B

Baby-farmer

 

The Victorian baby-farmer can be seen as the ancestor of today’s childminder, in that she took in other women’s young children and babies for a fee, usually so that they could be free go to work – these were often unmarried mothers or widows of the poorer classes, who had little alternative if they were to keep out of the workhouse. The arrangement could be ongoing (i.e. the children were left there permanently or semi-permanently) rather than day-to-day and was a legitimate business, but unfortunately was open to great abuse.

There were no controls on the women who ran the ‘farms’ and terrible cases of neglect and cruelty came to light in the later 19th century, with stories of babies being sold under the guise of ‘fostering’; even worse, some baby-farmers were found to be ‘disposing of’ unwanted babies. A series of crimes in the 1860s and 1870s led to calls for the registration of houses where child care was carried on (Infant Life Protection Act 1872), but the problem of how to regulate the system so that the good childminder or foster mother was not penalised along with the bad went on until well into the 20th century. In 1883 a day care crèche was opened in Croydon and for many campaigners this pointed the way to the future – a safe place where working mothers could leave their children during the day, on payment of a small fee. It was not until 1948 that compulsory registration for childminders was brought in.

Unfortunately, it is the names of the criminal baby-farmers that are recorded, and there are sadly many reports in the newspapers of the second half of the 19th century when cases of cruelty or murder were brought to light, often by the vigilance of doctors, registrars of births and deaths, coroners or, latterly, the NSPCC.

Baker

 

Making bread on a commercial basis was hard work, particularly before powered machinery such as dough mixers and easier to manage gas ovens became available from the end of the 19th century. The day began in the early hours, as bread had to be made ready for the morning trade, and large quantities of dough had to be kneaded by hand, knocked up and set to bake; the oven would have been heated overnight and the baker worked in a hot, dusty environment.

However, a look at any trade directory will show that it was common for women to run baker’s shops – they may have employed a journeyman baker or apprentices to carry out the heavier work, or done the baking themselves, particularly of lighter breads, cakes and confectionery. The baking industry website (www.bakeryinfo.co.uk) and that of the Federation of Bakers (www.bakersfederation.org.uk/baking_home.aspx) have background information on baking and bread, as does the Worshipful Company of Bakers’ website (www.bakers.co.uk/about-beginning.php.4).

Ballet dancer

 

The term ‘ballet dancer’ or ‘ballet girl’ was widely used in the mid-1800s for dancers we would more probably identify as chorus girls. In the summer some might appear in the corps de ballet in a ‘proper’ ballet, while in the winter they would be in the chorus line in a pantomime – usually as a fairy.

The ballet proper was dominated by foreign dancers and when Charles Booth investigated in the 1880s, he found that English girls were thought to be unwilling to work hard enough in training. If young and pretty they could be in the ‘front eight’ of the chorus, but age and lack of agility and ability would place them in the middle and back rows (the front row might command a wage of 30–35 shillings, more at panto time, the middle row getting roughly half that and the back row a meagre 12s 6d to 18s; out of that the girls had to provide their own tights and shoes).

The Empire Theatre in Leicester Square was opened in 1884 as a venue for ballet and variety and put on ‘grand musical spectaculars’, becoming in 1887 the Empire Theatre of Varieties. If dancers managed to be accepted into the corps de ballet at the Alhambra or Empire, they would have fairly steady employment through the year, but most girls could only find work at pantomime time or if they went on tour round the provinces. Otherwise, Booth recorded, ‘they live with their parents (who are usually of the working class), or turn dressmakers or needlewomen, or have recourse to less reputable modes of obtaining a livelihood’. In fact, the link between ballet dancers and prostitution was one often noted at the time.

The great sea change that took ballet from the working classes to the middle classes began when a popular Danish dancer appeared at the Empire in 1897. Adeline Genée (1878–1970) was to be billed in America in the 1900s as ‘The World’s Greatest Dancer’, and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1950. Dividing her time between London, New York and Australia, over the next couple of decades she used her popularity to revive classic productions, and by 1920 was involved in the creation of the Association of Teachers of Operatic Dancing of Great Britain (which received its Royal Charter in 1935 and was renamed the Royal Academy of Dancing in 1936). Her place at the pinnacle of British dance was taken by another legend, Dame Margot Fonteyn, by 1939 the star of the Royal Ballet.

The website of the Royal Academy of Dancing is at www.rad.org.uk. See actress for ideas on theatrical research. There are many books on the great stars and companies; for a more local view see, for instance, Ballet in Leicester Square, Ivor Guest (Dance Books, 1992).

Balloonist, aeronaut

 

In the 1800s the ascent of a woman in a balloon, frequently at night and accompanied by fireworks, was the high spot of many a fête or other outdoor entertainment. Madame Sophie Blanchard, a Frenchwoman, who made her first ascent in 1805, was among the pioneers of this new form of entertainment (as opposed to the serious aeronauts whose aim was to further the study of manned flight). In 1819 she appeared at the Tivoli Gardens in Paris, as The World of Adventure described in the 1890s: ‘Suddenly, the explosion of a bombshell gave the signal for the ascent. The glow of Bengal lights arose among the trees as the band struck up; and Madame Blanchard, seated in her little car, sailed slowly up out of the glare into the blackness of the heavens above. Hanging from the carriage was an illuminated star; a shower of golden flame burst forth from the fireworks with which the car itself was decorated; and rained among the spectators. The applause of course, was furious; and amid it Madame Blanchard stooped and lit a bomb of silver which, suspended from a parachute, descended with supernatural majesty to the gardens below.’

Unfortunately, all those pyrotechnics so close to a gas-filled balloon were highly dangerous – the balloon caught fire and Madame Blanchard fell to her death.

English aeronauts were appearing in the provinces, too. In 1838 Mrs Graham was advertising herself as ‘The Only English Female Aeronaut’ when she made her first ascent from a field ‘adjoining the Gas-Works, Shrewsbury’, while as late as 1890 the Lancaster Gazette reported that ‘Miss Cissie Kent made a successful balloon ascent and parachute descent at High Wycombe on Wednesday afternoon. . . . The balloon rose to a height of 5,000 ft, when the parachute was detached, and Miss Kent descended safely into a barley field, a mile distant’.

