Stoke-on-Trent’ Thanks to an abundance of local clays and coal, from the mid-seventeenth century, six towns in Staffordshire emerged as the centre of the British pottery industry, and one of the foremost pottery centres in Europe. These six towns were Burslem, Fenton, Hanley, Longton, Stoke-upon-Trent and Tunstall. A flip through the 1891 census shows Fenton, Hanley, Longton and Stoke-upon-Trent categorised as sub-registration districts under the civil parish of Stoke-upon-Trent. Tunstall was a sub-registration district under Wolstanton civil parish, and Burslem was a separate civil parish.
Location of the Six Towns. Image taken from thepotteries.org Click image to go to the page.
Modern-day Stoke-on-Trent is, famously, an amalgamation of those ‘Six Towns’. This happened in 1910, with the creation of the federation and county borough of Stoke-on-Trent. Later, in 1925, Stoke-on-Trent was granted city status. The county borough was abolished in 1974, when Stoke became a non-metropolitan district of Staffordshire, although it became a unitary authority in 1997. (Note that the original town and parish name of Stoke-upon-Trent becomes Stoke-on-Trent when referring to the modern city/unitary authority; or indeed, just ‘Stoke’.)
Even in 1911 and 1921, after the creation of the county borough of Stoke-on-Trent, the census returns continue to be enumerated under the headings of the distinct towns.
‘The Potteries’ Today, in recognition of the importance of Stoke-on-Trent to the British pottery industry, this whole area is known as ‘The Potteries’. By the turn of the nineteenth century there were more than 300 potworks here. However, in the last quarter of the twentieth century it became difficult to compete with cheaper overseas producers. A succession of factory closures resulted in the loss of 32,000 jobs in the ceramics industry: from 45,000 in 1975 and 23,000 in 1991 to just 13,000 by 2002. (The Guardian: Gone to pot, 29 May 2002)
I’ve not been able to find a properly sourced account of the proportion of the population of ‘The Potteries’ actually employed in the industry during its heyday. However, census pages suggest a very high proportion. Try looking for Clarice Cliffe’s entry on the 1901 census. This future ceramic artist and designer, now regarded as one of the most influential of the 20th Century, was born in 1899 in Tunstall, and is to be found in 1901 living with her father, Henry T Cliffe, mother Ann and three older siblings at 19 Meir Street. With the exception of Clarice’s father (a Foundry Ironmoulder) plus four other people, every single person of working age on the two pages straddled by the Cliffe family’s entry is employed in the potteries.
Okaay… But why ‘a family historian’s dream’? Pottery has been a huge part of Stoke-on-Trent’s past; and although there’s no doubt that the factory closures and decline of the industry have taken their toll on the local economy, it is immediately obvious to the visitor that it’s still very much part of the area’s present. First, a number of significant producers continue to thrive. These include Waterford Wedgwood Royal Doulton; Portmeirion; Steelite International; Burleigh; Wade; Churchill; Endeka; Johnson Tiles; Dudson and Emma Bridgwater. Second, a number of the closed factories are now open to the public as museums. One account I read described the area as a sort of ‘pottery theme park’, but this is not a derogatory statement. Quite apart from this successful move to tourism, it’s clear from other blogs and articles found online that these museums attract serious ceramics enthusiasts as well as practising potters. It’s here, too, where the genealogical goodness is to be found. Wherever we’re from, most of us are descended from the ordinary workers, not the big people who employed them, made the rules and more frequently made the news. Often, all we know about our ancestors is a handful of entries on a number of official documents. However, by reading about the area, the industry they worked in, the history of churches the devout ones attended and so on, we can build up a picture of their lives – and for me, this is really enjoyable. How much more so, then, if we can add to this by visiting the actual place where they worked, or at least one very similar to it, listen to recordings/ watch footage of people who worked there, and see before and after photos of the place. Apart from the New Lanark mill and village, now a wonderful UNESCO World Heritage site but being a much smaller, individual concern, of direct ancestral relevance to fewer researchers, I haven’t come across anywhere to rival Stoke’s living heritage experience. If you know of other places, please do say so in the comments.
The museums The Visit Stoke website has a page dedicated to the area’s award-winning pottery museums, heritage centres and pottery factory outlets. Here, you’ll find, among other listings:
Spode Museum Trust Heritage Centre This tells the story of Spode and its importance to Stoke over the 230 years of its operation, with displays of its history, people and working conditions from the 1770s until closure in 2008.
Dudson Museum, in Hanley. Located in an atmospheric, original Grade II listed bottle oven, and focusing on the history of the company’s production together with industrial history, what life was like for the workers, etc.
Middleport Pottery, in Burslem. Includes the mould store, rooms where the paintresses worked, original Victorian offices, and a Grade II listed bottle kiln. The earlier series of The Great Pottery Throwdown were filmed here.
