Struggle and Suffrage in Bristol: Women's Lives and the Fight for Equality

By CHRISTINA HOLLIS

It’s freezing, pitch black, and silent— apart from the sound of rats under the bed your wheezing children share. Snow has blown in under the door overnight. Fetching all the water you need from the communal well will be a slippery job today. If your husband gives you some money, your family can eat. If not, hard luck. You’ll all have to go hungry. Welcome to the life of a Victorian woman living in one of Bristol’s riverside tenements.Women lurked in the footnotes of history until they gained an element of control, first over their own money, later their vote and finally, their lives. Much of that progress was driven by women themselves. It took a hundred years of hard work, lobbying and violence before their lives improved to anything like today’s standards. The only way was up—and Bristol women led the way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Feb 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526717719

CHRISTINA HOLLIS

Christina Hollis began writing as soon as she could hold a pencil, and her first book was a few sentences about three puppies that lived in a basket, written at the age of three. Many years later, when one of her plays was short-listed in a BBC competition, her husband suggested that she should try writing full-time. Christina’s hobbies include cooking and gardening, and she always has a book to hand. You can visit her website at: www.christinahollis.com

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INTRODUCTION

Voteless, But Visionary

Imagine waking up on a freezing February morning in the days before electricity. It’s pitch black, and silent. Silent … apart from the sounds of rats in the walls, bugs behind the wallpaper eating the paste, and the wheezing of however many children share your single room. You grope for a match, and light a candle. That’s when you see how much snow has blown in under the door overnight. You’ll have a slippery journey to the communal well to fetch water for washing, cleaning and drinking today. If you’re very lucky, your husband’s left a couple of pennies in your purse. Then you can trudge through the snow to the shops. If he didn’t have anything to give you, or feels like ‘teaching you a lesson’, hard luck. You’ll have to give the children whatever scraps are left in the house, and go hungry yourself until he hands over enough money to feed you all.

Welcome to the life of a Victorian woman living in one of Bristol’s riverside tenements. It took a hundred years of hard work, lobbying and violence before daily life improved to anything like today’s standards. Women lurked in the footnotes of history until they gained an element of control, first over their own money, later their vote and finally, their lives. That progress was inspired, and driven, by women themselves. The only way was up – and Bristol women led the way.

Detailed census results are published a hundred years in arrears, so the 1911 count is the most recent one that can be referred to in this book. Many male supporters of women’s suffrage boycotted that census in protest, which will have affected the data collected. Historical documents are often open to interpretation, which depends on the stance of both writer, and reader.

In the 1851 census, the population of Bristol was 137,328. One hundred years later it had reached 442,994. The percentage of women to men remained virtually stable, with roughly fifty-three per cent women and forty-seven per cent men.¹ Despite this leap in population, direct comparisons are tricky. While many people had moved into Bristol, boundary changes drew in areas such as Shirehampton thus creating a geographically larger city.

The mid-nineteenth century saw Bristol hit its stride as an economic powerhouse, but illiteracy was commonplace. Many census forms were filled in by proxy. This adds an element of uncertainty to any analysis. How women were recorded on official forms could differ as well. As a child in the nineteenth century, my grandmother was known as Kitty Stinchcombe. She became Mary Kate Clifford on her marriage in 1914, but soon became known to everyone as Kit.

Bristol and Progress

Bristol is the hub for major routes between London, Wales and the Midlands. The Industrial Revolution brought canals and Brunel’s railway to Bristol, speeding up the movement of freight and people. Entrepreneurs moved in, building factories and workshops all along the rivers Avon and Frome to take advantage of the city’s transport links. Goods and raw materials arrived, then finished products were sent all over the world. The Avon’s famous gorge shields Bristol’s harbour from the worst weather before the river joins the busy Severn Estuary at Avonmouth. The River Frome enters Bristol via Eastville. Known locally as the Danny, it passes between Newfoundland Road and Pennywell Road then through St Jude’s, and used to provide access to the harbour from the north east of the city.

The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 put an end to Bristol’s overseas trade in human beings, but there was plenty of money to be made from people living within the city. Bristol’s new factories needed thousands of workers to cope with the demands of mass production. Women were the cheapest form of labour.

The 1851 census records more than 144,000 women under the heading ‘labourers and farm servants’. As Victorian farmers invested in mechanisation, fewer people were needed to work the land. Many women from Somerset, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire saw a brighter future in the city. The terrible winter of 1879 was another factor. Why work outdoors in all weathers, when you can earn better money inside a factory?

By the 1901 census, barely 12,000 women were still described as land-workers. The two World Wars of the twentieth century brought more of them into Bristol, replacing men who had gone to fight. During the century covered by this book, women were cheaper to hire and easier to fire than men, so they were employed in their thousands to do low-skilled jobs.

The sheer number of new arrivals overwhelmed Victorian Bristol. Damp tenements crowded the banks of the Frome. Everything from human sewage to toxic waste from tanneries and chemical works went into the river. Much of St Philip’s Marsh and The Dings was unfit for human habitation, but the poor had no choice but to live there.

