A Felsham Emigrant Family in Victorian Times

Leaving Felsham: an emigrant family’s journey to Australia 1849-50 On the 1st day of February, 1850, the emigrant ship, “Agincourt” arrived at Adelaide in southern Australia. On board were the Felsham farm labourer family – the Seamans – consisting of Peter Seaman, his wife Hannah, and their nine children. Their 13,000 miles sea voyage from England to Australia had taken 116 days. As the family walked down the gangplank into a new life on a new continent they must have wondered what the future held in store for them. And as they surveyed their new surroundings in Port Adelaide did they think back to their previous life in Felsham? In Felsham, twenty years earlier, Peter Batley Seaman, farm labourer, had married Hannah Cudbard, spinster, on 11 th September 1830, in the Parish Church of St Peters.1 Their first son, Luke, was born on the 11 th February 1833 and their first daughter, Rachel, on the 21 st June 1834. In 1838 we know that they were living in a little cottage on the Bury Road not far from the Blacksmith’s Shop on Upper Green. 2 Peter and Hannah Seaman were now in their early thirties and the number of children in their family had reached four. They shared the rented cottage with another labouring family, Thomas and Sophia Pilbrow and their seven children, so the little cottage must have been very crowded. 3 By the time the family embarked on the emigrant ship at Gravesend on the south bank of the Thames estuary on the 7 th October 1849, the number of children had increased to nine. The ship’s passenger list 4 recorded the family thus: 1 The event was noted in the Parish Registers by the officiating clergyman, the Rev. Thomas Anderson and witnessed by three villagers: Thomas Scott, Amy Cudbard and a WW Pilbrow who was sufficiently literate to be able to sign his name rather than just make a mark. [Marriages 1813- 37 Felsham Registers. Suffolk Record Office, Bury St Edmunds, Microfiche 7 0f 9 FL5704/7] 2 Tithe apportionment 1838: Felsham Suffolk Record Office, Bury St Edmunds Ref no. FL570/3/4 3 There is some evidence that the Pilbrow family with seven children had moved out by 1841 and were living nearer the Six Bells Inn at number 13 on the map. In the 1851 Census Returns, Thomas Pilbrow is described as a Journeyman Maltster and was now involved in the brewing trade. 4 The Ships List, http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/australia/agincourt1850.htm. That Luke and Rachel are noted as “with parents” suggests that it may have been possible for children of this age to travel on their own. The complete list of Agincourt passengers can be found on this website. - 1 - SEAMAN Peter B 42 Ag. Lab from Suffolk SEAMAN Hannah 41 SEAMAN Luke 15 Labourer with parents SEAMAN Rachel 14 Servant with parents SEAMAN Eliza 13 SEAMAN Mary 11 SEAMAN David 10 SEAMAN Phillip 7 SEAMAN Emma 4 SEAMAN Rebecca 1 SEAMAN Peter infant James Collinson – ‘Answering the Emigrant's Letter’5 On board ship the family faced the vicissitudes of a three- to four- month voyage over several oceans and climate zones. They would need to endure horrendous seasickness in the notoriously rough English Channel and Bay of Biscay; enervating heat in the breathless, becalming tropics; and bitterly cold, stormy, conditions in the southern latitudes. The family would also have known that life at sea could be 5 1850, oil on panel, 70 x 89cm, reproduced by kind permission of Manchester City Art Gallery. Notice that it is the children answering the letter, not the parents, in this rather romanticised but detailed portrayal of a labouring family’s cottage interior. - 2 - appallingly hazardous for infants and toddlers, even on fair-weather voyages. 6 But then child mortality rates on land in the mid-nineteenth century were pretty horrendous with death from childhood diseases such as measles, whooping cough and scarletina being particularly feared. Why did this large family, with three children under the age of five, leave Felsham and undertake a long and arduous sea voyage across the world to set up a new life in southern Australia? In the absence of local documentary sources we can only hazard a few guesses based on evidence gleaned from the experiences of other emigrants reported in diaries, letters, newspaper accounts and official documents. Among the factors “pushing” them away from Felsham we could list the following: • Life for an agricultural labourer family at this time was very hard and wages were only just above subsistence level • Many farm labourers were unemployed or under-employed with many only able to win seasonal work at times when labour was in great demand such as during the corn harvest. The spectre of destitution haunted workers dependent on such daily waged seasonal labour • The family cottage in Felsham was probably cramped, over-crowded and unsanitary with few home comforts • The family may have been in receipt of out-relief from the Parish or may even have been threatened with being sent to the Union Workhouse at Onehouse near Stowmarket with all its associated horrors • To prevent the family becoming a burden on the poor rates, the