P

Papermaker

 

Women workers were engaged in certain parts of the papermaking process. The rags that formed the main constituent of paper in the 19th century had to be sorted and cut up, with all buttons or other additions removed; the women in the rag room at a paper mill stood at long tables and worked either with scissors or with a curved knife set into the table. Rag rooms were liable to be full of dust, and the smell from the old rags must have been an added unpleasantness; later machinery treated the rags before they were sorted. Other ingredients were increasingly used as demand for paper increased, such as Esparto grass, and the women picked the bales over for roots or rubbish. In the 1870s rag sorters were paid about 10s a week.

Women also worked at the rolling machines that squeezed water from the paper pulp, and in the ‘sizing’ room, where the paper was laid on a moving belt of felt blanket to be carried through the glaze or size, which made the finished paper resistant to ink. Once the paper was made, it was sent to other parts of the factory or to other manufacturers to be made into, for example, envelopes, writing paper, notepads etc.

There were paper mills in many counties, including Buckinghamshire, Devon, Hertfordshire, Kent, Lancashire, Yorkshire, ­Lanarkshire, and also in Edinburgh; they tended to be situated in the country rather than in towns. There is a history of papermaking and a glossary of terms on the website of the British Association of Paper Historians (www.baph.org.uk); and the industrial processes involved can be seen on the Confederation of Paper Industries’ website (www.paper.org.uk). There are pages on paper mills and papermakers of Wales 1700–1900 at www.genuki.org.uk/big/wal/Paper.html; and on the Hertfordshire mills of John Dickinson at www.thepapertrail.org.uk. See also local studies such as Sheffield Papermakers: Three Centuries of Papermaking in the Sheffield Area, Tanya Schmoller (Allenholme Press, 1992) or The Endless Web: John Dickinson & Co Ltd 1804–1954, Joan Evans (Jonathan Cape, 1955).

Parish worker

 

‘A small demand exists for Parish Workers,’ said Cassell’s Household Guide in the 1880s, ‘to assist clergymen of the Established Church in the secular part of their duty – Evening Classes, Mothers’ Meetings, Clothing Clubs, Bible Classes for Young Women, etc. This position would be a very happy one for many a clergyman’s widow or daughter, and the salary of £30 or £50 she would obtain would keep the home together, while for the want of such work it might have to be broken up.’

Parlourmaid

 

The parlourmaid was a later Victorian invention, meant to take the place of the increasingly rare manservant. If she worked alone she might be classed as a house-parlourmaid, and have all the cleaning tasks of a housemaid, but in any case her duties were more responsible than those of other maids and her pay correspondingly higher (about £18 to £30 p.a. in the early 1900s).

 

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The parlourmaid always had to be dressed smartly in case she was called to answer the front door.

 

She answered the door to callers and announced them in the drawing room (‘Unless already acquired, some slight drilling is often necessary to teach an inexperienced parlourmaid how to announce visitors, etc, in a clear, distinct, yet not loud voice’); by the 1920s she also answered the telephone. She brought up afternoon tea, and cleared it away, laid the table for lunch and dinner, and waited on family and guests. (‘The appearance of a parlourmaid is of considerable importance, those possessing tall, trim figures being in far greater demand than short, stout individuals on account of their more graceful movements when waiting at table.’) Quiet shoes – no squeaking soles – were essential, and she was to take great care of her hands and not let them be roughened by manual work. She might assist either her mistress or master with laying out their clothes. All the less menial housework was hers where a housemaid was also kept – seeing to flowers and plants, for instance – and at night she locked up the house and put out the lights.

Her dress was similar to that of a housemaid – a print dress in the morning, a black dress in the afternoon, but in the mornings she did not wear the coarse apron needed for heavy work, only a white one so that she could go to the door quickly.

Pen maker

 

Birmingham was the centre of the steel pen making industry, employing about 2,000 women in the late 19th century – until the 1950s most of the pen nibs in use were still made in the city. The work was done in workshops or factories: steel or brass was pressed through rollers, cut into the required sizes, pierced and ground. The nibs were then heated, oiled, coloured, varnished and dried. Women were employed particularly on the presses and on sorting, counting and packing.

The Pen Room is a museum run by the Birmingham Pen Trade Heritage Association (Unit 3, The Argent Centre, 60 Frederick Street, Birmingham B1 3HS; www.penroom.co.uk), with some of the 100,000 varieties of nibs the women worked on; it has published A Brief History of the Birmingham Pen Trade (2000). See http://jquarter.members.beeb.net/walk9.htm for ‘a walk through Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter’ with a great deal of information about the pen making industry.

Percussion cap maker

 

At factories in Birmingham and London in the late 1800s women were employed making sporting and military percussion caps for firearms. Strips of copper were made into the shape of the cap, smoothed, cleaned, dried and then primed, i.e. charged with the detonating mixture (which was usually mixed away from the factory for safety). Even a tiny bit of grit on the iron charging plates could cause detonation and with something like 2,000 caps being done at a time, explosions were quite common: ‘it is remarkable with what sangfroid the workers regard the constant popping off of stray dozens.’ See also munitions worker.

