Trades, Travels and Trysts,
A Sampling of Social History in the UK - as it affects Genealogists
Approximate text for presentation on
Saturday Saturday 27th September 2003
at the National Archives - Ottawa Ontario

   Most of our ancestors had trades. With new inventions and changing economic times, there were often strong reasons for them to relocate - especially those in their early twenties. For example, in many areas it was the first-born male that took over the family farm; other boys were "given the road" instead - some of my forbears were! This presentation is intended, using many examples, to show the wealth of information that is now available on both the trades and the likely travels of our forebears within the UK. There are many local history books (often published by lesser-known publishers) and there is a weath of information on the web - if you know where to find it!

This presentation selects trades such as mining, fishing, farming and building construction - and even specialist trades and professions such as saddlery and the clergy - to show that information on such trades can be found, and that the needs within such trades cause people to relocate. A knowledge of social, (and local economic) history is a useful asset in order to decide what to do next when chasing a family line and getting a blank. The "trade" column on both civil registration records and census records may well be an invaluable clue to decide what to do next. Web pages on Local History, often found by a search engine, can provide both information and references on a wide range of specialist information. And finding lesser-known books with a web site that serves many UK second-hand bookshops is a great resource, too.

My wife and I spent three days this summer camping in a Gypsy Caravan Encampment in Southern Scotland; it was not by design, but from the experience I have further information on "trades and travel" - as well as lifestyles - from those three days. I'll pass on those stories some other time.

One trade or profession that is of interest to us all is - genealogy! My grandfather William Maxwell Reekie did quite a bit of family history searching in the 1930s - mostly from borrowed family bibles, I think. But in the Summer of 2003 my brother gave me a small book, published in 1865 - an edited listing of Church Session records for Dunfermline, Fife - the early record years - 1640 - 1689. The name on the flycover - John Reekie - my great-grandfather - shows me that the interest goes back a further generation! I had no idea that John, who was born on the family farm in Auchtertool, Fife was interested in old records that may relate to our family; lucky me!
2 - The Life of Drovers has been an interest of mine for some time. From the 1500s to the established use of railways, many drovers had long treks from farms to the cattle markets - such as the Falkirk Tryst and Smithfield in London. From Skye, cattle often had to swim as they were rowed across the Kylerea to the mainland at Glenelg in groups, with ropes attaching tails to the horns of the beast behind; the lead animal, selected for strength and determination, was held by the horns by a rear-facing farmhand in the stern of a rowboat, for the 15-minute crossing. Further south, to avoid customs duties at Gretna Green, many cattle were herded across the Solway sands from Annan to Cumberland; if the tide estimates were incorrect, the cattle were sometimes drowned. The new 4-lane A55 road across Anglesey, when entering the port of Holyhead, occupies land used for sheep and cattle pens until the 1920s; many animals were shipped, live from Ireland; this practice continues to this day - with cattle from Alberta to the USA - and sheep from the UK to Portugal - by truck. Norfolk was heavy with livestock in the 1600 and 1700s, and geese were driven to London - usually with tar on their feet. Pigs and all types of poultry had similar journeys. My great-grandfather John Jenkin no doubt drove his cattle from Blaen Pennal, near Aberaeron in Central Wales, to London in the 1860s, to set up a city dairy in the Bow Road, London. The routes of drove roads, (sometimes edged with dry stone walls) unused for over 150 years, can still be seen in many places (e.g. near Alston, Cumberland); the name The Highlander Inn in Hitchin, Hertfordshire attests to the frequency of Scottish drovers in the area.

