C

Canal boatwoman

 

Women were ever-present on the canals, living on the narrow boats alongside their husbands and taking their share of the work, though as unpaid helpers – ‘You want to be at Mark Lane sometimes, and see the good wife, when her boat is tethered to a wharf, and when she is supposed to be resting, turn up, alert and businesslike, ready to receive orders for the return journey to Birmingham, Nottingham, Stoke, Wolverhampton, Derby, or elsewhere,’ wrote Desmond Young in the early 1900s (Living London).

During the Second World War a Boatwomen Training Scheme brought a number of young women onto the canals to replace men called up for the services. It was the idea of Daphne March, who began using the family narrow boat to transport supplies for a flour mill at Worcester; she was joined by Eily (Kit) Gayford and Molly Traill, who devised the scheme in the summer of 1941. It was launched in February 1942 and was taken over by the government in the spring of 1944 – up till then there was little publicity and most contacts were made by word of mouth.

The Grand Union Canal Carrying Company was the first to give the women a try. They had a brief period of training and then had to go out and prove themselves, working 18 to 20 hour days and doing all the work themselves, including loading and unloading cargoes that might be coal, grain, munitions, aircraft and machine parts, cement, steel etc, and travelling in areas that could come under aerial attack, such as Coventry and the London docks. They were paid £3 a week, had to find their own clothing (ex-naval ratings’ trousers, usually, jerseys and overalls) and were given no extra rations – peanut butter sandwiches and large mugs of cocoa played a large role in their diet.

Some of the women wrote about their experiences, including Idle Women, Susan Woolfitt (1947) – the Inland Waterways badge they wore with its ‘IW’ initials gave them this unjustified nickname. The website www.btinternet.com/~doug.small/wtwomen.htm (‘Women on the wartime canals’) is an excellent introduction, with excerpts from books and articles. The National Waterways Museum is at Llanthony Warehouse, Gloucester Docks, Gloucester GL1 2EH (www.nwm.org.uk).

Candlemaker

 

Candlemaking, or ‘tallow chandlery’, was allied to ­soapmaking, both historically using byproducts from the slaughterhouses and tanneries. By 1850 new ‘chemical processes’ were changing the traditional industry – spermaceti (from whales), stearine (a purer extract, chemically treated tallow) and paraffin wax, which would be the principal ingredient from the 1890s onwards. By the 1870s only a few hundred women were employed in the candle factories, mostly ‘to attend to the moulds, set the wicks, cut the ends of the candles, and so forth. The females principally work in the night-light department, forming the cylinders, cutting them into rings (by machinery), putting the bottoms in, and gumming the labels on. The work is simple, and free from any unhealthy surroundings’.

The industry was hard hit by the increased use of gas lighting, and then by electric lighting. When candles represented the only source of lighting in homes and workplaces there were many factories and small tallow chandleries all over the country (the Worshipful Company of Tallow Chandlers has a website at www.tallowchandlers.org). The most famous firm of candlemakers is probably Price’s, which had two factories in London and one in Liverpool by the 1850s – see their website (www.prices-candles.co.uk/history/HISTORYdetails.htm) for background information on candlemaking.

Carpet maker

 

In the 1750s Thomas Whitty of Axminster designed the first loom large enough to allow the weaving of a carpet and he is rightly acknowledged as the pioneer whose business spearheaded the development of the British carpet industry. However, it was Whitty’s five daughters and sister who together learned how to use the loom and actually produced the first Axminster carpet in 1755, and female weavers continued to be an important part of the industry into the 20th century. Women were also employed in the factories for jobs such as picking waste from the finished carpet lengths. Axminster celebrated its 250th anniversary of carpet making in 2005; see the website of the Axminster Carpet company (www.axminster-carpets.co.uk; ‘How a carpet is made’) for an insight into the techniques that made it famous. Other manufacturers are also still household names, such as Brinson’s, Wilton, Tomkinsons and Thomas Bosworth.

Kidderminster was the premier carpet-weaving centre and there is an excellent online exhibition entitled ‘Made in Kidderminster: the history of the carpet industry’ that is essential viewing for anyone with carpet making ancestors, no matter which part of the country they came from (www.search.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/engine/resource/exhibition/standard/default.asp?resource=4429); it has many illustrations and a good bibliography too. The industry was also important in other areas, such as Durham, and in Scotland in Glasgow (Elderslie) from the 1860s and Lasswade and Bonnyrigg, near Kilmarnock, from the 1830s. The website www.carpetinfo.co.uk (‘All about carpets’) has a timeline of carpet history and the inventions that refined the looms on which the women worked. See also wool spinners and weavers.

Carrier

 

The country carrier was once the only link between market towns and the villages that made up its hinterland, few of which would have had direct access to a railway station. A number of these carriers were women, who had either taken over a deceased husband’s business or operated it in tandem with another business, such as innkeeping. Ann Russell, for instance, ran the carrier’s business in the little village of Denham in Suffolk in the 1870s, while husband James was a farmer and keeper of the Bell public house – her cart went from the village to Bury St Edmunds twice a week on market days, Wednesday and Saturday. In some cases, the women employed a man to drive the cart but female drivers were not unknown.

The carriers took passengers who wanted to get to market or to the railway station (for some country women a trip on the carrier’s cart might be a once-a-year treat for ‘special shopping’); their horse-drawn carts were covered but a single bench seat was usually the only other amenity offered. They operated at regular times, in all weathers and over all kinds of road conditions, which in the 19th century could often be extremely bad, with little more than rutted unmetalled lanes, dusty in summer and muddy in winter. They also offered a valuable service for those who could not travel themselves: taking orders for goods to be bought in the town shops or market, such as medicines, shoes, tools or items of clothing not to be found in the village; posting letters and parcels and bringing back those waiting for collection; transporting goods for small shopkeepers; even carrying livestock, suitably caged or tethered. The coming of motorised transport allowed carriers to travel farther and faster, and in the end the carrier’s cart became the rural omnibus.

