F

Factory inspector

 

The first two women factory inspectors, May Abraham and Mary Muirhead Paterson, were appointed in 1893 in response to growing agitation for female participation in the national regulation and investigation of factories and workplaces where women and girls were employed (as opposed to local regulation, where their duties overlapped to a certain extent with those of a sanitary inspector). It was believed that the workwomen would say things to a female inspector which they would not to a man and this proved true to a certain extent, though the inspectors still had to press their investigations into dangerous practices and sweated trades with some courage. The story is told in Lady Inspectors: The Campaign for a Better Workplace 1893–1921, Mary Drake McFeely (Basil Blackwell, 1988).

These women were also pioneers in government service: Hilda Martindale (1875–1952), for instance, one of the first women factory inspectors, in 1903 wrote an influential report on lead poisoning in brickworks and by 1914 was Senior Lady Inspector. In 1933 she joined the Treasury, one of the first women to reach the higher levels of the Civil Service (see civil servant).

Fairground worker

 

see circus performer.

Farm servant

 

The farm servant not only worked in the farmhouse, on indoor duties common to the general servant, but also in the dairy and the poultry yard, and at busy times might be expected to be outdoors in the fields, perhaps hoeing, picking or assisting at the harvest and haymaking.

Farm servants were often taken on at the local hiring fairs (‘mop’ or ‘statute’ fairs) for a set term. Although this system was gradually disappearing in the South and Midlands by the mid to late 19th century, in the North the hiring fairs were still going strong up to the 1920s and 1930s. The Newcastle Daily Journal reported on 25 May 1920: ‘The oldest farmers do not recollect more animated or dearer hirings than those for women at Cockermouth yesterday. Servants were snapped up before they reached the hall set apart for the conduct of negotiations. Experienced women commanded £30 for the term, second class hands up to £25 and even inexperienced girls got £18.’

Farmer

 

Farmers were quite frequently female, usually (but not always) women who had inherited the land from a father, brother or husband – in 1851, for instance, 69-year-old Miss Jane Clarke was farming 40 acres at Nether Alderley in Cheshire, and employing two male farm labourers and a female farm servant. As such they had the same responsibilities as male farmers with regard to poor rates or service as parish officers such as constables or churchwardens, and may well appear in parish records. See Farming: Sources for Local Historians, Peter Edwards (Batsford, 1991). They will be listed in local directories, usually with the name of the farm. Maps can also be a useful source for tracing farms.

Film, television and radio

 

By the start of the First World War there were at least 600 cinemas in Greater London – and taking the country as a whole the number must have run into the thousands – and the foundations for what became the ‘British Hollywood’ had been laid at Elstree.

Women can be found at every stage of the industry, from the film set to the cinema, though discovering which of many hundreds of small companies they may have worked for will be difficult. Books about the British studios, such as Elstree: The British Hollywood, Patricia Warren (Columbus Books Ltd, 1988), are useful for background and bibliographies, and see the website of the British Film Institute for information about their resources of catalogues and trade magazines (www.bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/library/).

There is also an interesting website of the AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies that lists the names of people found to be connected with the film business in London 1894–1914 (http://londonfilm.bbk.ac.uk) – here, for instance, are Eveleen B.A. Arton, a film renter and dealer who ran the Artograph Company in the early 1900s; Miss Carlton, proprietor of the Picture Theatre at Kingston in 1914; and Hannah Abrahams, of the Electric Palladium in Camden Town in the 1920s – giving an idea of the wide range of possibilities for employment.

  

Caryl Doncaster was a producer of documentaries for the BBC in the 1950s; she is talking here to the Governor of Wandsworth Prison.

 

Until the 1950s, when commercial television arrived in the UK, anyone working in radio or television would have been an employee of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Radio broadcasts began in 1922 (Radio Scotland was formed in 1923), and the first edition of Woman’s Hour was heard in May 1923; the first female radio announcer and newsreader, Sheila Borrett, did not follow until ten years later. The first woman to appear in a BBC television broadcast was Adele Dixon on 2 November 1936: she sang Here’s looking at you in a show of the same name, which was beamed out to 400 TV sets within 25 miles of Alexandra Palace. As television announcers, Elizabeth Cowell and Jasmine Bligh take the first honours; requirements, of course, were not only a good voice but also an attractive face – and in those days the pay was better on radio than on television.

Women broadcasters were few and far between, though there were other noteworthy individuals – such as Audrey Russell, who was the BBC’s first woman news reporter and their only accredited woman war correspondent in the Second World War (post-war she was the first woman appointed to the newly formed Home Service reporting unit), or Una Marson, the first black programme maker at the BBC, in the 1940s (see The Life of Una Marson 1905–1965, Delia Jarrett-Macauley, Manchester University Press, 1998).