Gladstone Pottery Museum, in Longton. The only complete Victorian pottery factory. Although not one of the famous potteries, it was typical of hundreds of similar factories in the area making everyday ceramic items for the mass market. Here, you can experience what conditions were like for the men, women and children who worked in the Staffordshire pottery industry. The 2021 and 2022 series of The Great Pottery Throwdown were filmed here.
Bottle kiln at Middleport Pottery, Burslem. Photo: Janice Heppenstall
The museum we visited was the Middleport Pottery, home of Burleigh ware and known locally in its time as the ‘Seven Oven Works’, this being the number of bottle kilns (three biscuit and four glost bottle ovens). All my own photos included here were taken there. It’s free to wander round outside, with a charge if you want to go into certain rooms and exhibitions.
The Middleport works opened in 1889, on the banks of the Trent & Mersey canal, and the Burleigh company was hailed as an example of efficient production and greatly improved conditions for the employees. That said, although these photos suggest a picturesque industrial past, The Potteries was not a healthy place to live and work. While today there are only forty-seven bottle kilns remaining in the city, there were previously more than two thousand. You’ll find more information about the bottle kilns [here].
Longton, below, situated in a slight hollow, was the most polluted of all the towns. Writer Arnnold Bennet considered it ‘akin to Hell’.
Longton, circa 1895, with at least 65 bottle kilns and a great deal of smoke. Photo A.W.J. Blake. Click the image to go to the Longton page on the Stoke on Trent/ Potteries local history website.
Clearly, such living conditions would have caused and aggravated lung diseases for all inhabitants. However, for those in close proximity to processes involving flint or alumina powder, there was an additional hazard, known in the trade as ‘Potter’s Rot’. Caused by breathing in large amounts of the dust, this affected the lungs of potters. If your potter ancestor’s death certificate recorded a cause of death of silicosis or other lung disorder, there’s a good chance this may have been Potter’s Rot.
Long tables where the Middleport Pottery paintresses once sat and worked. Photo: Janice Heppenstall
It was a poster about Potter’s Rot in one of the rooms at Middleport that opened my eyes to the possibilities of this as a fantastic, experiential source of information for family historians. I have no Stoke-on-Trent or potter ancestors at all, but I’ve enjoyed researching this, and have no hesitation at all in recommending a weekend in Stoke with visits to as many of the above-named museums as possible for anyone who can trace their ancestry back to this area.
Other resources If a visit is out of the question, there are still other resources, several of them freely available online.
On YouTube, search for “the potteries” and other similar terms to find lots of videos, including some documentaries.
Read the works of Arnold Bennet, which tend to be set in the area, including Anna of the Five Towns. Most of his works seem to be available for free from the Amazon Kindle store. (On the Amazon website, limit your search to Kindle, and search for “Arnold Bennett free”.)
There is a good bibliography on the Stoke-upon-Trent page at GENUKI. I’ve seen excerpts from The Borough of Stoke-upon-Trent… by John Ward (1843) and On the Mortality of the Parish of Stoke-upon-Trent, with reference to its causes, and the ratio of deaths among children and potters by John Thomas Aldridge (1864) whilst researching for this post; and they would be very useful for family historians. The older books are likely to be available freely online through Internet Archive or similar.
Whether you have Potteries ancestry or not, I hope you found this interesting. I hope it might give you some new ideas about thinking outside the box when researching the lives of your own ancestors. Do please add comments about any similar places you’ve come across, that would give useful insights about the lives of people working in particular places and industries. Is there anything to rival Stoke-on-Trent?!
Every so often, you read a book that resonates deep within you, and for me one such book was The Real Oliver Twist by John Waller. I posted a review of it back in March 2019, and although it was one of my earliest posts for this blog, I’ve since referred to it in several more recent posts. This ‘real Oliver Twist’ – the real-life boy on whom Dickens is thought to have based his novel, is in fact called Robert Blincoe. Ever since reading his story I’ve considered him a hero.
Waller’s book was published in 2005. It runs to 450 pages, but his starting point for the work was a 68-page pamphlet written by John Brown and published in 1822 with the title A Memoir of Robert Blincoe. Born around 1792 in St Pancras and living as an orphan in the parish workhouse, in 1799 Blincoe, together with about fifty other children from the workhouse, was apprenticed by the Parish Overseers first to a cotton stocking manufacturer in Nottinghamshire and then to Ellis Needham, owner of Litton Mill in the parish of Tideswell in Derbyshire, where he remained until about 1813. Blincoe didn’t set out to publish a memoir. By the time he was approached by John Brown he was living in Manchester, married with children, and the owner of his own waste cotton business, but he had made no secret of his humble origins and the cruellest treatment imaginable he suffered as a pauper apprentice at Litton Mill.