Trade directories list local carriers and their routes. The carriers themselves often became well-known local characters, mentioned in village histories and in local newspapers. Because of the link between carriers and early buses, some information can be found in histories of bus companies (such as those in Dorset, at www.countrybus.co.uk).

Cartographer

 

Women’s historic involvement in mapmaking usually extended only to tracing or colouring maps and plans (see tracer), until during the Second World War a small number of Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) girls were taken on in the Ordnance Office to be trained to draw maps. The ATS also worked with the RAF in revising maps and town plans by comparison with reconnaissance photographs.

However, there was one notable exception. In the 1930s Phyllis Pearsall CBE, (née Gross, 1906–1996), the daughter of a mapmaker, became so frustrated at not being able to find a good map of London that she began to explore on foot and draw up her own maps. She set up the Geographers Maps Co Ltd to publish her ‘A-Z of London’ in 1936, which still publishes that famous guide and A-Zs for other towns and cities. See Mrs P’s Journey: The Remarkable Story of the Woman Who Created the A-Z Map, Sarah Hartley (Pocket Books, 2002); her story is also to be found at www.designmuseum.org/design/phyllis-pearsall.

Cartridge maker

 

Gun cartridge and fuse making was almost wholly done by women, including at Woolwich Arsenal until the 1870s. Their work ‘consists in cutting paper, plugging and gauging shot, forming the cartridge cases, making pulp insides, filling, twisting, lubricating, cutting, packing in bundles and finally in barrels. None of this work is injurious to the health . . . except perhaps the pressing, which is somewhat sickly work, and the sticking on the green bands, during which possibly some arsenite may be swallowed’. (Industrial Classes, 1876.)

Women were already working at this trade in workshops in Birmingham and Coventry before the First World War brought in thousands of female munitions employees. In 1886 H. Sutherland Edwards visited the Ardeer dynamite factory in Ayrshire for the English Illustrated Magazine. Women worked in small huts making cartridges by ‘pushing the dynamite through copper tubes’; completed cartridges were taken from them by men stationed outside the huts. It was extremely dangerous work and an explosion had killed three of the women not long before. As Edwards rightly said: ‘One little mistake, and the poor cartridge girl is blown from her wooden hut to the skies.’

Cashier

 

In larger shops from the mid-19th century one woman would act as cashier in a department, taking the money from customers (or preparing their bills) after they had been served by the counter assistants. Some shops had a system that carried money or receipts by pneumatic tube or overhead lines, with the cashier seated in isolated splendour at the centre of the web. A cashier also might be the woman who took money for tickets at a cinema or theatre box office; or she might work in an office handling money, keeping ledgers and so on.

Chainmaker

 

The chainmaking industry of the 1800s was centred on Cradley Heath, straddling the Worcestershire/Staffordshire border – in the 1890s over 1,000 tons of chains were being produced there every week, ranging from huge ships’ mooring cables to handcuff links.

Although there were factories engaged in the making of the larger chains, it was still a cottage industry and the women who did much of the work were in effect blacksmiths. Robert H. Sherard visited the area for Pearson’s Magazine in 1896 and described the scene: ‘One may come across sheds with five or six women, each working at her anvil, that are all talking above the din of their hammers and the clanking of their chains, or they may be singing a discordant chorus; and, at first, the sight of this sociability makes one overlook the misery which, however, is only too visible, be it in the foul rags and preposterous boots that the women wear, or in their haggard faces and the faces of the frightened infants hanging to their mothers’ breasts, as these ply the hammer, or sprawling in the mire on the floor, amidst the showers of fiery sparks.’

Iron rods were heated in the fire until red hot, then cut and twisted, the woman (or a child) working the bellows continuously. Each link was then inserted into the last link made and welded closed with a hand hammer or the Oliver – the heavy hammer worked by treadle also used by nailmakers. Girls (‘blowing girls’) could work two pairs of bellows at a time, for ten or twelve hours a day, ‘the work being like that of a treadmill in a sulphurous atmosphere’, and for that they could earn 3s to 4s a week. Women might also work in the smaller factories, operating the bellows to provide ‘blast’ to the furnace. As with the nailmakers, the ‘fogger’ acted as middleman, or, more usually here, middlewoman. Louisa Addleton, a chainmaker living at Cradley Heath, was also a ‘fogger’.

Many of the women produced chain for the company run by Eliza Tinsley, who took over her husband’s firm after his death in 1851 and moved to Cradley Heath in 1853. Eliza retired in 1872 but Eliza Tinsley & Co is still a leading chain supplier.

The terrible conditions and starvation wages eventually provoked the women into a strike in 1910, led by Mary Macarthur of the National Federation of Women Workers. After ten weeks, their right to a minimum wage was established (giving some of the women a 150% pay rise) and this is now seen as a milestone in labour history. In 2006 the first Women Chainmakers’ Festival and rally was held at Dudley, in celebration of their achievement. The Black Country Living Museum is at Tipton Road, Dudley, DY1 4SQ (telephone: 0121 557 9643; www.bclm.co.uk). See Chains and Chainmaking, Charles Fogg (Shire Publications, 2008).

Chainmaker (gold or silver)

 

A completely different occupation from that above was gold and silver chainmaking for the jewellery trade. The firm of G.E. Walton, situated in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, is said to have been the ‘largest watch-key, and gold and silver chainmakers in the world’ by the 1880s, and it was estimated that over 2,000 people were employed in the trade, including many women.

