Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy (44 page)

Bradford Industrial Museum set in Moorside Mills gives you the opportunity to witness the differences between the lifestyles of mill workers and their superiors, with a fully equipped Mill Manager's House and a humble Victorian terrace known as Gaythorne Row decorated in the style of mill workers' cottages in the nineteenth century, the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

The Ironbridge Gorge in Telford has no less than ten museums specializing in the industrial history of this part of the world. The preserved Victorian town of Blists Hill is home to an iron foundry, blast furnaces and a brick and tile works where you can get an authentic taste of what it would have been like living in the midst of many industrial businesses. The former homes of members of the Darby family who owned Coalbrookdale Ironworks are open to visitors for you to see how this industrialist Quaker family lived. The old Coalport China Works has been turned into a museum where you can find out how fine china and glass products were made at the factory and take a tour of the social history gallery. In the 1880s Broseley Clay Tobacco Pipes Works was opened nearby and manufactured pipes in the village until the 1950s, when the factory was abandoned and left untouched until it became a museum in 1996. The Ironbridge website at www.ironbridge.org.uk has some brilliant pages about the history of the area and the companies who brought the Industrial Revolution to Telford.

Manchester is home to both the People's History Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry. The People's History Museum collects and conserves material relating to the history of working people in Britain and is where the Textile Conservation Studio and Labour History and Archive Study Centre are based. It has close links with the Museum of Science and Industry where there is a special Local History section tracking how Manchester changed from a Roman outpost to the world's first industrial city. The museum is a must for anybody with industrial roots in Manchester. Its collections encompass the textile industry, paper manufacturers, tool production, housing and sanitation and the website has snippets of oral history for you to download. Visit www.mosi.org.uk to get a taste of what's on offer.

Jane Horrocks grew up in Rawtenstall, which today is a small town in Lancashire but throughout the nineteenth century played an important part in the industrial revolution, specializing in the production of textiles from cotton. Indeed, the dozens of cotton mills in the town that operated from the mid-nineteenth century onwards provided the principal source of employment in the town.

Jane was able to construct a basic family tree using standard sources – birth, marriage and death certificates and census returns – and by looking at the occupations listed on each document established that several branches of her family worked in the cotton mills for a living. She was particularly interested in the women in her family tree, including Sarah Alice Cunliffe, her maternal great-grandmother.

Sarah Cunliffe was born in Rawtenstall in 1858, and according to her birth certificate her father John worked as a mechanic in a local cotton mill. This was confirmed by the census returns from 1861 onwards, where Jane was able to trace, decade by decade, the progress of the family. By 1881, Sarah Cunliffe, now aged 23, was working as a cotton weaver, joined by her 15-year-old sister Mary and 13-year-old brother George. Her parents died within two years of each other, in 1888 and 1890, leaving her to look after her younger siblings.

Jane was able to establish what conditions in the factory were like by reading contemporary accounts and examining photographs of Rawtenstall and its associated mills from the nineteenth century, gaining a sense of how harsh conditions would have been by looking at the daily rules and routines for each type of worker, and researching some of the likely injuries that would have come from the back-breaking tasks – risk of amputation of fingers or limbs, a dry cough caused by the fibres in the air, and constant ringing in the ears through the endless pounding of the looms hour after hour in an enclosed space. By visiting a working mill, some of the ferocity of the working environment became clear.

Yet life for the mill owners was in complete contrast to their employees, and the proprietors could afford large houses and a comfortable lifestyle. Jane discovered that one branch of cotton labourers, the Ashworth family, shared the same surname as one of the larger mill owners in Rawtenstall, James Henry Ashworth & Company, who were listed in a trade directory in the mid-nineteenth century. By following both family trees back in time, Jane was able to establish that they had actually shared a common ancestor in the seventeenth century; and that a quirk of fate had led her branch of the family into the mills as poor labourers, whilst the other side ended up owning them.

The Black Country Living Museum is an open-air urban heritage park where historic buildings from all over the Midlands have been rebuilt in tribute to the people who once lived at the heart of this industrial area to the west of Birmingham. The Black Country gained its name from the thick smoke pumped out by thousands of iron foundries and forges and the black spoil left over from coal mining in the countryside. Situated a mile from Dudley town centre, the museum is great for understanding what everyday life was like for ordinary workers in small industrial towns, from going to school to watching a silent movie in the 1920s cinema and visiting the many workshops and small factories to watch how people once worked.

If you would like to find a museum for a particular industry in the area where your ancestors lived then search the 24 Hour Museum's database of more than 3,800 museums, galleries and heritage sites at www.24hourmuseum.org.uk using the Advanced Search option. The website's City Heritage Guides give information about which attractions to visit in some of the biggest industrial towns in Britain, including Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, London and Newcastle
.

The National Museum Wales explores one of the country's most important industries at the National Wool Museum found in the former Cambrian Mills in the Teifi Valley, Carmarthenshire. Home to the National Flat Textile Collection, you can visit the restored mill buildings, see the machinery your ancestors would have worked with and have a go yourself at carding, spinning and sewing.

Northern Ireland celebrates its industrial heritage through the projects of the National Museums Northern Ireland. The Ulster Folk and Transport Museum has a special exhibition about the building of
Titanic
, and is home to the Living Linen Archive, set up to record oral history from workers in the industry. Their website contains an index of linen firms about which material has been gathered.