Crucially and perhaps almost astonishingly, despite his experiences, Robert himself was a good man of unblemished reputation, who somehow knew right from wrong. Those who worked under him, either in his capacity as employer or as adult employee in someone else’s business, had only the highest praise for him. Following publication of the pamphlet in 1822, his story became the focus for campaigns highlighting working conditions for children and also for factory reform and the short time cause. Despite this, and even with plentiful evidence of the cruel excesses of capitalists and mill owners, it would not be until 1847 that the Ten Hours Bill passed into law.
With the benefit of almost two hundred years’ perspective, John Waller analyses the story in the pamphlet, verifies facts using original records, and sets the whole story in the context of social and political history. I cannot recommend it highly enough, and if I’ve whetted your appetite please read my earlier post to find out more.
Last month I had reason to revisit Robert Blincoe’s story – quite literally: during a week’s holiday in Derbyshire I walked part of the Monsal Trail. Here, along the deep ravine forged over millennia by the river Wye, Litton Mill still stands. Now beautifully restored and converted to luxury apartments, the setting of the former mill is breath-taking. A row of workers’ cottages adjacent to the building, probably also known to Robert, look out onto the river. This is a popular beauty spot within the Peak District, of great interest to geologists, walkers and rock climbers. A beautiful setting for a truly dreadful story. A get-away-from-it-all destination that, in Robert’s day, amounted to complete isolation. No-one was coming to rescue him and his fellow apprentices.
Litton Mill. Photo: Janice Heppenstall
When I wrote that first post about Robert Blincoe I always intended to read the pamphlet that started the whole thing off. That original pamphlet, with the full title A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, An Orphan Boy; Sent from the Workhouse of St Pancras, London, at seven years of age, to endure the Horrors of a Cotton Mill, through his infancy and youth, with a minute detail of his sufferings, being the first memoir of the kind published, is available online via Internet Archive [here]. Finally, after my visit to Litton Mill, I read it.
I remembered the cruelty meted out to the children, the overwork, the inadequate food, both in terms of quality and quantity, and the lack of sleep. Now, reading the pamphlet I found it was much worse than I had understood from the excerpts in John Waller’s book. Children would routinely be required to work sixteen hours a day, but on Saturdays they worked until midnight, Sunday being a day of rest. On at least one occasion they worked a full twenty-four hours without break. The children were required to wash morning and night, but were not given soap. Since they worked with heavily greased machinery, plain water was no match for this; and since they were so hungry, the bran they were given instead of soap was eaten instead. Food was coarse, often mouldy and foul-smelling, but eaten anyway. The children would be bribed to keep working without a meal break during the day with the promise of a halfpenny – but often the halfpennies did not materialise. When they did the children bought food, collected for them by a kindly blacksmith who worked on the floor below. Insufficient clothing was provided, and the children were covered in lice. Effectively, they were commodities. If one died, no matter – there was an inexhaustible supply of them from more workhouse orphanages.
Wandering around the site, I tried to work out where the Apprentice House had stood. It is referenced in the 1822 pamphlet as accommodating two hundred, and standing about half a mile from the mill. Waller describes its location as across the river, and therefore in the adjacent parish of Taddington, meaning that burial of any children dying in the Apprentice House was the responsibility not of Tideswell but of that neighbouring parish. The building no longer stands, but given that the opposite bank of the river was, like the mill side, bordered by the steep ravine, it is difficult to imagine any reason for housing the apprentices there other than that given by Waller. There is no village nearby, no other form of habitation, and no road or obvious footpath. It would appear to be difficult to access from other parts of the parish of Taddington. Robert did recall that the children who died were buried half and half in the two parishes – so as not to attract too much attention at the number of them.
Plaque adjacent to churchyard in Tideswell. Photo: Janice Heppenstall
What was truly shocking, though, was the violence. Those were different times, and violence used as a means of ‘correction’ was acceptable. It can even be argued that overseers needed the children to work as quickly as possible so that they themselves were not punished for insufficient output. Hence the children were beaten to leave them in no doubt that slowing down was not an option. It’s difficult for us to think that way, but back then it was the norm. What wasn’t the norm, however, was the level of beating, the cruelty, and the enjoyment derived from this by the men in charge at Litton Mill. Children were made to dangle over moving machinery, having to lift their legs at the knee with every motion of the machine. They had clamps weighing up to one pound attached to their ears and noses, and were expected to work that way. Rollers were aimed at their heads. Supple leather belts with brass buckles were used to whip them. Teeth were filed. These, and other activities, were done for fun. The children were, in consequence, constantly covered in bruises, cuts and welts. When they did finally reach their beds it was often impossible to find a position they could lie in without pain from the injuries. If the acceptable use of beating was as a means of making the children work harder, then the thugs at Litton Mill were either too stupid or too evil to recognise that they and the children would produce more if they did not take time out for this particular form of ‘fun’.
