Uncategorised

Easter Smocks

SlopShopLeave a comment

Easter was traditionally the time to wear new clothes, with its associations with rebirth and renewal.  It was also the end of Lent and thus cause for a celebration, the lean months of the year over.  By the fifteenth century, it was seen as bad luck if you didn’t wear new clothes at Easter.  If you managed to do this, with the economic outlay that this implied, good luck would follow for the rest of the year.  In a newspaper report in the Derbyshire Times and Chesterfield Herald in April 1862, it was described as ‘a positive dereliction of duty if Hodge does not appear in a new velveteen coat or smock frock covered with fancy stitching’, for the Easter holiday.  It was an important celebration, the working men having ‘few “red letter” days compared with those on the Continent’.  The ‘red letter’ came from the idea of marking important holy festivals in red on the church calendar, a practice carried out since at least the fifteenth century.  Public holidays such as Easter and Christmas were a rare guaranteed break for workers, Bank Holidays not introduced until 1871.  The lack of religious festivals in England compared to other countries on the continent, also meant less time off, with the UK still today having the lowest number of public holidays in Europe, resulting in a Labour pledge in the upcoming general election for four more.

As always, the newspaper report, describing the new smock frocks and gowns with ‘very lively coloured’ ribbons, also focused on that Easter perennial, the weather.  Hoping for better weather than last year and for ‘skyey influences’ not to disrupt the gathering, a successful Easter celebration and enjoyment by all was hoped for.

Easter Bunny!

easter bunny

The Smock as a cover-up

SlopShopLeave a comment

In June 1828, John Barker was asleep on his barge in Mirfield in West Yorkshire.  Mirfield is a small town between Dewsbury and Brighouse, situated on the River Calder, and is also part of the canal system too with the Calder and Hebble Navigation.  Water transport was important for the town, taking away locally produced woollen textiles for sale.  Building the wooden barges used was therefore very necessary, three boat builders mentioned in Pigot’s Directory of 1828-9 for the town.

Barker was a ‘keel master’, which is perhaps significant.  His barge was entered and money and a smock frock stolen, waking him up.  Barker unsuccessfully pursued the thief in a state of nudity.  The constable found the suspect the next Sunday morning, at a pub in Mill Street, close to the river, drinking with two prostitutes, so failing the morality test on three accounts.

At his trial at the Quarter Sessions in Hull a month later, five keelmen from Mirfield gave John Harris, the suspected thief, good character references, saying that the action had been a result of a drunken spree.  Was this a ‘prank’ or  grievance against an employer perhaps?  His main fault, according to his friends, was that ‘he was too fond of the company of bad girls’, and in passing his sentence of a month of hard labour, the women were blamed for ‘seducing’ him into extravagance and therefore into committing crime.

A snapshot of a moment, this case draws us into the ordinary lives of people nearly two hundred years ago, how they lived and to a certain extent, how they thought.  Nudity and prostitution are not commonly associated with the smock frock, but here it is shown as an essential garment for a boat builder in West Yorkshire.  Produced in Barnsley and sold in towns such as Sheffield and Leeds, the smock frock was a useful overall for many men and a useful cover-up when getting out of bed.

Stealing milk from a cow

SlopShopLeave a comment

I have written before about how newspapers can indirectly reveal, especially through court cases, the hard reality of life for working people.  These often plot the minutiae of their lives in a way that other sources don’t.  In 1852, one such case stands out in the Hereford Times.  Anne Price lived in Peterchurch in rural Herefordshire, in the beautiful border country of valleys near Hay-on-Wye.  She is described as aged forty, married but illiterate, neither able to read or write, and had two children ‘on the point of death’ at home.  She was relying on the parish for support, her husband presumably no longer able to support them or no longer in the area.  This was a type of welfare where rate payers contributed towards minimal payments given to recipients who lived within the parish.  The payments were given for a specific reason and without them recipients would not otherwise survive.  This kept them living and, to a degree, working within the community rather than becoming inmates of the local workhouse.  This welfare was continually being cut as far as possible to decrease the tax burden for contributors, as well as putting forward complex terms about who could receive such benefits to lower the number of recipients.  Thus only the ‘respectable’, ‘deserving’ hardworking poor were probably able to claim.  Anyone convicted of a crime was unlikely to qualify.  As always, the welfare bill was constantly thought to be too high.