Bank clerk

 

‘While on duty at the Bank of England a cashier never knows a restful moment. What with counting sovereigns, taking care not to make an error, and keeping a look-out for forgeries, his task must be the most worrying known to mortal man,’ thought C. Duncan Lewis in 1902 (Living London). The 1911 census shows that out of over 40,000 bank employees, only 500 were women.

No wonder, then, that even when the banks desperately needed staff to fill the posts left by men called up for military service during the First World War, the Bankers Magazine was still worried about the ability of women to cope: ‘It is probably impossible to employ them on heavy tills or in offices subject to periodic rushes, where the physical and nerve strain would be beyond the endurance of a normal woman.’ Where they were taken on as counter staff, as at Lloyds Bank, women were reminded to dress soberly in dark colours.

Janet Courtney was Oxford-educated in Philosophy, German and Greek, but when she became the first woman to be employed by the Bank of England in 1894, she was segregated to a separate office and thought capable only of sorting cheques into piles. Anne Tulloch was the first woman employed at Midland Bank’s headquarters in 1907, but only to translate French and German newspapers for the senior managers. The First World War proved the catalyst for change, albeit slowly, and then increasing mechanisation from the 1920s brought more opportunities for women, whose ‘nimble fingers’ proved particularly adaptable to the new adding machines. The first woman bank manager in Britain was Hilda Harding, working for Barclays, in 1958.

To trace any woman bank employee, you would need to know the bank and branch where she worked, and there have been many amalgamations and takeovers in the banking world since the 19th century. British Banking: A Guide to Historical Records, Alison Turton and John Orbell (Aldershot, 2001) is a good place to start.

Barber, lady

 

In October 1899 the Pall Mall Gazette carried an enthusiastic article entitled ‘The Woman Barber: Her Qualifications and the Development of her Art in London’: ‘The lady barber is no new thing, but she is new in the sense of modern development. Some of us, whose memories can go back a good few years, can remember a little barber’s shop, somewhere off Holborn, where, if the good man was not in, his buxom wife would herself operate upon customers with razor and shaving brush. The female barber too is and was by no means unknown in Paris. But it is in its organised form as a recognised calling for women that it presents features of novelty. The Lady Barbers Association – the original one, mark you! – which is the peg upon which these words of introduction have been hung, has existed for eleven years. Its present address is 65 Chancery Lane, and its latest proprietor Mme St Quentin, who has been in possession since June last. She is a charming and accomplished lady – learned in the mysteries of hypnotic influence, and has even views on Buddha’.

The writer was correct that it was not a new trade and examples can be found in earlier decades – Elizabeth Briggs in the 1880s at Hampstead, for instance, a 54-year-old widow. Unfortunately, by the early 1900s, lady barbers were suffering from a certain scepticism about their trade, perhaps not surprisingly as many of them also offered ‘vibro-massage’, ‘face massage’, and just ‘massage’, not to mention chiropody.

Bark peeler

 

Between May and July bark peeling occupied women in rural areas, right up to the 1930s in some cases (such as in the Wyre Forest in the West Midlands; see the website www.search.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk for a photograph from Bewdley Museum). The bark was stripped from trees or branches when the sap was rising, cleaned of any lichen, then dried in the open air and sent off to tanneries – the tannin in the bark of oak, chestnut, willow, larch and other trees was used for the curing of hides in the leather industry. It was casual employment that came at a lean time in the year for many labourers’ families. It may be known by different names in places – in Norfolk, for instance, it was known as ‘barsel’ time in the 19th century. An article on The English Bark Trade 1660–1830 is online at www.bahs.org.uk.

Barmaid

 

There have been ‘serving wenches’ for centuries but the barmaid as we know her made her appearance in the 19th century, the earliest in large town and city pubs where trade was brisk or where there was no publican’s wife or daughter to serve behind the bar counter. Barmaids were also employed in hotels and at railway station buffets, and in the bars of clubs, music halls and theatres. In 1886, for the Girl’s Own Paper, Anne Beale described the ‘subterranean hostelries’ of the London underground railway, where young women ‘spent long days in a small, dark, close vault’ serving food and alcohol to travellers, mostly men, ‘who look on her who waits on them as a recipient for coarse compliment or feeble jest’. She went on, ‘In some places, the atmosphere is clearer than in others . . . but everywhere the young women stand the livelong day imbibing the very unpleasantly-combined odours of sulphur, smoke and alcohol.’

Evidence given before the Royal Commission on Labour in 1891 showed that hours were particularly long in pubs and railway bars – up to 100 hours a week. Girls might start in employment at any age from 15 onwards and larger establishments would give opportunities for promotion to a senior, or first, barmaid, or perhaps manageress. Wages in 1891 for a hotel barmaid, for example, might start at 10 to 12 shillings, plus board and lodging, rising to 15 shillings, and then to 18 to 38 shillings for manageresses. See publican for possible background sources.

Basketmaker

 

Basketmaking was an important rural craft practised all over the country, the product being in great demand for a variety of containers from heavy industrial and laundry baskets to shopping bags, to crab and lobster pots. The basic process was that the young willow shoots (osiers) were boiled to soften them, and either peeled or left ‘natural’ for different effects, then dried and finally soaked before use to make them pliable. In some areas women worked on certain parts of the process, usually the preparation, while in others they actually made the baskets. The craft of weaving cane seats for chairs was also important.

Willows could be grown on suitable land anywhere in the country, though much of the raw material was imported before the early 19th century; some areas such as the Somerset Levels were particularly heavily cropped. There was a concentration of basketweaving around industrial towns and ports, and in areas where market gardening was important, such as Bedfordshire and the Vale of Evesham. In 1891 there were some 14,000 basketmakers listed in the census, and about one fifth were women, who worked particularly on smaller, lighter baskets and those requiring some intricacy of weaving. From the turn of the century, foreign competition and increased use of containers made from cardboard or paper meant that the industry gradually declined in importance, although it has never completely died out.

