The 1901 Census in Bishop Burton

Bishop Burton Census 1901

An analysis by Bryn Jones based on three articles first published in the Bishop Burton News 2008

1 Introduction Every ten years since 1841 (except 1941 because of World War 2) the government has undertaken a census of the UK population. One hundred years later the detailed contents of the census are opened to public inspection and so are leapt on by family historians wanting to track their ancestors. All the UK census returns are now on computer and so it is possible to search for particular individuals using software you can subscribe to or access from the library. To help with the war memorial project, I have transcribed the 1901 census for Bishop Burton into a database on my computer. This then allows us to analyse the village population as a whole as well as see what individuals were up to.

The census surveyed the population of the village on 31 st March 1901. Each registrar’s sub- district was divided into a number of enumeration districts, each of which was the responsibility of an enumerator. The enumerator delivered a form known as a schedule to each household a few days before census night, and collected the completed schedules the day after. The schedules were then sorted, and the details copied into the census enumerators’ books. It is these books which have survived and which can be seen today on microform or digitally online. There are 15 pages for the Bishop Burton enumeration district with roughly 30 entries per page.

The enumerator for the village was Richard Hornsey who lived at Mill House. The information he collected was: name or address of house (sometimes), no. of rooms occupied, surname, forenames, sex, age, relation to head of household, marital status, occupation, whether they were an employer or a worker, whether they worked at home and the county and place of their birth. The last column records whether the person was (1) deaf and dumb, (2) blind, (3) a lunatic or (4) an imbecile or feeble-minded. No one fell into any of those categories, officially at least!

2 Population On the night of the census there were 415 people who “slept” in the village; the 212 males slightly outnumbered the 203 females. The graph shows the size of the village’s population between 1801 and 1971.

600 500 400 300 Population 200 100 0

1801 1821 1841 1861 1881 1901 1921 1951 1971

Our villagers lived in 90 households, an average of 4.6 persons per household; two houses were unoccupied. This compares to the 114 households there were in 1841 and the 119 to be found in 1961. The largest household was Raike’s Farm where 19 people lived. The reason for the large size of the farming households was that there were many servants (male and female) living-in, some sleeping in dormitory style accommodation. There were 77 servants living in other households in the village; 23 were female and were either housemaids or domestic servants; 54 were male and were mostly farm workers of some sort.

3 Names Many households in the village shared surnames with more than one other household in the village. The most common surnames were Hayton(25), Berridge(15) and Waslin(13); there is now no one with any of those surnames living in the village. The largest family in the same household were the Collingwoods; they had eight children living at home with an age span of 2 months to 13 years.

The most popular female and male first names in the village were:

Sarah Charles

Elizabeth John

Anne George

Mary William

0 5 10 15 20 0 10 20 30

The top 4 names for the 52 girls aged 10 or less were Mary, Anne, Edith and Lily, each with three occurrences. For the 45 boys in the village, the most popular first names were: Harold(4), John(4), Ernest(3) and Joseph(3).

There were at least two people in the village that had names they shared with no one else in the country: Page Barrow, a gardener, and Blanch Alphonsine Quest, the wife of the publican of the Altisidora Inn, Tom Quest, who shared his name with just one other person in England.

4 Origins The census shows where the 415 villagers were born; as you can see almost half were born in Bishop Burton with 29 born in Beverley and 20 in Walkington. Only three people (plus one not declared) were born in the nearest village, Cherry Burton, slightly surprising since by 1901 almost 400 people lived there.

Hull

Leconfield

Walkington

Beverley

ishop Burton

0 50 100 150 200 250

89% of the villagers were born in Yorkshire. The next most popular county was Lincolnshire; 16 people hailed from there. We had one “foreigner” in the village, Blanch Quest, the wife of the publican of the Altisidora who was born in France but was a British subject. Villagers did not always declare their true birth-places. The records for the Hawes family mention Holbeach in Lincolnshire as the place of birth for most of the family but previous returns correctly identify Norfolk, Etton, Thirsk and Cherry Burton as their places of birth.

