For this one, I am thinking only an Apple mini-series could do it justice.
I’ve mentioned the Bryant family before: my husband’s great-grandmother was a Bryant and her father, John, came to America from Padbury, in Buckinghamshire, England. His sister, Hannah, is my focus today.
Let me set the scene:
It’s 1841, the start of the Victorian era in England. Crowned queen in 1837, Victoria married her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in 1840.[1] For ag laborer William Bryant, his wife Philis, and their five children, all the hoopla around the Queen’s marriage must have seemed a world away. The newspapers of the time regaled their readers with every detail of the elaborate ceremony and the celebrations before and after the wedding.[2] While it appears neither William nor Philis could read (they signed their marriage register with “Xs”), talk of the festivities must have been common. One paper reported that the Queen’s wedding was celebrated “in many villages by donations of some kind or another amongst the poor inhabitants,” of which William’s family was likely included.[3]
As you may remember, Victoria was one of the first women to wear a white wedding dress, a trend that continues today. She also adorned her dress with handmade “Honiton lace,” from Devon. “Her Majesty wore a magnificent lace robe and veil of the most exquisite workmanship. …. Her train was of white satin, with a deep fringe of lace, and she looked the impersonification (sic) of dignity, gentleness, and love, as she advanced up the aisle to the altar.”[4] It was reported that the cost of the lace was £1,000.[5] Yikes! In 2021, the relative value of £1,000 was about £96,000 or $119,145.[6]
So, about that lace. The 1851 England Census reveals that William (an “Ag. Laborer”) and Philis had two of their eight children living with them in Padbury: nineteen-year-old John, (also an “Ag. Laborer) and little ten-year-old Hannah, a “Lacemaker.”[7] Of the 72,727 women enumerated in 1851 in Buckinghamshire, 10,487 of them were lacemakers, including 2,045 girls ages 5 to 14.[8]
Children (mostly girls) learned to make lace at a very early age. It was thought that best that the girls begin at five or even younger while their small fingers were still nimble. To learn the craft, girls were sent to the many “lace schools” in Buckinghamshire (about four or five per village). In some parishes there were no ordinary elementary schools, just the lace schools.[9] Packed together with as many as twenty or thirty girls in a twelve-foot square room, they were expected to work between four hours (for five- or six-year-olds) to sixteen hours (for the twelve- to fifteen-year-olds). The work took a physical toll on the girls, causing damage to their spines and loss of vision.[10]
Despite the cruel conditions and physical harm to their daughters, hardly any other work opportunities existed for women and girls and the families could not have survived without their income, as meager as it was.[11] Of the 660 residents of Padbury in 1851, eighty women and girls were lace makers, although apparently that might be an undercount.[12] The only lace dealers in Padbury were Richard Viccaro and his son, Richard. I can’t tell if they were “large” dealers but if they had all the women in the village working for them, their business would have been considerable.
The largest lace dealer in Buckinghamshire was Thomas Gilbert of High Wycombe who contracted with about 3,000 lacemakers. Gilbert insisted his workers buy their materials from him, at a cost of about one-third the value of the finished lace.[13] This was likely true of the Viccaros.
The plight of the lacemakers was not lost on the general public. In 1848, “A Lover of Fair Play” wrote a letter to the editor of The Buckingham Advertiser and Aylesbury News entitled “The Ruined Lace-Makers”:
She is a good hand indeed who can earn 2s. a-week, by sitting for twelve or fourteen hours a day over her lace-pillow, but the great bulk of lace-makers do not earn upon an average more than 1s. a-week. Many of these poor girls are driven to walk the streets for a morsel of bread. …[A]nd all who attempt to earn their bread by it are also ruined.[14]
Fast forward eight years: Hannah’s parents had died that summer of 1859, less than three weeks apart and brother John had gone to America some years earlier. [15] What of Hannah? She had only two siblings still living in Padbury: Elizabeth, married to Thomas Gibbs, and Fanny working for the Gibbs as a house servant.[16] Could she have lodged with them? Sadly, it appears not.