The Basket Makers Company had traditionally controlled apprenticeship and the admittance of freemen (see www.basketmakersco.org; the Company admitted widows who were carrying on their husband’s business). The many techniques and designs of basketmakers are covered in Baskets and Basketry, Dorothy Wright (Batsford, 1964); and see the website www.craftsintheenglishcountryside.org.uk for some background on the industry. Museums with basketmaking or chair-seating interest are listed on the website of the Basketmakers’ Association (www.basketassoc.org/pages/museums.php).

 

Re-caning chair seats was an associated craft to basketmaking, sometimes carried out door to door, as here in Buckinghamshire in the 1940s.

Bathing machine attendant

 

It was not ‘done’ in the late 18th and 19th centuries for a woman to appear on the beach in what amounted to a state of undress, so bathing machines were invented. From these contraptions, little dressing rooms on wheels, the bather could emerge unseen and slide into the surf. Some machines were ‘parked’ at the water’s edge, but there were also early ones that floated. A horse usually pulled the machine down to the water, and into it, but the ‘floating bath-rooms’ most enjoyed by the ladies were probably those that required them to be carried out to the machine in the arms of a strong man. Bathing machines could still be found on Britain’s beaches into the 20th century, when they were finally pensioned off as sheds or chicken huts.

Proprietors of bathing machines jealously controlled certain patches of the beach, and employed women to ‘man’ the machines themselves. The women – usually into their mature years – who controlled the machines, and who helped ladies to dress, undress and bathe, were also known as ‘dippers’. They would distribute cards advertising their services, making their living from fees and tips, and could be found anywhere around the coast where sea bathing was popular. Martha Gunn was perhaps the most famous dipper and worked the Brighton beach from about 1750 to 1814 – she died in 1815 at the age of 89. She was said to have been ‘stout and rather ugly’ and her face adorned souvenir toby jugs as her fame spread. At Bognor, Mary Wheatland worked till she was in her seventies and is said to have saved 34 people from drowning during her career. As late as 1881, Ann Fox, a 36-year-old widow, was working as an attendant at Ramsgate in Kent.

Beerhouse keeper

 

A beerhouse differed from an inn or a public house in that the proprietor was allowed only to sell beer, not wine or spirits, a deliberate distinction created by the government in 1830 to try to discourage the drinking of spirits such as gin. Brewing was traditionally a female household occupation, and many beerhouses were run by women, often widows, who also brewed their own beer. The legal situation regarding application for Excise certificates etc changed through the 19th and 20th centuries, but in general a beerhouse was run in a room in the woman’s own home and could be ‘on’ (selling beer indoors, as in a normal bar) or ‘off’ (only selling beer for consumption off the premises, sometimes also called an ‘outside’). Beerhouse keepers did not have to apply for a licence from the local magistrates, only an Excise certificate, so they do not appear in the licensing sessions records (although after 1869 they had to get a ‘certificate of permission’ from the Justices). See also publican.

Besom maker

 

A besom is a type of broom (typically the witch’s broomstick). Besom making was a rural industry, often carried out by men but in some areas women made them, working from home. In the 1800s women living in the Finsthwaite area, near Lake Windermere, were expected to make several dozen a day – using birch cuttings, bound with strips of elm bark, willow, briar or wire onto a handle of ash, lime or hazel – for a grand halfpenny a dozen (www.fellsanddales.org.uk).

Between maid, ’tweeny

 

The ’tweeny was usually a very young servant girl who helped both the housemaid and the cook. In the morning, therefore, she might be cleaning and polishing or carrying coals and shining boots and shoes, while later in the day she would be down in the kitchen washing up pots and pans, polishing the copper utensils, preparing vegetables, laying the table for kitchen meals and clearing away.

If her fellow servants were hard on her, the little girl’s life could be miserable. ‘Her duties are difficult to define, as they are so numerous and varied; indeed, every mistress should watch that her little maid is not overworked,’ Everywoman’s Encyclopedia of 1911 advised, when a between maid might be paid from £8 to £14 a year. ‘The girl is usually allowed to go out in the afternoon and evening every alternate Sunday, and one afternoon or evening every week, with one week’s holiday every year.’ A woman who started as a ’tweeny in 1940 at Gedding Hall in Suffolk recalled that she ‘worked from 6.30 am to 10.30 pm and had to scrub the kitchen floor daily (including my day off!)’. She was paid 7s 6d a month (Suffolk Within Living Memory, Suffolk Federation of WIs, Countryside Books, 1994).

Bible woman

 

She was a working class woman paid a small amount to work in her own neighbourhood (having been given some instruction in poor law and hygiene) visiting the homes of the poor to give them practical help and advice, and to talk about the Bible and Christianity. She might also be called a ‘mission woman’.

The idea for this embryonic social worker is credited to Miss Ellen Ranyard (1809–1879), who set up the Bible and Domestic Female Mission in London in 1857 (which became the Ranyard Mission in 1917; see also nurse, Ranyard), and who wanted to offer working class women ‘self-help’ and give them the knowledge to better themselves. By 1867 there were over 200 bible women in London, and the idea had spread to other UK cities – the Dublin Bible Woman Mission was established in 1861, for instance.

The term ‘bible woman’ was also used abroad for women who worked amongst their own people for European and American missionaries as interpreters, teachers and bible readers.

Billiards/snooker player

The game of billiards was often linked to gambling and a dissolute (male) lifestyle, so much so that in the mid-18th century it was actually declared unlawful in public houses, and it is not a sport that is commonly linked to professional women players before recent years. However, professional players there were. They included Ruth Harrison, who held the women’s professional snooker title from 1934, Agnes Morris, professional champion in 1949, and Thelma Carpenter, champion professional billiards player 1940 to 1950 and the first woman to be invited to commentate on the game for the BBC. You can see a two-minute film of Agnes Morris and Ruth Harrison at www.screenonline.org.uk – Cue for Ladies (1948).