Some of our working-class ancestors found a voice and an outlet for their frustrations about their appalling working conditions by joining organized movements that could communicate their grievances to employers and local sympathizers. It is unsurprising that labour movements gained popularity in British industries renowned for their monopoly over the world market given the nature of their success. Wealthy industrialists praised globally for their business skills and innovation relied heavily on the cheap labour of unskilled, uneducated people who saw few of the financial rewards reaped by their company's success. In an era of political change when the importance of freedom of speech and universal suffrage were widely debated, workers found the confidence to unite and confront these issues. Those who went on strike did so at the risk of their job and often relied on charity for subsistence while they were on strike. The records left behind from these volatile times include strike fund registers, reports, newspaper articles and specially published journals.

Chartism was a movement that gathered momentum among the industrial working class when economic depression was just around the corner in the 1840s, with its grassroots based in Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, the Black Country, Middlesbrough and Scotland. The movement was originally started around 1837 by a group of skilled London artisans in response to the Great Reform Act of 1832, which had promised universal male suffrage but in practice gave it only to the propertied classes. Consequently, and after many public meetings and riots, the Chartists drew up their own bill requesting democracy for all men and in 1848 presented it to Parliament with a petition. The propertied classes were fearful at the possibility of revolution spreading to Britain from the Continent, and the government used military force and the powers of the press to ridicule the Chartists into eventual submission. Some Chartist activists were caught, punished and even executed. If you believe your ancestor was one of them then read
Chapter 27
about how to locate evidence of a criminal ancestor.

Records concerning the Chartists and other political labour movements are held at the Labour History and Archive Study Centre found in the People's History Museum in Manchester and you can find out more about these men online from the Chartist Ancestors website at www.chartists.net. Chartist Ancestors contains the names of many Chartists drawn from newspaper reports, court records and contemporary books. The Chartist Ancestors website has a sister site for Trade Union Ancestors where information about other industrial labour movements can be found
.

The Independent Labour Party (ILP), a forerunner to the Labour Party, was formed in 1893 as a result of the Manningham Mills strike in
Bradford. Manningham Mills (later known as Lister's Mills), built in 1873, was the largest textile mill in northern England. In December 1890 the mill workers there went on strike in response to wage reductions. The strike was to last until April the following year, during which time clashes with the Bradford authorities gave the movement national attention. The strike has been recognized as historically significant because it marked a crisis in the relations and opposing interests of textile employees and employers, and highlighted the imbalance of power. A growing awareness of class hostility and the need for political representation emerged in the West Riding of Yorkshire and key activists in the Manningham movement set up the Bradford Labour Union, which formed the ILP two years later. If you think your ancestor was part of this momentous social and political movement then you may be interested in reading Cyril Pearce's analysis in
The Manningham Mills Strike, Bradford, December 1890–April 1891
. Records concerning the strike are held at West Yorkshire Archive Service at Bradford Central Library.

The Trade Union Archives at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, holds the records of some trade unions that protected factory, foundry and mill workers, such as the Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton Spinners etc. of Lancashire and Adjoining Counties. They also have monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and annual reports of the Friendly Society of Ironfounders, 1850–1920, that give names of new entrants organized chronologically by branch. Most of the trade union records deposited at the Modern Records Centre do not include membership records, but their papers may be of interest if you know your ancestor was involved in a particular movement.

The Working Class Movement Library in Salford houses a collection of books, pamphlets, periodicals, archives and artefacts expressing the concerns and activities of labour movements since the 1700s. The Library Catalogue can be searched by keyword from the WCML website.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has been operating since 1868 and has created The Union Makes Us Strong website, where a digitized register of around 700 matchworkers from the East End of London, most of them young women, who went on strike against the Bryant & May Match Factory in 1888, can be searched. The matchworkers went on strike in revolt against the sacking of three of their colleagues as a result of speaking to the radical journalist Annie Besant about their working conditions. There is a great deal of history about the activity of
matchmakers and the strike as well as an abundance of digitized documents, photographs and a search engine to search the Match Workers Strike Fund Register set up by Besant at www.unionhistory.info/matchworkers/matchworkers.php. The TUC website also has a timeline of its history where other major strikes can be researched, including the General Strike of 1926. If you would like to find other records of the TUC the London Metropolitan University holds the TUC Library Collections.

Very often working-class people joined labour movements out of frustration in an attempt to improve their living and working conditions. These frustrations were magnified at times of economic depression and hardship. If you think your relatives were affected by economic disasters such as the one that led to the Lancashire Cotton Famine, then poor relief records are worth looking into. Records of Poor Law Guardians are arranged by parish and should be found in the relevant county record office. For more information on locating records for poverty-stricken ancestors see
Chapter 24
.

‘
People joined labour movements in an attempt to improve their living and working conditions
.'

Suggestions for further reading:

•  Work, Society and Politics: The culture of the factory in later Victorian England
by Patrick Joyce (Gregg Revivals, 1991)

•  The Hungry Mills
by Norman Longmate (Temple Smith, 1978)

•  Women's Factory Work in World War I
by Gareth Griffiths (Alan Sutton, 1991)

•  Scotland since 1707: The Rise of an Industrial Society
by Roy Hutcheson Campbell (Donald, 1985)