Obviously all of this took its toll on the children’s health. Malnutrition and insufficient rest meant that some of the children’s bodies were deformed – Robert Blincoe included. Children were often sick, and many died. Why didn’t the doctor raise his concerns with the authorities? For the simple reason that the doctor, the magistrate, the magistrate’s clerk and the factory owners, in this case Ellis Needham, were all on the same side. They socialised together, as Robert found to his cost on two occasions when, as a teenager, he tried to alert the authorities to the cruelty at Litton Mill. The only outcome was more brutality. Knowing this, some prayed to God to take them during the night, there were suicide attempts, and some of the boys committed crimes, purely in the hope that their punishment would be transportation to Botany Bay, which they believed would be better than the cruelty they were enduring at the mill.
Google Maps The steep ravine forming the valley of the river Wye alongside which Litton Mill is situated is shown.
As outlined above there is, ultimately, a happy ending to Robert’s story. He retained a sense of justice and was a good man; he married, established his own business and had children. His son won a scholarship and went to Cambridge, and one of his daughters made a very good marriage. Meanwhile, Ellis Needham was bankrupt in 1815 and died a pauper.
What can we, as family historians, take from Robert’s story?
Starting with the obvious and the specific, if you have ancestors in the Tideswell or Litton areas of Derbyshire – or in Lowdam, Nottinghamshire, location of the first mill to which the St Pancras children were apprenticed – you may recognise a name or two from the text. Even if your ancestors aren’t named, the story still serves as background history to the area where they lived. Today, Robert Blincoe is very much part of the history of Tideswell.
However, even if this part of the country has no relevance to your research – as is the case for myself – there is still much to be learned from reading texts like John Brown’s or John Waller’s. This can then be applied to the reality for your own ancestors.
If you have ancestors in Yorkshire, Lancashire or other areas where large-scale textile production was a major part of the local economy during the 19th century, understanding about life in a textile mill might be useful to you. Mills, for example, needed to be situated alongside water for powering the wheel, hence others were built in locations like Litton that we might now consider beauty spots but back then, with no local amenities other than what the mill owner chose to provide, increased the likelihood that children of workers would also be sucked in to the same work. Some might even be paid with tokens so that families had to buy their food and provisions at the mill owners’ shop.
More broadly, there is the social history, the operation of the Poor Laws, the Factory Acts and the apprenticing of parish and pauper apprentices. The nature of these apprenticeships is quite different from that of privately negotiated apprenticeships for sons of families who could pay. Robert Blincoe’s apprenticeship happened before the Poor Law Reform Act of 1834, when the earlier system of relief of the poor was coming under strain. Many parishes in the south sought to save money by offloading their orphans and children of paupers to the northern mills. My impression is that these mills could operate only because of the slave labour of the pauper children.
If you have an ancestor in the northern mills with no baptism record or identifiable parentage, it’s worth considering whether they might have been taken from the south to work in the mills. Conversely, if the sibling of an ancestor in the south disappears but no burial record is found, consider looking for them in the booming industrial towns in the Midlands or the North. They would have to remain living until 1851 for their place of birth to be confirmed on the census – Robert Blincoe gives his place of birth as London in the 1851 census.
Two or three minutes walk from the central Market Place in Ypres, stands the magnificent Menin Gate, Memorial to the Missing. It honours all the British and Commonwealth soldiers whose bodies were never found or remained unidentified in and around Ypres after the First World War.
My first glimpse of the Menin Gate was a black-and-white postcard brought back by my great uncle who went there before I was born to remember his older brother, Cyril. Cyril is one of the 54,896 men – from the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, India, South Africa and the West Indies – whose names are engraved on the Portland Stone panels. I now have that postcard, along with some photos and one of the death notices my great grandparents sent out to family and friends.
In April 1914, as the centenary of the Great War approached, I spent a few days in Ypres, learning about the final days not only of Cyril but of another great uncle too: Joseph. Like Cyril, Joseph lost his life in the Third Battle of Ypres, also known as Passchendaele. His remains lie in Poelcapelle Cemetery.
The Menin Gate, or in Flemish Menenpoort, was historically the eastern gate opening from the walled town of Ypres (Flemish: Ieper) in the direction of the town of Menin (Flemish: Menen). The grand archway now marking the road to Menen bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original gate – as the pre-1914 contemporary photograph below shows. In fact, the whole of Ypres had to be completely rebuilt after the war.