Women sometimes popped up elsewhere too – ‘There was a billiard saloon in Oxford Street where, some fifteen years ago [1874], a girl officiated as marker, and did her work carefully and well,’ noted the English Illustrated Magazine in 1889.

Blacksmith

 

‘The smith, a mighty man is he’ – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Village Blacksmith crystallised the brawny figure of the blacksmith in popular culture and the idea that the smith might be a woman seems laughable. However, it would be wrong to dismiss it out of hand.

The village blacksmith usually performed two main functions – as a farrier shoeing horses, and as a smith working black metal, i.e. iron, to make and mend tools and agricultural implements, wheel trims, nails, locks, bolts, pots and pans and so on. It was work vital to life in both town and country before the railway and, particularly, the internal combustion engine destroyed its importance by the 1950s.

  

After their sons joined the Army during the First World War, Mrs Emmeline Saunders of Essex ‘gave her husband active and effi cient help in his business, and learned to shoe a horse as satisfactorily as she could mend a fire.’

 

A female blacksmith sometimes crops up in medieval literature, but she was an evil soul who bore the responsibility of having made the nails for Christ’s crucifixion (her husband having feigned illness to avoid the task). One who attracted rather a better press was Mary Ann Hinman of Melton Mowbray, who in the 1850s worked in her father William’s forge and ‘excelled in the shoeing department, which she managed with admirable tact and skill, and might often be seen, with leather apron and muscular arms, leading or riding a high-bred hunter home through the streets to its stable’. Mary Ann was only eighteen when she died in 1858 after a short illness, so we can only guess at how her career might have developed.

Female blacksmiths appear quite often in census returns and in trade directories, yet are seldom credited with having actually worked as smiths themselves. Admittedly, many of them were the widows of blacksmiths who had taken over the business after their husband’s demise: in Hinxworth, Hertfordshire in 1851 Ann Briant was recorded in the census as ‘Blacksmith employing 6 men’ and, aged 78, was head of a business that included four sons, a grandson and a lodger. Few probably wielded the hammer (especially at Ann’s age), but women were quite capable of working at a forge – as not only Mary Ann Hinman but also the chainmakers of the Midlands could testify. As could the unnamed woman blacksmith at Witham in Essex in 1917, who was reported as keeping the business going while her three brothers served in the Army (at night she worked in munitions), or Mrs Emmeline Saunders, also of Essex, who was photographed helping her husband at the forge.

Entry into the trade was for centuries by apprenticeship and, as with other crafts, women could apply for admittance to the guild in the place of a male family member who had died. Women also took on apprentices: in 1900 a 15-year-old boy was apprenticed for six years to Ann Cluer, blacksmith of Burton Lazars (Leicestershire and Rutland Within Living Memory, Leicestershire and Rutland Federation of WIs, Countryside Books, 1994). The Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths (City of London) has a website at www.blacksmithscompany.org. An American website (www.appaltree.net) has useful information about blacksmithing techniques. Try also The Village Blacksmith, Ronald Webber (David and Charles, 1973) or The Village Blacksmith, Jocelyn Bailey (Shire Publications, 1985) for background.

Blanketmaker

 

Woollen blankets, rugs, and such 19th-century necessities as horse collar cloths were all woven by a substantially female workforce. See wool spinners and weavers.

Bleacher

 

Cotton and linen cloth, grey and brown in its natural state, went to the bleachworks to be whitened before it could be used, either as it was or as a base for dyeing; some bleachworks specialised in certain items, such as lace and hosiery bleachers in Nottingham, while others were integral parts of dyeworks. Cloth meant for papermaking also had to be bleached before use, so that printworks often had a bleaching department.

In the 19th century some linen was bleached in the open air, particularly in Scotland and Ireland, while in chemical bleaching chloride of lime was used. In either case, the cloth had to be finished by being steamed in hot stoves, and this was often a female occupation, before further ‘chemicking and souring’ treatments using carbonic acid gas. Because the bleachers worked to order, once a process had been started they continued until the batch of cloth was complete, which might be 24 hours or more. Cases were cited of young girls sometimes staying overnight at the works, sleeping for a few hours on makeshift beds in a storeroom. Working from 18 to 20 hours a day was common.

The cloth was steamed in a ‘kier’, an iron container that acted as a kind of pressure cooker, and the room in which this work was done was extremely hot, sometimes reaching 180 degrees Fahrenheit. The workers called it the ‘wasting room’ and it was not uncommon for women to be carried out, overcome by the heat and humidity. All would leave with their clothes saturated with sweat. In Parliament in 1856 William Cobbett reported seeing rooms where ‘the temperature [was] frequently so high that the nails in the floor became heated and blistered, that burnt the feet of those who were employed in these rooms and who were therefore obliged to wear slippers’.

In the 1850s and early 1860s attempts were made (finally successfully) to get a Bleaching and Dyeing Works Bill through Parliament, which would bring the works under the Factory Inspectorate and limit the hours of women and children. The employment of women in bleaching works became less common, but women were still working in the bleaching and dyeing factories into the 20th century. See also dyeworks.

Boarding house keeper, landlady

 

A woman taking in paying guests (‘PGs’), short or long term, who provided meals (or at least breakfast) as well as accommodation. In seaside resorts, increasingly popular from the mid-19th century, she would concentrate on the holiday trade, and the best-known resorts such as Brighton, Blackpool, Scarborough etc had hundreds of boarding houses, many of them large and prosperous, with their own small army of servants. In towns and cities, she would take in working people who needed a room near to their employment – as for example, Martha Morris, a 50-year-old widow, who in 1881 was running a boarding house in the St Pancras area of London and whose ‘PGs’ were six young men, clerks by trade, whose origins were in Norfolk, Germany and New York. Some landladies specialised in guests who travelled for a living – salesmen, perhaps – or most notably there were the famed ‘theatrical landladies’, who took in touring actors and music hall acts. (Exit Through the Fireplace: The Great Days of Rep, Kate Dunn (John Murray, 1998) has a chapter on landladies.)