The smaller the links of the chains, the slower the work, and “it is said the difficulty of making the smaller chains is so great, that the women who make them cannot work above two hours at a time”. To be a good gold chain maker, a girl must start young, commencing with “linking”, and passing the chains on to the “finisher”, who solders them. “Dipping”, viz. placing the metal in aqua fortis, brightening or “charging”, viz. putting small pieces of metal together to form supports inside a larger one, as in the case of ear-rings, are other branches of employment’. (Industrial Classes, 1876.) See also jewellery worker.

Chambermaid

 

A woman employed usually in a hotel or boarding house to carry out housemaid duties, specifically cleaning rooms and bedmaking. (American usage sometimes equates chambermaids directly with domestic housemaids.) Before indoor plumbing was universal, she would also have to carry hot water upstairs for guests’ baths and cold water for drinking and washing. Tips from guests formed a major element in her wage and she worked long hours, responsible to the housekeeper in a large hotel or the manager. There was effectively a ‘servants’ hall’ in larger places, mirroring the set up in large country houses.

One girl started work at the Sawrey Hotel near Ambleside in 1935, aged 14, and was taught ‘setting tables properly, waitressing and chambermaiding’ for 8s a week and her board; she had to provide her own uniform of a blue dress and large white apron for the morning and a black dress and ‘small fancy apron’ for the afternoon, plus caps (Cumbria Within Living Memory, Cumbria Federation of WIs, Countryside Books, 1994).

Charlady, charwoman

 

A woman hired by the hour or day to do the heavy cleaning, inside and out, perhaps coming in once or twice a week. She never ‘lived in’ with other servants and would probably ‘oblige’ for several different households. By the 1920s the numbers of charladies (their preferred title by then, often shortened to ‘char’) had risen considerably as the difficulty in finding servants increased. By then, too, they were in demand by owners of flats or maisonettes who had no other cleaning help and nowhere for a servant to live if they could find or afford one. Often older women, their ‘unimpeachable respectability’ was described as ‘somehow enhanced by their Victorian clothing’. See also daily maid.

Chauffeuse

 

In July 1915, when the loss of men to the Front in the First World War was beginning to open up new horizons of employment to women, The Times noticed an ‘increasing tendency on the part of gentlewomen to take up various forms of domestic service . . . In one West End agency which deals only with gentlewomen there is an enormous demand for the feminine motor car driver who can do running repairs . . . An increasingly large number of women are qualifying as drivers, taking advantage of cheap tuition in various polytechnics and motoring schools, and they make up for their lack of experience of London traffic by their extreme carefulness. The usual wages in private service is from £1 resident to 35s or £2. . . ’.

It would have only been ‘gentlewomen’ who would have had the opportunity to learn to drive at this early stage of motoring, but those that did were as keen as their male counterparts on their motor cars. The Ladies’ Automobile Club began meeting at Claridge’s Hotel in 1904, proving that ‘the woman motorist is in real earnest in the matter of horseless locomotion’ (Lady’s Realm). By the end of the war, a woman driver was no longer a curiosity.

Chevener

 

An embroiderer, in silk, of stockings or socks. Ann Birkin of Nottinghamshire was chevener to Queen Victoria and had a signed portrait of the Queen on her cottage wall until she died in 1909. In Lea Mills, Derbyshire in the early 1900s female cheveners added silk embroidery to men’s socks; they worked at home, fetching the socks by the gross from the stocking factories. They had a different needle for each colour they were using, and the needles were stuck into cloth, much like a pincushion, until they needed them.

Chimney sweep

 

Marian Dye was a chimney sweep in Hertford in the mid-19th century, running the family business with her husband. She was a huge woman, said to have been over 6 ft tall and weighing over 18 stone. One morning in 1844 she arrived at Goldings, the house of the local MP, to sweep the kitchen chimney. Marian began work at 3 am because otherwise, once the servants got up at 6 am, the chimneys would be in use. She would have erected a screen around the kitchen fireplace, to catch the falling soot, before sending her son, James, up the chimney.

James’s job was to scrape the soot from the walls of the chimney as he clambered up towards the roof – climbing boys had to be young and small. If all had gone well, Marian would have collected the soot (a valuable commodity, which could be sold on for fertilizer), cleaned up in the kitchen, hoisted James back on the cart and gone home with no one the wiser. But this time when he should have climbed to the top and signalled to his mother that he was through, he did not appear. Marian heard a noise behind the fireplace but could not get to him, so she ran off for help. It took hours for the brickwork to be chipped away, by which time the boy was found to have suffocated in deep soot.

James should not have been sent up the chimney at all, as in 1840 an act had prohibited the use of ‘climbing boys’, following a campaign from the late 18th century, that created a great deal of heat on both sides. Marian was by no means the only sweep to be caught using boys after 1840, but magistrates were often lenient in sentencing because, living in large houses themselves, they frequently agreed with the sweep that she could not otherwise clean properly – the machines that could do the job were fiercely resented for years. Only after a third prohibitive act in 1875 did the practice cease, but not before chimneys had claimed too many young lives.

In rural areas cottagers might clean their own chimneys, but in towns and for larger houses a professional chimney sweep would be called in, like Marian Dye – although men dominated the profession, women sweeps were, and are, by no means unknown. Hundreds are listed in the census returns, often widows – such as Ann Howard in Hitchin in 1851, who, aged 32, employed four men in her business. Although cleaner fuel and reduced dependence on coal for heating brought a decline in the profession by the mid 20th century, the necessity for sweeps has never gone away.

There is background information at www.chimneysweep.co.uk/history/history.html, or read British Chimney Sweeps: Five Centuries of Chimney Sweeping by Benita Cullingford (Book Guild, 2000), or Chimneys and Chimney Sweeps, Benita Cullingford (Shire Publications, 2003).

Chiropodist

 

The ‘corn cutter’ was a lowly form of life, as seen through the eyes of medical practitioners in the 19th century, but a necessary and (mostly) respectable one and it was a job that could prove remunerative if a good clientele could be built up.