Personnel officer

 

see welfare worker.

Pew opener

 

A woman paid a small amount to look after the cleaning of the church and the pews, to keep all in order. In the 19th century many churches still had their boxed-in pews, allocated to specific individuals or families who paid pew rent, and the pew opener would also be on duty at service time to open the door to each pew and usher in the occupants. The women often did the work for many years and are mentioned in church records and histories. In 1882 Mrs Bates, for instance, had been pew opener at King’s Cross Wesleyan church for 40 years, while Mrs Joanna Mott had been pew opener at Moulsham church in Essex for 30 years when she died in 1884, aged 77.

Pharmacist

 

A chemist’s shop has always been a staple of the high street, selling medicines, cosmetics and personal items. Working behind the counter was a sought after position for young women, and in fact having a bright, attractive assistant was a positive plus in a business where female customers were unlikely to have comfortably whispered their needs to a male assistant.

In addition to these counter assistants, many Victorian women took a more active role in the preparation of medicines and prescriptions, particularly in a family concern. Wives and daughters of local doctors, too, often helped dispense medicines. The familiarity of seeing women working with drugs, however, did not immediately translate into accepting them as fully qualified pharmacists.

In 1868 the Pharmacy Act stipulated that registration with the Pharmaceutical Society was necessary for anyone ‘compounding and dispensing medicines and selling certain scheduled poisons’ – those currently in business, which included over 200 women running high street shops, could register straight away, but in future passing the examinations of the Society would be necessary. The register has been produced annually since 1869. Since 1815 the Society of Apothecaries had been offering a short course of study and a certificate of ‘Assistant to an Apothecary’ (equivalent to a Pharmacy Technician), and many women chose to follow this route into the profession, even into the 20th century, although it did not hold the same standing as qualification under the Pharmaceutical Society.

In 1873 Alice Vickery was the first woman to pass the ‘minor’ examination of the Pharmaceutical Society to qualify as a ‘chemist and druggist’ – the ‘minor’ examination in ‘prescriptions, practical dispensing, materia medica, pharmacy, botany and chemistry’ qualified her as assistant to a pharmacist and enabled her to register with the Society. In 1875 Isabella Clarke passed the ‘major’ examination, which in theory allowed her to become a member of the Society and have her own business as a ‘pharmaceutical chemist’, but the Society took four years before it admitted her for membership, after a great deal of rancorous debate. Nonetheless, Isabella Clarke pre-empted them and opened her own shop in London in 1876 as a ‘certified pharmaceutical chemist’ and offered female apprenticeships at a premium of £100. She later, in 1905, became the first President of the Association of Women Pharmacists.

By then there were 195 female registered pharmacists, just over 1% of the total number (this had increased to 10% by 1945). A pharmaceutical career became an alternative to medicine or nursing for young women with a good education. As an article in The Queen put it in 1905, it was ‘a suitable profession for the young woman who cannot afford to spend the requisite time and money to become a doctor, and yet is not without private means’.

The Museum and Library of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (1 Lambeth High Street, London SE1 7JN) has a complete run of the Register of Pharmacists, and operates a search service; the library can be visited by appointment (fees payable). Their website (www.rpsgb.org) has an online exhibition celebrating the centenary of the National Association of Women Pharmacists, with a full history and photographs, and a useful research sheet on ‘Tracing people and premises in pharmacy’ (www.rpsgb.org/pdfs/tracing.pdf). See also The Pharmaceutical Industry: A Guide to Historical Records, Lesley Richmond, Julie Stevenson and Alison Turton (Manchester University Press, 2003).

Photographer

 

Many early women photographers or photographic assistants have been concealed from posterity behind a husband, father or brother whose name appeared on the studio frontage, but their involvement in the profession is being increasingly acknowledged. By the 1850s most towns of any size had one or two photographic studios in the high street, and the appeal of dressing up for a studio portrait was beginning to spread across the classes, aided by increasingly cheaper processes, once cartes de visite and cabinet prints were available from the 1860s.

One of the first women professionals was Jane Nina Wigley, who purchased a licence from Richard Beard in 1845 to allow her to use the daguerrotype process ‘in Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead and the surrounding area’. She moved to London in 1847 (see Michael Pritchard’s Directory of London Photo­graphers 1841–1908, online at www.photolondon.org.uk/directory.htm.) At this time, of course, no one could have predicted the enormous advances in photography that were about to take place, and in the 1851 census, Jane gives her occupation simply as ‘artist’.

