mad hatters and more a article "Just Jobs: The Effect of Occupations On British Family Life"

 

Just Jobs: The Effect of Occupations On British Family Life

Article by Elizabeth Simpson in World Conference on Records, 1980
Born in England.
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 seventeenth 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 indus­try was booming and had even developed a flourishing export trade to the Conti­nent. 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 dif­ferent, 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.
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 menand 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 indus­tries 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 thistrade, 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 ention 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 "welldigger"—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 shoemakers 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 perma­nent 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 theirway 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 willshow many young children as inmatesalone—that is, without any other personthere with the same surname as them­selves. The 1841 census for StockportWorkhouse, for instance, shows that 35percent of the children there were alonelike this. Because men, women, andchildren were housed separately then in workhouses, they are listed apart fromeach other, so it is hard to try to work out family relationships. If some of thesurnames are common in that area, then there could easily be even more of thesechildren alone. Another point: because workhouse children were expected to workto support themselves as soon as they possibly could, many of them would havebeen put out as apprentices already, thusdecreasing the real numbers. They were often forced onto unwilling masters and cruelly used. The mills literallydevoured them. The burial registers for Linby Parish in Nottinghamshire read likea trail of disasters as they list thedying children, sent there as a seeminglyendless supply from the city workhouses, from even as far away as London, to workin the mills which stretched along the river Leen.^[14]
The seasons of the year, besides changingthe laborer's job, offered the chance ofwork to all sorts of people who might notwork right through the year. Tradition­ally, harvest time was the one importanttime of the year when everyone was busy.Whole families worked together harvest­ing, in a race against time and weather.There were three major types of harvest­ers: (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; theworkers in turn looked upon the harvest time as a bonus time and relied upon theextra money earned to make special pur­chases against the coming winter—shoesand food, for instance. Men, women, andchildren all worked together in whatever capacity each of them could manage. Thiswork force moved from farm to farm in thearea till all the crops were gathered in.It was the one time in the year when thelaboring man had some bargaining power!
The individual traveling harvester was aperson prepared to work hard, reallyhard, specifically to earn as much as hecould during this special time of year.It was possible to work out a schemewhereby one could travel from one part ofthe country to another, harvesting vari­ous crops as he went. Young men formed themselves into teams and planned their routes out very carefully. It was impor­tant to be in the right place at theright time. Once they had worked out agood route and made their contacts, theywould repeat this journey each year.When a member of this team had to fallout for any reason—maybe he had married by now; maybe he was so employed that hecouldn't get away or had simply become too old—then his place would be eagerlyfilled by another growing lad. Theseharvest journeys could entail many hun­dreds of miles of walking and cover themonths of June to September. The menwalked between the jobs, usually on aSunday, for they hoped to be able to workon all the working days while they wereaway from home, both going and coming back. The jobs they did included haymaking, corn cutting, grass mowing, fruitpicking—even hoeing and weeding formarket 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 matcheach other for speed and reach, forinstance. They lived rough, sleepingwherever they could, and carried withthem their own scythes, of which theywere duly proud, each one balanced and honed to suit the worker's own prefer­ence. A strange and unique combinationthat some of these teams practiced was todance a$, well as harvest. Morrisdancing,^[18]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 anancestor of yours met and married a girlsome hundreds of miles from his ownvillage, could it have been because hewas a member of such a harvest team? Hadhe met this girl before as he had gone through this village where she lived, theprevious year perhaps, possible even theyear before that as well? Now, as hepassed through again, she agreed, at long last, to marry him and he carried her offback to his own village. Perhaps they started their married life together withthe nest egg he had earned on thisharvest trip. For him this might havebeen the last of such trips, for I doubtshe would let him go again the next year!
Family traveling teams really did takethe whole family, right down to thesmallest child. Perhaps the best exampleof these teams was the hop pickers.Londoners traditionally migrated en masseto 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 couldnever have coped alone, these migrantworkers were welcomed, especially by thehop farmers. Payment was by the weightpicked, so even the smallest child couldcontribute to the family bag. Grandmacame along too and had her own specialjobs, minding the littlest ones and pre­paring 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 goodlong stint of harvesting if you had amind to work it all. This colorful hop holiday for Londoners lasted well intothe twentieth century, right up until someone at last worked out how a machinecould replace all those willing littlehands.