Mrs Seymour Hill (d.1860) advertised herself as ‘the celebrated corn cutter’ (she was said to have been the original of ‘Miss Moucher’ in Dickens’ David Copperfield) and following her death her London practice was scrapped over by the women who had worked for her. Miss Emily Bath, calling herself Miss Emley (because she had always been addressed as ‘Miss Emily’ or ‘Emily’), had cards printed and distributed that emphasised she had been ‘for many years with the late Mrs Seymour Hill’ and set herself up in ‘the profession of chiropodist’ in 1861. The competition was not welcomed by Mrs Knight and Mrs Hayward, who had been left the bulk of Mrs Hill’s property and were continuing her business.

There was little that could be done to stop ‘Miss Emley’ setting herself up as a chiropodist because there was no requirement to obtain professional qualifications or registration. At the turn of the 20th century, several court cases indicated that ‘chiropody’ was one of the personal services offered at ‘disorderly houses’ – including, in 1899, that of Florence Story, who advertised herself on her door in Great Portland Street as ‘Nurse Florence, hospital certificated chiropodist’. It might also be included in a bona fide setting – but not always successfully, as Isobel Hawkridge of Barrow-in-Furness, Lancaster (‘Madame Arthur, hairdresser and chiropodist’) proved when she was made bankrupt in 1924.

All this was galling for the men and women who were serious about their occupation and determined to make it a respected adjunct of the medical profession. The National Society of Chiropodists was formed in 1912, the first such in Europe, with a founder member who was also one of the first female chiropodists (as opposed to corn cutters), Miss Catherine Norrie. Over the next 30 years four other societies were formed – the Northern Chiropodists Association in 1925, the Chelsea Chiropodists Association in 1926, the British Association of Chiropodists in 1931, and the Chiropodist Practitioners Group in 1942. All of these societies had their own journals. In 1945 they merged to form the Society of Chiropodists (today the Society for Chiropody and Podiatry; website: www.feetforlife.org) and with the coming of the National Health Service registration was made a requirement for employment. However, in the private sector it was still possible to be a ‘Miss Emley’ until 2002, when the title ‘chiropodist’ was protected by law. See Past Imperfect: A Brief History of the Chiropody Profession, Alan Ryecroft Whitby (2002). The records of the Society 1945–1996 are held at the University of Warwick (www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc).

Chorus girl

 

see ballet dancer.

Circus performer, fairground worker

 

The credit for creating the modern circus goes to Philip Astley in the late 18th century, who developed the idea from a riding school and performing with horses, to include acts by clowns, jugglers, trapeze artistes etc. Many circuses travelled around the country, performing for a few nights at a town before upping sticks and heading for the next engagement; others developed as static entertainments, such as the Tower Circus at Blackpool (see www.blackpoolcircusschool.co.uk/circus_history.html).

Women performers were an important part of the circus world – for example, Patsy Chinery, known as ‘Pansy Zedora’ in the ring and born plain Francis Murphy in Liverpool in 1879; in one act she was ‘shot from a giant crossbow, flew through the air into a huge paper target, to be caught on the other side by her sister swinging from a trapeze’. The Theatre Museum website, which includes Pansy’s story, has a wealth of photographs, postcards, cuttings and biographical information on people in the circus. John Turner’s site (www.circusbiography.co.uk) relates to the project he is working on: ‘an index of showmen, performers and other people connected with the circus in Britain’ over the 19th and 20th centuries.

Some databases and indexes tend to lump circus and fairs together, which is why they have been put together here – but circus folk would have disliked that, as they considered themselves a cut above the fairground. As with the circus, some fairs travelled a circuit each year, while fairgrounds also developed as entertainment centres – such as the fairground at Bricket Wood in Hertfordshire, which attracted London crowds every weekend and bank holiday from the 1880s. Fairs have a very long history and many families have equally long associations with them – see Fairfield Folk: A History of the British Fairground and its People, and Fairground Strollers and Showfolk, both by Frances Brown (Ronda Books, 2nd ed. 1988, and 2001) for a fascinating background. The Fairground Heritage Trust, at Dingles Fairground Heritage Centre, Milford, Lifton, Devon PL16 0AT (www.fairground-heritage.org.uk) has preserved equipment, sideshows and memorabilia.

The National Fairground Archive at the University of Sheffield, Western Bank Library, Sheffield S10 2TN (www.nfa.dept.shef.ac.uk) includes material on both fairs and the circus and has a guide for family historians (under ‘Using the NFA’). At http://users.nwon.com/pauline/Travellers.html there is a Showmen, Circus and Fairground Travellers Index, taken from census and other records. See also actress.

Civil servant

 

In 1911, Everywoman’s Encyclopaedia stated: ‘The chief advantages which belong to the Civil Service as a sphere in which women may work include permanency of employment, regularity as regards hours, the prospect of a pension, and the comfort to be gained from working among those at least equal in the social scale.’ Women were admitted into government employment in the Civil Service as typists from the mid-1890s, some 40 years after the Service had been opened to male entry by competitive examination rather than the system of patronage that had previously existed (see also Post Office).

By the 1930s there were about 70,000 female employees, mainly clerks, typists and shorthand-typists, but there were some specialists and a few women were being promoted through the ranks – Miss Isabel Anne Dickson, OBE, became the first and only woman assistant secretary in the Civil Service, in the Board of Education, having also been one of the first women appointed as an inspector of schools in 1905. Women were paid less than men on the same grades, a bone of contention still unresolved by the 1950s. They were also segregated from their male associates for work and for promotion prospects. In 1934, following a Royal Commission recommendation, it was agreed that all posts should be open to women, including administrative (except initially in the Colonial Office) and executive (except in the Defence Department). In 1923 the examinations for Assistant Inspectors of Taxes had been opened to women, which could lead to a career with the Inland Revenue.