 

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Taken from the back of a carte de visite: Hannah Rogerson (later Hannah Jones) had a photographic studio in Newport for about 20 years from the late 1860s. (Maureen Jones)

 

The very useful lists of local photographers being compiled and, often, put online are of great help in bringing professional female photographers to light: see for instance Staffordshire photographers 1861–1940 at www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/STS/Stsphots.html; or Sussex studios at www.photohistory-sussex.co.uk. Some have also been published, e.g. Lancashire Professional Photographers 1840–1940, Gillian Jones (PhotoResearch, 2004). See also A History of Women Photographers, Naomi Rosenblum (Abbeville Press, 2nd edn, 2000) and Victorian Photographers at Work, John Hannavy (Shire Publications) for background. The National Media Museum in Bradford has a collection relating to photography (www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk).

Women also worked behind the scenes in high-street photographic studios, developing prints and retouching and colouring portrait photographs (before the widespread use of colour film, colour was painted onto a black and white print with a small brush). One woman who worked for a time in a photographic studio in Chelmsford in the 1930s recalled that the girls used artistic licence on eye and hair colour according to their mood.

‘Photographer’ was a name also applied to those who administered the early X-rays (‘Röntgen rays’) in about 1900.

Physiotherapist

 

Until the Second World War, those who would today be called a physiotherapist were called a masseuse (or masseur for the men). In 1892 the Young Woman told its readers: ‘The demand for masseurs and masseuses is very slight at the moment. I am quite sure no one could make a livelihood by it now. Massage was a fashionable medical fad some years ago, and it has had its day. Training may be had at the West End Hospital, 75 Welbeck Street, London.’

That rather terse advice was soon out of date, as in 1894 the Society of Trained Masseuses was formed by four nurses anxious to protect the professional evolution of their service – Lucy Robinson, Rosalind Paget, Elizabeth Manley and Margaret Palmer. It was incorporated in 1900 and in 1920 was granted a royal charter. The work done with injured servicemen by the Almeric Paget Military Massage Corps during the First World War had shown the wide range of mental and physical conditions that could be helped by qualified masseuses. Amalgamation with the Institute of Massage and Remedial Gymnastics followed.

By the 1930s the ‘fad’ had become a profession, the 18-month course of training for which included ‘a study of anatomy, nerves and muscles’ at a school recognised by the Chartered Society of Massage and Medical Gymnastics. ‘The masseuse requires to be strong, for the work makes heavy demands upon the physical energy. It is also desirable to possess a knowledge of pathology and the causes and symptoms of disease.’ Qualified masseuses might be employed by hospitals or nursing homes, or in hotels, or could work in private practice.

It was during the Second World War, in 1944, that the society became the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists – and only then did the now familiar name come into general use (the Society almost chose the name ‘rehabilitant’ instead). Massage was just one facet of the physiotherapist’s work, involving also exercise, movement and manipulation, and electrotherapy, and again the dreadful injuries of battle provided the experience that moved the profession forward – the first spinal unit was opened at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in 1944. The Massage Corps had been founded to work with the services in 1936 and became the Physiotherapy Service in 1943, with corps members serving in Europe, Africa, India, Palestine and Egypt (those who were with the Army wore the Royal Army Medical Corps badge, and shoulder flashes). Women completing their training during the war years had to volunteer for either an Army hospital in the UK or to serve overseas.

See In Good Hands: History of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy 1894–1994, (ed.) J. Barclay (Butterworth Heinemann, 1994). The Society’s Library and Information Service, 14 Bedford Row, London WC1R 4ED, has a list of book and journal articles, and advice for family historians (www.csp.org.uk/director/about/thecsp/history/familyhistory.cfm).

Picker of flowers, fruit, herbs and vegetables

 

Until after the Second World War, every year country women spent weeks on farms or market gardens picking local produce, earning a welcome addition to the family income. This was casual labour and there will rarely be records of individual workers, but clues to the work women in a particular area may have undertaken can be found in local histories and surveys of agriculture.

 

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Picking tulips in Kent for the London markets in the 1950s.

 

In Herefordshire, for instance, picking cider apples for Bulmers paid £1 a ton (in 20-cwt bags) in the late 1940s. In the area around Market Drayton in Staffordshire in the 1930s women picked damsons every September for the dyeing industry in Sheffield. In the 1920s the ‘lady pickers’ of Devon picked tons of raspberries and other soft fruits for the jam making factories, at 3s 6d a day, working from 5 am to 3 pm. Mitcham in Surrey was famed for its flower and herb farms for much of the 19th century, with acres of lavender, roses, mint, poppies, sage, rosemary and much more scenting the air – Potter and Moore were a well known local firm. At Wallington Sarah Sprules (d.1912) carried on her father’s growing and distillery business and was ‘Purveyor of Lavender Essence to the Queen’. Some of these industries are well documented and will be included in local museum collections: e.g. see The Story of Lavender, Sally Festing (London Borough of Sutton, 1982).

Pin maker

 

Unlike needlemaking, which by the late 19th century was still a labour-intensive industry, pin making had been simplified in 1824 by the invention of the Wright pin machine. Whereas it once took 14 people to make a pin, now one woman could supervise the operation of three or four machines, the wire being fed in at one end and the complete pin emerging at the other at the rate of between 80 and 150 a minute (although in some factories women were still employed at mid-century fixing the heads onto pins, making from 12,000 to 15,000 pins a day). In the 1870s, pin factories were to be found mainly in Birmingham, and also in Stroud, Warrington, Bristol and Redditch.

