H

Hairdresser

 

Although wealthier women relied on a lady’s maid to dress their hair, in the outside world hairdressing was a man’s profession until the end of the 19th century. In 1883 the Girl’s Own Paper noted that hairdressing was admirably suited to women, but for ‘the almost unaccountable fact that women actually like to submit their heads to the manipulation of men.’ Some still do, of course, but at least they have a choice.

However, there were increasing openings for girls to enter the profession, as the Paper noted: ‘For some years the great Bond-street hairdressers, Messrs Trufitt & Douglas, have been in the habit of taking apprentices, and in their rooms ladies can always be attended by women. A moderately clever girl is ready to give help in the hairdressing salon in six or nine months, and the wages are from 32 shillings to 35 shillings a week. . . . A few girls earn a respectable living as visiting hairdressers, but it must be much less fatiguing and more profitable to work in a shop, and especially if the girl understands the preparation of supplementary hair, and the making of hair chains, brooches and other ornaments, which would employ her leisure time.’

It was dressing long hair into different styles, rather than cutting it, that was usually required. Not until short hair became fashionable in the 1920s did the scissors truly come into play. Girls increasingly chose hairdressing as a career from that time too, with salons opening up in towns and villages all over the country. They were taken on as apprentices for two years, and worked as an ‘improver’ for another year before being considered qualified. At the same time, technological advances brought electrical appliances into the salon, such as the ‘permanent wave’ machines and hairdryers, and an array of shampoos, conditioners and colours.

Recalling her apprenticeship to a Folkestone hairdresser in the 1930s, one woman ‘learned to make shampoo from soft soap, sewed little muslin bags into which we put dried camomile flowers to use as a rinse for fair hair, learned to shampoo, cut and set hair and also to Marcel wave with tongs. We also singed hair if requested, and a permanent wave was a mammoth task with the customer strung up to a machine and the whole business, to me, fraught with danger!’ (East Kent Within Living Memory, East Kent Federation of WIs, Countryside Books, 1993.)

The National Hairdressers Federation was formed in 1942 but its antecedents go back to the 19th century when local hairdressers formed their own associations (www.nhf.biz). The Hairdressers Journal began appearing in 1882. See Good hair days: A history of British hairdressing by Caroline Cox (Quartet Books, 1999).

Handywoman

 

An unregistered midwife. See also nurse, monthly.

Hat maker, felt

 

Felt was the foundation of the majority of men’s hats and although the hat makers were predominantly male, women outworkers were employed to trim and finish hats of all kinds, from the sober bowler through to the exotic fez.

The manufacturing industry was concentrated in Stockport, Denton (Manchester) and London, though hatters can be found in many other places and in the 20th century the Luton hat industry compensated for the decline in straw hat manufacture by expanding into felt hats. The use of felt dated from the 16th century – it was made from a mixture of fur (beaver, hare, rabbit, coypu), goat or camel hair, and wool, which was matted together, cut, shrunk, blocked to shape, dyed, and finally trimmed and finished. The making of the hats was originally done by hatters in their own workshops but by the end of the 19th century factory production had taken over most of the market.

The women who worked on the hats did a variety of tasks, including sewing in linings and adding trimming to the outside. Most worked in their own homes, but in some cases small workshops were set up, as in the village of Poynton, near Stockport. The Female Branch of the Felt Hat Trimmers Association was formed in 1890. In the 1920s and 1930s felt hats gained greatly in popularity with women, particularly in styles such as the cloche and the beret.

See milliner; the Stockport Hatworks museum, in particular, has a great deal on felt hat making.

Hat maker, straw

 

The straw hat making industry was centred on the Bedfordshire towns of Luton and Dunstable, and St Albans in Hertfordshire, which employed hundreds of workers, many of them women, in the factories and as outworkers. It was a prosperous industry through the second half of the 19th century but declined after 1920 with the increased popularity of felt hats.

Straw plait (see straw plaiter) was hand-sewn into bonnets and hats until sewing machines became available from the 1870s (at first, just ordinary domestic sewing machines, which still made the process much quicker and easier, but then increasingly sophisticated industrial machines – hand-sewing continued to a certain extent for the finest, most ornate styles of hats). The sewers and pressers worked to a pattern according to current fashions, some at home and others in small factories as makers-up, who then sold on to the larger factories.

