Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy (42 page)

Suggestions for further reading:

•  My Ancestor Was a Coalminer
by David Tonks (Society of Genealogists, 2003)

•  The Hardest Work under Heaven: The Life and Death of the British Miner
by M. Pollard (Hutchinson, 1984)

•  Life and Work of the Northern Lead Miner
by A. Raistrick (Alan Sutton, 1990)

•  The History of the British Coal Industry
(Oxford, 1993)

•  The History of Tin Mining and Smelting in Cornwall
by D. B. Barton (D. Bradford Barton, 1967)

•  
The National Archives Research Guide number 35, ‘Coal Mining Records in The National Archives', and number 64, ‘Sources for the History of Mines and Quarries'

There is a distinct lack of centralized information and documentation regarding the mining and quarrying industries and, most importantly, the people who worked in them. Some ex-miners and descendants of pit workers have built websites dedicated to the history and memory of the mines where they worked, often rich with photographic archive material. These can be difficult to locate and a general web-search or browse through the list of links on some of the other websites already mentioned is the only real way of finding out if somebody has already researched the history of the mine where your ancestor worked. Some examples include the history of Blaenserchan Colliery at www.blaenserchan.com and the Welsh Coal Mines website at www.welshcoalmines.co.uk, which is packed with information about collieries once found around Wales. A particularly informative site about the history of working in a coal pit, with pages about disasters, mining heroes, pictures and memories compiled by a former miner can be found at www.pitwork.net.

The greatest embodiment of the Industrial Revolution were the mills and factories that spread over large swathes of the country, and the associated movement from the countryside that created the great towns and cities of the North West. This chapter examines the sources that enable researchers to step back in time and revisit the dry, dusty and noisy factory floor of a typical cotton mill, match factory or similar place of employment.

The Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, coupled with a population boom, changed the British landscape forever and germinated modern society as we know it today. While Britain's rural economy declined, ‘those dark satanic mills' springing up all over the north fuelled a booming export industry. Formerly small towns like Manchester and Sheffield exploded in size, and their communication networks spread rapidly. In 1851 Britain invited the world to marvel at industrial masterpieces housed at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. Meanwhile the social and economic revolution taking place attracted international attention for both its merits and its woes. Those people who worked long shifts under intolerable conditions and lived in squalor to keep the workshop of the world running were equated to
white slaves by horrified onlookers, like the MP Michael Sadler. This was the age and environment in which Karl Marx wrote the
Communist Manifesto
, urging the proletariat to rise up against their capitalist oppressors, while Friedrich Engels despaired at
The Condition of the Working Class in England
. Whether you trace your family tree back to a humble cotton spinner or a wealthy mill owner, getting to grips with the rich heritage hiding behind our industrial ancestors is a fascinating journey through modern British social history.

‘
The Industrial Revolution changed the British landscape forever
.'

Early factories were commonly called mills because they were powered by watermills before steam power was deemed more efficient. The development of the steam engine and subsequent use of steam power at the very beginning of the 1800s marked a dramatic change for manufacturing as mills and factories no longer needed to be located next to rivers. Urban areas that built up around a newly opened mill or collection of factories were known as mill towns, and our ancestors who inhabited them were primarily unskilled machine minders and people trained to use the latest technology being developed. They formed a new breed of working-class people who lived a highly regulated life dominated by clocking on and off, pay rates, supervised labour and monotonous production lines.

Most factories opened up in urban centres where there was a large workforce to draw upon, but industrial slums developed as local trades and the old cottage industries became obsolete, forcing people from rural areas into the already overcrowded towns. If you find an ancestor employed in a manufacturing industry you may discover that their generation or the generation before them had migrated from a more rural setting in search of work. By the end of the Victorian period, far more people were employed in manufacturing than in agriculture. (In contrast rural Ireland did not experience an industrial revolution in the way the rest of Britain did and as such was sorely hit by the Potato Famine of the late 1840s that killed around one million agricultural workers and led to the emigration of millions more.)

Manchester, Birmingham, Bradford and Leeds were at the heart of industrialization in the early 1800s, dominated by a few key industries.