‘Pins’ included hairpins and hatpins, and there was a strong hatpin making industry at Gloucester in the earlier 1800s; see the website of the Hatpin Society (www.hatpinsociety.org.uk/history.html) for more about the background. The industry is mentioned in local histories, such as Warrington at Work, Janice Hayes (Breedon Books, 2003).

Policewoman

 

Before the First World War, female involvement in the police forces throughout the country was restricted to an occasional quasi-official role in searching and supervising female and child suspects and criminals (see matron, police; searcher). This was often done by the wives or widows of police officers – marrying a police constable meant marrying the force, and especially in rural areas the policeman’s wife acted as an unpaid helper to her husband.

The First World War brought women volunteers under the police umbrella for the first time, in response to a call by the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. There were two main groups involved. One was organised by the National Union of Women Workers, the other was formed by Margaret Damer Dawson and Mary Allen and named initially the Women Police Volunteers, renamed the Women Police Service (WPS) in February 1915. By the end of the war there were hundreds of female police volunteers in cities and ports around the country; they were not sworn-in members of the constabulary and had no powers of arrest. They were used mostly in a welfare role, concerned with the problems of women, children, refugees and prostitutes. Occasionally there was something a little more exciting – in 1916 the Admiralty used a WPS volunteer to infiltrate the naval base at Scapa Flow to investigate claims of drug abuse and spying. Only in Grantham, which had a persistent problem with disorder and prostitution arising from the large army camp, were women sworn-in to the local force during the war, Mary Allen, Ellen Harburn and Edith Smith being the first ‘official’ women police constables. The WPS, in particular, was not universally popular and, in 1918, when recruitment began for policewomen to join the Metropolitan Police Force, Chief Commissioner Macready declined to make them a permanent part of the Met.

 

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Anything involving women or children was seen as the natural responsibility of a policewoman: here shepherding evacuees onto a train during the Second World War.

 

Regional police forces were not quick to employ policewomen – in Hertfordshire Annie and Margaret Johnson were the first, posted to Watford in 1928, and remained the only examples until 1941. The county’s Chief Constable had in 1923 noted his reasons for objecting to women in the force. They included the lack of toilet facilities in stations, that women would be liable to talk too freely about their work and were not amenable to discipline, and that time spent training them would be wasted when they left to get married, as they inevitably would. In 1920, when the Baird Committee reported, some 43 police authorities in England and Wales were employing women constables, but by 1931 there were still 88 towns without a single policewoman. Essex was to be the last county force to recruit women, after the Second World War.

An applicant to the Met in 1934 would have to be single or widowed, aged between 24 and 35, and sit an examination in English, arithmetic, geography, general knowledge and ‘intelligence’. Tests included writing a description of ‘The attractions of a public park with which you are acquainted’, and an essay on ‘Street merchants and their ways’. Pay began at £3 16s a week. The whole question of what a policewoman was actually for was still perplexing the authorities and most senior officers thought they should only be employed on ‘matters concerning their own sex’.

War in 1939 once again created a demand to fill posts left vacant as men went into the services, and the Women’s Auxiliary Police Corps (WAPC) came into being for the duration. In that year there were 246 permanent women officers and by 1949 the number had quadrupled and the Police Federation was admitting them as members, albeit grudgingly. An account of a policewoman’s life in Hereford in the 1940s is in Herefordshire Within Living Memory, Herefordshire Federation of WIs (Countryside Books, 1993); the first time women were taken into the force there was in 1941, under the WAPC. They were untrained and used as drivers, escorts and telephonists, but after the war three women stayed on to join the force.

My Ancestor Was a Policeman, Antony Shearman (Society of Genealogists, 2000) is a good place to start finding your way around the records of different forces and police authorities, although records for women will not start to appear until at least the 1920s. The history of the development of Scottish police forces and advice on research is online at www.scan.org.uk/familyhistory/myancestor/policeman.htm. The British Policewoman, Joan Lock (Robert Hale, 1979) tells the background story. The Imperial War Museum collections include material on First World War volunteers (www.iwm.org.uk), and the National Police Library (Centrex, Bramshill, Hook, Hampshire RG27 0JW; www.centrex.police.uk/business/police_library.html) may be able to help with publications.

Politician

 

Fifty years before women got the parliamentary franchise, in 1869, they were granted the borough vote, provided they were unmarried or widowed and had the equivalent rateable property qualification as men; by 1900 over a million women were eligible to vote in local elections. Not only that, but women became eligible to stand for election too and this ‘domestic politics’ was sometimes compared to an extension of women’s natural duties in the spheres of education, poor law (workhouses and hospitals), public health and so on.

