Our Daily Bread

Barony Mills.

The type of bread or grain your ancestors ate depended on which part of Britain they lived in, and which time period. In the middle of the 18th century, many labouring families in the northern counties lived on bread made from barley, or barley and rye.

They also lived on porridge or gruel made from oatmeal, and oat cakes. (Dr Johnson famously defined 'oats' as 'a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people').

Part of the mill machinery.

Which grain was grown depended on the soil, and the local climate. By the early 19th century, about 3.3 million acres of wheat was grown in England, plus about 2 million acres of barley.


In Cheshire, wheat, oats and potatoes were grown, but very little barley. However in Sussex, wheat, barley, oats, and rye were grown. In East Lothian in the 1790s, wheat, oats and barley were grown.


Whether barley or grain was used to make flour, the basic process of milling it to make flour changed little since very ancient times. The grains were ground between 2 pieces of stone (querns) powered either by hand, wind, or a waterwheel. Roller milling was introduced in the industrial revolution.

The overshot waterwheel.

Last year we enjoyed a tour of Barony Mills, Birsay - the last water-powered beremeal mill on Orkney. The mill was built in 1873, but it's thought that a mill has been on the site since Viking times. Beremeal (pronounced BEARmeal) is used to make bread, biscuits, and bannocks, and

The author setting the big wheel in motion!

very tasty they are too. I was allowed to set the mill machinery going, which was very exciting!

During the Regency era, the price of bread varied hugely owing to several factors - uncertain harvests, the war with France, and (in 1815) the Corn Laws, which artificially raised the price of grain, were introduced to protect the profits of the landowning classes.

When high food prices coincided with a scarcity of work, the government knew that trouble such as food riots were in the offing. The government, and local magistrates relied on spies and informers to let them know if trouble was brewing on the home front, and I'll be discussing what kinds of people were employed as spies in a later blog post..

All Aboard The Shroppie Fly!

Saturn.

We took advantage of a nice sunny day recently to enjoy a visit to our unique local attraction, the Anderton Boat Lift.

Anderton Boat Lift.

 It is always a treat to see this amazing feat of engineering, but this time we had a special surprise - the historic Shropshire Union flyboat, Saturn, was moored on the Weaver at the bottom of the boat lift.

Saturn, which has recently been restored, has had a chequered history.
 



She originally carried cheese from Cheshire to Manchester. Flyboats usually had four-man crews - two on duty, two off.
They were the fastest vessels on the canals, and perfect for carrying perishable goods.
The volunteers who were looking after Saturn very kindly invited us on board to have a peek inside the cabin and cargo hold. As Saturn is used for education, the interior has been decorated to resemble a family narrow-boat cabin. We very much enjoyed looking around inside.

Cabin shelves and crockery.

After cooling off with an icecream from the visitor centre at the Boat Lift, we explored the museum downstairs, and I tried on a traditional boatwoman's bonnet. I don't think it's the most flattering headgear I've ever worn!
All photos © Sue Wilkes.

Cabin stove.

Cargo hold.

Jessie Stephen: Servant and Suffragette

Today I'd like to welcome fellow Pen and Sword author Michelle Higgs to my blog. Michelle's wonderful new book Servants' Stories is out now., and Jessie Stephen's career is just one of the many amazing true stories inside:

JESSIE STEPHEN: THE HOUSEMAID WHO BECAME A SUFFRAGETTE AND TRADE UNIONIST

By her own admission, Jessie Stephen was no ordinary housemaid. Born in 1893, she was the daughter of a tailor who worked for the Co-operative Society in Glasgow. She wanted to be a schoolteacher and when she was 14, she won a scholarship to secondary school. Sadly, Jessie had to leave a year later when her father became temporarily unemployed. Duty to one’s parents and contributing to the family finances had to come first. 

When she was interviewed about her life in 1977, she recalled:

“trade was so bad that particular year [1908], I had to go out to work. I went to one or two jobs, factory jobs, but it was only half a crown a week and I wasn’t helping Mother. So I said I’ll find a job in service because at any rate the money will be completely free of any expense to Mother. Of course, you’d have your board and lodging… I am grateful to my Dad. He cried a bit when I was said I was going…he wanted something better for me but of course in later years, I justified his appreciation of what I’d learned.”

(From recorded interview in LSE Library’s collections, ref: 8SUF/B/157, 1 July 1977.)