•
 
Cotton:
The manufacture of cotton, based principally in Lancashire but also found in parts of Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Cheshire, was Britain's most valuable manufacturing industry from the mid-nineteenth century until the late 1920s, at which time the effects of the Great Depression and tension with its biggest raw cotton supplier and cotton goods consumer, India, led to a decline. The manufacture of cotton goods was a two-phase process. Spinning, which was mechanized by the eighteenth century, was a process that transformed raw cotton into usable threads. The second phase, weaving, manufactured the cloth into clothing or other cotton goods. Weaving was not mechanized until the 1840s, after which time hundreds of thousands of handloom weavers became redundant at an astounding rate.

•
 
Wool and worsted:
In Yorkshire wool and worsted provided employment for the majority of factory workers in towns like Bradford and Halifax, and this continued to be the case until the mid-twentieth century.

•
 
Flour milling:
Corn milling was an ancient rural industry that changed drastically in the 1880s when giant flourmills were built in London, Liverpool, Hull and other major ports to take advantage of increasing wheat imports and the use of new roller grinding technology. These gradually replaced the wind and water mills once found all over rural England.

•
 
Foundries:
Foundries built up around mining areas to manufacture the tin, copper, iron and zinc excavated there and to use the coal from the mines. Sheffield was once world renowned for its steel, a major source of employment in the area until international competition led to most of the foundries closing down in the 1970s and 1980s.

Despite generally rapid industrial growth during the nineteenth century there were downturns in the economy. There was widespread unrest in 1841 and 1842, and in 1846 the whole of Great Britain experienced a temporary industrial depression that lasted until 1848. The textile industry suffered during the American Civil War when imports of raw cotton from the United States stopped, bringing about widespread unemployment and the onset of the Lancashire Cotton Famine in 1861 lasting four years. The end of the 1880s and early 1890s saw another general economic downturn, known at the time as the ‘great depression', a term which has subsequently been used for the worldwide depression following the Wall Street Crash in 1929.

Manufacturing was chiefly based in the north of England and in Scotland, while the Welsh economy was supported by wool, mining and the manufacture of the materials this produced. The north of Ireland had a more industrial-based economy than the south, relying upon shipbuilding, textiles and rope manufacture
.

Child labour was a problem posed by these new industries, as it was in mining (see
Chapter 15
). A major piece of legislation, the Factory Act of 1833, was passed after a Royal Commission led by the Tory MP Michael Sadler and the Evangelical social reformer Lord Ashley found evidence of the exploitation of children in British factories. The Factory Act forbade the employment of children under the age of 9, and all children aged between 9 and 13 were limited to a 48-hour week, while children under 18 years old could not work more than 12 hours a day. A Factory Inspectorate was created by this legislation to monitor the working conditions of women and children in factories. There were regular modifications to the Factory Act, including an 1891 Act that raised the minimum age of children employed in factories to 11 years old.

The new industrial occupations of the nineteenth century quickly became gender specific. By far the majority of workers in the cotton, wool, worsted and other textile industries were female, although some men were employed in more responsible and better-paid positions. Many Irish Catholic women, escaping bleak lives in rural Ireland by immigrating to the north-westerly ports of England, were employed in the lower-paying spinning jobs by the turn of the century.

During the First and Second World Wars women were temporarily expected to replace men who had left their factory jobs to fight in the Army. The steel factories in Sheffield were seconded for use as ammunition factories, making the city a prime target for air-raid attacks and putting the women working there at great risk. Royal Ordnance Factories (ROFs) were munitions factories set up by the government during the Second World War and were built in areas considered safe at the time from German bombing, such as south-west England, Wales and Scotland. Most records of the ROFs are kept at The National Archives among records of the Ministry of Aviation in AVIA series.

In order to research the history of your industrial ancestors in any depth, it is necessary to know the name of the company that they worked for.

Tracing your industrial ancestors

Actor Robert Lindsay discovered that his paternal grandfather, Jesse Stevenson, worked in the local Stanton Ironworks as an iron fettler on his return from serving with the Sherwood Foresters during the First World War. Jesse lived in a cramped two-up two-down cottage owned by the company. His situation was typical of many men returning from the war
.