Most of those who were born out of the county were from “professional” families – schoolmasters and religious ministers; of the schoolmaster’s family, for example, the head, Benjamin Swann, was born in York, his wife and two of the children were born in the Isle of Man, and the family had a servant with the same name who had been born in Grimsby. What is more surprising is that of the ten shepherds in the village, only two were born here and three

5 Life span The census does not provide a basis for analysing life expectancy or morbidity, but I’ve been able to tap into some research that was carried out on the Waslin families who lived in the village. Francis and Rebecca Waslin had six children between 1893 and 1906; their ages on death were 14, 1, 78, 0, 75 and 74. John and Harriet Waslin had seven children between 1888 and 1909; their ages on death were 6, 70, 0, not known but >27, 1, 0 and 71.

6 Occupations Almost of the males in the village aged 14 or above had an occupation with the following exceptions: Mr Poole who was unfortunately paralyzed; Mr Simpson, a retired farmer; two other eighty year olds were living on their own means and two others were living in the almshouses. As you might expect the great majority of working men (110) were engaged in occupations based on the land – farmers (and their sons), agricultural labourers, gardeners, horsemen, carters, shepherds, beastmen, waggoners, hinds (foreman), gamekeepers.

All the women who worked were in domestic service except for Miss Adeline Walker and Miss Ellie Skingle, both of whom were governesses and Miss Sarah Wilson who was a cow-keeper. Miss Walker was live-in governess to the two Pearman children at the vicarage, Dorothy and Margery. The youngest (official) workers were Laura and Agnes Batchelor both aged 14 and working as domestic servants at Raike’s farm and Callis farm. None of the married women had an “occupation” but I suppose that didn’t spare them from hard work. The village had one “parish pauper”, Madge Stather, a widow aged 75 years, who had been a shopkeeper in the village according to Bulmer’s Directory of 1892.

If we exclude the farms and the Hall, four households had a single domestic servant and one, the vicarage, had two, a cook and a housemaid. On the farms, female servants were needed since many of the farm workers lived on the farm and received both board and lodging from the farm.

Farm Family Family Child Male Female Tot. male female worker worker adult adult Raike’s 1 2 6 9 1 19 Cold Harbour 2 2 2 8 2 16 Killingwoldg’ve 2 3 3 4 2 14 Ling’s 1 2 0 5 2 10 Dalegate 2 3 4 1 0 10

Dalegate Farm run by the Elleringtons had the least number of live-in servants of any farm in the village; other farms not listed above had between 2 and 4 servants living-in. (The census labels this farm as Dalegate Farm but we believe this is incorrect and it should be Callis Farm. Dalegate is probably the farm that is now called Knights Garth).

Young men who stayed in the village mostly followed their father’s occupations. Farmers’ sons became farmers; joiners’ sons were apprenticed as joiners and so on. The Whipp family that farmed Mount Pleasant provides a rather different path. James Whipp took the farm on the death of John Thompson. James’ first occupation had been as a hairdresser in Huddersfield; he then became a commission agent (turf) i.e. a bookmaker. Taking on Mount Pleasant Farm in the 1890’s must have seemed quite appropriate since it is adjacent to the race course that he must have had to visit regularly. There was another connection with the race-course in that his brother was a race horse trainer living in Willow Grove, Beverley.

Of other occupations, most would have been focussed on providing services required within the village. So including apprentices and assistants we have: joiners(6), blacksmith(3), butchers(2), ministers(2), shoemakers(2), butler, postman, tailor, schoolmaster, publican.

Other occupations mentioned include: auctioneers(2), bank cashier, watch-maker’s apprentice, photographer’s apprentice and a railway engine stoker. The railway didn’t come to Bishop Burton, by the way; the stoker was Daniel Smith, a visitor to the Waslin household from 11 George St. Hedon. He was courting Isabella Waslin, to use an old-fashioned term; it’s nice to report that they were married on 4 th June that same year.