The BBC website (www.bbc.co.uk) has many interesting pages on radio and television history. The British Film Institute website, above, will also be useful for the history of television. The National Media Museum at Bradford has collections relating to film, television and radio (www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk).

Firewoman

 

While a small number of women worked in some way with local volunteer fire crews in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was the creation of the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) in 1938, in preparation for war, that opened opportunities for female staff. All recruitment was done at this time by local authorities, but in August 1941 the National Fire Service (NFS) was formed in response to the devastation of the Blitz, and the service taken out of local hands. The difficulties of forming a coherent whole from a mass of individual town services with different organisations and equipment cannot be underestimated.

The pay for women in 1941 ranged from £3 a week to £400 per annum for the top grade. The first course for women officers opened in February 1942 at Brighton and 50 women took part, receiving training in ‘welfare work, communications, and messenger service’. They were never expected to actually fight fires (some undoubtedly did, but a professional female firefighter would not arrive until 1982) but were taught drill and how to operate a light pump – their purpose was to release men from indoor duties onto the pumps. At its peak in March 1943, there were 29,000 women working full time in the NFS, and 41,000 part time. In 1948 the NFS was disbanded and the service returned to local authorities.

‘Firewatchers’ were not part of the NFS, but were volunteers who watched for fires caused by bombing, often stationing themselves on rooftops of factories, churches etc. Many women did this after their day’s work.

A History of the British Fire Service, G.V. Blackstone (Fire Protection Association, 2nd edn, 1996) gives a broad picture of the service. Individual records may be difficult to find, depending on the area. For the London area, for instance, see the London Fire Brigade website (www.london-fire.gov.uk/about_us/our_history/your_history.asp).

Firework maker

 

One of the most famous firework manufacturers, Messrs C.T. Brock & Co, were established as firework makers in the 18th century and female workers were prominent in their ­factories through the 19th and 20th centuries, moving out of London to ­Hertfordshire and then in the 1970s to Norfolk and Scotland.

In 1891 an article about their 50-acre factory in South Norwood appeared in the Strand Magazine. Women were engaged particularly in making ‘coloured lights’ in the dry rolling shed: ‘They sit at slate tables, with paste-pot and brush handy, and piles of paper in front of them cut to a square about the size sufficient to hold half-­an-ounce of tobacco. The thin rolls of paper are shaped with a steel rod, and are used for the great set pieces. A girl can roll twenty gross of cases for coloured lights in a day.’ Elsewhere they made crackers, filling small paper cylinders with fine-grain gunpowder, and Catherine wheels.

 

Making crackers in a fireworks factory in 1891, running the paper cylinders filled with gunpowder through a press.

 

At the website www.photolondon.org.uk there is a 1930s photograph of women workers in black overalls – the ‘filler girls’, who handled the powder – when ‘Brocks fireworks factory consisted of many small bunkers, widely dispersed over the Gander Green Lane area of Cheam’.

There were many smaller fireworks manufacturers all over the country. An interesting site for anyone with firework-making ­ancestors is that of the UK Pyrotechnics Society (www.pyrosociety.org.uk), which has a forum page for questions and comments, many of them historically based.

First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY)

 

The FANY was formed in 1907, the brainchild of a veteran of the South African War who felt there was a role on the battlefield for a small mobile force of mounted, trained nurses who could save lives by filling the gap between the fighting men and the Army’s medical corps. The women who responded to Capt Edward Baker’s recruitment advertising were trained in first aid, cavalry drill (though the ‘mounted’ aspect fell before the advent of motorised transport) and army discipline, and they were a very independent bunch.

That feistiness came to the fore when the First World War broke out. FANY was a voluntary service, supported by public contributions, and the two women at its head – Grace Ashley-Smith and Lilian Franklin – were determined it would serve wherever the nurses could save lives. The War Office was not interested in using them, but the Belgian government was, so that Ashley-Smith was working in Antwerp within a few weeks, joined by the first FANY volunteers. The fall of Belgium cut that short, but the experience gained had been invaluable, and, when the FANYs returned to France shortly afterwards, they had their own ambulance. In Calais they took over the Hospital Lamarck for the Belgian Army, and were soon accepted as invaluable help on the British side as well. For the rest of the war they earned respect and admiration for their courage in the most dangerous and stressful conditions. They went wherever they were needed, whether nursing the dying and wounded behind the lines or driving ambulances to the trenches to bring back stretcher cases.

 

The FANYs were among the first women to go to the front line during the First World War, and they worked closely with the French and Belgian forces as well as the British.