In 1861, twenty-one-year-old Hannah was an “inmate” in the Buckingham workhouse with her two-month-old daughter Agnes.[17]
The English workhouse system likely began in 1601 with the passage of The Act for the Relief of the Poor,” although parochial poor relief extended back to the fifteenth century.[18] By the mid-1700’s, about 600 parish workhouses had been established in England and Wales. In 1723, the Workhouse Test Act instituted the “workhouse test” requiring each resident to undertake some kind of work in return for relief.[19] The 1861 census shows Hannah was working as a lacemaker, typical “industrial employment” for women and girl inmates.[20]
Agnes was born in the middle of February in Lechhamstead, about the six miles or so from Buckingham.[21] She was one of 337 children born out of wedlock and registered in Buckinghamshire that year. Of the two dozen or so children living in the workhouse, many were the children of unmarried women.[22]
We know Hannah was able to escape the workhouse and move to Toddington, Bedfordshire, where her second child Joseph was born 1863. I have not been able to discover why Hannah was in Toddington, about forty miles from Buckingham. Regardless, she wasn’t there long as her third child, William Thomas, was born in the Buckingham workhouse two years later.[23]
Living in the workhouse with three small children must have been horrible and that was not unintentional. Life inside a workhouse was designed to be as “off-putting” as possible. [24]While children were generally separated from their parents, because they were so small, it is possible Hannah’s would have been allowed to stay with her in the female section, likely all four sharing one bed.[25]
In an unexpected development (to me), Hannah married Henry Smith in 1869 while they were both inmates at the Buckingham Union Workhouse.[26] Was Henry the father of Hannah’s children? That would likely explain why they were given permission to leave the workhouse and get married. With a name like “Smith,” I am having trouble getting a bead on where he came from (according to Ancestry, there are hundreds of Henry Smiths in the 1861 and 1871 England censuses).
In 1871, Hannah was back living in the Buckingham workhouse with her children Joseph, William, and new baby, John.[27] Agnes is not listed in the census, indicating that she likely died sometime before her tenth birthday. The new baby was born just the year before in the Oxford Union Workhouse.[28] Henry was identified in several records as a “house painter,” so perhaps he found employment in Oxford, Oxfordshire, although obviously not sufficient to keep his family out of the workhouses. Henry was not enumerated with Hannah in 1871 nor can I locate him in either Buckinghamshire or Oxfordshire in 1871.
Nevertheless, he must have been “around” at least some because in November of 1877, Hannah gave birth to her fifth child, Fanny Smith. For Fanny’s birth, she was back in her hometown of Padbury.[29] Could this mean she had escaped the workhouse? Perhaps. In February 1881, Henry died of “congestion of the lung, heart disease, and exposure to the weather” while an inmate in the Buckingham workhouse.[30] Two months later, Hannah was enumerated in the census as head of house in Padbury with her four living children and her aunt, Ann Bryant.[31] Both Ann and Hannah were lacemakers. It’s hard to tell whether Hannah and Henry had been separated long, but the evidence may point in that direction.
Hannah and family were living in the same section of Padbury (“Old End”) as she had with her parents forty years earlier.[32] Today, of the eighteen or so buildings on Old End, five are on the National Heritage List for England, a register of the country’s most significant historic buildings and sites.[33]
Life seemed to take an upward tick for Hannah when, in October of 1882, she married Allen Bandy, a widower from Steeple Claydon with four children of his own.[34] Allen’s first wife, Ann Innis, died in the previous summer of 1881. While Steeple Claydon is about eight miles from Padbury, it is likely Allen and Hannah knew each other since childhood as the 1851 census, shows both their families living on “Old End.”[35] After their marriage, Hannah and her children moved in with Allen in Steeple Claydon and the couple had three more children: Ellen in 1883; George in 1884; and an infant boy in 1885, who died at 48 hours old and was not registered).[36]
According to the 1891 censuses, Hannah no longer had to work.[37] Allen and his two teenaged sons were farm laborers, while their daughter Ellen and son George attended school. By this time in England, school attendance for children aged five to ten was compulsory and while some parents could not afford to give up the income earned by their children it appears Allen and his older sons made enough so that neither of the little ones had to work. [38]
Allen died at the Royal Buck Hospital in 1903 when he was sixty-five.[39] The fact that he died at a private hospital is perhaps another indication that he made a decent-enough living to support himself and his family. Hannah died four years later at the home of her daughter and son-in-law, Alfred and Fanny (Smith) Biddlecombe.[40] I’d like to think that in her later years, Hannah was living happily in the town of her birth, surrounded by her daughter and grandchildren. After such a hard life, I think she deserved some comfort.