7 Happy families? There were 67 married couples in the village in 1901. Between them they had 72 sons and 80 daughters still living in the village. On average, wives were 5 years younger than their husbands. Only 8 husbands had a wife older than themselves. 2 men had wives more than 20 years younger than themselves; but both were second marriages following the death of their first wives.

The census reveals that the families in the village were very stable. People got married and mostly that was that. So there are no divorcees in the village and no households that might now be described as based on a “civil partnership”.

However, Lewis Bullimore and John Smithson are described as married and I suspect it may be a mistake – the record not the “marriage”! Lewis and John live in the house that I think was the Hall but it was only occupied by servants, 7 in all, as the owners, the Hall Watt’s, were away in Torquay. John was the butler and Lewis is rather strangely described as an “indoor odd man”. Lewis was single in 1891 working as a grocer in Great Yarmouth but living with his mother who was a widowed dressmaker. I cannot trace John in 1891 unfortunately.

Sophia Walker was married to George Walker but was actually recorded as a visitor to the house next door where Sarah Wilson lived as Head. Sarah otherwise lived on her own and is the only female in the village with a non-domestic job; she is a Cow-keeper.

The domestic arrangements of Thomas and Catherine Winstanley nee Ibbotson create a small puzzle for us that I will come back to.

8 Absent friends I thought it would be interesting to see if I could find some of the people who might have been included in the census for the village but were not.

One such was Robert Dunning, aged 19, the son of Daniel and Rose Dunning of Cold Harbour Farm. In 1899, Robert was at home working on the farm, went to Hull Fair and was caught by the marine recruiting officer for the Royal Marine Light Infantry. On the night of the 1901 census he was on board HMS Wildfire in Sheerness Dockyard with more than 80 other marines. He was a private in the dockyard reserve. HMS Wildfire was actually the Royal Navy Gunnery School. There is a description of the dockyard and pictures of it and the school in 1901 on this web site: http://www.battleships-cruisers.co.uk/sheerness_dockyard.htm .

Robert sadly died in 1903 when serving on HMS Eclipse. He was taken ill on his return voyage from the China Station in 1903 and died in the Royal Navy Hospital at Chatham. He is remembered in our village churchyard with a memorial erected by his shipmates at Chatham.

The China Station was one of the geographical divisions into which the British Royal Navy divided its world-wide responsibilities. It covered the coasts of China and its navigable rivers, the western Pacific, and the waters around the Dutch East Indies. The China Station complement usually consisted of several light cruisers and destroyers and the Chinese rivers were patrolled by a flotilla of suitable, shallow-draught gunboats, referred to as "China gunboats".

Robert’s brother Francis (aka Frank) was also not at his home in Cold Harbour Farm because he was lodging at 42 Elm Row in Edinburgh where he was completing his veterinary studies. He qualified in December 1901 and went to South Africa where he took part in the Boer War as a Civil Veterinary Surgeon. Frank was also involved in the East Africa Campaign in World War 1. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in 1911 and continued to practice in South Africa. Frank is also commemorated on the same stone as his brother Robert; he died in January 1948 in Port Elizabeth.

Another missing person was a Thomas Winstanley that I mentioned earlier. Thomas was an Inland Revenue officer and in 1891 he lived with his wife, Catherine, and family at 1 Westwood Road, Beverley. In 1881, Thomas was not living at the family home then in Albert terrace and Mrs Winstanley is described as the head of the household; her occupation is “Revenue Officer’s Wife”. Thomas is a lodger at 28 New St, Westminster in London; his occupation is described as a clerk. By 1901, the family, except for Thomas, had moved to Callis Farm and son Harold was the farmer although it has no “head”. We find Thomas in Falsgrave Road, Scarborough, now retired from the Inland Revenue and living on his own means. He is the Head of a household comprising a visitor, Julia Ford of Lund, a single female aged 38 and a young domestic servant. Both Thomas and Catherine are still shown as married. In 1891 Julia Ford was housekeeper for her uncle, Thomas Forge, a retired bank clerk, and his brother-in-law, William Ford, in a residence on North Bar Without, Beverley. Julia’s uncle was the brother of Catherine’s mother, Anne Ibbotson and so he was also Catherine’s uncle. Mrs Catherine Winstanley died in 1911.