The two stone lions guarding the entrance to the town were removed during the war to prevent damage. They were presented to the Australian nation in 1936, in honour of the more than 36,000 Australian soldiers killed or wounded on the battlefields of the Ypres Salient. They stand now at the entrance to the Australian War Memorial museum in Canberra.
The Menin Gate (Menenpoort) before World War 1
The new gate and memorial was unveiled on 24th July 1927. It was designed in classical style by Sir Reginald Blomfield, and features a central Hall of Memory (which is also the road), loggias on the north and south sides of the building, and staircases linking the two levels.
And yet the Menin Gate is not a sad, dusty old memorial. It remains very much a part of daily life in Ypres. Since 2nd July 1928 The Last Post Association has overseen a daily act of homage to those who fell in defence of the town. Between 7.30pm and 8.30pm every evening, the road through the archway is closed, and as many as several hundred people gather.
At 8pm promptly, wearing the uniform of the local voluntary Fire Brigade, the buglers of The Last Post Association sound the Last Post – the tune used to commemorate the war dead in Britain and in Commonwealth countries.
Buglers at The Last Post Ceremony at Ypres
Marching bands, visiting dignitaries and delegations from organisations throughout the world come to Ypres to take part, and to lay wreaths. But even if not one single visitor attends, the ceremony still goes ahead.
Its significance to the people of Ypres is illustrated by the fact that this daily act of hommage was interrupted only during the years of German occupation during World War II, and was resumed on the very evening the town was liberated in 1944. Today, on 11th November 2021, the 31,317th ceremony will take place.
These last two photos are from the 29,545th ceremony on 11th April 2014.
If only the world could reflect upon such bloodshed, loss of life and destruction; and resolve henceforth that hatred, violence and war will never be the answer.
Crowd gathered in the street at the Menin Gate, Ypres
Last month I wrote about a lot of errors in the online transcripts of parish registers for St James Pockthorpe in Norwich, where several generations of my ancestors lived. I’ve written previously about the wonderful medieval churches in Norwich, and the Norwich Historic Churches Trust that ensures the ones no longer in use as places of worship are beautifully maintained and leased to organisations who bring them back into use with new purposes. St James Pockthorpe is one of these repurposed buildings. Since 1979 this Grade 1 listed building has been home to the Norwich Puppet Theatre, and I was delighted to visit there a couple of years ago. The building was open, and when I explained my interest I was given a guided tour.
Shortly after writing that previous post about the parish registers I was looking online at some old photos of Norwich, and since St James Pockthorpe was fresh on my mind I searched for that. There were several photos, but this one dated 1931, actually took my breath away. Apart from the church building itself, there is literally nothing left of this scene.
CLICK FOR BIG! St James Pockthorpe, Norwich, showing the south side, from Cowgate. Image date 1931. Source: George Plunkett
I’ve looked at these two photos full-size and side by side, and it would no longer be possible to capture the building from this angle today. It was taken from about 20 metres to the right of where I was standing to take my photo, along what was then Cowgate. The two maps below show that today the church (now the T-shaped building to the right of the roundabout) is set back from the road. I think I was standing at the edge of the new grass verge when I took my photo. We can also see that all the street names have changed, although there is a nod to what was there previously. Cowgate Street, where the 1931 photo was taken, is now Whitefriars; Cowgate is now north of the roundabout. The church had stood at the junction of Cowgate and Bargate Street. Bargate is now the main inner circular road for Norwich and is called Barrack Street, referencing the Barracks that was built along the road around 1805. To the left of the roundabout we have St Crispins Road dual carriageway; formerly this was Norman’s Lane, and the church once standing along it is now referenced only by a street name: St Paul’s Square. A tiny part of the ancient city wall that you can just see to the right of the older map is still there, by the way.
CLICK FOR BIG! Modern map showing location of St James Pockthorpe, NorwichCLICK FOR BIG! 1789 map showing location of St James Pockthorpe, Norwich
I love visiting historic towns, and particularly places where my ancestors lived. I imagine that by doing so I’m getting a feel for the place they knew. Yet when I look at this lovely old photo, I see that in this case at least I really didn’t achieve that just by visiting and walking around, taking photos. There was a lot of heavy bombing in Norwich during the war. St Paul’s and the area around it was severely damaged and later demolished, and of course it made sense to rebuild for the changing world: wider roads and modern housing. But oh! How lovely it all was before the bombs! I do wish I could have seen it then.
The moral of this story, then, is that visiting is lovely, taking photos and asking questions is great. But to really get a feel for a place, alongside reading around the history sometimes we also need old photos and maps.
The 1789 map above came from the British Historic Towns Atlas website. It includes a page dedicated to Norwich, with links to several maps and other topographic information. I’ve added it to my Norwich links page (or you can find that page from the menu bar above, and navigate from ‘Links’ to ‘About Norwich’).