family may have been encouraged to emigrate. Money may have been made available to pay for their passage and to equip the family for the long journey and their re-settlement in the colony of South Australia. Among the factors “pulling” the family towards Australia we could suggest the following: • They may have seen or heard of notices in local newspapers advertising a free passage to Australia where there was a considerable shortage of labour 7 • Peter and Hannah Seaman may well have thought that life in Australia offered hope and opportunity for their maturing young family. Certainly, at 14 and 15, Luke and Rachel were of an age where they would need to think carefully about the security of their future employment • The family may well have heard of other local people including farmers who had sold up and headed for a new life in the colonies 8 • Perhaps, they had relatives or friends who had been convicted of a deportable offence and wished to be re-united with them in Australia 9 6 Robin Haines, Life and death in the age of sail: the passage to Australia , (National Maritime Museum, 2006) 7 For an example of such an advertisement see Appendix A . 8 An advert in the Bury and Norwich Post for 7 th February 1849 describes how the growing crops at Chapel Farm, Hitcham were to be sold by auction because the tenant farmer, a Mr John Pilgrim, was about to emigrate to Australia - 3 - • Perhaps, they had relatives or friends who were already living in Australia and who wrote back giving details of their new-found wealth and happiness. In particular, they may have been struck by this passage in a letter 10 from a recent Australian settler to his uncle in Pakenham and printed in the Bury & Norwich Post on 7th February 1849: A daily labourer gets from four to five shillings per day, and tradesmen are getting from six to ten shillings a day …Female servants get from six to twelve shillings a week, according to their servitude; women that go washing and charing from three to five shillings per day. It is very unlikely that Peter Seaman earned more than 10 shillings a week labouring in Felsham even if he was in regular employment on one of the local farms. And although Hannah Seaman could have earned a few shillings doing casual seasonal labour such as gleaning after the Harvest, she would have been busy most of the time looking after the young children and babies in the family. 11 Moreover, the older children, Luke and Rachel, probably only contributed a few shillings each week. Relative to this meagre family income the wages in Australia would have seemed incredibly generous. Like many agricultural labourers in Felsham, Peter Seaman may well have had a small garden attached to his cottage and he may also have rented an allotment from the village charity. 12 Vegetables would have been an important addition to the predominately bread-based diet that existed in the village at the time. No doubt, the family would have been equally impressed by the Pakenham letter writer’s Arcadian description of the prolific nature of the crops growing in Australia: Our gardens grow green peas all the year round, and cucumbers about nine months out of a year. You may grow two crops of potatoes and turnips a-year; onions and cabbages, turnips and potatoes, the best that I ever saw, and plenty of grapes, oranges and figs, almonds and peaches in abundance, all grow in the open gardens. The letter writer continues: We have left the land of starvation, and the Lord has kindly guided us to a land that is flowing with an abundance of all kinds of not only the necessaries of life, but its luxuries; with an ample supply of beautiful fresh water. After drawing water from the muddy ponds of Felsham the thought of clean water must have been irresistible. The letter writer further tempts his readers declaring: Besides you may buy land at a pound an acre for yourselves, and farm it as well as others. Besides it is a free country: we have no tithes, taxes, nor rates of any kind… 9 Read about Henry Hickmott, and his wife Sarah who emigrated to South Australia in 1849 to join his father and uncle convicted in 1840 of sheep stealing and sentenced to deportation at the genealogical website: http://homepage.mac.com/g.cheeseman/henryhickmottinsouthoz.html 10 The Bury and Norwich Post 7 February 1849 [Bury St Edmunds Record Office] EMIGRATION TO AUSTRALIA Letter: Adelaide City, August 12 th 1848 (See Appendix B) *There is an excellent overview of emigration from East Anglia throughout the 19 th century, and which includes a discussion of “letters home” at http://www.foxearth.org.uk/Emigration2.html 11 See: “Working women and children in 1840s Felsham” http://felshamhistory.blogspot.com/2011/05/working-women-and-children-in-1840s.html 12 See: ““Down on the allotments 170 years ago” http://felshamhistory.blogspot.com/2010/12/down- on-allotments-170-years-ago.html - 4 - Peter Seaman and his family, after years of drudgery in the pay of others, may have been attracted by the possibility of buying land and achieving an independence that had been denied them in Felsham.

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