But it was politics for all that, and women who stood for election to school boards (from 1870), poor law boards of guardians (from 1875), parish councils (from 1894) and borough and county councils (from 1907) had to work within the political system and learn to canvass votes, organise their supporters, talk to public and press, and be accountable to the people who voted for them. Many of the women came from philanthropic backgrounds and used the system as an extension of the traditional duty of the better off to care for the poor, while others had a more purely political agenda and saw this as a route into trade union or parliamentary politics, allied to the suffragette cause that was to eventually come to the boil in the 1910s.

The influence exerted by female politicians should not be downplayed. As an active member of a local board they could play a direct role in the development of services that affected every resident’s life, particularly schools, hospitals, workhouses, adoption and the care of children, clean water and better sanitary facilities. The first woman to be elected to a school board in London was Elizabeth Garrett (see doctor), following the passing of the Elementary Education Act in 1870, with three times more votes than her nearest male rival. And within 30 years there were women serving on school boards in every major town. Miss Martha Merrington was the first woman elected onto a poor law board, in 1875 in London, and again there was a rapid spread of female guardians.

Some of the women who stood for election to borough and county councils after 1907 used their experience as a springboard to Parliament. The parliamentary vote was extended to women over the age of 30 after the First World War, and the first woman MP to take her place in the House of Commons in 1919 was Lady Nancy Astor (1879–1964), who kept her seat for the Sutton division of Plymouth until 1945. Perhaps more representative of the women referred to above was Arabella Susan Lawrence (1871–1947), a solicitor’s daughter, who was MP for North East Ham 1923–1924 and 1926–1931. She was a member of the London County Council (Poplar) from 1913 to 1927 and of Poplar Borough Council from 1919 to 1924, a member of the National Executive of the Labour Party, the Parliamentary Secretary Ministry of Health 1929–1931, and contested elections at East Ham, Camberwell and Stockton-on-Tees; she was also organiser for the National Federation of Women Workers 1912–1921. From the late 1920s about 20 to 30 women were returned to Parliament at every election.

Local archives are the best source for background material on the women who served at local government level. In the first instance, a Kelly’s Directory or similar is a good place to find lists of council and committee members: in 1937 in Southend-on-Sea, for instance, Mrs Constance Leyland of 17 Cotswold Road, Westcliff-on-Sea was serving for Milton Ward, while Mrs Harvey of 171 West Road, Southend was elected for All Saints Ward.

The Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament in 4 volumes from 1832–1974, edited by M. Stenton and S. Lees (Harvester Press), or the far more detailed History of Parliament in 23 volumes published between 1965 and 1992 (now available in some archives and libraries on CD), give biographical information on MPs. For information about Parliament’s own archives, see www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_publications_and_archives/parliamentary_archives.cfm.

Porteress

 

Another name for an assistant matron in a workhouse. See matron, workhouse.

Post Office

 

The General Post Office (GPO) was one of the few organisations to offer opportunities for employment to women from its earliest days, admittedly limited until the 20th century but still a source of pensionable and secure work that could be performed by intelligent women and girls. Its terms and conditions of work were those of the Civil Service. All applicants had to be single or widowed, and employment was terminated on marriage.

Postwomen: there were a few women employed as ‘letter carriers’, as postmen were called until 1883, when the parcel post started. One was Ann Carter, who, until she died in 1835, aged 77, delivered letters around Great Yarmouth, ‘fortified by a glass of gin and with spectacles on her nose’, according to the Post Office Magazine of 1937. She also had to collect money, as there were at that time no postage stamps and letters had to be paid for on delivery.

A surge in employment came nearly a century later during the First World War, when by 1915 women were replacing postmen called up for military service. For the first time they had a specific uniform, of a blue serge skirt and jacket and a blue straw hat with a detachable waterproof covering. The number of postal deliveries each day during the late 19th and early 20th centuries seems now quite utopian – in towns and cities there could be up to ten deliveries a day to homes and businesses, while in the suburbs that figure might drop to four a day; in rural areas it would of course be normally only one or two, particularly when in some areas postmen and women needed a whole day to get to all parts of their round.

Postmistress, sub-postmistress: postmistresses were full time, salaried staff, employed by the GPO to oversee mail distribution and take control of a designated post office. The first postmistress of Salcombe in Devon was Mrs Sarah (Sally) Stone, appointed in 1821 at a salary of £5 per annum, rising to £10, but there were few women in this position. By the 1880s they were paid from 14 shillings to 24 shillings a week.

Sub-postmistresses, on the other hand, were normally not employees but were paid according to the work they generated and they usually had another business, such as a village shop. They started simply as letter receivers, the shop being a convenient place for people to call in to leave their mail to be collected and sent; in later years the services they could offer increased, including savings, money orders, telephones and telegrams, and they became an indispensable cog in the local economy. Local trade directories are useful sources of information about these women and their businesses. White’s 1874 directory for Suffolk, for instance, lists details for the village of Barrow, six miles west of Bury St Edmunds: ‘Post Office at Mrs. M. Watson’s. Letters arrive at 8.30 am from, and are despatched at 5 pm to Bury St Edmunds, which is the nearest Money Order Office.’ Maria Watson was ‘grocer, draper and postmistress, and agent for Liverpool and London and Globe Insurance Company’.