They were created in 2013 by two teams of six students from De Montfort University. The task was to create a gritty representation of 17th century London.
Both videos ‘recreate’ 17th century London as it existed before The Great Fire of 1666. The amount of research is clear, not to mention artistic and animation skills. They researched street layouts using historical maps, contemporary building construction, and diaries from the period. The hanging signs record genuine inns and businesses from contemporary records.
Watching these videos really helps me to imagine myself back in the period. One of the things I notice is the number of church spires. London had 126 parishes, and although most of them have not survived, the scenes remind me very much of central Norwich today, with a church and little churchyard at almost every corner. I realise that London must have looked very similar. I literally lose myself every time I watch these.
The videos were created for ‘Off the Map’, a competition run by The British Library and video game developers GameCity and Crytek. ‘Pudding Lane Productions’ (above) won first prize.
The first video lasts 3 minutes 29 seconds; Triumphant Goat’s, below, is 7 minutes 59 seconds.
If you know Norwich you may recognise this scene, captured from The Forum. The 15th century church opposite is St Peter Mancroft. The significance of this scene for me was not only the reflections of the super-modern structure juxtaposed with the historic church, but also in the fact that here I was with my son, inside the modern structure in the year 2019, looking out on that ancient church inside which, 230 years earlier, my 4x great grandparents were married, and six years after that my 3x great grandfather Thomas was baptised.
I was in Norwich visiting my son, spending each evening with him and passing the days while he was studying, at the county archives or walking around the churches and parishes of significance to my Norwich ancestors. Amongst others, I was on the trail of the aforementioned Thomas and his wife Lucy: my 3x great grandparents. After marriage they settled in another Norwich parish: St Martin at Oak. Yet the baptism records of their children were puzzling: five children born in St Martin at Oak between 1819 and 1828, then a daughter born two hundred miles away in Fewston, Yorkshire in 1830, another son back in St Martin at Oak in 1832 and then seven more children in Fewston and Leeds between 1834 and 1846.
I understood why they had moved to Yorkshire. Thomas was a weaver: the very trade upon which Norwich’s wealth had been built; and yet even by the time of Thomas’s apprenticeship weaving was on the decline in Norwich, and with that the city itself. Quite simply, Norwich was unable to compete with the new spinning and weaving mills located in other parts of the country alongside fast flowing water and ready coal supplies. And so Thomas traded in his cottage industry lifestyle, working long hours at his loom beside the trademark long weavers’ window on the upper floor of the family home, for a position spinning flax at West House Mill at Blubberhouses within the parish of Fewston, about eight miles from Harrogate.
Typical Norwich weavers’ window
It’s known that the owners of West House Mill toured workhouses and charitable institutions in London and other large towns in search of hundreds of apprentice children, just as Thomas’s orphaned contemporary Robert Blincoe (‘The Real Oliver Twist’) had been ‘recruited’ around 1800. In fact, they hold the dubious honour of being amongst the first to do that. It’s reasonable to suppose, then, that Thomas might have been persuaded to relocate to the mill as an ‘engine minder’ while the owners were on a recruitment drive in Norwich. Reasonable, too, to imagine that all the benefits of this new life were highlighted, and little of the reality. The fact is that West House Mill was a huge, noisy, five-storeyed mill in a remote position in the Washburn Valley on the southern edge of the Yorkshire Dales. The working day, starting at 5am and ending sixteen hours later with perhaps just an hour’s break for rest and a midday meal, was hard-going and repetitive. The mill depended on the slave labour of the pauper children, effectively imprisoned there until they reached the age of twenty-one: it was a place of misery. While workers’ cottages were provided and the beauty of the countryside undisputed, the culture shock for Lucy and Thomas, used to the milder climate, the facilities of Norwich, the tranquillity of detailed work at the handloom and family nearby would be immense.
There was very little risk for the mill owners in employing Thomas. In accordance with the law, it’s almost certain that he left Norwich with a Settlement Certificate. Ever since the 1662 Settlement Act these certificates had facilitated migration by serving as a guarantee from the Churchwardens and Overseers of the Poor of the ‘home’ parish to those of the intended ‘host’ parish that, in the event of difficulties resulting in an application for poor relief, the home parish would pay the costs of ‘Removal’.
West House Mill at Blubberhouses, Fewston, Yorkshire
Two days after taking my ‘ancient and modern’ photo I was back in The Forum. Alongside several restaurants, the building is home to the Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library which includes the Norfolk Heritage Centre. Here, I came across a reference to Thomas, Lucy and their first four children: a Removal Order dated 1826. This surprised me on two counts. First, based on the baptism records I had believed their initial migration took place between 1828 and 1830; and second, if my family had been removed from Fewston back to St Martin at Oak in Norwich, what was the reason for this, and why had they returned there in time for the 1830 baptism of their sixth child?