Women were required to leave if they got married, though there was leeway in ‘exceptional circumstances’ for a head of department to keep individual women on if it was ‘in the interests of the public service’. In 1932 the case of Miss A.C. Richmond, ‘a first-class officer in the Ministry of Labour’, hit the headlines when the male union objected to her being kept on after marriage – the government rebuff was that because of the marriage bar there were too few women in the higher ranks of the service, therefore keeping Miss Richmond on was in the public interest. It was a very arbitrary process, however. Miss M.L. Green, a botanist at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and therefore a specialist officer, was another woman who managed to stay on in 1938, but the great majority of women who married simply left the service.

The National Archives has a Research Guide on Civil Service record holdings (Domestic Records Information 117), though it admits that the ‘amount on female civil servants is limited’. The Federation of Women Civil Servants was formed in 1916 from existing female staff associations, and their records (1915–1942) are at the Women’s Library (London Metropolitan University, 25 Old Castle Street, London E1 7NT; www.londonmet.ac.uk/thewomenslibrary). When an application was made to take the Civil Service examin­ations, applicants had to prove their age and these ‘evidence of age’ records (to 1948) are held at the Society of Genealogists; the name index can be searched online at www.findmypast.com.

Clay worker

 

Women worked as surface labour at specialist clay works in Cornwall, Devon, and around Stourbridge in the 19th century. Cornwall provided the china clay and kaolin (the Chinese name for porcelain clay) essential for the production of fine china, and, today, the white mountains that are the waste product of the pits around St Austell are a reminder of the importance of this industry in the local economy for over two centuries.

China clay was first discovered in the area in 1745 and commercial use was under way by the 1820s. It proved to be the ingredient that would make it possible for Staffordshire pottery makers to produce wares that rivalled the best porcelain in the world and the process was a major employer of local labour, involving whole families. The women, ‘balmaidens’, worked at the surface of the pit. Once brought up by male workers, the clay had to be left to dry, after which it was cut into blocks. Women carried the blocks to dressing yards (‘taking out clay’), where the clay was laid out again to dry further. Once completely dry, the blocks were cleaned by scraping them to get rid of any mould or sand, and then packed into wooden casks for transporting, all tasks done by women workers until the beginning of the 20th century.

On the Isle of Purbeck blue or ball clay was dug and formed the basis of the pottery industry in the area, notably Poole Pottery (although earlier it had been used for the manufacture of clay pipes). Once dug, the clay was taken to Furzebrook to be ‘ripened’ for about six months, by which time it was more elastic and workable.

Fireclay was dug in many places, usually in conjunction with coal mining, but in Stourbridge a special kind of heavy clay, completely different from the products above, was used to make pots for glasshouses and for gas retorts. Women formed the major part of the workforce on the surface of the quarries, breaking the clay into regular sized pieces and sorting it from discoloured and irregular lumps and stones.

Lynne Mayers, who specialises in the occupations of women in the West Country, wrote an article ‘Was your great grandmother a balmaiden at the clay pits?’ for the Cornwall Family History Society journal (no. 107, March 2003) which describes the women’s work at the St Austell china clay pits; see mine worker for details of her website. See also A History of the English China Clay Industry, J.A. Buckley (Bradford Barton, 1997); and the Wheal Martyn China Clay Museum (Carthew, St Austell PL26 8XG; www.wheal-martyn.com) has access to the China Clay History Society and its archives.

Clerk

 

Usually an office worker (see office staff), although she may have worked in other environments such as hospital wards (see below), or the word may describe someone working in a telegraphy office. Before the widespread use of the typewriter, every piece of paper in an office had to be handwritten, and copies made by hand. In 1871 there were fewer than 1,500 female clerks, but by 1921 this number had rocketed to nearly 600,000.

Advice given to those wanting to apply as a ‘commercial clerk’ in 1911 was that they should be able to spell well, write with a clear ‘commercial hand’, have a basic knowledge of book-keeping, and be able to cope with shorthand and typing. That the adviser expected the applicants to be not only well educated but also middle class was plain: ‘A very important point is punctuality. The better the clerk the fewer occasions will she plead “fog” as an excuse for being late on winter mornings, and in the summer she will very rarely leave the office five minutes before time to join a tennis party.’

Clinical clerk

 

This was what we might now call a ward clerk, though the duties in the 19th century seem to have been a little more hands-on than would be expected today. When Augusta E. Mansford went into the Royal Free Hospital as a patient in 1895, she encountered a clinical clerk who completed the paperwork and even marked her up with blue pencil ready for the visit of the doctor an hour or so later: ‘She was my idea of a strong-minded woman. Though her skirts were short, her hair was not, but lustrous brown plaits were coiled round and round a classic head, and her broad forehead, well-marked brows, clear grey eyes, and calm mouth, all inspired me with confidence’. (Strand Magazine, 1895.)

Coffee stall keeper

 

The coffee stall, open night and day, has long been a familiar feature of city streets. Henry Mayhew believed that the majority of those in London in the 1850s were kept by women. The stall might vary in size and amenities according to the district but it was often a two-wheeled barrow, with the water for the coffee carried in large tin cans over iron fire-pots heated by charcoal. The keeper would also provide sandwiches, bread and butter and cake to go with the coffee, tea and cocoa. See also street seller. Women also kept coffee houses, which by the mid-19th century had lost their earlier connection with merchants and intellectuals and were quite often simply working class meeting places.

Colourmaker

 

The making of ships’ colours (flags) and pennants was restricted to female workers in naval dockyards such as Portsmouth and Chatham – the widows of naval men and, later in the 20th century, the widows of dockyard workers. The women at Portsmouth also made overalls, curtains and furnishings for ships and shore establishments. They were given special consideration by being allowed to leave work at 4 pm, half an hour before the male employees, so that they could avoid the rush at the dockyard gates (www.seayourhistory.org.uk).