When you consider how city-based peoplelived then, even though they worked hardright through the hours of daylight,endlessly picking in order to earn asmuch as possible, these hop holidays wereindeed looked upon as holidays. Livingconditions in the towns and cities were often truly terrible. Small four-roomed houses, two rooms up and two down, couldcontain 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 necessarybetween them. A page of the 1851 censusfor Nottingham shows a lodging house ofonly four rooms in which fifteen people slept the night. A man, his wife, and three children—girls aged twenty-one andthirteen and a boy of sixteen—formed thelodging house keeper's family, and theyshared the house with another ten people.This kind of gross overcrowding was notuncommon in places where large numbers ofpeople were gathered and there justweren't enough houses to go around. Instone and slate quarries in North Wales,rural areas if ever there were any, it isreported that people even slept inshifts. As the day workers rose, thenight workers retired, and the beds were never really allowed to go cold!^[19]
Is it any wonder then that men and womenalike would look towards the open spaces reported to abound in those lands beyondthe seas? Migratory workers would evencross the Atlantic.^[20] Stone quarriers from Scotland regularly spent the summer in America working, crossing over in thespring and returning for the winter.
The bizarre catalog of jobs done by thepoor and hopeless of any city, particu­larly London, makes strange and pitifulreading: the cigar finders^[21] who sold the butts to a "master" who put thesehorrible cigar ends together again tomake new cigars! The finders andrestorers of dogs ^[22] who more often than not enticed dogs into custody regularlyand ransomed them back to their owners;the child crossing-sweepers,^[23] who often worked in gangs, the most powerful ofwhich could reap good rewards in placeslike Trafalgar Square in London in an agewhen horse manure lay on the roads andwomen'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, dogdirt, 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 situation 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? Bothmen and women finding themselves in thiskind of situation will volunteer foranything—anything at all which willoffer an escape, be this the chance of aback-breaking hop holiday, foreignservice 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 thatsome at least found this El Dorado. Folkwho were prepared to try, and willing towork hard, flocked to these shores, facedthe 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 suc­ceeded. To their great credit and per­sonal joy, they succeeded. To them isowed an enormous debt, which you cannoteven begin to contemplate unless you havetried to understand something of what itwas like for them as they struggled tomake a living.
Look at your pedigree forms again. What have you written there? Great-grandpapawas born in 1820, he married in 1850, andall his children were born between thenand 1870. All right, then, so what?What was he doing to earn a living tosupport them all? Did his wife earn too?Are all the birthplaces of the children the same? If not, why not? What causedhim to move his family around? Ask your­selves these kinds of questions, and setabout finding the answers. When you havefound some of these, then begin askingmore questions: What was it like to workat this occupation? Was the familyinvolved? How did they fare for thingslike food, clothes, and living quarters?Would there have been any chance of aneducation for the children, that is,apart from an apprenticeship straightinto some job? How did they cope withillness, and did their job expose them tomuch of this? Would they ever havemanaged to take a rest, never mind a fullholiday? If they traveled, then how?Could it have been by train or canal, byhorse and cart, horseback, or just plainwalking.
In time you will find that you can put together something much more valuablethan that sterile string of beads whichthose three magic dates and a namesignify. You will find yourselvestelling the story of your own background.You are what you are today because ofwhat your ancestor was yesterday. Under­standing him will greatly help you tounderstand yourself.
It would be impertinent of us to lookback on our ancestors with pity, to besorry for them. Of course times wereoften hard for them. But each of us in our own time learns how to cope withlife. Let us do them the courtesy of atleast trying to understand what life waslike for them, for it is because of theirstrength and determination that we are all where we are today.

The phrase “mad as a hatter” actually began in the Victorian era and the Hatter was, unfortunately, a victim of his own occupation. Felt hats became very popular during this time: bowlers and top hats were a fashion requirement for men accepted in society.

The occupation of making hats in the 1800’s was a complex process which involved hand brushing a solution containing mercury dust onto the fur hide  to enhance its texture and make it more workable for shaping into hats.  Today we know that mercury is a heavy metal, poisonous if not handled with proper safety measures, but this was not known back in the 1800’s. The hatters would continually use this product, day to day, and the mercury solution eventually would get into their lungs, paying some harmful side effects. (AKA as “mad hatter syndrome” and “hatter’s shakes”)  The side effects would cause the body to twitch and shake, loss of coordination, slurred speech, loss of memory, and personality changes.

So the Hatter really did go mad! Poisoned by his own passion, spilling forth through his hair, fingernails and eyes.

 

Hatmaking in the 16th Century, [Schoppert Technologia Carminiabus, 1568, © The British Library (C27.d.10). All Rights Reserved.”