The detail of the Removal Order was even more unexpected. In 1826 Thomas, Lucy and their four named children (6 years to 3 months) were removed from St Martin at Oak, where they had ‘lately intruded themselves contrary to the law relating to the settlement of the poor, and that they had there become chargeable’. By decision of two Justices of the Peace they were to be returned to the last legal place of settlement, and that was Fewston in Yorkshire.
I confess that until this point I had misunderstood the full draconian extent of the application of ‘settlement’ in the operation of relief of the poor. While fully understanding the rules for acquisition of settlement rights in a new parish, my understanding had been that an individual would always retain rights acquired by birthright. In other words, that the granting of new settlement rights was a privilege and an additional set of rights. Raising my eyes from the index, my eyes lighted once again on St Peter Mancroft, right outside the huge modern windows of The Forum. Here Thomas had been baptised. Here his existence had first been recorded. In trying to do his best to provide for his family Thomas had lost his right to live in his home town and was henceforth banished to a noisy, remote mill two hundred miles distant. My ‘ancient and modern’ photograph now assumed a new significance: loss and injustice. Injustice because the empty promises made to him cost the mill owners nothing, while believing them had cost Thomas and Lucy a great deal.
Sadly the Settlement Examination papers (I referred to this stage of the process in my last post) have not survivied, nor have the equivalent papers for the other end of the process in Fewston. These would have given me a lot more information about dates of migration. However, thanks to this Removal document I now know that Thomas and Lucy first moved to Fewston earlier than previously thought – probably around 1825. I now understand that the Certificates of Settlement were time-limited. As soon as Thomas had acquired legal rights of settlement in Fewston – presumably by being hired continually for more than a year and a day – the certificate ceased to have value. Hiring Thomas may have been risk-free for the owners of the West House Mill, but for Thomas and Lucy it was a one-way ticket. We might imagine that they tried to make it work, but finally were so unhappy that they decided to return to Norwich; and by then it was too late. All previous settlement rights had been erased. On 29th April, 1826, just three months after the Norwich birth of their fourth child, the Removal Order was signed for their forced return to Fewston.
Thomas and Lucy did not go quietly. They were back in St Martin at Oak for the baptism of a fifth child by 1828; in Fewston for the sixth in 1830; possibly (according to a note on the parish accounts) back again briefly in 1831; and in 1832 a final child was baptised in St Martin at Oak. Between 1834 and 1843 six more children were baptised, all at Fewston, and the 1841 census shows them here, living in workers’ accommodation. Thomas, formerly a skilled handloom weaver, is now an ‘engine minder’. The six oldest children, aged twenty to eleven are all ’employed at the flax mill’. I strongly suspect that it was through realisation that this would be the inevitable fate of all their children, and a desire to avoid this, that Lucy and Thomas were so desperate to escape. It is notable, however, that the eventual ‘acceptance of their fate’ coincides with the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, with its central focus on the workhouse in dealing with the poor. Faced with trying to make a go of it in Norwich but the likelihood of the workhouse for the entire family if they failed to do so, Thomas and Lucy seem, reluctantly, to have chosen Fewston. They would now live out their days in Yorkshire, relocating to Leeds by 1846, but my guess is that their hearts remained in Norwich.
If I should die, think only this of me;
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England…
From: The Soldier by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
Writing these lines in 1914, Rupert Brooke could never have dreamed that one day they would come to evoke so strongly, for the people of his homeland, the young men killed in battle during the First World War. Nor, having himself died in 1915, could he have envisaged the beautifully designed and lovingly tended cemeteries that were to rise up from the devastation of rat-infested, waterlogged Flemish battlefields in the corners of which he had helped to bury the fallen.
During the hostilities, around seven million civilians and ten million military personnel lost their lives. Two of these were my great uncles. They were amongst the 1,700,000 men who fell in defence of the Flemish town of Ypres (Ieper). In 2014, wanting to make sense of their final moments, I went to Ypres. On behalf of my late grandparents and great grandparents I wanted to visit their memorials. In doing so, I crossed battlefields, walked in trenches and tried to imagine the horrors once witnessed by that now peaceful landscape.
Along the way I learned how to ‘read’ the war graves cemeteries. Below, I share some of my discoveries.
All photos were taken at Poelkapelle, Tyne Cot, Essex Farm and Hooge Crater Commonwealth War Graves Cemeteries in West Flanders.
There are two types of war graves cemetery: battlefield and military. These differ as follows: Apart from their smaller size, the hallmark of a battlefield cemetery is that the men lay exactly where they were buried by their brothers in arms during battle, only now with the addition of a permanent headstone. (See below.) When the larger military cemeteries, such as Poelkapelle and Tyne Cot were later created, many bodies were moved to these new sites and laid to rest in uniform rows, all facing the same direction.