Anne, apparently at her wits end, had gone into a farmer’s field between one and two o’clock in the morning, accused of carrying a jug, where she was said to have milked a cow and therefore ‘stolen’ three pints of milk.  The farmer, Mr Barrett, a rate payer, had suspected that his cows were being surreptitiously milked and had set a servant to watch them.  This was how Anne was caught.  According to the witness, the servant, she apparently threw the jug on the ground when he accosted her and bribed him if he wouldn’t tell his master, with half a sovereign or a new smock frock.  She presumably made smock frocks for sellers in Hereford or for drapers nearby, a common local female occupation but very poorly paid.  He supposedly refused the bribe and in court Anne denied this story, instead saying she had just been to the doctor for her sick children and was passing through the field.  It seems unlikely that she would have half a sovereign to hand and claimed the story was a ‘sting’ and a trumped up charge as she was ‘chargeable to the parish’.  If the case succeeded, she would probably no longer be eligible for parish support.  The court refused to believe the male witness could lie that credibly and found her guilty.  The chairman remarked that even if she had done it to give sustenance to her children, which he thought she might have, it was still an act of theft and she was to spend a month’s imprisonment in the house of correction.

It seems to be such a heart breaking case – an uneducated woman ranged against a male court and prosecutor, apparently trying to do her best for her ill children, living on the very limits of existence.  There seemed to have been very little empathy with Anne’s situation but instead a determined attempt to get another person chargeable to the parish off hand-outs in any way possible, including locking them up.  Whether she saw her sick children again, or how they were cared for if she wasn’t there, is not apparent but one is tempted to think the worst.

Plough Monday

SlopShopLeave a comment

This last Monday was meant to be the most depressing day of the year, Blue Monday, although apparently this was a ruse invented about ten years ago by the travel industry in order to coax us all into booking summer holidays straight after Christmas.  A day which I think could do with more revival at this time of year is Plough Monday, traditionally the first Monday after Epiphany.  This rural custom is still celebrated in some areas of the East Midlands and East Anglia although originally it probably had a broader geographical spread.  It was said to be the first day that ploughmen went back to work after Christmas and was celebrated in various ways including ‘Molly’ dancing, similar to Morris dancing, mummer’s plays, parading straw bears and general dressing up, face colouring and transgression of the norms, depending on the customs of the area.  The ploughmen also asked for monetary contributions from landowners during a parade of the plough through local streets. Those who did not contribute risked having their front garden or doorstep ploughed up.  February was said to be the hardest month in the rural calendar: work was scarce, nothing new had yet grown, and winter vegetables and food from the previous year were running low.  Getting the ‘trembles’ was common – the colloquial term for starvation.  Such a parade and collection presumably helped the labourers through such lean times.

plough monday

In 1886, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph reported on Plough Monday, a parade visiting Sheffield from ‘beyond Pitsmore’, Pitsmoor now a suburb of Sheffield.  A brass band started off the parade, then ‘a strong contingent – 12 men in top hats and smock-frocks with faces daubed a villainous hue, were yoked together by ropes to a plough, the stilts of which were in charge of a farm labourer, with seven-leagued boots and leathern leggings, adorned with wisps of straw’.  They were driven by another, who occasionally banged their backs with a bladder, in the manner of a whip.  This was also described and illustrated by George Walker in his 1814 book, The Costume of Yorkshire (see above). Reprinted a year earlier in 1885, this illustration was entitled the ‘Plough Stotts’, the Yorkshire term for the day, ‘the plough-driver with a blown bladder at the end of a stick by way of whip’.   In 1886, two others were dressed as women, ‘gorgeously got up’ and rattled the cash box ‘under the noses of spectators’, jumping onto trams to collect from passengers and trying to extort money from tradespeople, which according to the report they did quite successfully.  Bantering wittily with people they met, the procession of ‘Hodges’ seems to have made quite an impact and achieved the aim of raising money for those taking part. There was also another similar procession in the area, including a representation of Little Boy Blue with his horn, so it seems to have been not unusual for Yorkshire at this date.  Already there was nostalgia for the countryside for those living in cities and towns, and the representation that agricultural labourers brought forth into urban areas included the smock frock as essentially rural, playing to these notions and the idea that they were the guardians of long-held English customs.