Post Office Savings Bank: clerkships in the Savings Bank (started in 1861 and by the 1880s handling accounts worth nearly £50 million) were considered amongst the best appointments for young women between 16 and 30 years of age, according to Cassell’s Household Guide; second class clerks receiving from £40 to £75 a year, first class clerks £80 to £100, ‘while principal and head-clerks get as much as from £110 to £150 yearly’. The examination for the Civil Service Commission included ‘writing and orthography, grammar and composition, arithmetic, including both vulgar and decimal fractions, and geography’.

clerks, typists, and sorters were employed in large general post offices and in the cities. In 1892 the Young Woman advised its readers: ‘The pay of post office female clerks begins at £65, and rises by £3 annually, till it reaches £100. Beyond that, special salaries reach £400 per annum sometimes, but £65 to £100 is the average. Each official is entitled to a Government pension when her term of service is over. Clerks are accorded a month’s holiday in the year, and all Bank holidays. The subjects for the entrance examination do not cover a wide range, but competition is very keen, as there are usually four times as many candidates as vacancies, which the best qualified secure. Candidates for examination must not be under eighteen years of age. Female sorters enter the post office from fifteen years, and it is not very unusual for a sorter to qualify for a clerkship; but the combined work and study are too much for the strength of most girls, and therefore not to be advised.’

The telephone and telegraph services were open to women and some may have spent part of their working lives on the postal side and part in telecommunications. An example was Mrs Louisa Massey, who succeeded her father as sub-postmaster of Stonehouse, Plymouth and was later appointed a sorting clerk and telegraphist. As such she was salaried and entitled when she retired in 1897 to a government pension – which she was still collecting at the age of 100 in 1937.

The best place to start researching a postal ancestor is the British Postal Museum and Archive (Freeling House, Phoenix Place, London WC1 0DL; http://postalheritage.org.uk). The archives include employment records such as appointment books and details of pensions and gratuities (e.g. the marriage gratuity paid to women who left to get married). They also have a photograph collection. Getting the Message: The Story of the British Post Office by Christopher Browne (Alan Sutton, 1993) is a good general history. See telegraphist and telephonist.

Pottery worker

 

In England the heart of the Potteries lay in north Staffordshire, in the area around the towns of Stoke-on-Trent, Burslem, Tunstall, Newcastle under Lyne, Hanley, Shelton, Etruria, Longton, Cobridge etc, but there were also potteries, major and minor, in many other counties, such as Kent, Suffolk, Durham, Surrey, Sussex, Worcestershire, Yorkshire and London. The industry had come to prominence during the 18th century and many of the manufacturers are still household names – Minton, Copeland, Davenport, Wedgwood etc in Staffordshire, Coalport in Shropshire, Worcester in Worcestershire, Doulton in Lambeth, to name but a few. In 1871 there were nearly 16,000 female workers in the earthenware trade, the great majority of them in Staffordshire.

Women had certain jobs in the manufacturing process. A female ‘baller’ or ‘handler’ cut clay into pieces and weighed them ready to be handed to the potter to be thrown on the wheel. Before steam power, a girl was often employed to keep the potter’s wheel turning, and another to take the piece off when it had been thrown. A turner, who operated on clay in much the same way as a turner of wood, also had a female assistant to hand him the clay and take away finished pieces. When the wares were dried and fired, they had to be sorted and stacked in warehouses, often women’s work.

Now, if it was to be decorated the piece went to the printers. Women and young girls were employed in this department, as ‘transferrers’ and paper-cutters. In the 1880s at Minton’s factory for instance, printing under the glaze was done with designs engraved upon copper plate. The women had to work quickly, transferring the design first to a piece of paper and then to the ware, which absorbed the colour – ‘The work requires some little neatness of hand and quick rubbing down with a flannel roll. . . . Immediately the paper is washed off, leaving the design on the biscuit (ware) from which it will not wash off on account of its oily character.’ The oil was got rid of by baking the ware, which then went to be dipped in glaze and fired again. If there was going to be overglaze work added, it was sent on to the painting department, where the women were ‘of a much higher and more talented grade’.

These were all ‘work women’, not artists, merely filling in colours according to the design marked out for them. The work needed attention and neatness, but no particular skill in drawing or inventiveness. The ‘artists’ were those who hand-painted original designs. In 1876 an artist designer received pay of between £3 and £6 a week, while a female painter received 10–14 shillings, and a stenciller 21–23 shillings.

After this, the remaining areas in which women were employed were gilding, burnishing and scouring. The gilders completed the decoration before firing, and the gold had to be burnished using bloodstone or agate burnishers to bring out the brightness. Scouring with sandpaper to remove any trace of roughness was particularly injurious to health because the fine dust that came from the china was actually fine flint powder and a major cause of lung disease.