__________________________
[1] Wikipedia.org, “Queen Victoria,” rev. 16:21, 23 May 2023. As listed in the newspapers of the time, he was “his Royal Highness Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emanuel, Duke of Daze, Prince of Saxe Coburg and Gotha, Knight of the most Noble order of the Garter.” “Her Majesty’s Marriage,” The Maidstone Gazette and Kentish Courier (Kent, England), 11 February 1840, p. 3, col. 4.
[2] “Marriage of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen of England with Prince Albert of Saxe Coburg and Gotha,” The Aylesbury News and Advertiser (Buckinghamshire, England), 15 February 1840, p. 6-7.
[3] “Festivities,” The Oxford (England) Journal, 15 February 1840, p. 3, col. 4.
[4] “Marriage of the Queen,” The Dover (England) Chronicle, 15 February 1840, p. 4, col 1-3.
[5] “Celebration of her Majesty’s Marriage, Reading Mercury, Oxford Gazette, Newbury Herald, and Berks County (England) Paper, 15 February 1840, p. 4, col. 1-3.
[6] "Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a UK Pound Amount, 1270 to Present," MeasuringWorth (https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ukcompare/relativevalue.php : accessed 30 May 2023).
[7] 1851 England census, database, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 14 June 2023), entry for William Briant (age 54), Old End, Padbury, Buckinghamshire; citing the National Archives, H0107, piece 1724, folio 287, page 5, ED 7f, household 18.
[8] Pamela Horn, “Child Workers in the Pillow Lace and Straw Plait Trades of Victorian Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire,” The Historical Journal, Vol. 17, No. 4 (December 1974), pp. 779-796, specifically Table I p. 780; image copy, JSTOR (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2638556 : accessed 30 May 2023). I noted two four-year-old female lacemakers in my review of the census records.
[9] Horn, “Child Workers,” 782-83.
[10] Horn, “Child Workers,” 784-85.
[11] Horn, “Child Workers,” 785-86.
[12] Horn, “Child Workers,” 780, Table I, note.
[13] Horn, “Child Workers,” 787.
[14] “The Ruined Lace-Makers,” The Buckingham Advertiser and Aylesbury News, 13 May 1848, p. 7, col. 1.
[15] England, General Register Office, Buckingham/Buckingham, 1857 Deaths, entry 357, William Bryant, died 18 August, registered 18 August 1859; PDF obtained May 2023, HM Passport Office, General Register Office (https://www.gro.gov.uk). England, General Register Office, Buckingham/Buckingham, 1859 Deaths, entry 353, Phillis Bryant, died 31 July, registered 3 August 1859; PDF obtained May 2023, HM Passport Office, General Register Office (https://www.gro.gov.uk).
[16] 1861 England census, database, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 14 June 2023), entry for Thomas Gibbs (age 38), Main St., Padbury, Buckinghamshire; citing the National Archives, Rg 9, piece 878, folio 128, page 3, ED 8, household 12.
[17] 1861 England census, database, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 14 June 2023), entry for Hannah Bryant (age 21), Union Workhouse, Buckingham, Buckinghamshire; citing the National Archives, Rg 9, piece 878, folio 12, page 5, ED 71.
[18] Peter Higginbotham, “The Old Poor Law,” The Workhouse (https://www.workhouses.org.uk/poorlaws/oldpoorlaw.shtml#Act1601 : accessed 31 May 2023).
[19] Ibid.
[20] Horn, “Child Workers,” 789.
[21] England, General Register Office, Buckingham/Lechhampstead, 1861 Births, entry 291, Agnes Eliza Bryant, born 13 February, registered 22 February 1861; PDF obtained May 2023, HM Passport Office, General Register Office (https://www.gro.gov.uk).
[22] Out of 5,019 births for Buckinghamshire. “Table Showing the Number of Births, of Births of Children Born Out of Wedlock, and of Deaths … in 1861,” Twenty-Fourth Annual Report of the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in England (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottswoode, printers, 1893); image, Hathitrust.org (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433087546440&view=1up&seq=1 : accessed 31 May 2023).
[23] England, General Register Office, Woburn Union/Toddington, 1863 Births, entry 44, Joseph Bryant, born 13 October, registered 18 November 1863; PDF obtained May 2023, HM Passport Office, General Register Office (https://www.gro.gov.uk). England, General Register Office, Buckingham/Buckingham, 1865 Births, entry 2, William Thomas Bryant, born 31 January, registered 10 February 1865; PDF obtained May 2023, HM Passport Office, General Register Office (https://www.gro.gov.uk).