The hats were stiffened by being immersed in gelatine, then steamed to soften so that they could be shaped on wooden blocks. The blockmakers were the original hat designers, and it was not till the 1900s that factories began employing women millinery designers. Trimming provided the finishing touches – trimming weavers, makers and manufacturers are found in the same areas as the hat industry. Sometimes braids of horsehair or straw plaited with another material, such as silk, were used as a trimming, but more usually the women used artificial flowers, ribbons and other fabrics.

‘Chip bonnet’ makers worked with shavings of willow or poplar, plaited like straw, while ‘Brazilian’ hat makers used strips of palm leaves and the hat was woven entire, working from the crown out, and not sewn.

‘Straw hat manufacturers’ are also found in many other towns and cities round the country, and these were probably workshops producing for a local market, perhaps even buying in the plain shells from the factories and making up hats as required. See also milliner.

For background see, for instance, Luton: Hat Industry 1750-2000, Luton Museum Education Service (2003); Luton and the Hat Industry, Charles Freeman (Luton Museum, 1964); Vyse Sons & Co Ltd: 200 Years of Millinery (1965); or see www.galaxy.bedfordshire.gov.uk/webingres/luton. Examples of the hats made in the factories are on display at Wardown Park Museum, Old Bedford Road, Luton LU2 7HA (telephone: 01582 546722).

Health visitor

 

As a municipal employee in the late 1890s and early 1900s, a woman called a health visitor was in some areas one and the same as the lady sanitary inspector, or else she worked for a charitable foundation dedicated to providing nursing care in slum homes (and probably at the same time spreading the Christian message) and was a forerunner of the district nurse (see nurse, district). In 1898 the Lancet was of the opinion that ‘an intelligent, well-educated and kindly woman’ could do the job.

However, the Notification of Births Act 1907 stated that a ‘trained health visitor’ was to ‘call on the mother at home to teach her how to protect her baby’s health’. The health visitor was initially very specifically targeted at the working class mother, whose ignorance was blamed for many infant deaths.

 

‘She enters each home with the consent of the occupants, and teaches the housewife the importance of cleanliness and proper ventilation and explains the dangers of dirt and overcrowding. She instructs her in the choice of suitable food and clothing, shows her how to cook, and especially points out the dangers of using impure water, at the same time explaining how best to prevent its contamination and that of food generally. She helps to nurse the sick, and promotes a knowledge of home nursing and all that relates to the care of young children. One of the health visitor’s most important duties also is to attend on women during or shortly after childbirth.’ (Everywoman’s Encyclopaedia, 1911.)

 

The salary varied from place to place, from about £50 to £100 per annum. In Hertfordshire, Miss Burnside, the County Inspector of Midwives, was named also County Health Visitor in 1911 and appointed 70 health visitors, most of whom were midwives or district nurses.

The high rate of infant mortality in poor areas was brought down to an all-time low by the 1920s with the advent of this new profession, and midwifery remained an essential element of health visiting until 1938. After the war, new duties were assigned the visitor, including school health. With the coming of the NHS in 1948, the emphasis was to turn to the family as a whole, long-term illness, and hospital after-care.

In 1896 the Women’s Sanitary Inspectors Association was formed by seven female Sanitary Inspectors in London and within ten years had over 60 members around the country. In 1915 the name changed to the Women’s Sanitary Inspectors and Health Visitors Association, which in 1918 registered as a trade union, now with over 3,000 members including health visitors, school nurses, TB visitors etc. Then in 1929 it became the Women’s Public Health Visitors Association, in 1962 the Health Visitors Association, and is now the Community Practitioners and Health Visitors Association. The archives are held by the Wellcome Institute under ‘Public Health’ (http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTL039941.html); see also Sanitary Inspectors Association of Scotland. Records of employees of town, borough and county councils will be held by county record offices. For background see, for example, Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting since 1900, Peta Allan & Moya Jolley (Faber & Faber, 1982).

Hop picker

 

The harvest, usually in September, was the ‘grand jubilee’ of hop-growing areas and an important source of extra income for the families of not only the local labourers, but also the tens of thousands of (mostly) women and children who left the cities each year for probably their only breath of fresh air. About 60,000 acres of hops were being harvested in England in 1880, predominantly in Kent, Sussex and Herefordshire. The annual exodus of London’s East Enders for the fields of Kent and Sussex has passed into folklore, while for Herefordshire it was the Black Country and the mining villages of Wales that provided the labour. Some regular pickers wrote beforehand to farmers to ‘book’ their place, others went on the off-chance and took what they could find. All lived in tents or semi-permanent huts erected by the farmers close to the fields.