 

http://www.ploughmonday.co.uk/

 

 

Christmas Dog Show at Curzon Hall, Birmingham

SlopShopLeave a comment

Shopkeepers who try to squeeze the most potential purchases out of consumers in the run up to Christmas are nothing new.  The traders of Birmingham did this in late November 1870, with seasonal decorated windows ‘of the most varied and tempting character’, seeking to attract the thousands of additional people who visited the city for the annual cattle and poultry show held in Bingley Hall.  Those who visited the show before making their seasonal purchases included ‘ruddy-faced countrymen in smock-frocks and mud-coloured leggings’, as well as landed gentry, tenant farmers and others in the ‘country party’.  Bingley Hall was the first purpose built exhibition hall in Britain, built in 1850 with a capacity for up to twenty-five thousand people, which burnt down in 1984.

warcs-farm-show-bingley-hall-birmingham-antique-print-1850-250405-p

Bingley Hall

Along with the cattle and poultry on show there was also a dog show in the Curzon Hall, an exhibition space first built to house dog shows in 1865, the first ‘dog show’, said to have taken place in Newcastle in 1859.  One for sporting dogs was tried in Birmingham a few months after this and was so successful that it was repeated with additional classes for non-sporting dogs and led the organisers to build the hall to host the shows.  By 1874, there were over a thousand entries for the dog show.  Seating three thousand and named after the local MP, the hall later became a space for circuses and other events, and then a cinema before it was demolished in around 1967.  In 1870, crowds of ‘fanciers and connoisseurs…criticise and admire the shape, build, and breed of hounds, harriers, mastiffs, bulldogs, terriers, spaniels, and fancy pet dogs, with queer-looking tails and still queerer names.’  These dog shows laid the foundation for the world famous Crufts Dog Show, first organised in London in 1891.

curzon hall

Curzon Hall

http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/19933/photos/187577

The importance of dogs in country life as working companions should not be forgotten. When a man or youth was depicted in a painting in a smock frock, a dog was usually never far away.  In this picture, ‘Rus in Urbe’ by Briton Rivière, a well-known animal painter, the boy was shown with his collie dog.  They were pictured on an urban doorstep, as alluded to by the title of the picture, translated as the ‘country in the city’, a phrase coined by the epigrammatist Martial in the first century AD to conjure up the illusion of the countryside in the city, usually through a building or a garden.  Here the countryside is represented by the smock-frock, gaiters and collie and, although the picture is dated 1890, these were the kind of visitors Birmingham was used to throughout this period.

briton riviere

 

http://www.pastorescozzese.com/storia/history/eng/storia2_e.htm

see also Workshop of the World, Birmingham’s Industrial Legacy, by Ray Shill, (The History Press, 2006)