Comptometer operator

 

The comptometer was an American invention of the late 1880s that rapidly came into use in practically every office and was used by many women – a calculating machine with a numeric keyboard that was capable of adding and listing entries, operated by pulling a small lever at the side. It was still widely used after the Second World War.

Conductress

 

Leader of an orchestra or choir. At the beginning of the 20th century this was not common, though by no means unknown, especially in amateur musical circles. In 1900 women musicians and a woman conductor were employed to play at the Women’s Exhibition at Earl’s Court. Male musicians who felt they had been ousted showed their feelings by ‘raucous and derisive applause’, cat-calling and rapping with sticks on the bandstand, but the unnamed conductor rose above it all with good humour and commonsense.

Also the name for a kind of stewardess on board ship, or a bus conductor.

Confectioner

 

A maker or seller of sweets, chocolates, fudges, candies etc – women ran confectionery shops, or combined the trade with a baker’s shop, general store or teashop. It was a trade thought suitable for middle class ladies. Some confectioners, however, were travellers, making their living with sweet stalls at fairgrounds and showgrounds, or in holiday resorts.

Cook

 

Although the upper classes and the restaurant trade perpetuated the myth that women could not produce the finest cuisine, female cooks of all types were more common than the male chef.

In large houses where the full panoply of servants were kept, the cook would be third in seniority in the female servants after the housekeeper and the lady’s maid. She would be assisted by kitchenmaids and scullery maids (and would probably have come up through their ranks herself), and the kitchen would be her kingdom.

 

‘Good plain cooks’, or cookgenerals, were a mainstay of middle class life up to the 1930s.

 

Cooks in general had a reputation for touchiness, perhaps brought on by the heat in the kitchen and the pressure of their work, so that employer and assistant alike might have to tread carefully. Punch cartoons of the 19th and early 20th centuries frequently portrayed the cook as a tyrant, rather fond of the bottle, over-familiar with the tradesmen, and protective of her right to her ‘perquisites’ – the dripping, bones, empty jars etc that she could sell on her own account. By 1910 mistresses were being told that this practice should be forbidden and to keep their own eye on the bills, but many a mistress with a good cook would overlook a little ‘wastage’ rather than lose her.

Her kind fared badly during the First World War: ‘The only kind of servant who is without a post at the moment is the high class cook at £50 or £60 a year, for whom there is little demand, owing to the steady growth of thrift and the almost total cessation of private entertainment on any large scale. The highly-trained cook is not adaptable and stands out obstinately for the old elaborate kind of meal,’ said The Times in July 1915.

The majority of households were, of course, small to middling-sized and then the cook might be one of only two or three servants, or she might be on her own altogether. She also might be a ‘plain cook’, preparing simple dishes and probably self taught, rather than an experienced and capable ‘professed cook’. Other opportunities opened up for women cooks during the l9th and 20th centuries – in institutions such as workhouses, schools, hospitals and the armed services particularly. See also domestic servant.

Cook, Army

 

During the First World War, cooks were needed by the Army even before the women’s services were formed. ‘There is an ever increasing demand for women to act as Army cooks and waitresses in camps, hospitals, convalescent homes and officers’ messes,’ reported The Times in January 1917. ‘The salary is £20 per annum, board and accommodation found, laundry allowance and free uniform, with the prospect also of the salary being raised in the near future. Women doing this work have also the satisfaction of knowing that they release men for military service. The military cooking section of the Women’s Legion, Duke of York’s Headquarters, Chelsea, have already enrolled 2,000 women for this service.’

Cook-general

 

Many families employed a cook-general, or ‘general’, who would have to combine cooking with domestic duties such as lighting fires, cleaning and sweeping, filling the coal scuttles and cleaning the boots, answering the door and washing up. In 1910 the advice on uniform was: ‘Cooks should always wear washing dresses and white aprons, with coarse ones for cleaning purposes. Black dresses and fine aprons are usually worn in the afternoon. Frequently cooks do not wear caps, except in houses where they are expected to answer the front door’.

The cook-general was increasingly in demand as it became more difficult to find servants in the 1920s and 1930s: ‘Where only one other servant is kept it is wisest to advertise for a cook-general rather than a cook, as, when so styled, the latter at times goes on strike and refuses to assist in the housework.’

The careers of some cooks highlighted the fears of employers. Ada Brennan confessed in August 1922 that she had carried out robberies at houses in London where she had been employed as cook-general. After only one day in service at a house at Beaufort Gardens she ransacked the place and absconded with jewellery, plate and linen to the value of £150, plus £20 in notes. At her next job, in Finsbury Park, she absconded after two days’ service with goods valued at £50. However, there was another side to the story of the living-in servant, as a court case in 1928 demonstrated. Laura Easy, a cook-general, described as a frail little woman, had gone to bed at 9.35 pm instead of 10 pm and refused to get dressed again to post a letter, for which she was told she could not have her day off on Sunday. She slipped out anyway, but when she returned she was locked out of her room and struck on the legs with a stick by her employer: Murray Fletcher Rogers was ordered to pay a fine of £2 and costs for assault, but the decision was overturned on appeal because there was no independent corroboration of Laura’s story.

It was no wonder that servants were becoming scarce. In 1925 an advertisement appeared in The Times offering a £3 reward to anyone who could help find ‘a really reliable and industrious cook-general’.

Cook, visiting

 

A few women hired themselves out as visiting cooks. In the 1880s it was said that ‘for really clever visiting cooks there is ample employment. We know two excellent middle-aged women who earn more than a livelihood by cooking dinners and suppers for people.’ It was the ideal solution for a mistress who gave only the occasional dinner party.