There are a multitude of books and websites about the individual pottery companies, their products and the famous artists and designers who worked for them. For an introduction to ‘Clarice Cliff and her contemporaries’, for instance, see the online exhibition at www.stoke.gov.uk/ccm/museums. The Potteries, David Sekers (Shire Publications) gives some background to the area. For Scottish potteries, the website of the Scottish Pottery Society (www.scottishpotterysociety.co.uk) has many links and bibliographies for the factories. The website www.thepotteries.org/jobs/index.htm has an alphabetical list of specific occupations and much more on methods of work, biographies and history, plus a family history index.

Princess Mary’s Royal Air Force Nursing Service (PMRAFNS)

 

The decision to create a nursing service for the newly formed Royal Air Force was taken early in 1918, to replace Army nursing sisters. It was to be run along the same lines as the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, but with sisters appointed on short-term contracts. By 1919 there were 130 qualified nurses in place. In line with post-war economies, when the RAF was reduced to a shadow of its wartime strength, the amalgamation of the service with QAIMNS was considered, but it was allowed to continue as a permanent service and in 1923 was renamed Princess Mary’s RAF Nursing Service, under royal patronage – Princess Mary also equipped the RAF hospital at Halton.

On joining, a new recruit was sent to Halton or, after 1939, Ely or Wroughton, for instruction in service discipline and etiquette, though they remained specifically nurses rather than officers, and then drafted to an RAF hospital. The only overseas postings in the inter-war years were to Aden and Iraq, though during the Second World War they served in all fields of combat, including Burma, manning mobile field hospitals which moved up behind the lines as soon as airfields were in operation, casualties frequently being evacuated by air – in June 1944 they brought some 300,000 ‘casevacs’ out following the D-Day landings.

The sisters held honorary military rank from the beginning, but after March 1943 held commissions, and wore the same badges of rank as men (on the shoulder of the cape, just as a male officer would wear it on his greatcoat). Their uniform was distinct from that of WAAF officers, with white shirt blouses and collars, and a black felt hat with four corners, the officer’s hat badge worn at the front. On 1 February 1949 they were integrated into the RAF.

Equivalent ranks (RAF in brackets): Matron-in-Chief (Air Commodore), Chief Principal Matron (Group Captain), Principal Matron (Wing Commander), Matron (Squadron Leader), Senior Sister (Flight Lieutenant), Sister (Flying Officer).

There are no personnel records at The National Archives (apart from some relating to the very first intake in 1918/1919; see their leaflet ‘Royal Air Force: Nurses and Nursing Services’), as these remain with the RAF (write to PMA (CS) 2a2, Building 248A, HQ RAF PTC, RAF Innsworth, Gloucestershire GL3 1EZ). See the website of the Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon (www.rafmuseum.org.uk) for information and history; and the website of the service (www.pmrafns.org) for history and photographs.

Principal boy’

 

During the Victorian period pantomime grew to be a hugely popular form of Christmas entertainment, so that by the late 19th century productions were lavish and intended for adult entertainment rather than for children. Early pantos were mostly vehicles for male performers, but the fairies were always female (see ballet dancer) and, from the 1800s, so was the ‘principal boy’, although the length of her skirts really began to rise only after the 1860s. The first principal boy may have made an appearance sometime in the early 1800s, although a Miss Ellington who appeared as the Prince in The Good Woman in 1852 at the Lyceum theatre ‘has the strongest claim to be honoured as the first actual principal boy of pantomime’ (Pantomime Pageant, A.E. Wilson, 1940s). Mr Wilson also described Harriett Vernon, a later and popular star of pantomime, who was ‘a handsome, statuesque creature with a fine, ample presence and she was a sight for the gods when she took the stage, jewelled stick in hand and decked out with diamonds and ostrich plumes’. See actress for sources.

Printer, publisher

 

Women can be found running small printing businesses throughout the mid-19th and early 20th century, such as Harriett Welsford in Exeter in 1851, who was recorded as a printer employing two apprentices. She would probably have been a jobbing printer, producing letterheads, business stationery, fliers, posters, booklets etc.

Printers’ offices tended to be badly ventilated and overcrowded, and the work highly pressurised, particularly in the newspaper and book trade, but women were finding work in the industry, particularly as readers, who corrected proofs for the press, and compositors. This latter was a skilled job in the printing trade, in the early days setting up the press by hand, inserting each letter of type individually by lines into frames to make up the pages. It required the ability to read upside down and right to left. From the 1920s machines took over the setting; they acted like a typewriter that the compositor tapped to put each letter into a mould, which was then filled with molten lead. When set, the blocks of type were put onto the bed of the press and inked, the paper pressed down firmly and the printed sheets peeled off. A disadvantage for women was that the Factory Acts prohibited night working, which was a necessity in many large companies, particularly newspapers. Books, magazines and newspapers then had to be collated, folded, sewn and bound (see bookbinder).

