Shopping Saturday - Go east my son!

A bundle of 1950s hire purchase statements for a spin drier, a washing machine and a fridge might not seem the most promising starting point for an interesting bit of family and social history.  But bear with me ...

I found the carefully preserved statements amongst the belongings of my great aunts - "Nancy" Thompson and Lillian Barton.  The first thing that struck me was how expensive everything was!

The spin drier bought in 1959 was £32 - £600 today.  And they paid £68 and £71 for the washing machine bought in 1961 and the fridge bought in 1963 - that's over £1,000, ($1,500), each today.

My aunts were comfortably off but certainly not rich.   Nancy, was a nursing supervisor and Lillian, who was separated from her husband, didn't work.  These precious - to any housewife! - items represented a major outlay of money.  The statements from Roomes of Upminster, suggest the hire purchase was very quickly paid off, so there must have been some serious saving to  afford them.

Mystery Monday - There but not there!

Lillian Newnham, the daughter of William Essex Newnham and Margaret Gill, was born in Guisborough, Yorkshire in 1879.  Her parents had only moved to Yorkshire from Woolwich, London a few years before her birth and  the rest of the Newnham and Gill families - apart from her mother's brother Edward who came north with them - remained in London.

Census records show Lillian living in the Guisborough area with her family in 1881 and 1891 but after that no trace can be found of her in census, marriage or death records and she effectively disappears.

Except she doesn't.  For in the belongings inherited from her nieces - my great aunts - she is ever present.

There are photos of a slightly austere but stylish woman in the 1920s, gorgeous Raphael Tuck Oilette post cards sent to her nieces in  the 1930s and beautifully inscribed books given to her nieces and nephews as birthday and Christmas presents.

Obituary Sunday - A Wartime Nurse

Marjorie Thompson died on August 5th 1945 aged just 35 from a heart attack caused by her asthma.  Although, still young she had had a successful nursing career and shortly before her death was appointed deputy head of district nurses and midwives across the county of Norfolk.

To die young is always cruel but to do so having just come through the second world war seems particularly so. Marjorie's death came three months after the end of the war in Europe and just 10 days before the end of the war in Japan.

Marjorie's obituary, which I found amongst her sisters' belongings, appears to be from a local newspaper in Woodbridge, Suffolk where she had been a district nurse.

Talented Tuesday - A "Brown Dog" Nurse

Marjorie Thompson (1910-1945) was born in Hartlepool in County Durham in the north of England. Her father's family had lived in County Durham and the neighbouring county of North Yorkshire for at least 500 years, but her mother's family - the Newnhams - had only moved north from London in the 1870s.

In the late 1920s, Marjorie left Durham for London to train as a nurse.  Marjorie's motivations for choosing to train in London are not clear.  The impact of the great depression on the north east of England was severe and Marjorie's father lost the small shop he kept in the mining village of Esh Winning as a result of it, but Marjorie actually left for London at least 6 months before the stock market crash of October 1929, which is generally seen as the start of the depression and so, it may have been the still strong family ties of the Newnham family that drew her south.

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner that I love Middlesbrough!

Woolwich Arsenal © 2009 Loz Flowers Creative Commons Licence

My grandfather was born and raised in the north of England in the 1920s but he was a lifelong "Gooner".  That is - for those of you not fans of English football - he supported Arsenal, a football club founded in south London in 1886.  It wasn't that he was disloyal but that his mother's family had moved north from London where they had all worked at the great Woolwich Arsenal ordnance works, the birth place of Arsenal football club.

I was incredibly surprised on first discovering that my "northern" grandfather was - at least half - a Londoner.  The story didn't seem to fit with the picture I had of migration to the great industrial cities of northern England that grew like wildfire in the 19th Century.  I thought these cities had been built on local rural workers and migrants from those areas of the UK that suffered the worst agriculturally - Ireland, Scotland, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cornwall and the like.  Not Londoners!

I couldn't understand why my grandfather's family would have moved from south London where they were settled and had employment to the area around Middlesbrough in north Yorkshire to which they had no ties.  The work at the Arsenal was certainly hard - my grandfather's grandmother filled ammunition caps there when she was just a child - but it was still employment and the ironstone mines of Middlesbrough were hardly offering anything easier!

So I started to research whether this was a personal journey or one that other families had made at a similar time.  What I uncovered completely changed my understanding of 19th Century migration within the United Kingdom.  From a quick analysis of the census I discovered over 50 families made the journey from Woolwich to Middlesbrough and the surrounding villages of the "rusty gold" ironstone  mines as Middlesbrough grew at a phenomenal speed from a village of just 154 people in 1831 to "Ironopolis" or as Gladstone described it an "infant Hercules" and a population of over 90,000 by 1901.

Families in Middlesbrough, Guisbrough, Marske, Skelton, Wilton & Redcar connected to Woolwich
1861 Hormer, Keay, Bruntfield
1871 Patterson, White, Grundy, Everson, Edwards, Shaw, Taylor, Waterman, Gatehouse
1881 Armstrong, Hodder, Newton, Newnham, Gill, Wiltshire, Bingham, Buss, Cook, Copus, Denney, Higgins, Jessop, King, Oldham, Tindale, Walker, Ward, Watts, Wray, Wright
1891 Drew, Oheara, Holmes, Sadler, Smith
1901 Havord, Jones, Lawrence, Moulton, Naylor, Walker, White
1911 Tucker, Cafferey, Denney, Dormelly, Easton, Gibbins, Haggerty, Lawrence, McLoughlin, MacNeil, Mitchell, Pearson, Rice, Stevens, Wagg, Walker, Waylor, White, Young

Middlesbrough from Guisborough © 2007 T Brelstaff Creative Commons Licence

What these records seem to show is that the new cities of the north needed not just raw unskilled agricultural labour but also skilled or at least semi-skilled workers that they had to recruit from previously industrialised areas.  And that there was an ongoing need to recruit workers not just as the cities grow but as their core industries changed and developed, with the majority of the Woolwich families moving to Middlesbrough in the 1870s and later when Middlesbrough was being forced through global competition to innovate radically to hold onto its position as the world's largest steel producer.

Further research into these families also challenged my preconception that migration to the new cities of the north was a one off.  I thought that families "upped sticks", moved and then stayed put in their new home.  But the migration patterns of the Woolwich families are much more complicated.  Some of them seem to have been long time south London and Kent families, but others such as the Gills who originated from Worcestershire & Herefordshire had only been in Woolwich for one generation before moving north and other such as the Gatehouses, Ohearas and Newtons were actually local Yorkshire families who had moved to Woolwich and then back up to Middlsbrough.

What emerges is a pattern of families moving backwards and forwards taking skills with them and returning with new skills.  And it was a pattern that my grandfather continued.  In the 1930s, still in his teens he got on a train by himself and made the journey back south to London to start as an apprentice at - of course - the Royal Ordnance Works in Woolwich.

Please do add your posts on migration within or to the United Kingdom to the linky below:

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Researching patterns of migration from and to places that your family lived is pretty straightforward but requires a little patience.  If you have some migration clues from your own family history, it's simply a question of searching for census records containing both places names or if specific villages aren't producing results with county names.  If you don't have any clues to start from it's a matter of wading through census searches for your target place to see if records come up with births or deaths outside the county and then using these for more specific searches to see if they are individual movements or part of something wider.