In the spring local village women were employed in the hopfields to tie in the early main shoots of the bines so that they would grow upwards on the poles. Come harvest, the poles, with the bines still attached, were lifted and taken to the waiting pickers at their bins (large bags suspended from a wooden framework), where the hop flowers were picked off by hand, as free of leaves and stalks as possible. When full the bins were emptied and a tally kept of the amount, as the pickers were paid by the volume, not weight. While the hops disappeared off to the oast houses to be dried, the pickers tackled more poles. At the end of the day the cry of ‘Pull no more bines’ went up, and work ceased. The wage paid to the pickers varied from year to year, depending on the quality and extent of the crop, but it was enough to keep whole families, often under the supervision of the mother while the husband remained at his own work, coming back year after year.

There are many books and articles recalling the hop pickers: see for instance Old Days in the Kent Hop Gardens (West Kent Federation of WIs, 1962); Pull No More Bines, Gilda O’Neill (The Women’s Press, 1990); Herefordshire Within Living Memory, Herefordshire Federation of WIs (Countryside Books, 1993); Hops and Hop Picking, Richard Filmer (Shire Publications). The Museum of Kent Life holds a Hop Picking Festival each year (Lock Lane, Sandling, Maidstone, Kent ME14 3AU; www.museum-kentlife.co.uk or www.hoppingdowninkent.org.uk).

Hosiery worker

 

The hosiery industry had its origins with the framework knitters of the Midlands, based mainly in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Although it was one of the most extensive and prosperous of domestic industries in the 18th century, by the mid-19th century it was in a long, terminal decline; for background to the industry see Framework Knitting, Marilyn Palmer (Shire Publications). One of the causes of that decline was competition from factory production, and by the late 19th century the hosiery industry had reinvented itself very successfully, with production now heavily dependent on female labour in factories and as outworkers.

One of the centres of manufacture of socks and stockings was Hinckley in Leicestershire, where the first factory was in production in 1855 (www.hinckley-online.co.uk/hosiery.shtml). Women doing outwork for the manufacturers were provided with knitting machines until the 1920s, although by the 1950s their work was mainly mending. In the factories the knitters were responsible for perhaps a dozen machines – in contrast to many other industries the finishing and packing was done by men. ‘There was much variety in stockings, from pure silk down through rayon, wool and lisle; fully fashioned or the cheaper circular knits, which were sold in Woolworths in the early 1930s for sixpence a stocking,’ recalled one knitter (Leicestershire and Rutland Within Living Memory, Leicestershire and Rutland Federation of WIs, Countryside Books, 1994).

Leicester had many hosiery factories in the 20th century, including well-known underwear manufacturers such as Chilprufe and Corah, and for local girls being ‘in the hosiery’ meant working as machinists, pressers, cutters and graders on anything from heavy-duty pure wool men’s combinations, to ‘passion killer’ directoire knickers or delicate silk stockings.

The East Midlands Oral History Archive (www.le.ac.uk/emoha/community/resources/hosiery/index2.html) has a great deal on ‘Leicestershire Hosiery’ in the 20th century, with details and photographs of all the processes and products. Knitting Together: Memories of Leicestershire’s Hosiery Industry, Geoffrey Bowles and Siobhan Kirrane (Leicester Museum Service, 1990) follows the same lines. There is information on hosiery manufacture in Dumfriesshire and Galloway, which had a thriving industry until the late 20th century, at www.futuremuseum.co.uk. The British Hosiery and Knitwear Industry: Its History and Organisation, F.A. Wells (David and Charles, 1972) looks at the industry as a whole.

Hospital staff

 

Hospitals were like small communities, employing not only medical and nursing staff but also housekeeping and laundry staff, therapists, office staff, catering staff and so on. To find the records that survive for a particular hospital, look at the Hospital Record Database, created by the Wellcome Library and online at The National Archives (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/hospitalrecords/). Many of the older hospitals have had histories published, and a local county library or archive will be able to identify relevant books.

Hotel keeper

 

The hotel, as opposed to the inn, was a Victorian creation that grew out of the new opportunities for road and rail travel and the expansion of seaside and spa resorts. Female hotel keepers are common. Some even became famous, like the larger than life cockney Rosa Lewis (1867–1952), who provided ‘not an ’otel but an ’ome from ’ome for my friends’ (including Edward VII) at the Cavendish in Jermyn Street, London.