One woman who had an impact on the female printing and publishing trade was Emily Faithfull (1835–1895). In an interview in 1894 she recalled that she ‘collected a band of women compositors in 1859 and started a regular typographic establishment’ – this was the Victoria Press in London, which published the English Woman’s Journal and, from 1863, the Victoria Magazine. In 1862 she was appointed Publisher and Printer-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria. Her firm employed only women, except for machine hands. In the 1890s the Women’s Printing Society Ltd at 21 Great College Street, Westminster was employing women as compositors, as were several large printing houses such as Messrs Hazell, Watson & Viney. Firms in Glasgow and Edinburgh also employed a considerable number. Fanny MacPherson, who was taken on as a compositor with other women in 1871 by the publishers R. & R. Clark of Edinburgh after a strike by the male staff, stayed with the company for the next 60 years!

 

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Emily Faithfull’s Victoria Press employed an all-woman staff of compositors from the 1860s.

 

From 1799, when the government was in the grip of fear following the French Revolution, all printing presses had had to be licensed by local magistrates in Quarter Sessions, so that records may exist locally of small businesses (after 1888 county councils took over the responsibility); local trade directories will also often be a good source of information. The St Bride Printing Library (Bride Lane, Fleet Street, London EC4Y 8EE; www.stbride.org/library) has a huge collection of books and archives relating to printing companies, though you would need to have an idea of the identity of the company you were interested in. Local museums may also have examples of the equipment used in the 19th and early 20th centuries: for instance, there is a collection of old printing presses at the Cockermouth Museum of Printing, 102 Main Street, Cockermouth CA13 9LX (www.visitcumbria.com/cm/printmuseum.htm).

Prison staff

 

Nowadays a prison matron is concerned with prisoners’ health but, in the 19th century, she was the chief female officer in the prison, or in charge of a women’s prison. She should possess ‘great judgement, sympathy and tact, not only because she has the care and superintendence of the prisoners, but also because the warders, servants, and all the female officials are under her charge, and she is responsible for the working and safe keeping of all beneath her sway’.

A matronship was seen as ‘an excellent opening for educated women’ in the 1880s (Cassell’s Household Magazine): ‘Matrons are elected by the magistrates in Quarter Sessions, or by a committee appointed by them; and the selection of the applicant is afterwards confirmed by the magistrates, in Quarter Sessions. In government convict prisons these appointments are made by the directors. The salaries vary in almost every prison, and pensions, or gratuities for length of service, are granted. Women of high principle and deep religious feeling are desired who unite kindness and firmness and have a great love of order, and a good judgement. The matron’s salary varies from £100 per annum to £175, generally with furnished lodging, coals, gas and washing.’ In 1881, the matron at Lincoln HM Prison was Ellen McGeoch, an unmarried woman of 42.

Just a few years before, in 1877, prisons had been brought under the central control of the Prison Commission (later, Prison Department) and this was a period when many smaller gaols were closed in favour of larger, purpose-built prisons. In 1919 prison warders, and wardesses, were renamed prison officers.

Finding the records of prison staff will depend on what has survived from the prison itself, often held now by the local record office. Search under the prison name at A2A (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a) and The National Archives’ catalogue (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk). The Lincoln Prison matron’s journals 1848–1878, for instance, are at Lincolnshire Archives. The Prison Service Museum and Collection is at the Galleries of Justice, High Pavement, Lace Market, Nottingham NG1 1HN (www.galleriesofjustice.org.uk). For background, try Victorian and Edwardian Prisons, Trevor May (Shire Publications, 2006), or Prison Life in Victorian England, Michelle Higgs (Tempus, 2007).

Publican, innkeeper

 

There can be few female publicans who could match the record of Margaret Tate, proprietress of the Boot and Shoe Inn at Ullerton, near Selby, who died in 1910. As reported in the Lancaster Mail, ‘The inn has been in her family for 300 years. Her father was 90 when he died. Mrs Tate was born in the house, and never slept a night away from home. It is the only public house in the village.’ Many pubs were run by women, who often took over the licence on the death of their husband or father, subject to the consent of the local magistrates at licensing sessions. The terms ‘inn’ and ‘public house’ are roughly interchangeable today but an inn was legally defined as ‘for the reception of travellers’ and an innkeeper would be obliged to provide beds for them. The landlady of a public house, however, was under no such obligation and would only provide drink (and perhaps food) within normal licensing hours. See also beerhouse keeper; hotel keeper.

Because publicans had to apply for a licence, records can often be found at local record offices; see the finding aid Victuallers’ Licences, Jeremy Gibson and Judith Hunter (Federation of Family History Societies, 1997). Sometimes a licence was refused or revoked, in which case it was often reported in the local newspaper, even if it was a small village pub. See also Researching Brewery and Publican Ancestors, Simon Fowler (Federation of Family History Societies, 2003), and his website (www.sfowler.force9.co.uk/page_12.htm) for pages about the history of pubs and tracing ancestors.

 

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Women publicans who belonged to the Women’s Auxiliary League of the Licensed Victuallers Association 1939–40.