Local directories would be useful aids, and museums in seaside resorts may well have more information on this essential local industry. Boarding houses thrived until after the Second World War, when in the 1950s and 1960s holiday camps and foreign travel started to threaten the traditional British seaside holiday, and young working people began to share rooms or flats and look after themselves rather than live in as ‘PGs’. For a flavour of the seaside boarding house, try The Blackpool Landlady, John Walton (Manchester University Press, 1978).

Bobbin mill worker

 

The Lake District was a centre for the manufacture of the wooden bobbins used by the cotton and woollen mills of Manchester and Ireland. The wood was turned by men and the bobbins finished and decorated by women. In Longtown, Cumbria in the 1920s the girls earned about 12s a week, which was paid to them fortnightly; every evening they came home covered in sawdust (Cumbria Within Living Memory, Cumbria Federation of WIs, Countryside Books, 1994). In the 1880s it was estimated that over 30 million cotton reels were made each week.

Bobbin-net maker

 

See lacemaker (bobbin-net).

Bondager

 

Female bondagers were once commonly found working on farms, but by the mid-19th century had virtually disappeared except in Northumberland and other northern and remote areas. The farmer hired a ‘hind’, a male labourer whose terms of employment required him to provide a bondager (sometimes more than one), who assisted him in his work. The hind took her on at a hiring fair, or she might be his daughter or another relative, and he fed and housed her and paid her wages (unless she was his family) – about 8d a day in the 1860s, or £12 a year. The bondager only worked outside and might undertake any task except ploughing and ditching, and had to do her master’s bidding. The bondager and the gangworker had much in common, often working in the fields with other bondagers under a male supervisor. Arthur Munby’s notes on the system in 1863 are quoted in full in Labouring Life in the Victorian Countryside, Pamela Horn (Alan Sutton, 1995). See agricultural labourer.

Bookbinder, bookfolder

 

In 1871 there were nearly as many women employed in bookbinding as there were men (7,557 against 7,917) and 40 years later they outnumbered their male counterparts. That women had long had an important role in the craft is shown by the existence as early as 1814 of a Friendly Female Bookbinders Society.

In the 1870s the Labour News reported: ‘Girls and women are employed in the following branches of the bookbinding trade:- folding, sewing, collating (placing the sheets in alphabetical order), arranging the plates, laying-on gold on covers, head-banding, covering magazines etc. The number of folders and sewers far exceeds that of the workers in any other branch. In laying on the gold, and in covering magazines, men were formerly exclusively employed, and the introduction of women is a recent innovation. Girls are usually apprenticed to the trade at 14 years of age for two years, but without formal indentures; and they are paid a small amount during apprenticeship. The earnings by piecework and time-work in all branches vary from 7s to 25s per week, but the average may be taken at 11s a week. The usual price for folding is a penny for 100 sheets, but in some shops only three farthings per 100 is paid. Great quickness of hand is required in folding and sewing. In collating, ­considerable care and intelligence are necessary and the worker is fined for the smallest error. Care and economy must be exercised in laying on the gold leaf. Head-banding is a branch of the work not much in demand now, excepting for expensive bibles, or for some other books in the most costly kind of binding.’

 

When pages had been printed, folded and collated, the loose sheets were made into a book by being stitched on a sewing press, one woman being able to sew 2,000 to 3,000 sheets a day (1840).

 

A lot of folding work was also distributed to be done in the women’s homes, thus evading the limitations on hours imposed by the Factory Act, especially at peak publication times such as Christmas. The majority of bookbinding firms were in London but they could be found in towns all over the country, and particularly in Manchester. Some ‘firms’ were very small, such as that of Mary Bellamy, a widow in Oxford, a ‘bookbinder and stationer’, who worked with her three sons in 1851 and by 1861 was employing seven men, five women and three boys.

Bookbinding in its finest form was also a part of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century and there were a number of women producing fine artistic work, including Sarah Prideaux, Katherine Adams and Sybil Pie – see Women Bookbinders 1880–1920 by Marianne Tidcombe (British Library, 1996). See also printer.

Book-keeper

 

During the late 19th and early 20th century, book-keeping came to be seen as something women could do, largely due to the efforts of the accountancy profession to distance itself from the mere upkeep of financial ledgers and order books. All manner of firms, shops and factories will have employed book-keepers in their offices – such as Martha Cook, aged 29 and a ‘female clerk and book keeper’ at Lambeth in 1881. See also accountant.

Boot and shoe stitcher

 

Stitching the uppers on a boot or shoe, a process known as ‘closing’, was traditionally women’s work (they could also be called machinists or fitters). It was done by shoemakers’ wives in small family workshops, and increasingly by outworkers and in factories for mass production in places such as Northampton (especially), Leicester, Stafford, Norwich, Bristol and so on. The uppers and their linings were sewn together by hand or using machines. Women also inserted the eyelet-holes for laces, or button-holes, and fastened the ‘tongue’. This completed the upper, which then went on to be fastened to the sole. Women also cleaned, coloured, polished and packed boots and shoes.

In Northamptonshire boot and shoe making was the dominant occupation from the mid-1800s to the 1930s, becoming increasingly mechanised and going through periods of severe depression. See www.northamptonshire-history.org.uk/shoemaking for background and links. Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, Guildhall Road, Northampton NN1 1D has ‘the world’s largest collection of boots and shoes’, which will give a good idea of the work being done at any one time. Information can be found around the country; for instance for K Shoes, a major industry in Kendal since the 1850s, at www.cumbriaindustries.org.uk/kshoes.htm (or see K Shoes: The First 150 Years 1842–1992, Spencer Crookenden, 1992); or for Clarks shoes at the Shoe Museum, Street, Somerset, which has material from the company archives (C.& J. Clark 1825–1975, C. & J. Clark’ 1976). For a general background to the processes see Shoemaking, Julie Swann (Shire Publications, 1976).

Boxmaker

 

A huge variety of boxes were made up either in factories or as a home industry, predominantly by female workers – everything from boxes for collars, ties and other pieces of clothing to boxes for cigars, soap, sweets and foodstuffs. While the work in the factories was fairly well paid, outworkers at home were paid a pittance and had to involve every available member of the family in order to make a living wage. When made by hand, it was simple work involving folding and pasting the paper and cardboard. Another branch of the industry was paper bag making.

