With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread –
Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang ‘The Song of the Shirt.’
Thomas Hood (1799–1845)
In the 1851 census, behind agricultural labourers and servants, the third most frequent occupation was cotton manufacturing, with over half a million people. Milliners/dressmakers were seventh. Add tailors and nearly a million people worked in the clothing trade, excluding shoemakers and hatting, out of a total population in England and Wales of 18 million people. Because of their low status, records are sparse and generally involve a trip to the record office.
The first mass-produced clothing is generally accepted as military uniforms for the 1812 war with France. However, for those unable to afford a dressmaker or tailor, ready-to-wear clothes were bought from ‘slopshops’, or sweat shops making and selling clothes; Pepys mentions a slop seller called Burrows in his diary entry for 21 March 1665. If you couldn’t afford this, acquiring second-hand (third/fourth-hand) clothing elsewhere was your only option.
Writing in 1850, Henry Mayhew (1812–87), co-founder of Punch, describes a London sweat shop in disturbing terms. Seven workmen sitting cross-legged on the floor worked in a room about eight feet square, surrounded by sleeve boards, irons and material, making coats, jackets, vests, cloaks and trousers for slopshops, for which they received between five shillings and six pence and six shillings and nine pence for a frock coat taking two and a half days to make. Trimmings and thread were bought from their pay and four shillings a week was deducted to pay the master for food, tea and bed. One tailor commented that his working week was sixteen hours a day, seven days a week for thirteen shillings, for which, after deductions, he received seven shillings and three pence, adding that wages were higher in 1847.
There wasn’t enough business in villages so tailors, since at least the eleventh century, generally wielded their needles in towns. Essentially, a tailor made, altered and mended coats and jackets for men and women, and trousers and shirts for men.
Conditions did not change in the sixty years between Thomas Hood’s Song of the Shirt and Charles Booth’s extensive Life and Labour of the People in London, published in 1902–03, associating the trades of tailoring (and shoemaking) with poverty. Booth made a strong distinction between a journeyman working for a respectable West End London business and the ‘wholesale contractor’, the slopman, living and working with wife and children in one room with bad sanitation. Both tailors had undertaken an apprenticeship. According to Booth, a suit made by the respectable journeyman lasted forever whereas the other blew up ‘like a balloon in the wind’ and was unwearable within a few weeks. Booth did not take into account those unable to afford better-made clothing.
He included a table itemising rates and hours expected by various levels of tailors working from home. A routine working day was thirteen to fourteen hours, although some jobs were ‘infinite’; the day ended when work was finished. A tailor-baster making three to four coats a day was the highest paid, receiving seven to nine shillings. The sewing machine, usually hired, was on the never-never. Payment, like rent, was collected weekly.
On the other hand, the West End journeyman piece-working in 1900 on the Society of Amalgamated Tailors’ rates earned, depending on his skill, £2 10s a week in the high season, averaging £1–£2 a week over the year. London’s season consisted of balls and social events and a new costume was made in a few days or overnight.
John Raymond, a witness at the murder trial of James Mullins and Walter Emm in 1860 describes himself thus: ‘I am a tailor by business and reside at 12 Oxford Square (London)… a journeyman tailor, not a jobbing tailor – I am a coat maker – I work for Mr James Cook, of 63 Shoreditch…. I worked for Stevens and Clark – I have not been working for anybody since’. This detail for a journeyman is unusual and with this a family historian could investigate the employers; the more famous tailoring companies have more available information.
Using the free search of Merchant Taylors membership index 1530–1928 at www.parishregister.com and typing in John Raymond’s name, there are two hits; John Raymond and John Rayment, but no date or further information. For £3.95, you might get the date of freedom by apprenticeship, patrimony or redemption; if apprenticeship, the name of his master; date of election to livery i.e. the Merchant Taylors’ Company and any remarks. The Index of Freemen, compiled around 1930 and transcribed and published by Docklands Ancestors Ltd, contains 36,000 names and can be bought as a CD for £29.95. The results are either posted within twenty-one days or emailed. The Merchant Taylors’ Company www.merchant-taylors.co.uk get a percentage of all purchases. The index can be viewed for free at Guildhall Library at MS 34037/1-4.
As always, go to your local record office first. The Shropshire Record Office has a register book for 1620–1771 (ref 6001/5837) for the Shrewsbury Company of Tailors and Skinners. Essex Records Office has records dating from 1572 including sessions rolls, writs, statute staple bonds and wills.
The V&A Museum has an extensive reading list of books and magazines on its website about the history of clothes and fashion from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries including pattern books. See www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/reading-list-tailoring. Amazon has others.
The Working Class Movement Library in Salford www.wcml.org.uk has annual reports from the Amalgamated Society of Journeymen Tailors (later the Amalgamated Society of Tailors and Tailoresses) for 1870 to 1931, including obituaries for both members and wives, sick pay and benefits as well as roughly ten years of annual reports for the Amalgamated Society of Clothiers’ Operatives dated 1894 to 1909.
Dressmaker is a common occupation for women in the census; not including ancillary occupations, 195,754 are listed for 1881 in England. They custom-made, repaired and altered dresses, blouses and evening gowns. A few are listed as ‘dressmaker milliners’ and were obviously responsible for the ‘whole package’. The seamstress made, for instance, blouses. During the Edwardian penchant for tightly tucked and elaborate pleats selling for eighteen to twenty-five shillings each, she stitched up to a dozen blouses a week for ten shillings.
Dressmaking was more respectable than working in a factory but, because of cheap cloth manufactured in mills, women demanded correspondingly cheap garments, resulting in appallingly long hours for dressmakers and seamstresses. Twelve-year-old apprentices worked late into the night without pay. The official fifty-nine hour working week was overridden by women taking work home to finish.
Thomas Hood’s 1843 poem The Song of the Shirt, which scandalised the middle and upper classes and depicted a respectable woman with failing eyesight freezing in a garret, was no exaggeration. For middle-class women who had fallen on hard times, dressmaking and seamstressing was the only suitable work offering independence. The alternative was being a governess or teaching (many women didn’t have enough education for this), or becoming a servant or prostitute. For a woman who had employed servants of her own, working in service was untenable and a middle-class woman was unlikely to employ her anyway. The conjecture on various websites that ‘dressmaker/seamstress’ was a euphemism for prostitute is usually wrong. However destitute a woman might have been, in most cases a dressmaker was exactly that – a dressmaker.