My grandfather, Daniel Jenkin was born in the High Street, Bow in the 1880s and grew up a Welsh speaking cockney; he was first educated at the Peoples' Palace in the Mile End Road, London a short walk away, with evening classes; there was a similar institution in Glasgow. In London, Queen Mary College was developed from the Peoples' Palace, Mile End Road - perhaps one of the first instances of higher education for the masses.
3 - Studying the development of the UK postal system inter-relates roads (both their building and their improvement) and the means of transporting the posts - horses were used for centuries; in certain parts of the UK, the postal system development played a significant role in changing and improving the ferry system. ARB Haldane has an excellent book on the development of the Scottish postal system - the introduction of cross posts in the 1820s was a significant change; in the 1830s the Scottish Commissioner of Posts made a trip to Oban and Mallaig, and found out that the ferries were often in unsuitable locations - they were often subject to delays for low tides, or exposure to sea storms; he made changes to improve postal reliability. The road builders and the bridge builders - especially Thomas Telford - made a vast difference in journey times from 1700 to 1820 - in many cases the timetable would improve by up to a factor of ten. In 1700 many posts were carried by pack-horse, with overnight stays; by 1820 metalled roads were used, and in the summer stagecoaches would travel through the night. I have a very early Bradshaw railway timetable , which mentions the interconnection of the rail services with stagecoaches. In the early days of the railways, it was common for "prominent families" to move not just the family, their servants and luggage by train, but their horses and carriages as well. A similar practice is continued to this day by the Royal family: the main reason for the Queen being in London for just one day (and not staying overnight) for Lady Diana's funeral was because many of the "living arrangements" at Buckingham Palace had been moved to Balmoral; I understand that even beds get moved; it was quite impractical for the Queen to stay at the Palace overnight.

With the high cost and extended times for travelling, it is not surprising that many people travelled little, until Victorian times; I often think that the decision of a teenager to seek an apprenticeship in a major city, and get a letter of introduction, even in the early 1800s, was a decision with more important consequences than the decision made in 1969 when I emigrated to Ottawa from the UK. Many apprenticeships required the youngster to sign on for a seven year time period; the consequences and penalties for running away, and trying to break the arrangement, were quite severe.

One significant aspect of road improvements in the 1700s and 1800s can ben seen in the UK, in many locations - you see rows of beech trees adjacent to the road. Most turnpikes, or stagecoach routes, were built with tree shelter - usually beech trees, (with their silvery smooth bark) where these would grow. Similar to this, on certain roads, you will see a 20-30 - foot side stretch, to one side, with a deciduous wood; I believe that this was because the road, being older than for wheeled traffic, was specifically designed for packhorse, foot traffic and animals. The A70 road from Ayr to Edinburgh is one such road; the A34 Manchester to Southampton has sections with this feature too; in Canada, I noticed a section of Highway 15, between Crosby and Lombardy (south of Smiths Falls) with this feature; providing some protection from wind and driving rain or snow was an important element of road design. You can often see the old toll houses on the major roads that Telford and other road builders constructed, (along the A5 for example) but I digress. Much older roads can still be seen; Holloways were common in southern England; their construction provided some natural relief from the elements, and many are still marked on Ordnance Survey maps.

An example of changed circumstances was shown to me near Montrose, on the east coast of Scotland a few years ago. Until the 1870s, when the railway was built and a new road bridge nearer the seawas also built, the way north from Edinburgh and Dundee to Aberdeen was around a large sea lake-like estuary called the Montrose Basin. The first up-river bridge, the Bridge of Don is a standard 3-arch structure; quite wide, permitting wheeled carriages to pass. There are "refuges" in the bridge abutments (a common practice) for foot passengers to step aside, if faster wheeled traffic was passing. On this particular bridge, there were steps up to this refuge. You can see from the wear on the stone how much these refuges were used; most people would be wearing wooden clogs, with iron shod fittings, adding to the wear. But this bridge must have been heavily used; it now gets less than 50 vehicles on a summer's day - mostly cars and local farm tractors.
4 - Hiring practices of old were sometimes strange - as were the work conditions; two situations come to mind. In Victorian times, larger families often meant that large city families had a surplus of teen-agers, with no factory jobs available. Often, girls went into Service, which was usually of two opposite forms - city and country; in Victorian times going into service was second only to Agriculture in terms of numbers employed. The lucky ones were hired by professional city people with large families: my mother's parents hired a nanny and a cook when Daniel Jenkin (my grandfather) was the minister of the Calvinistic Methodist Church in Upper Bangor, North Wales; these two service ladies, well known to me, used to enjoy every minute of the big Boxing Day family reunions in the 1950s; by this time their original charges (i.e. my aunts and uncles) were fully grown and so the "service ladies" were semi-retired, staying with my "Uncle Bill" - a Presbyterian Church minister in a big manse in Sale, Cheshire; there they often disciplined the offspring of their original charges - i.e. all my cousins - myself included! As in most other cases, their employer looked after them in their old age as they were "part of the family". These two ladies travelled the country - first with my grandfather as he moved to new charges, and then with my aunts - helping with their small children.