 

Still a voluntary organisation (as they have remained), FANY stayed together after the war and offered its services to the government – an offer taken up during the General Strike of 1926, when the women drove for the War Office and Great Scotland Yard. Recruitment continued through the 1930s and in 1936 the name was changed to the Women’s Transport Service (FANY). In 1938 they were asked to recruit for and form the Motor Driver Companies of the new Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), which they continued to do until the spring of 1940 when that part of FANY was incorporated into the ATS. Many members transferred (though they kept their FANY arm flashes on the ATS uniform).

The FANYs went on, though, with separate units, serving with the Polish Army in England as canteen workers and drivers, the British Red Cross as ambulance drivers, and the ‘Alnwick Unit’ as hospital drivers. Many of the women served in addition as clerks, wireless operators, drivers etc with government departments. Abroad, they drove ambulances for the Finnish government, and the Kenya Section worked with the military in East Africa. Some of the FANYs transferred to the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and famously played their part behind enemy lines.

In 1907 the FANY uniform was a dark blue riding skirt topped by a scarlet tunic and scarlet service cap, but by 1910 this dashing outfit had toned down to the khaki it would remain. Their badge was a Maltese Cross enclosed within a circle. In 1999 they were renamed yet again, and are currently known as FANY (Princess Royal’s Volunteer Corps).

Their official website (www.fany.org.uk) has background information. There is a centenary project to record the memories of surviving FANYs and SOE agents (www.our-secret-war.org/The_FANYs.html). There is also a list of those who died during the two wars, commemorated at St Paul’s church, Knightsbridge (www.stephen-stratford.co.uk/wts.htm).

Amongst useful books are The FANY in Peace and War, Hugh Popham (Pen and Sword, 2003), In Obedience to Instructions: FANY and the SOE in the Mediterranean, Margaret Pawly (Leo Cooper, 1999), and War Girls: The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry in the Great War, Janet Lee (Manchester University Press, 2005). Remember to search for records under Women’s Transport Service (WTS) as well as under FANY.

Fish curer

 

Smoking fish to preserve it is usually thought of as a coastal trade, but strangely there was a haddock curing industry in London, in Camberwell, in the 19th century and at least up to the First World War – and if it was there, it was probably to be found in other inland settings where there was a thriving fish market. George R. Sims went ‘Off the beaten track’ for the Strand Magazine in 1904 and found women working at a trade that could prepare and smoke four tons of haddock a day, working in two shifts – the day shift did the preparation and the night shift the smoking: ‘In the centre is a big table or bench, at which two women and a number of men are “sounding” the fresh haddocks, splitting them open and decapitating them with marvellous rapidity.’

Fisher woman, fisher lass

 

The fishing industry could not have existed without the labour of women. Practice varied around the coast, but in many places they made nets and dried them after the catch had been brought in, gathered limpets and mussels for bait and then baited the lines, helped to launch the boats and to bring them in – and in some areas they carried the fishermen out to their boats through the shallow water, so that they did not start their long and arduous work soaking wet.

It was in the preparation and packing of the catch that women were dominant – only if the fish could be quickly preserved or despatched to the inland markets or for export would anyone make a living. In Cornwall some of the pilchard catch was going into tins by the 1890s: the local women washed the fish before drying them off and then boiling them for a very short time and packing them carefully into the familiar flat sardine tins and covering them with olive oil.

Otherwise, large quantities of the fish were salted, as described in the Strand Magazine in 1891: ‘salt being plentifully used and the heads placed outwards. The row of carefully arranged pilchards is then thatched over and left to pickle for about a month. The pay is pretty good for this work, the children even getting 3d per hour. The pile is then undone, the fish packed with great care into barrels, and by means of a long lever with a heavy stone hooked on at the end, pressed down tightly. It is then ready for the market.’ Much of this salted fish was exported to Italy.

However, it was in the East Coast herring industry, from Scotland down to Suffolk, that women were most important. Every year, until the 1940s, Scottish women followed the herring harvest south from the Shetlands in early summer to Yarmouth in the autumn, working in the herring yards along the way gutting and cleaning the fish and packing them into barrels for transport (again, there was a big export trade, this time with Germany and Russia).

In some places they lived in specially built sheds, much as the hop pickers did for their harvest work, while in others they found lodgings with local people. This was the case in Lowestoft, where cottage rooms were cleared for their arrival. They brought their belongings with them in wooden chests and lived four or five to a room; at the end of the season they spent some of their money on presents and clothes and then disappeared back to Scotland until the next time, usually travelling by sea along the coast. When they were not working they were noted for their knitting, which they did even as they walked around.

 

Packing Cornish pilchards in salt, the heads outwards, to ‘pickle’ for a month, 1891.