Like so many working-class girls, Jessie Stephen went into domestic service as a ‘general’, working first in Glasgow. She quickly found she was better educated than many of the mistresses she served. Jessie described one of the homes in which she worked:

“There were four [servant] girls … [and] they had two bathrooms [in the house] but we weren’t allowed to use the bath. Oh, no! We had to go in the wash-house and have our bath in the copper, warm the water and get in the copper, one of the girls holding the door so any of the men who might pass couldn’t get in. It was humiliation that servants had to suffer back then, as if we were different creatures. We were often very much cleaner than they were because we were always taught to be clean. Every one of us had a bath every week, my Mother saw to that.”

Not content with her lot, Jessie became a labour activist at an early age; she was made vice-president of the Maryhill branch of the Independent Labour Party at the age of 16. She was also a militant suffragette and a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union; while wearing her maid’s uniform, she dropped acid into pillar boxes to destroy the contents.

Determined to improve the working lives of her fellow servants, Jessie was also involved in founding a domestic workers’ union in Glasgow in 1913. There were minor successes, but it was difficult to recruit members and the union eventually became affiliated to the Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain.

You can find out more about Jessie Stephen’s experiences as a domestic servant in Servants’ Stories: Life Below Stairs in their Own Words 1800-1950 by Michelle Higgs (Pen & Sword, 2015).

Michelle’s blog about servants is at http://servantsstories.blogspot.co.uk and you can also follow her on Twitter: @michellehiggs11.

IMAGES:

Jessie Stephen, 1930. (Source: Bundesarchiv Bild 102-09812, Jessie Stephen).

Members of the Women's Social and Political Union campaigning for women's suffrage in Kingsway, circa 1911. (Source: The Suffragette by Sylvia Pankhurst. New York: Source Book Press, 1970. First published by Sturgis & Walton Company, 1911. Facing p. 174)

Blue plaque for Jessie Stephen MBE (1893-1979) in Chessel Street, Bristol. (Source: Flickr: Jessie Stephen MBE. Author: Trevor Johnson)

Regency Spies Now Available For Pre-Order!

I'm thrilled to announce that my forthcoming book Regency Spies is now available for pre-order from Amazon UK or from the publisher, Pen & Sword. Launch date is currently scheduled for 30 November 2015. 
Here's a preview of the blurb to whet your appetite:

                                                                          Regency Spies:  

                                            Secret Histories of Britain’s Rebels and Revolutionaries 

An Age of Revolutions

Sue Wilkes uncovers the hidden histories of Regency spies and the men they hunted. Eavesdrop on the secret meetings of Britain’s underground political societies of the 1790s and early 1800s. Discover the true stories behind the riots, rebellions, and treason trials in late Georgian Britain.

Regency Spies explores the plots, intrigues and perils of those thrilling times:      

• Wolfe Tone’s ambitious plan to free Ireland from British rule      
• Luddites incite arson and machine-breaking in Britain’s industrial heartlands
• The doomed Pentrich uprising of 1817 
• The race to stop the 1820 plot to murder cabinet ministers and seize control of the capital 

Inside Cover:

Sue Wilkes reveals the shadowy world of Britain’s spies, rebels and secret societies from the late 1780s until 1820. Drawing on contemporary literature and official records, Wilkes unmasks the real conspirators and tells the tragic stories of the unwitting victims sent to the gallows.

In this ‘age of Revolutions’, when the French fought for liberty, Britain’s upper classes feared revolution was imminent. Thomas Paine’s incendiary Rights of Man called men to overthrow governments which did not safeguard their rights. Were Jacobins and Radical reformers in England and Scotland secretly plotting rebellion? Ireland, too, was a seething cauldron of unrest, its impoverished people oppressed by their Protestant masters.

Britain’s governing elite could not rely on the armed services – even Royal Navy crews mutinied over brutal conditions. To keep the nation safe, a ‘war chest’ of secret service money funded a network of spies to uncover potential rebels amongst the underprivileged masses. It had some famous successes: dashing Colonel Despard, friend of Lord Nelson, was executed for treason. Sometimes, in the deadly game of cat-and-mouse between spies and their prey, suspicion fell on the wrong men, like poets Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Even peaceful reformers risked arrest for sedition. Political meetings like Manchester’s ‘Peterloo’ were ruthlessly suppressed, and innocent blood spilt. Repression bred resentment – and a diabolical plot was born. The stakes were incredibly high: rebels suffered the horrors of a traitor’s death when found guilty. Some conspirators’ secrets died with them on the scaffold...  

James Gillray, 'End of the Irish Invasion and Destruction of the French Armada'. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-8768