A musical concert at Eastnor Castle

SlopShopLeave a comment

Eastnor Castle, near Ledbury in Herefordshire, now famed as a celebrity wedding venue and film location, was also the setting for entertainments in 1862.  The ‘castle’ was a nineteenth century building in various architectural revival styles from Norman to Italian Renaissance.  The foundation stone was laid in 1812 on the site of an older house, and work continued on the building into the mid-nineteenth century.  In 1862, the painter and muralist G. E. Fox was working on the great hall which had originally been designed by Robert Smirke in Romanesque style.  After recently visiting churches in Poitou, France, for inspiration, he added marble columns and alabaster capitals to Smirke’s blind arcade around the top of the hall.  On canvas attached to the walls below the arcade, he painted repetitive ‘Saracenic’ designs.  Apparently, the fresco painting was underway when a concert took place at the castle, attended by Lord and Lady Somers, their guests and local people, tradesmen and ‘even wearers of smock frocks’.  The hall was full, accommodating about four hundred people, and some had to be turned away.  The audience utilised ‘a large travelling “pagoda-like stage”, reaching to the ceiling, and constructed for enabling the artists to work at the frescoes, [which] was improvised into a gallery, and its numerous platforms filled with listeners’.  The impression given was that the hall was crammed with people of differing social status, from aristocracy down to those from a ‘humble life’, some almost literally hanging from the rafters in order to hear a concert.  Possibly not the best in terms of ‘health and safety’ but as the report noted, ‘it shows that a taste for music pervades the country’, and the smock frock was no barrier!

 

eastnor

Above: the great hall with painted frescoes as it appears today.

The Real Oliver Twist?

SlopShopLeave a comment

A strange story appeared in the Evening Mail in January 1831.  Maybe it is something Charles Dickens read as there are certainly echoes of Oliver Twist about it, although the real Oliver Twist was said to be Robert Blincoe, a workhouse boy, whose memoir of his early life was published in 1832.  It is the latter part of the intriguing story that has comparisons with Dickens’s tale, which was published as a serial from 1837.

So here goes:  the previous December, ‘a young country lad dressed in a new blue smock frock’, hence my interest, was brought before the magistrates as he had been found wandering near Westminster Abbey, trying to find his uncle, a sawyer.  At that time, before the Westminster Improvement Schemes from 1845, there were notorious slums in the area.  In the medieval period, an open space, the Broad Sanctuary, was in front of the Abbey and along its west side ran the city wall and ditch with a gateway opposite the Abbey. Outside the city gate on the low-lying area along the line of Tothill Street, houses were built, which, because of their central position, became, over the centuries, the nucleus of some very close-packed development.

The area was so cramped that by the early years of the nineteenth century it had become one of the most squalid and overcrowded rookeries of London, including ‘several sinks of iniquity and vice’. The most notorious of these, around the Pye Street area, was known locally as ‘The Devil’s Acre’.  The boy was destitute and had only a small bundle with importantly a clean pair of stockings, a shirt and Bible, symbolising his respectability.  Without intervention, he was likely to have fallen into the underclass of the slums.

He was called Joseph Hopkins and he had been placed on a farm four miles from Liverpool.  His mother was dead and his father was a sailor, who had sailed for New York but had fallen overboard on his last voyage.  He was fourteen years old and his master had been obliged to get rid of his servants a few days previously, giving Hopkins 30 shillings.  He had used this to travel to London, staying overnight at Northampton and sharing a room with ‘Jew pedlar’ who had robbed him of his money. The landlord gave him a shilling and 6d to continue and he assisted a drover to get his meals and work his way to London.  His uncle lived in Pimlico which he had thought was a street rather than an area and so had got lost. As a country lad, in a smock frock, the magistrate advised him to go back to where he had come from.

Crying outside the court, after the magistrate had given him this advice, a gentleman began to question Hopkins and having found him a bed for the night also got him a position in a house in Blackfriars Road.  He worked well and was liked and trusted by the household, so he was soon handling sums of money.  He was sent to a butter shop in Blackfriars a few days before with a shilling but failed to return.

Suspicions as they were, he was thus thought to be an imposter, only after money and part of a gang set to rob the house with inside knowledge.  After he had disappeared another youth turned up at the house asking for work as he, somewhat surprisingly, understood there was a position vacant.  He was sent away and enquiries made after him at police stations but he had disappeared.

oliver

While this was going on, a letter had come from the parish where Hopkins had originally lived near Liverpool, confirming ‘contrary to every expectation’ that he had the ‘highest character for honesty and integrity’ and was praised by all the farmers in the neighbourhood.  The mystery as to his whereabouts then deepened, as he had left his Bible behind in the Blackfriars Road house and that was stated to be his greatest treasure.  It was thus thought that the boy had been abducted by ‘some diabolical villain’, who sent the other youth to ask about his position.  The mystery was passed over to L division of the police for investigation and I am not sure what happened next or if he remained a missing orphan sucked into the London underworld, something the magistrates had tried to prevent.