 

At work they got some protection from their clothing, especially the ‘thick, black, oily skirt and apron, which at the end of the day would stand alone when they stepped out of it’ and black rubber boots, with their fingers wound round with cloth against the sharp knives, but gutting 50 to 60 herrings a minute all day, every day would still have left them stinking of fish and covered with slime, blood and fish scales. By all accounts, they were tough, independent and in general loud and cheerful.

Local histories of fishing ports like Lowestoft often include chapters on the work of women; and see books like Yorkshire Fisherfolk, Peter Frank (Phillimore, 2002). For the East Coast fisher lasses the place to start is with the website www.geocities.com/transport_and_society/routine.html, which has pages on the women’s work, as well as a bibliography and many links to other sites, including a very early short film of the girls gutting fish. Walking Through Scotland’s History, Ian Mitchell (National Museums of Scotland, 2001) has a chapter on the women’s annual migration (which is also online at the website above). See also ‘Herring women’, Karen Foy, Ancestors magazine, April 2007.

Flax worker

 

Linen was manufactured from the stalk fibres of the flax plant. Flax mills in the North and Scotland employed female workers in the preparation processes, including ‘retting’, i.e. rotting or steeping in water to break down the fibres and produce the typically silky flax, which was then sorted and baled for the linen manufacturers. Attempts were made to grow flax commercially in England in the 1930s and 1940s to lessen our dependence on imports and by 1944 over 60,000 acres were under cultivation and flax mills in operation in Norfolk, Suffolk and elsewhere, largely employing women. See also linen spinner and weaver; weaver.

Florist

 

A woman selling flowers from a shop, rather than the flower girls working on the streets, and relatively rarely found until the 20th century. A girl wanting to work in floristry would take up an apprenticeship in a shop or nursery.

Flower girl

 

Henry Mayhew in the 1860s divided flower girls into two classes. There were the young women who, as prostitutes, used flowers as a way to approach and proposition a man, and the genuine article who made their living selling flowers on the streets. An article by P.F. William Ryan in Living London in 1902 sub-divided them even further. Some concentrated on button-holes and targeted businessmen, perhaps at the Royal Exchange or by waiting outside the main railway stations; some made up small bouquets or sold loose flowers, mainly aimed at women purchasers. A few made public houses their selling ground, or toured residential streets. The working class neighbourhoods of the East End were as well covered by the flower girls as the more prosperous areas, and Sunday was usually a working day too – selling outside hospitals being popular.

Flowerer

 

An embroiderer of muslin. See tambourer.

 

Less a flower girl than a flower lady, at her pitch in Piccadilly Circus in the 1940s.

Fur puller

 

Pulling the fur off rabbit skins – getting the loose down off with a blunt knife so that the fur could be used to line cloaks and jackets, the down in stuffing beds and pillows – provided a living for some women in the 19th and early 20th centuries, both in town and country. It was a particularly busy time during the Crimean War when the fur was in demand for soldiers’ coat linings.

‘The fur puller sits in a small barn, or out-house, on a low stool. She has a trough in front of her, into which she drops the down as she pulls it off the rabbit-skins with her knife. . . . The down gets into her nose and mouth. Her hair and clothes are white with it, She generally suffers from what she calls “breathlessness”, for her lungs are filled with the fine down, and she is always more or less choked.’ (Toilers in London, or Inquiries concerning Female Labour in the Metropolis, 1889; www.victorianlondon.org.) The women also cut out the bones from the rabbit tails, which were used for manure, and prepared old pieces of rabbit skin for use as cheap blankets and fur hats. In the late 1920s a Mrs Eagle of Brandon in Suffolk was getting rabbits delivered to her home and would sit all day skinning them for local furriers’ factories.

Fustian cutter

 

Fustian was a coarse, thick cotton cloth from which corduroy, velveteen and other varieties of finished cloth were prepared. The cloth (in rolls sometimes 150 yards long) was laid out flat on special tables called frames and held steady at each end by rollers, for women fustian cutters using a special sharp knife to walk the length skimming the top and cutting through the weft just enough to form a pile on one surface. The cutters would walk miles, up one side of the frame and back down the other, their hands having to be steady enough to cut evenly even at the end of a long day, otherwise they would be penalised in their pay.

Right to the end of the 19th century velvet dealers set up special mills to cut fustian, or the job was carried out in fustian shops, or in attic spaces over cottages – anywhere where there was enough space to set up the extremely long tables. By the 1940s machines had taken over in the industry and all the ‘walking shops’ had closed by the 1950s. The work was carried out in many places around the country – one major centre of the trade was around Warrington, Lymm and the surrounding villages in Cheshire. A woman apprenticed for two years to a shop in Lymm in the 1910s recalled being paid about 35s for a 77 hour week. Mow Cop in Staffordshire had three mills – see the website http://mowcop.info/htm/fustian.htm for a useful background to the trade.