Cookery instructor/teacher

 

In 1874 the National School of Cookery was founded in Exhibition Road, South Kensington, by Sir Henry Cole (1808–1882), who was an active public figure and patron of the arts. The first Lady Superintendent was Lady Broome, who had written a ‘little book’ on First Principles
of Cookery, but she soon left to follow her husband abroad and Mrs Edith Clarke (d.1919) took on the post, staying for the next 44 years. She had a tremendous influence on the teaching of cookery teachers and instructors, so much so that at her death the teaching of domestic science in schools was put down to her ‘inspiration and foresight’. The School closed finally in 1962 as the National Training College of Domestic Subjects.

 

A class at a board school in London in the early 1900s, ‘making tarts, and a few looking after a joint of beef – which a group of the teachers will buy for their own dinner’. (Living London, 1902)

 

There was much concern in the last quarter of the 19th century that working class girls were not being taught the basics of cookery and good housewifery to fit them for their role as wife and mother, and the School held classes for local children and ‘female pupil-teachers’ in ‘artisan cookery’. At the same time, cookery instruction was seen as a suitable and useful job for ‘ladies’ to undertake, after a period of training. Instructors might find work in colleges or schools, or take private pupils – young middle class women were also being urged to take a course in cookery to ‘finish’ their education. In 1881 the School was estimated to have awarded 148 diplomas in teaching, and trained over 12,000 people in classes throughout the country; by 1913 over 2,000 teachers had been trained for posts in public elementary schools, secondary and private schools, high schools and training colleges.

Other training schools could be found at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Nottingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Wakefield, and Birmingham. The National Training School itself employed ‘a considerable number’ of teachers, loaning them out for demonstrations and lectures throughout the country.

Copywriter

  

Advertising agencies emerged during the late 19th century in response to an increasingly crowded marketplace, first in the USA, where it was quickly realised that the great majority of purchases were made by women. However, the copywriters who created the slogans and advertisements were almost all male. The League of Advertising Women of New York was formed in 1912, but a similar movement does not seem to have existed in Britain. During the 1920s and 1930s copywriting was seen as an attractive job for an educated and literate woman – the writer Dorothy L. Sayers worked from 1922 to 1931 as a copywriter at the London advertising agency, Benson’s. She was good at her job but later condemned it for creating need where none existed.

Cork cutter

 

In 1806 the Book of Trades or Library of the Useful Arts said that both men and women worked at cork cutting and called it the ‘blackest and dirtiest of all the trades’. This was probably because of the method used to prepare the cork – the bark of a species of oak tree, grown around the Mediterranean and imported into England – for cutting and shaping into the familiar bottle stoppers and also larger items such as shoe soles and heels. It was a trade dating back to the 17th century. The pieces of cork were heated over open flames so that they softened and tightened before being worked on, the blackened areas being scraped off like burnt toast. Corkcutters worked in small workshops and the trade became increasingly mechanised through the 1800s. Mrs Rose Ann Stokes was a ‘cork cutter (dealer)’ at Thetford in the 1870s, and in 1881 Jane Beach, a 55-year-old widow, was a cork cutter employing four men and one boy in Shadwell, East London.

Corsetmaker, corsetière

 

The fashions of the 19th and early 20th centuries demanded well-made undergarments, and particularly corsets. Corsetmaking needed much the same skills as tailoring, and garments made to measure were the ideal for most fashionable women, who would buy them from specialist corsetmakers, either working from home or in shops. Many staymakers worked for the corsetières at home to order, making the intricate and substantial garments.

Mass production made good quality corsets available to a wider range of customers by the 1900s. One of the specialist companies, the Spirella Corset Company of Great Britain, formed in 1910, had a factory at Letchworth, the First Garden City; Mrs F. Wright was the first corsetière at the factory and large numbers of local women worked there, carrying out many of the processes by hand, such as putting the laces in the corsets.

See the website www.corsetiere.net for a great deal of information about the 20th century corsetmakers and their corsets, including many photographs. To gain an idea of the work involved in making a corset, see Waisted Efforts: An illustrated Guide to Corset Making by R. Doyle (Sartorial Press Publications, 1997); or for history, Corsets and Crinolines, Norah Waugh (Routledge, 1954).

Coster girl/woman

 

A costermonger was a street seller of fruit, vegetables, fish and provisions and it was common for their daughters to be sent out onto the streets to sell from the age of about seven, beginning probably with oranges, apples, violets or watercress. By the time they were 15 or so, they would be walking barefoot eight or ten miles a day, carrying a basket of produce – anything from sprats to apples – weighing near 200 cwt on their head, so that when they put their burden down at the end of the day their necks were cricked and their heads felt ‘as light as a feather’. Otherwise they might exhibit their wares on a heavy tray, a strap around the neck holding it in front. From the centre of the city the younger women would walk out to the nearby towns. Older women were more likely to have a regular fruit or vegetable street stall. Most of these coster girls married or lived with costermongers in their turn. See street seller.

Cotton spinner and weaver

 

By 1851 the cotton industry was the third largest employer in Britain (after agriculture and domestic service), providing work for over 250,000 women. Fifty years later the workforce was dominated by women. Despite the long hours and often poor working conditions, many women found greater freedom and better pay in the mills than they could expect elsewhere. Female weavers were amongst the highest paid women workers in industry. For years the industry led the world, despite the hardships caused by the cotton famine during the American Civil War in the 1860s, until its gradual decline began during the 1920s and 1930s.

While Lancashire was the acknowledged ‘Cotton County’, spinning and weaving took place at mills around the country. In 1893 Hamish Hendry visited the Paisley works of J. & P. Coats, manufacturers of cotton thread, and wrote about it for Good Words. The process by which cotton was prepared had been roughly the same for decades, although in earlier times much of the preparation and cleaning was done by hand.