They would either be a manageress, appointed by a board or an individual owner, or, like Rosa, owned the hotel themselves. Advertisements in tourist guidebooks or directories usually specify either ‘manageress’ or ‘proprietress’ – Miss Boulding, for instance, was manageress of the Zetland Hotel at Saltburn-by-the-Sea in Yorkshire in 1874, a 150-bed ‘Hotel of the North’ with ‘splendid Coffee-Rooms, large Drawing and Music Rooms, Bed-Rooms, Rooms en suite, Smoke and Billiard Rooms, etc.’ Some ran small family hotels, perhaps little bigger or better than a boarding house (see boarding house keeper), while others like Miss Boulding were in charge of large and prosperous concerns, and it was a job that required a good commercial sense as well as an aptitude for housekeeping.

The Golden Age of British Hotels, Derek Taylor and David Bush (Northwood Publications, 1974) is a good general introduction to the period. Hotels still in business often have a reference to their history on their website.

Housekeeper

 

The most senior of the female staff employed in the servants’ hall, second in command only to the mistress of the big house. It was a prestigious and responsible position, that called for quite varied talents – which some were able to fulfil and in the process become prized members of staff. Elizabeth Payne, for instance, was housekeeper for the Dukes of Bedford at Woburn Abbey for almost 30 years from 1865. As a matter of courtesy, housekeepers were awarded the title of ‘Mrs’ whether married or not.

The housekeeper had the power to hire and fire the maidservants (though not usually the cook, the lady’s maid or the nanny). The store rooms, stillroom, china and linen closets were under her control and she doled out supplies and kept accounts. She had her own private rooms below stairs, where she took meals with the other senior staff, and she did not wear a uniform as such, though would usually be dressed in black. The household keys would jingle at her waist, a badge of office in themselves.

Apart from her management and financial responsibilities, the housekeeper apparently had to know how to make wines, preserves and pickles, pot pourri and scented flower waters, candied fruit and sweets, which she produced in the stillroom, perhaps with the assistance of a stillroom maid. She, not the cook, baked the finest pastries and cakes, and afternoon tea was her special forte; she also made the elaborate desserts for upstairs dinner. Her skills extended to simple first aid and, again in the stillroom, to the mixing of herbal potions, medicines and cosmetics. When the family travelled, the housekeeper was often left behind in charge of the house – in the great houses she might earn a tip or two by showing visitors round the public rooms like a modern tourist guide. See also domestic servant.

Women may also be recorded as ‘housekeepers’ who never set foot in a servants’ hall. It is not unusual to find entries in the census returns for a housekeeper in quite humble homes; usually this is because there is no wife or matriarch and she is looking after the cottage and the family, perhaps for a wage but more probably for her food and a roof over her head.

Housekeepers may also be found in large institutions such as hospitals, possibly having trained in domestic economy, or in responsible positions in such places as judges’ lodgings, schools and colleges.

Housemaid

 

In the very big houses or stately homes, such as Belvoir in Leicestershire, there would have been a head or upper housemaid to superintend the work of the under housemaids, having usually been one of those under housemaids herself. She herself would have done the lighter housework, such as dusting, especially of valuable items, and seeing to the best bedrooms. The housemaids might have had their own sitting room, and one or two of them may have travelled with the family. In the great majority of households, however, a single housemaid was employed, perhaps having to overlap her duties with those of parlourmaid, waiting maid, cook etc, where these were also employed, or to help with the children.

‘It is most important that a housemaid should be methodical and punctual, be an early riser, clean and neat in work and person’ – a good housemaid was essential for a comfortable, well-kept home for she, after all, did the housework, aired the beds and the rooms, and catered to her family’s little whims. In rooms crowded with Victorian clutter, with no modern appliances such as vacuum cleaners before the 1920s, she worked from about 6 am to late in the evening.

 

A family snapshot of two young women in service in Lancashire in the early 1900s, Sarah Jane Whittaker, housemaid, and Violet Matilda Derry, the cook. (Jean Owen)

 

Her duties would have varied from place to place, but followed a similar pattern – attending to fires, cleaning grates and stoves, dusting, cleaning carpets, floors and furniture, brushing the stairs, carrying water upstairs, making beds and cleaning bedrooms, emptying basins and chamberpots, laying and clearing tables, getting beds ready for the night. If there was no ‘boy’ to do it, she would clean the boots and shoes, and carry coals. In quiet moments, she would help with mending and renovating the household linen, and skill with a needle was highly prized. Whatever she was doing, she had to be ready at all times to answer the bell rung by a member of the family. In 1911 wages were quoted as head housemaid £23 to £30 a year, under-housemaid £16 to £20; single housemaid £18 to £22. See also domestic servant.

House-parlourmaid

 

A combination of housemaid and parlourmaid, with all the duties to carry out. See also daily maid.