Just one tale from the contemporary London of Charles Dickens, but one of lost country orphans in the big city, kindly gentlemen and gangs of thieves and villains who would entice or abduct new children to their ranks.  It was a rich furrow to plough for an author such as Dickens and a world he knew well.

Lincolnshire Blue

SlopShopLeave a comment

The Royal Agricultural Society, established in 1838 and granted a Royal charter in 1840, put on shows which quickly became an important part of the farming calendar, with events across the country.  The aim of the Society was to use science to help agriculture and so improve productivity to meet the needs of the growing population.  In 1854, their show was held in Lincoln and was deemed to be a great success with 23,000 admissions on the second day, the city illuminated and the old gateway lit with coloured lamps in the evenings.  The newspaper correspondent noted the interest shown by people in everything from implements to animals.  However, he also remarked on the dress of the Lincolnshire labourers, inspecting machines designed to save them work, in their ‘blue smock-frocks curiously embroidered with the needle which they delight to wear. Could the Royal Agricultural Society not do something in the way of suggesting a better and more convenient dress for the labourer than this extraordinary garment! They have greatly improved the other denizens of the farmyard, and might now with advantage take steps by which to avoid the reproach of doing everything for the cattle and nothing for the human beings who tend them’.

In other words, the smock frock was part of the problem – not modern and scientific, but was still popular and no official alternative had yet been put forward to encourage its disuse.  Blue smocks were common in many areas, along with green and brown.  The town of Newark in Nottinghamshire was a centre of ready-made smock manufacture and associated with those of a blue colour in particular.  As this was probably the closest large centre of smock manufacture to Lincolnshire, it is perhaps not surprising that blue smocks were common in the county.  Lincolnshire Museums hold one of this colour, from the 1840s, and worn near Sleaford.

 lincolnshire smock

 

The capaciousness of the garment is obvious and this made them dangerous as farming began to embrace steam power and the machine age, as promoted by the Royal Agricultural Society.  Apt to get caught in spokes and spindles and pull the wearer in behind, the smock’s days were starting to be numbered.

 

http://www.lincstothepast.com/exhibitions/treasures/smocks/

 

The Travelling Menagerie

SlopShopLeave a comment

Victorian non-elite provincial society is often seen as being insular and parochial, perhaps knowing little of the wider world, but the travelling menagerie and circus, which gained increasing popularity during the nineteenth century, added exoticism and a touch of foreignness to many locations. Showmen would travel around the countryside presenting both their rare, exotic animals, drawn from the colonies, and their performing acts.

One such showman was William Batty, who from the 1830s became one of the leading proponents of the animal menagerie and the circus generally.  He toured the provinces, stopping in major cities such as Liverpool, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Portsmouth and Southampton.  His acts included rope dancers, equestrians with various gymnastic displays, clowns, and exotic animals: zebras, elephant, lions and tigers.  By the mid-1840s, his lion tamer was called White and he presented a group of performing lions, tigers and leopards to the paying public.

800px-Lion_tamer_(LOC_pga.03749)

It was at one such show in 1850 at Market Hill in Barnsley that an incident occurred.  As the newspapers reported, one Saturday night, just before Christmas, during a show, shrieks were heard that ‘Th’ lions out! Th’ lions out!’  It turned out that this was not true – it was actually a leopard that had escaped and had got hold of the arm of an unfortunate individual named Charles Fleetwood, presumably a spectator, dragging him to the side of the cage.  Here, the smock frock he was wearing saved the day, the fabric both being strong enough to prevent initial harm and then the sleeve giving way, so that was all the leopard was left with, Fleetwood escaping with a ‘slight bruise’ to his arm.