 

The Lancashire mill girl’s familiar and distinctive clothing, with a shawl to cover her head.

 

Raw cotton arrived at the factory in bales and had first to be cleaned of dirt. This was done by machine in 1893, the cotton being revolved on cylinders that teased the fibres out into a layer of uniform thickness. This layer of cotton went through a carding-engine, where ‘several millions of small sharp wire teeth’ combed it into ‘a soft light fleece’, rounded into a coil called a ‘sliver’. A drawing-frame stretched the sliver out into long and even strands of cotton. Next came a slubbing-frame and a roving-frame, each of which drew the thread out again and twisted it, to be wound onto a bobbin – now the spinning process could begin. On the spinning mule, its ‘pure white bobbins stretching away, row upon row, in this vast building’, the cotton was spun into yarn. At Paisley, this would be used to make sewing cotton thread, but where the spun cotton was intended for weaving it would now go to the powerlooms in the weaving sheds. Here the basic method involved the use of a shuttle to throw the weft between the divided threads of the warp to produce woven cloth, or cotton tape.

Women were involved at every stage of this process, including the spinning, which in the earlier 19th century tended to be dominated by male workers. This is a large subject and it is not possible here to more than touch on the many processes that it involved and the technological advances that affected day to day working life, both in spinning and weaving. There is a huge range of general material available for the cotton industry and its workers. There may even be surviving employee or trade union records for individual firms but to find them luck will play a part in being able to identify the mill where a woman worked.

Information from archives, museums and libraries in the North West, including a bibliography, extracts from books, and photographs, is gathered at www.spinningtheweb.org.uk; while an introduction to the ways in which the Industrial Revolution affected Lancashire is given at www.cottontimes.co.uk. At the Helmshore Textile Museum, Holcombe Road, Helmshore, Rossendale BB4 4NP, demonstrations and exhibitions are held in the original textile mills – this is only one of many local museums that over recent years have concentrated on recreating life in the cotton mills and towns. See www.paisleythread.org for more about the mills of Coats and others; Coats’ archives are held by Glasgow University Archives Service. There is a dictionary of cotton fibres and weaves at www.ntgi.net/ICCF&D/cotton.htm. The 18th century New Lanark mills in southern Scotland are now a World Heritage Site (www.newlanark.org).

A helpful start for reading about the industry (which is online at Spinning the Web, above) is Cotton: A Select Bibliography on Cotton in North West England, Nigel Alan Rudyard and Terry Wyke (Manchester University Press, 1997); see also The Cotton Industry, Chris Alpin (Shire Publications, 2003) for a brief introduction. The Hungry Mills, Norman Longmate (Hamish Hamilton, 1978) tells the story of the hardships of the 1860s. To bring the story up to date, see Memories of the Lancashire Cotton Mills, Ron Freethy (Countryside Books, 2008).

See also fustian cutter; lacemaker (bobbin net); weaver.

Cowkeeper

 

A woman who kept one or more cows in a town location to provide fresh milk for customers. In 1851 Jane Clarke, a 40-year-old single woman, was a ‘Cowkeeper, grocer etc’ in Gloucester Street in the Mile End area of London.

Cracker maker

 

Thomas Smith marketed the first crackers in the late 1840s, originally with a wrapped sweet in the cardboard tube. It was the crack of the snap that made them completely original, though, which he created with a small strip of saltpetre pasted onto thin card – he launched ‘Bangs of Expectation’ in 1860. It was also the noise that gave early crackers the name ‘cosaques’, because it sounded like the crack of a cossack’s whip. Other firms began to make crackers too – Caleys, and Hovells, for example – but Tom Smith’s remained the market leader.

 

Even in city back streets, up to the turn of the 20th century a cow or two might be kept for fresh milk.

 

By end of the 19th century Smith’s was producing about 13 million crackers a year and exporting all over the world. The manufacturing process was very labour intensive – machines made the boxes and assembled the papers but women rolled, glued and tied the crackers by hand, as well as putting in the essential novelties, hats and jokes. Alice Adelaide Morgan, born in 1910, worked at the Smith’s factory in Finsbury Square, London from the age of 14 until she married in her mid-twenties. She remembered that the crackers for the Royal Family were made there, and that every year a member of the Royal Household came to the factory with small packages to be put inside them – but the women working there were never told what they were.

The website www.christmasarchives.com/crackers.html has useful background information on the history of crackers. Unfortunately, the Tom Smith’s factory and archive was destroyed by bombing during the Second World War.

A ‘cracker maker’ may also sometimes be a female worker in a firework factory.

Curds and whey seller

 

A street trade of the 19th century mostly carried out by women, in the summer months. They bought skim milk from a dairy, scalded, cooled and sweetened it and added rennet to make it set. In an hour it was ready – the curd was the solid and the whey the liquid that ran out when it was cut into. It was served in mugs or glasses, from a stall ‘covered with a white cloth, or in some cases an oil-cloth, and on this the curds, in a bright kettle or pan, are deposited’. See street seller.

Cutlery worker

The cutlery industry, based in Sheffield, employed women on the finishing processes for knives, forks, spoons, tools, razors, files, saws, scissors and surgical instruments: in 1871 there were nearly 2,000 female workers.

The industry was a dirty and unhealthy one, but women did mostly the lighter work – making up and finishing the products, particularly by adding bone, ivory or wood handles and if necessary lacquering them, and ‘dressing and scouring’, i.e. scouring the metal with sandpaper and polishing it to a good finish (earning 7s to 12s a week in the 1870s). For examples of the trade see the website of the Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust (www.simt.co.uk/collections/collections-1-2-1.html). A History of Sheffield, David Hey (Carnegie Publications, 2005) has details of the cutlery industry.