Matchboxes for instance, like matches, were produced initially in home workshops before being increasingly made and packed in factories from the late 19th century, with women and children working long hours for little more than starvation rates. The materials were distributed by a middleman, or ‘sweater’, though the women had to pay for their own paste and twine.

 

Making hat boxes for a silk hat manufacturer: ‘I’m able to make a very decent living for a poor widow.’

 

‘First there’s the wood shavings,’ explained a Bethnal Green mother of three small children to a Daily News reporter in 1871, ‘they’re already creased for bending into shape when they come to us. They form the match-box, and are made ready for shaping by machines which are worked by boys . . . one of these shavings makes the outer part of the match-box, and this other shaving which you see is just a trifle less size, it makes the inner part. Then there’s a bit of coloured paper, like this, which has to be pasted on the inner half to make it look tasty like; and there’s this label, with the maker’s name we work for, has to be pasted on the outer box. The sand-paper comes next, and is pasted at the bottom like this. The sand-paper is the nastiest part of box-work.’ Three-year-old Freddy’s bleeding fingers were exhibited as proof of this. Once pasted together, the boxes were spread out to dry around the room in which the family lived and slept. ‘We’re paid twopence-halfpenny a gross for our work, and very glad we are to get it.’ In the 1920s and 1930s women who worked at the Morelands Matches factory in Gloucestershire were still finding their fingers bled from the sandpaper on the sides of the boxes (and outworkers were still glueing the boxes together).

Another example of the variety of work was given by the widow interviewed for Living London in the early 1900s who made hat boxes for a firm of silk hat manufacturers: ‘The box is supplied with an outside covering of white glazed paper which is stuck together with paste, but the body and the bottom of the box are sewn together with thread. “I have to find the paste, and the needle and thread, and when I’ve finished a gross I get half-a-crown. I don’t grumble at the pay, for when I can get the work I’m able to make a very decent living for a poor widow. It’s only when we’re slack I don’t like it, for then I have to go out charing and such work is a little beyond my strength.”’

Braider

 

see net maker.

Brassworker

 

Within the term ‘brassworking’ is included a huge range of processes – including brass-founding, cabinet, bell and general brass-founding, plumber’s brass-founding, rolled brass, wire, tubes, and so on. And amongst these there were some tasks that were seen as particularly ‘female’. One was the soldering of brass and copper tubing, of the kind used in brass bedsteads, curtain rods, gas fittings etc: ‘Brass tubing is made from sheet metal, by cutting up the sheet into oblong strips, and bending these round a central core . . . The two opposite edges of the brass are made to lap one over the other, and are in that state soldered together.’ (Penny Magazine, 1844)

Another female task was lacquering finished bronze or brass pieces produced by casting or founding. The Penny Magazine described the finishing process for some of the articles produced in the Birmingham factories, from statues to bells, cannon, chandeliers, vases, lamps and railings. The item was heated to get rid of any grease, ‘pickled’ in dilute acid and brushed well with a wire brush, dipped into ‘aquafortis, by which means it speedily acquires a clear bright yellow colour, wholly free from specks and stains’, washed in water, dried in hot sawdust, burnished, and then lacquered. ‘Lacquer is a liquid composed of spirit of wine, gum-lac, turmeric, saffron, and one or two other ingredients. The brass-work is made clean and hot, and is in that state coated with a layer of the lacquer, either by dipping or brushing. A subsequent drying finishes the process.’

In 1855 women solderers in Birmingham were earning 10s to 12s a week, and lacquerers 8s to 10s. In 1871 nearly 4,000 women were employed in lacquering, burnishing, final polishing and wrapping up goods.

Brewer

 

The old name for a female brewer was a brewster and it was a time-honoured women’s occupation in the home and on the farm. Once, nearly every inn brewed its own beer – and female servants and owners would have been concerned with this – but throughout the 19th and 20th centuries the spread of large-scale and increasingly industrialised breweries, initially based predominantly in London but later also in Burton on Trent and other towns such as Hertford, and in Edinburgh for the Scottish market, meant that hundreds of small breweries were taken over or went out of business. However, women can be found who took on a thriving business from either a father or a deceased husband: Elizabeth Taylor, for instance, in 1881 was a 52-year-old widow at Aldsworth in Gloucestershire: ‘Brewer and Wine and Spirit Merchant and Farmer employing 6 men on 67 acres of land’. Women would not normally be found as employees of the breweries, except during wartime, when they took on jobs such as malting in the place of men called up for the services.

Because there have been so many takeovers and amalgamations in the brewery world, The Brewing Industry: A Guide to Historical Records, Lesley Richmond and Alison Turton (Manchester University Press, 1990) is a good start to tracking down individual companies, and Researching Brewery and Publican Ancestors, Simon Fowler (Federation of Family History Societies, 2003) an essential aid to research. The Scottish Brewing Archive is held by the University of Glasgow (www.archives.gla.ac.uk/sba/default.html). See also beerhouse keeper.

Brickmaker

 

The demand for bricks was insatiable in the 19th century and beyond, and every town – and most villages – had a ­brickfield nearby, though the scale of production varied, particularly as industrial machinery took over many of the processes on the large fields. Brickmakers had a reputation for drunkenness and brutality and the brickfields could be barren, dispiriting wastes – as Dickens described in Bleak House.

Women were employed usually as part of a ‘gang’, and were often family members under the direction of the ‘moulder’ or foreman, who was paid for the work and who doled out a share to those under him. Women had no part in the industrialised brickfields, but had long been involved in the handmaking process, which went something like this (though details would vary in different parts of the country). The employment was seasonal. During the autumn and winter the clay was dug out and left to weather in frost and snow. Then in the spring the work would start by the clay being ground in a pug-mill, and brought in blocks to the moulder standing ready at his hut or ‘stool’, which sheltered him from sun or rain. Working at the moulder’s side was the ‘walk-flatter’, and this was usually the woman’s job – she rough-shaped the lumps of clay for him so that he could fill the brick moulds, which were first coated with sand. The raw bricks were emptied onto boards, and wheeled off to be stacked up to dry out. When they were completely dry, they were fired in a kiln.