[24] Peter Higginbotham, “Introduction,” The Workhouse (https://www.workhouses.org.uk/intro/ : accessed 31 May 2023).
[25] Peter Higginbotham, “Children in the Workhouse,” The Workhouse (https://www.workhouses.org.uk/education/ : accessed 31 May 2023).
[26] England, Certified Copy of an Entry of Marriage for Henry Smith and Hannah Bryant, 3 May 1869; obtained May 2023, HM Passport Office, General Register Office (https://www.gro.gov.uk).
[27] 1871 England census, database, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 14 June 2023), entry for Hannah Smith (age 30), North End, Union Workhouse, Buckingham, Buckinghamshire; citing the National Archives, RG10, piece 1423, folio 12, page 15.
[28] England, General Register Office, Headington Union/Saint Clement, 1870 Births, entry 188, John Smith, born 17 February, registered 14 March 1870; PDF obtained May 2023, HM Passport Office, General Register Office (https://www.gro.gov.uk).
[29] England, General Register Office, Buckingham/Buckingham, 1877 Births, entry 446, Fanny Smith, born 14 November, registered 31 December 1877; PDF obtained May 2023, HM Passport Office, General Register Office (https://www.gro.gov.uk).
[30] England, General Register Office, Buckingham/Buckingham, 1881 Deaths, entry 88, Henry Smith, died 13 Jan, registered 14 Jan 1881; PDF obtained May 2023, HM Passport Office, General Register Office (https://www.gro.gov.uk).
[31] 1881 England census, database, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 14 June 2023), entry for Hannah Smith (age 40), Old End, Padbury, Buckinghamshire; citing the National Archives, RG11, piece 1485, folio 131, page 18.
[32] 1841 England census, database, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 14 June 2023), entry for William Briant (age 44), Old End, Padbury, Buckinghamshire; citing the National Archives, Class H0104, piece 44, folio 12, page 18, ED 8.
[33] Historic England (https://historicengland.org.uk : accessed 7 June 2023).
[34] England, Certified Copy of an Entry of Marriage for Allen Bandy and Hannah Smith, 14 October 1882; obtained May 2023, HM Passport Office, General Register Office (https://www.gro.gov.uk).
[35] 1851 England census, database, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 14 June 2023), entry for William Bandy (age 53), Old End, Padbury, Buckinghamshire; citing the National Archives, Class H0107, piece 1724, folio 292, page 14 (page 5 for William Briant and family).
[36] England, General Register Office, Buckingham/Buckingham, 1883 Births, entry 380, Ellen Banydy, born 18 March, registered 28 April 1859; PDF obtained May 2023, HM Passport Office, General Register Office (https://www.gro.gov.uk). England, General Register Office, Buckingham/Buckingham, 1884 Births, entry 33, George Bandy, born 22 March, registered 3 April 1883; PDF obtained May 2023, HM Passport Office, General Register Office (https://www.gro.gov.uk). "Deaths (son of Hannah Bandy0," Buckingham (England) Advertiser and Free Press, 5 Dec 1885, p.8, col. 5; digital image, Findmypast.com (https://search.findmypast.com/bna/viewarticle?id=BL/0001082/18851205/090&stringtohighlight=hannah%20bandy : accessed 11 May 2023).
[37] 1891 England census, database, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 14 June 2023), entry for Allen Bandy (age 52), Claydon Hill, Steeple Claydon, Buckinghamshire; citing the National Archives, RG12, piece 1155, folio 76, page 6.
[38] “The 1870 Education Act,” UK Parliament (https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/livinglearning/school/overview/1870educationact/ : accessed 7 June 2023).
[39] England, General Register Office, Aylesbury/Aylesbury, 1903 Deaths, entry 453, Allen Bandy, died 2 May, registered 4 May 1903; PDF obtained May 2023, HM Passport Office, General Register Office (https://www.gro.gov.uk). Originally called the Buckinghamshire Infirmary, the story is that it became “Royal” after the future Edward VII received treatment there.
[40] England, General Register Office, Buckingham/Tingewich, 1907 Deaths, entry 4-78, Hannah Bandy, died 24 January, registered 25 January 1907; PDF obtained May 2023, HM Passport Office, General Register Office (https://www.gro.gov.uk).