The memorial stone in the foreground of the above image bears a closer look. Private T Barratt, below, was awarded the Victoria Cross. Apart from the soldier’s regiment and a cross, Star of David, or a Sikh, Hindu, or Muslim symbol, the Victoria Cross was the only other symbol permitted by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission on the headstones.
Close by, is the final resting place of Rifleman V J Strudwick, below. His grave also receives a lot of attention. You’ll see why – look for his age.
Notice also an inscription at the bottom of Rifleman Strudwick’s stone: Not gone from memory or from love. Families of the deceased soldier were given the opportunity to have an epitaph engraved at the bottom of the headstone, to a maximum of 66 letters. They could write their own words or choose from a number of ‘standard’ epitaphs selected by Rudyard Kipling. However, whereas the headstone itself was provided by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, any inscription had to be paid for by the family, at a cost of threepence half-penny for each letter. My Great Uncle Joe’s stone, like that of Private Barratt VC, bears no inscription – the several shillings more, presumably, than their families could spare.
Next, the grave of a Jewish soldier, Rifleman M M Green. In the Jewish tradition, visitors have left memorial Stars of David, and piled pebbles on the gravestone.
In the front row of the next image, seven stones are set closely together. This is a communal grave for seven men killed in one blast – it was presumably not possible to work out precisely which body part belonged to which soldier.
And here, one little plot bearing the found remains of eight whole men. I won’t spell it out…
It was touching to see that local people continue to leave flowers and keepsakes, such as this rosary, on the graves of unknown soldiers.
The largest of all the Commonwealth military cemeteries anywhere in the world is Tyne Cot. Alongside 11,954 actual graves, a further 34,959 British and New Zealand soldiers are commemorated on the Memorial to the Missing. Added to the 54,896 men whose names are recorded on the Menin Gate, this brings the total of men missing in Ypres to 89,855. Most of these men do not lie undiscovered beneath the heavy Flanders soil; many were found but not identified. Their names are commemorated on the plaques of the Menin Gate or Tyne Cot, but they may also be buried in graves like the one above: A Soldier of The Great War.
One of these missing soldiers, my Great Uncle Cyril, is commemorated at the Menin Gate.
All of these grounds were given in perpetuity by King Albert I of Belgium in recognition of the sacrifices made in the defence and liberation of Belgium during the war. Designed by Sir Reginald Bloomfield and Sir Edwin Lutyens, with input from Gertrude Jekyll and Rudyard Kipling, contrary to expectations they are not forlorn, tragic ‘corners of some foreign field’. And yet nor do they glorify war. On the contrary, they are beautifully tended, tranquil spots: places to meditate on the people whose lives were so cruelly cut short.
My 7xG grandfather, Lister Simondson, studied at St John’s College, Cambridge. I found him there quite by chance while doing a general search on Ancestry a couple of years ago. I could never have imagined then, that within two years I would be walking in his footsteps inside the Upper Library at St John’s.
The library was completed in 1624. That date is affixed in stone to the exterior of the building on the brick parapet above the oriel window, and clearly visible from the river, which flows immediately outside, as well as from the adjacent Bridge of Sighs (which is where I was when I took the photo below). By the time Lister arrived in 1696, it was still fairly new, but even so the Library of St Johns College could claim to be the largest and most impressive in Cambridge. The books are arranged on 22 beautifully carved tall, dark oak bookcases alternating with 20 ‘dwarf’ cases. At the end of each of the taller cases little doors open onto a tiny cupboard, inside which are itemised, in various hands contemporaneous with Lister’s time in the library, the contents of the shelves. It seems likely, then, that the library remains pretty much as it was when he was there. In 2005, it was designated by the Museums Libraries and Archives Council as of national and international importance.
The library isn’t usually open to the public, but a year ago, by some strange quirk of fate, a distant cousin from the US on my husband’s side was awarded a visiting fellowship at St John’s, and a few months ago I was able to visit. Since I was with a Visiting Fellow, we were able to go up there and wander round, just three of us, alone. We weren’t allowed to touch any of the books but we could take photos without flash, and I took quite a few.
I was looking for any books that Lister, who graduated from St John’s in 1700, might have used. This little set seemed likely – the Holy Bible in Ancient Greek, Latin and German. I happen to know Lister was a talented linguist, and he went on to become a Church of England vicar. Of course I can’t guarantee he used these books, or even that they were in the library at the time he was there (1696-1700) but online research confirms that they were published in 1596, edited by David Wolder and printed by Lucius Jacob. So I’m thinking they were. Imagine that!
English Ancestors 