Page 26 - Just another English family (Sep 2019)

named Soothill in the 1861 census. Being a head of household means that such persons are in some senses established in the community and, as a consequence, they can represent the standing of a family in a community. So what does this kind of roll call produce? The two females who are heads of household are respectively a former nurse (now aged 79) and a power loom weaver (now aged 43), therefore having the wherewithal to run a household. Of the 14 male heads of household living in Yorkshire, the importance of the woollen trade is very evident – four (aged 25, 28, 32 and 55 years) identified as stuff pressers and three (aged 28, 38, 51) identified as wool dyers. These old occupations are difficult to understand nowadays, but a stuff presser was the person who placed the cloth within sheets of special stiff press paper and passed it into a hot-pressing machine which gave the finish to the cloth. The other heads in Yorkshire had various occupations which are easier to comprehend – housekeeper (1), railway guard (1), labourer (1), agricultural labourer (1), a Chelsea pensioner from 53 regiment (1), a cotton yard loom weaver (1) and a maker of some kind but the type of maker is difficult to decipher. The five heads of household in Lancashire were engaged in different occupations with the cotton industry perhaps as the backcloth – there was a 41-year-old cotton twist packer in a cotton mill (a twister is someone who worked a machine twisting the yarns or threads), a carder and beerseller (a 48-year-old Soothill was engaged in these two occupations – a carder was regarded as a skilled job which was essentially combing wool or cotton, while a beerseller sold beer and cider in beerhouses under the 1830 Beerhouse Act), a 45-year-old engineer, a 42-year-old fuller (a fuller was a person who ‘full’" cloth, that is, the process of cleaning - removing the natural oils and lanolin - wool in preparation for spinning and weaving, using fuller's earth), and a 45-year-old who was involved in the making of fustian, a kind of coarse cloth made of cotton and flax.
More discussion about occupations will feature as I focus on the members of the various groupings. Using the later censuses, I can probe whether these heads of households change their occupations over time and also whether their children enter the same range of occupations. Meanwhile, one can say that generally these head s of households were engaged in occupations reflecting the industrial base of Yorkshire and Lancaster in the mid-nineteenth century. They seemed to be a tribe holding its own in finding appropriate work.
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