Another puzzle surrounds the Whipps who farmed Mount Pleasant. On the night of the census the only people in residence were Arthur and Edith Whipp, described as Son and Daughter, but neither their father nor mother was at the farm that night. Their mother Hannah was still at the house that the family occupied in Huddersfield with two other daughters and she is described as a Wife; but James is not there either. So where is he? Sorry, I haven’t been able to crack that one but it does show that the census may not always catch everyone or that their name may be incorrectly transcribed.

9 In the workhouse A Robert Richardson aged 64 was to be found in the District Union Workhouse in Beverley. He was single and described himself as a retired cowman and farm labourer. He was born in Bishop Burton in 1837, the son of John and Mary Richardson.

Workhouses were built to accommodate the poor and the destitute of an area or town. Some “paupers” were supported by charities and parishes directly; there were six people living in the almshouses in our village. Workhouses were fairly unattractive places, deliberately so, to encourage the poor only to use them as a last resort. The Beverley workhouse gradually transformed into a hospital so that it is now the site of the Westwood Hospital (just about). In 1881, the workhouse had 144 inmates and eight staff; by 1901 this had fallen to 75 inmates with six staff. Those familiar with Dickens will know that whole families lived in the workhouse; in 1901 this included a 2 day old child with apparently no relative in the workhouse. 5 of the 1881 inmates had been born in Bishop Burton, with one unfortunate lady of 46 being described as an “imbecile from birth”. The workhouse was supervised by the Beverley Union whose chairman in 1901 was Thomas Sample; he was then farming at Riding Fields, the area between the railway in Beverley and Swinemoor Lane that is now a housing estate. Like Robert he never married but he lived with his sister Harriet. They too were born in Bishop Burton, at the Grange Farm where their father, also called Thomas, farmed in the mid 19 th century.

More information about the workhouse can be found online and in a booklet Beverley Workhouse by Anthony Chadwick (Ripon Museum Trust, 1996).

10 Broadgates Another place where many people were to be found was the East Riding Lunatic Asylum later referred to as the Broadgates Hospital. It is now the site of a housing estate between

Walkington and Beverley. There were 465 patients in the asylum on the night of the census. Only one definitely came from the village, Mary Jane Blakestone, a domestic servant, born in about 1860 to John and Ann Blakestone (also spelt Blakeston, Blakstone and other variants). Mary never married and died in 1908. Mary first appears there in the 1881 census working as a domestic servant not as a patient but by 1891 she has become a patient and is classified as such again in 1901. She is classified in the census as a lunatic rather than an imbecile. In 1871, at the tender age of 11 or 12, Mary was working as a domestic servant in Walkington for Samuel Tully and his family; he was a grocer and carrier in the village. Mary’s parents had also moved to Walkington at this time and lived further up Main Street. They had a month old grandchild, John, living with them. I wonder who the mother was. Mary had an older sister aged about 21 and she is probably the only other possible mother.

11 Prison Another place where people might have been on the night of the 2 nd April 1901 was prison. However, I can’t find anyone from the village who was in prison that night. There was definitely no one in Hull prison from the village.

12 Lord of the manor The Hall Watts, the family of the lord of the manor and the owners of High Hall, do not appear in the 1901 census return for the village. They are to be found staying at Park Hill House in Torquay on their Easter break. The family also had a large estate at Cowling near Keighley. They were back in the village by the end of April. The Bishop Burton school log enables us to track the family’s movements to and from the village fairly easily since both Mr and Mrs Hall Watt were regular visitors to the school and their every visit was noted.

13 Conclusion I hope this article has whetted your appetite for more personal history. I hope you agree that we should try to “personalise” our history with the lives of identifiable ordinary people and not just treat history as only featuring the great and the good (and not so good) while the rest of us just make up the numbers. Let’s hope that the 1911 census gives up some more interesting insights into the life of our village. But for that we must wait until January 2012.

Bryn Jones