J

Japanner

 

Japanning was an important industry around Wolverhampton, Bilston and Birmingham in the 19th century and employed many women, though it had died out by the 1920s. Japanned ware was very fashionable in the 18th and 19th centuries, involving a process whereby a dark varnish was applied to tin or metalware to make it black and shiny. It was carried out in workshops, as well as in a handful of large factories. There was also a thriving industry at Pontypool in Montgomeryshire from the early 18th century; the history is at www.pontypoolmuseum.org.uk. Background to the Wolverhampton factories is given at www.wolverhamptonhistory.org.uk. The site www.japanware.org has a great deal of information on the workmanship and the products.

Jewellery worker

 

Major centres for gold and silver work and for jewellery making in the later 19th and early 20th centuries were Clerkenwell in London and Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, where there were not only larger manufacturers making use of modern machinery, but also small workshops employing any number from 5 to 50 people, many of them women working as stampers and polishers.

Birmingham was known in particular for mass-producing cheaper jewellery as well as quality pieces. In the late 19th century gold ornaments, such as ear-rings or lockets, were created from blanks or discs that were stamped in a screw-press and cut to shape: it was a task that needed a good eye and good reflexes as it was easy to leave a finger under the heavy press – it was said to be the ‘badge of a good [?] stamper to be minus the usual allowance of fingers’. There is a Museum of the Jewellery Quarter at 75 Vyse Street, Hockley, Birmingham B18 6HA (telephone: 0121 554 3598; www.birminghamuk.com/go/index). See also chainmaker (gold or silver); electroplate worker; goldsmith.

Journalist

 

By 1896 there were over 200 members of the Society of Women Journalists, and there was keen competition for every advertised post. They were barred from the Gallery of the House of Commons but every other type of reporting was open to those with the ability. Some women occupied prominent positions by that time – Mrs Rachel Beer (1858–1927) was already editor of the Observer when she bought the Sunday Times in 1893 and became not only the first female editor of a national newspaper, but the only editor ever to have worked on two national newspapers at the same time, which she continued to do until 1904. Flora Shaw (later Lady Flora Lugard, 1852–1929) began her journalistic career in 1886, writing for the Pall Mall Gazette and the Manchester Guardian, but from 1892 to 1900 was the Colonial Editor on The Times and the highest paid woman journalist of her day.

There were many more lowly women who worked as freelances. Susan Carpenter, for instance, worked for the Press Association, and her work was syndicated around the country – in the 1891 census she is rather coyly referred to as a ‘literary worker’.

For most female writers, however, the opportunities came in ‘women’s columns’, writing about fashion, food, gossip, beauty, relationships etc for national or local newspapers, or magazines, and many articles are anonymous or the writer’s identity is hidden behind a pseudonym. It will be difficult to trace them without some indication of who they wrote for. If it can be identified, most newspapers have had histories published and all have their own websites. There is a biographical dictionary of British and Irish journalists of all kinds at www.scoop-database.com (fee for use).