Entire families were involved in the process – making up to a thousand bricks in a week – and the work done by children and women in the brickfields became a focus of concern by the 1870s, when George Smith wrote The Cry of the Children from the Brickyards of England. The Factories Act (Brick and Tile Yards) then brought women and children under the scope of the Factory Inspectors and their employment in the fields soon waned.

Researching brickmaking ancestors can begin with David Cufley’s Brickmakers Index and bibliography of related books, described at
www.davidrcufley.btinternet.co.uk. Village histories or museums will often have information on local brickfields and working conditions, e.g. the Somerset Brick and Tile Museum, East Quay, Bridgwater TA6 4AE (www.somerset.gov.uk/museums).

Bronzer

 

Advances in colour printing (chromo-lithography) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries enabled labels, postcards, trade cards, pictures etc to be printed with edgings and raised areas in simulated gold or silver. This technique was called ‘bronzing’ and was usually done by women. Finely powdered bronze (or aluminium in the case of silver) could be applied to previously varnished areas, to which it would stick. Unfortunately the varnish was highly toxic; the women were supposed to drink a pint of milk a day, or take castor oil, to counteract the effects but rarely did. Bronzers also worked in the metal industry, like Emma Amor, a 57-year-old widow, and Mary Ann Ashford, aged 14, who were fender bronzers in Birmingham in 1881.

Brushmaker

 

Women were prominent in the brushmaking industry throughout the 19th and into the 20th centuries but it was a centuries-old craft – overseen by the Society of Brushmakers – and there was protracted resistance to allowing women equal pay with men for doing the same job. Page’s of Norwich were a large brushmaking firm who set up a new factory in Wymondham in the 1880s with the intention of employing low-paid local women. In 1891 the women joined the Amalgamated Society of Brushmakers and went out on strike because they were being paid less than the Norwich workers. It was not until 1917 that women’s contribution in the trade was officially recognised, with the setting up of the Brushmaking Industry Trades Board and the National Society of Brushmakers (Working Class Movement Library; www.wcml.org.uk).

 

‘Drawing’ a nail brush – fastening the bristles into the back of the brush (1883).

 

In 1883 work in a brush factory was described in an article in Cassell’s Family Magazine. From the cutting of wood for the brush-backs, to the finished article, thirteen workers contributed to the making of a nail brush. The majority of women were employed on drawing – fastening the bristles into the brush-back. ‘It is quite possible to carry on this operation outside the factory walls, and, as a matter of fact, many married women once engaged therein take out work and employ themselves at it in their own homes. The cost of fitting up a bench is very small, and the increase of the family income by this use of trained fingers is often considerable.’

In the early 1800s, baleen – hair from a whale’s throat – was often used for brushes, though bristles might
be of hog’s hair or badger’s hair or that of some other animal. Cheaper imports of bass (made from the bark of a tree) made brushes themselves cheaper and gave a great boost to the industry in the later 19th century; no wires had to be used for bass, the bristles were simply stuck into the heads with pitch. There was a huge range available, some 80 different varieties of brush coming out of one factory, ‘from carpet brooms to brewers’ brushes; from oil brushes to jewellers’; from hair to hat brushes to those of the chimney sweep.’ See also besom maker.

Bumboat woman

 

Bumboats were the small craft that plied between the harbourside and ships lying at anchor, carrying supplies for sale to the ships’ crews, and sometimes passengers as well. They were often rowed by women. At Devonport in 1881 Mary Holland, the wife of a waterman, was recorded as a bumboat woman.

W.S. Gilbert immortalised Poll Pineapple (Little Buttercup), a bumboat woman, in HMS Pinafore in 1878 but they were certainly common for a century and more before that in ports such as Portsmouth or Plymouth, or on the Thames. Poll sang of carrying ‘apples and cakes, and fowls and beer’, and an 1811 dictionary calls the bumboats ‘floating chandler’s shops’.

A popular sideline was smuggling illicit goods onto shore, and in 1761 an act required all bumboats to be registered by the Trinity Corpor­ation and gave the Corporation’s officers power to search and detain any boat they suspected of having goods on board that were stolen or ‘unlawfully obtained’ – in the first 40 years of the act’s existence there were over 2,500 convictions. There were dangers from passengers too, as an incident in 1802 in Plymouth showed. A bumboat woman was ‘crossing the passage’ with several passengers in her boat, when a drunken customs officer tried to search her intimately for hidden ‘bladders of liquor’. A sergeant from the East Devon Regiment told him to stop and was run through with a sword for his trouble.

Burnisher, buffer

 

A woman who worked on finished pieces of metal, jewellery etc. to put on the final shine. With reference to the electroplating trade in the 1870s, it was said: ‘Women and girls are largely employed as “burnishers”, with blunt-pointed steel tools, or as “buffers” for polishing forks and spoons by rouge [a granular mixture, oxide of iron, used to bring up the shine]. When this is done by steam-power turning bobbins, a great deal of dust is given off. The inhalation of rouge is apt to cause bronchial irritation and a peculiar oppression in the breathing.’

Earlier, in mid-century, reference is made to burnishing by using ‘blood-stone’, a hard, smooth Derbyshire stone used on gold and silver – ‘fixed in a handle, and held in such a manner as to give considerable power of pressure on the work, it is first moistened to prevent it becoming too hot, and is nibbed rather forcibly over every part of the article which is to be burnished, by which a surface of exquisite brilliance is produced’. See electroplate worker; goldsmith; jewellery worker; pottery worker.

Bus conductor

 

There may have been one or two women working on rural bus routes in the early 1900s, particularly for family firms, but this was one of the jobs for which women volunteered during the First World War. ‘I have heard that some clever people are laughing at us, saying that we only undertake this sort of job for the sake of the uniform (navy blue cloth, with a coat of semi-military cut, a short skirt, and an Anzac hat of the same colour),’ wrote one new female conductor for the War Illustrated in 1916, ‘but a uniform isn’t much of an attraction to a woman who cares about dress after she has worn it for a few weeks on a motor-bus.’