You may be fortunate enough to have an elderly relative who can give you some guidance, or you might find a letter from the firm among some of the paperwork passed down through the family. Army discharge papers (if your ancestor served in the forces during either World War) sometimes state the name of the company the soldier intended to work for, or at least their occupation and address (see
Chapter 9
for more information about Army ancestors).

If this is not the case and all you have to go on is a census return stating ‘cotton spinner' then your research will start by exploring who the main employers were for the area your ancestor lived in. This can be done using detailed historical maps, particularly those updated regularly by the Ordnance Survey, and trade directories, and by reading books about the history of the local area, all of which can be found in the county record office for your ancestral hometown.

Unless your family lived in one of the few industrial villages that adapted to urban changes taking place in neighbouring towns, you are likely to find more than one company who could have employed your ancestors and will probably never be able to pinpoint which is the right one. Even if you are sure of the company they worked for, the likelihood of locating concrete evidence of your ancestor's employment there is very slim. Do not let this deter you because you can still research what working life was like for people living in that area. Your task will be one of local history research, finding out what the main employers of the area were like, how well business did there and whether there were any localized depressions or booms that might explain a sudden change in circumstances or location for your family.

When looking at maps of the area take an interest in the way the streets were formed and the houses were built. You can trace how a village or town expanded over the nineteenth century as industrialization took hold by comparing maps from different decades. Ordnance Survey maps in particular will give you a bird's-eye view of each building and an idea of the house sizes so you can see whether your ancestors lived in one of the two-up two-down terraces that characterized industrial urban centres. Compare this with the number of people you found living there on the census return.

Try to find old photographs among the county record office's collections of the street or urban district where your ancestors lived and analyse the impact industrialization had on their landscape. Look out for smoggy factory chimneys and the names of local companies emblazoned on the outside of mills on the horizon, and be aware of the clothes people in those photographs are wearing. Most working-class women and children, and even some men, wore wooden clogs as late as the twentieth century because they were cheap, hardwearing and protected against the damp factory floors. Draw on as many of these sources as you can find to conjure up a picture of your industrial ancestors' world.

Investigating the exact meaning behind your ancestor's job title will give you a deeper understanding of what their daily routine would have involved. What part did they play in the overall production process? There may have been safety risks involved in the tasks they had to do and the machinery they used. Try to find out how their job was affected by technological advances throughout the industrial age – were more job opportunities created in their field of work or were there widespread redundancies as employers invested in machinery that did their job more quickly and efficiently and was more cost-effective?

The Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHM), which was amalgamated with the Public Record Office to form The National Archives, produced a catalogue to the records of around 1,200 textile and leather businesses of between 1760 and 1914, describing the type of records that survive for each, their covering dates and location. These descriptions can now be searched using the NRA online database at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra along with those of many thousands more manufacturing businesses. If you know the name of the company your ancestor worked for then a quick search of the Corporate Name database may be able to find some records that are worth you looking through. For example a search for the records of Stanton Ironworks Co. Ltd using the Corporate Name search located records dating back to 1878 held at Derbyshire County Record Office, including the diaries of Fred Alvey, a draughtsman.

Publications such as Water and Titford's
Dictionary of Old Trades, Titles and Occupations
can aid you in finding out exactly what a Carder or Flaxdresser did, and specialist books found in the local history section of the county record office library will help you to establish the development of that type of work in the area. The ScotlandsPeople website has a glossary of old occupations and the tools or machinery people in those occupations would have used that can be located on the Research Tools page by clicking on Help & Other Resources
.

As with locating the records of mining companies explained in
Chapter 15
, it is also worth searching the Access to Archives database for company records, at www.a2a.org.uk. For Welsh companies look at the Archives Network Wales website at www.archivesnetworkwales. info, and for records held in Scottish archives try searching the Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) at www.scan.org.uk. If you cannot locate the company records you are looking for using any of these databases then speak to the county record office that covers the area the company was based in to find out if the business is listed in their catalogues and indexes.