The more sinister side of "Service" was the practice often used when hiring young male farm labourers: as many skilled ploughmen etc were married, farmers got into the habit of expecting a female (often the ploughman's wife) to look after some hens, as well as keeping the ploughman's house - usually a "tied cottage" on the farm property. But the farmers then insisted on hiring a female labourer; so younger, unmarried skilled male farm labourers were forced to find a suitable female companion as part of the hiring process. Some service girls were obliged to accept these jobs, occasionally with disastrous social consequences; this practice continued until the First World War in parts of Northumberland.

The tenements (or apartments) of major UK cities usually conformed to a limited range of designs. In Leeds, Yorkshire there remain some row, or terrace, houses that were built "back to back": in Victorian times; the sanitary procedures in such buildings, when built, were quite horrific; many row houses had a "netty" in the back lane - an earth toilet, cleaned out daily. In larger and newer tenements one can imagine the room structure, to some extent, just by looking at the chimney pots; a row of 20 pots in Glasgow was quite common; there is a restored tenement in Glasgow as a museum - well worth a visit.

In medæval times, with the timber-frame black-and-white houses often seen in history books, the sanitary arrangements were very different from the present day. Very early in the morning, chamber pots were emptied into the street - often with the loud cry "gardez loo" - this is where the expression Loo for toilet comes from. At about 7 am special collector's carts went around to clean up the streets; as a result many ladies preferred sedan chairs, rather than having to change shoes (and perhaps their long dresses) at the end of their journeys. You can still see streets with central, single gutters in Edinburgh and Norwich - two cities which escaped major redevelopment - but for different reasons.

Another time of great activity, and occasional stress, were the Feeing Fairs, or Trysts, held in all the major UK towns, usually at Martinmas or Michaelmas. If a farmhand was not to be re-hired for the next year, he would go to town, usually with his family and posessions in a farm cart; he would offer his services - in the Feeing area of the Fair. There were instances when a desperate man would accept a low annual wage, late in the day, rather than have no job at all. Once the contract was agreed, the family would have to trudge, slowly to their new home. In some instances this "home" had no roof, as it was the practice in some districts to remove the heather roof, and carry away the precious wood beams, for re-use on the new building, which would be of similar standard size. This practice was common in Scotland, Wales and the West Country, where heather-thatched cottages were common. For this reason, one can see the shells of simple single-storey country cottages, that obviously have not been lived in for 150 years or more, but with no indication of a fallen-down roof. Robert Burns birth cottage in Alloway is an example of this type of building.
5 - If your forebear was a miner there is much to be found of old mining practices; it is recorded that the Phoenicians visited the Scilly Isles (The Cassiterides) from 500BC to collect tin. While coal mines are dirty and cramped, touring a slate or disused lead mine is a delight; the museum store will probably have books on other local trades, too; in fact I tend to purchase books and pamphlets from museum stores and family history centres in the UK, rather than in bookstores as such.

The books in the series Shire County Guides are particularly useful in describing local activities of trades that are no longer practised. Two examples - Flax processing - or linener, as listed in census and on civil record certificates - and Mining in Wales e.g. Gwynedd.