 

A woman conductor on a Glasgow tramway: the female conductor became a commonplace during the First World War.

 

The routine was to arrive at the yard in the morning, sign on and get the box containing the tickets, the punching machine and the bag for small change. At night they had to account for tickets sold and hand over the cash. They became familiarly known as ‘clippies’, from the method of clipping tickets in the punching machine. They had to know all the fares and the routes, learn how to stand on a moving bus without holding on while operating the ticket machine and giving change, keep an eye on passengers, operate the bell that communicated with the driver, and cope with drunks. Into the 1920s, buses still had open staircases at the back, and often also open upper decks.

Some companies kept women on after the war and the clippie became a commonplace. Come the Second World War, women again became essential to keeping the buses running. During the previous war it had sometimes been dangerous work, particularly at night, but in the 1940s the threat from aerial bombardment was tremendous in some areas. The East Kent Company, for instance, ran its buses in a state of permanent emergency over the Dover road; at least fifteen conductors and conductresses were killed by German bombs and machine-gun fire.

As to bus drivers – Dolores Rennie was the first woman to obtain a London bus driver’s certificate, in April 1944, but she was not allowed to drive passengers on the public road, only ferry buses between depots and manoeuvre them in garages.

Tracing an individual will not be easy because of the many bus companies that could be found in nearly every large town until routes and services were regulated by the Road Traffic Act 1930, but once a company is known it is possible to find photographs of bus types, routes and sometimes staff, this being a subject that, like the old steam railways, has a devoted following. Identifying a uniform or badge might help – see the website http://stephen1071.fotopic.net for a useful photographic archive. The Omnibus Society’s website has links to other useful resources (www.omnibussoc.org), and the London Transport Museum (www.ltmuseum.co.uk) has interesting online photographs showing female conductors’ uniforms.

Butcher

 

Female butcher’s shops are quite commonly found in trade directories – such as those of Margaret Briercliffe, Ann Fairclough, Isabella Harper, Mary Kearsley, Ann Lord, Peggy Parkinson and Fanny Tempest at Bolton in 1853. As with bakeries, they may have employed a man to do the heaviest work, or they may simply have served at the counter or overseen the business. There is no reason to think, however, that this was not a job that women could do – the work carried out on farms at pig-killing time demonstrates their abilities in coping with carcasses and meat products. Certainly as the 19th century wore on, the actual slaughtering would probably be done by a slaughterman, especially in a town or city.

Buttonmaker

 

There is a phrase ‘Not worth a button’ that refers to something worthless but, in the days before the zip fastener came into general use after the First World War, buttons were big business, not least because they were subject to fashion and absolutely essential to the clothing trade. In some areas buttonmaking, like lacemaking and strawplaiting, was an early 19th century home industry that supported many families otherwise dependent upon an agricultural labourer’s wage. This was certainly the case in Dorset, where Abraham Case introduced buttonmaking into Shaftesbury in the 17th century. By the beginning of the 19th century it was a major industry throughout the county. From a very young age, perhaps five or six years, a child would be taught the craft, earning little or nothing at first but soon becoming proficient enough to add to the family income. The children worked with their mothers and older female relatives, some women becoming so fast at the job that they could produce up to 12 dozen buttons in a day, giving them a wage far above that which they could earn in agricultural work, which was the only alternative employment for them in this rural county.

The early 19th century saw this home industry at its peak, with over 4,000 people employed. Buttonmaking as a craft was intricate and time-consuming, with some women so skilled that they could produce buttons that were almost works of art. Early examples used sheep horn as the base, covered with cloth and then embroidered with waxed thread. Later, the use of wire rings as a base allowed even more intricate designs to be introduced. However, as the lacemakers were also discovering in the 19th century, machines could make comparable products far more quickly and far more cheaply for the new mass market that was opening up. By the 1850s the Dorset button industry was collapsing and despite attempts at revival in the early 20th century, it became a treasured craft rather than a livelihood.

In Birmingham and the industrial North the story was very different. Buttonmaking by hand was also a source of livelihood here (and elsewhere throughout the country in a smaller way). But Birmingham was also the home of the factories that could soon produce thousands of buttons each week, employing mostly female workers, and it was already an important local industry by the early 1800s. Buttons could be made of a wide variety of materials – pearl, horn, shell, bone, wood, glass, porcelain, gold, silver, plated copper, white metal, pinchbeck, steel, japanned tin, ivory, tortoiseshell, jet, leather and more. Different manufacturers specialised in certain types of buttons, so that mother-of-pearl buttons would be made in a different factory from those of horn or wood. At the end of the process, buttons were sewn onto cards or papers and packed into boxes for delivery.

By the 1870s, female workers outnumbered men in the industry, many of them girls in their teens. Wages were paid, as they always had been, by piecework and ‘working from 8 am to 6 pm an average woman can earn 8s to 10s a week, while the more skilful make 14s to 20s; children 1s 6d to 2s’. Many of the factories were small and some of the processes were unhealthy for the workers – ‘the shop is generally heated by steam-pipes and there is a good deal of gaslight . . . the atmosphere is far from fresh and there is much noise and vibration from the presses. . . . The dust that is given off in pearl button making is very considerable, and not only induces by inhalation a tendency to respiratory disease and phthisis, but, according to German scientific observers, a special kind of bone inflammation or osteitis, which attacks the thighs and arms.’ (Industrial Classes, 1876.)

The great variety of hand-made buttons that were native to Dorset can be seen at the Dorset County Museum (High West Street, Dorchester DT1 1XA; www.dorsetcountymuseum.org). Buttons are highly collectable and all things ‘button’, including examples of workmanship and techniques, can be found online at the website of the British Button Society (www.britishbuttonsociety.org); or see Buttons, Alan and Gillian Meredith (Shire Publications).