As the report remarked, chaos had ensued, people inside the circus tent rolling amongst a ‘large fire-pan … [which] contained several gallons of blazing naphtha, and under the belly of the elephant without doing the least harm’, to escape the leopard.  The fire was presumably to give an exotic atmosphere but was obviously another hazard.   It was noted that three people had been seized by animals whilst viewing them in the last few weeks in different parts of the country, although they had displayed ‘a reckless temerity’ in getting too close to the ‘wild beasts’.

Even with the dangers, the wild beast menagerie, usually combined with a performing circus, remained popular throughout the period, Batty apparently worth half a million pounds at the time of his death.  Despite how we may regard performing and captive animals today, for ordinary people across Victorian England, they opened a window onto a different world, as with the Great Exhibition during the same year, 1850, and possibly fuelled dreams of running away to a circus.  And the smock frock proved the ultimate protective garment, not just from hard labour and weather, but also from the bite of a big cat!

http://www.circushistory.org/Frost/Frost8.htm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/0/20184882

 

 

A Portrait of a Rural Working Woman

SlopShop2 Comments

In researching smock frocks, I have been reading newspaper articles which detail ordinary people’s lives in a way that often gets lost in other historical evidence.  One such article from 1879, detailed the life of an “ordinary” mother in Gloucestershire.  It was recounted by Lady Stradbroke, whose subjective portrayal was of a respectable woman whom she knew personally. According to the account, the woman lived well and long, and was an example to the more feckless. Perhaps slightly patronising coming from a member of the elite but Lady Stradbroke’s aim however, was to get her peers to donate ready-made clothes to such women, as ‘the overworked mother has hardly time to mend and darn, and bake, and wash, and nurse the baby, much less to make clothes for herself and husband and children’.

Lady Stradbroke then detailed the un-named woman’s life:  she had married at eighteen, her husband about the same age being an agricultural labourer with wages of 15 shillings a week.  She also worked in the fields from 8 till 6 earning 10 pence a day.  She brought up nine children and made and mended all their clothing.  She got up at 5am and on washing days at 4am and was in bed between 9 and 10pm.  At harvest time she got up at 2am and with the children went gleaning at daybreak.  This was scouring the field for any of the crop that had been missed in harvesting and gathering that up for personal use.

On Saturdays, her work in the fields finished at 1pm, so she would walk to Bristol, three miles away, carrying a basket of clothes for her neighbour who was a laundress.  She would do any shopping needed, which she called ‘marketing’, presumably buying at a market rather than in the modern sense of the word in reference to promotion, and carry home her flour and purchases.  Saturday evening was spent baking, making a pair of trousers or smock frock, washing and ironing clothing for Sunday, and other jobs often until midnight.  She would then attend church on Sundays.

Presumably from a local charity, she received a loaf of bread and material for a shirt on the 30th January each year.  Her children began to work with her ‘almost as soon as they could toddle’ and grew up respectful, as also her grandchildren, ‘with a great capacity for work’.

This account was thus looking back at a working life during the course of the nineteenth century, as the implication is that the woman was dead when the article was written in 1879.  It is interesting that  ready-made clothes, clothing that is made up as we would buy it today, was seen as a boon to such working women by this elite lady, saving time and effort, whereas other contemporary commentators railed against it for being of poor quality, literally shoddy (the recycled rags of old clothes) and also by the end of the century, too fashionable rather than respectable, respectability always something the working class should aim for in the eyes of their self-appointed superiors.  There was also much consternation about the workers who made such clothing often for a pittance, the production of which increased after the sewing machine became more common place in the 1860s.

How true this account was is open to interpretation as it seems unlikely that Lady Stradbroke would know much detail, especially looking back in time.  But the generalities of rural existence, certainly as presented in the 1870s, make it interesting with the focus on idioms and the everyday routines of a hard life.