Fishing is a specialized subject about which I know little. But one of my first visitors, to the Scottish Discovery Table at a BIFHSGO Saturday meeting, mentioned that his great-grandfather was from Great Yarmouth Norfolk, ands he was surprised that he married a Scottish lass - from Stornoway. I was able to suggest the connection. As the herring trade developed, it became the habit of the support trades - filleting and packing, to "follow the fish", which moved in shoals from the Scottish North-West in early Summer to the Thames estuary in October; this was the likely cause of the social connection at Great Yarmouth. Related to fishing was coopering and the manufacture of salt: saltpans can still be seen in many parts of the UK, often with heating/drying ovens nearby. Visiting operating fishing ports is an interesting persuit, especially if you have a fisher/sailor forebear; each harbour seems to have a character of its own.

There are many other technical and trading delelopments in the last 300 years which have changed the face of the UK. Iwill mention just a few. The increase in foreign trade developed ports significantly; consider the tobacco trade in Glasgow, Liverpool and Bristol. The need for water power, together with the humid climate, changed the face of many Lancashire and Yorkshire valleys with cotton (and woolen) spinning mills. The invention of coke, for firing blast furnaces, changed the location of the iron smelters in the UK, previosly dependent on charcoal. And talking of wood, road and bridge building, in some parts of Scotland, were in conflict with the lumber trade. Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo changed things a lot, denying the UK access to Scandinavian wood - for boat building etc. This put a big boost on the Ottawa valley lumber trade; but similar things were going on in Aberdeenshire: the half built Bridge of Potarch on the River Dee was swept away when a river lumber drive removed the bridge arch wooden cribbing, in 1814.
6 - Of considerable interest to me is Agricultural Reform; this had three distinct aspects - a change in livestock/crops (some may remember Turnip Townsend - his crop rotation ideas spread far and wide), improvements (and often enclosure) of the land, and the building of larger, more efficient, farmsteads. By searching the internet, and using information from an old family heirloom with a written description, I have been able to establish that one of my great-great grandfathers, William Maxwell, was a very specialized Civil Engineer - he designed and supervised the construction of farmsteads in the Ballinasloe (Galway) area of Ireland. This is an instance where limited family knowledge, together with geographical data, can be used with an internet search to find additional information. The full article written by William Maxwell and published in the Dublin Builder  on Nov 1st 1859, is now on the internet.
7 - I was lucky finding out about the trade of one of my forebears. A Grace Curror married an Andrew Reekie in Dunfermline Cathedral in 1830; her mother was a Grace (or Girzel) Young, married in 1806. I was delighted to get a copy of a letter sent to my grandfather from one his distant cousins, written in 1937; it mentioned that Grace was part of the family of "Young's the Saddlers" - of Dunfermline, Fife. An internet search showed that the Youngs were one of the first traders to re-establish their business in the High Street after the disastrous fire of 1624 - see the 1628 entry - Dunfermline Annals. This from a simple internet search!! The surname Rimmer, common in Lancashire, is derived from the Old Norse, and means saddler. I spent some time going through old directories in both Dunfermline and Kirkaldy this summer.

Here is an interesting piece of history: In the 1390s Sir (or Prince) Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney arranged a multi-vessel sailing expedition, which crossed the Atlantic - so it is believed; it certainly reached Greenland and visited a monastery there. Sir Henry's grandson William built Roslin Chapel, near Penicuick, Edinburgh - which is quite English-looking. There you can see stone-carved images of pineapples - proof that something interesting had happened!

One last question - why do most railways have a gauge of 4' 8 1/2"??

If you wish to find books on Local Social History, try typing in "Social History" <your county> under "keywords" at www.abebooks.com; you will likely get a mixture of modern novels - Catherine Cookson and the like - and local social history books; you'll even get an easy opportunity to buy them!! I also find the Shire books on trades very informative; they are often available at Family History Fairs and Workshops.

So in summary I have 2 conclusions: Take an interest in Social History - it expands your genealogical horizons and makes your ancestors much more interesting. If you are in the UK, you don't have to go to a museum to see what your forefathers have done - it's all around you, especially when you know what to look for.

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