After a cholera epidemic in 1849 put the wider (and richer) population of Bristol at risk, the rivers were recognised as a breeding ground for disease. The Frome was eventually culverted, sending that handy waste-disposal system underground for much of its length.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, baby girls born into the warrens around Lewin’s Mead and The Pithay lived short lives of filth and degradation. Those who escaped to work in domestic service, or factories such as the Great Western Cotton Factory², toiled until they dropped.

The daughters of Bristol’s elite had better living conditions and a wider education but despite those advantages, they had no money to call their own and their personal ambitions ended with marriage.

A woman’s primary role throughout the century covered by this book was as a carer. Poor women either worked from home while looking after their children, or spent hard-earned cash on unregulated and sometimes criminal childcare. Middle-class women weren’t much better off. When 24-year-old Helena Born’s mother died in 1884, Helena was expected to become her father’s cook–housekeeper, abandoning her interest in everything else.

Helena had other ideas. She became a leading figure in the Bristol Women’s Liberal Association, and an activist in a Bristol strike wave. Abandoning her father’s comfortable home in Whiteladies Road, she moved into a tiny cottage in poverty-stricken St Philip’s to be closer to the working people she wanted to help.

In the mid-nineteenth century, women were treated as second-class citizens both by men and by the state. Unlikely though it seems, the rigid Victorian class system and the power of organised religion working together managed to improve the lives of Bristol’s women. In turn, women made huge contributions to the city’s efforts in two world wars.

They may not have been given the vote until the twentieth century, but the influence of Bristol women was changing the world long before then. Only the names of local visionaries like Mary Carpenter, or home-grown monsters like Amelia Dyer reached the history books. Yet Bristol has always been supported by a network of housewives, mothers, committee-members, charity workers, businesswomen, activists and other heroines who keep families going, and the wheels of commerce turning.

There are enough notable Bristol women to fill several volumes of this size. I’ve been able to include only a fraction of those who worked, schemed, loved, lived and entertained their way around the city of Bristol between 1850 and 1950.

This is their story.

CHAPTER ONE

Knowledge is Power

Life in Victorian Bristol revolved around rich white men. While religious observance was central to their lives, they weren’t all members of the Church of England. The founding fathers of Methodism, Whitfield and Wesley, had preached long and hard in the area. Other non-conformist groups such as Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Unitarians and Quakers gained plenty of followers in the city. A big proportion of Bristolians liked their anti-slavery message, ideas for social reform, and religious freedom.

The Church of England treated women like children: they could be seen, but not heard. Non-conformists had a more relaxed attitude. Their women weren’t forbidden to preach, but it was controversial so most found other ways of doing their Christian duty. With no limit to the amount of teaching and charity work they could do, women set about educating and organising Bristol.

In the mid-nineteenth century, girls stayed at home to help with housework and childcare. Unless the family’s financial situation was dire, only boys were sent out to work. Improved education for children, especially girls, changed Bristol forever. Their literacy and numeracy had a knock-on effect for generations.

First Principles

In the better-off parts of Bristol such as Clifton, a governess taught all a family’s children to an elementary level. Depending on how much more the head of the household was willing to pay, girls were also given tuition in drawing, music, languages, needlework, dancing and all the other skills expected of a Victorian woman. When governesses were outgrown, middle-class girls went to establishments such as Mrs Carpenter’s Boarding School for Young Ladies on Brandon Hill. One daughter of the owner, Mary Carpenter³,⁴ (1807–1877), became a driving force behind the reform of Britain’s education system, and the treatment of young offenders.

So-called Ragged Schools provided basic education for working-class children, but a girl sitting behind a school desk could neither earn her keep, nor mind her siblings while her mother went out to work. Mary Carpenter saw things differently. A girl who could read didn’t need to rely on her memory when it came to carrying out instructions, or on guesswork when it came to measuring medicines or ingredients. In her role of carer, she could pass those skills on to her siblings.

Mary’s father, a Unitarian minister, founded the boarding school less than a mile uphill from his ministry in the slums of Lewin’s Mead. After a brief spell as a governess, at the age of 20 Mary took over the running of her family’s school. Inspired by Ram Mohan Roy, a Hindu reformer, and Joseph Tuckerman, an American Unitarian who ran a ministry for the poor in Massachusetts, Mary helped organise a society for visiting the poor in Bristol. In association with local surgeon John Bishop Estlin, she also opened a free school in Lewin’s Mead. After Mrs Carpenter’s Boarding School for Young Ladies closed in 1848, Mary published a series of articles about ragged schools in the Unitarian newspaper The Inquirer. Like her reforms, Mary’s writing was driven by her deeply held religious beliefs. Her determination, devotion and work ethic inspired many people across the country. She was consulted by leading educationalists and reformers during the drafting of educational bills, and invited to give evidence before House of Commons committees.

Mary helped devise the 1870 Education Act, which prompted the setting up of the publicly funded Bristol School Board. This was responsible for providing elementary education for all children in the city. Given her involvement in its creation, it’s ironic that women weren’t admitted as members of the Board until 1877. That same year, Mary’s ragged school in Lewin’s Mead became one of the first to be certified as a Day Industrial School. These provided free elementary education, training for work (‘industrial training’) and at least one meal a day for children ‘whose education is neglected by their parents, or who are found wandering or in bad company’.⁵

The school soon outgrew its original site and moved to Silver Street. With a good schoolroom, classroom and a dining room, it could take 120 pupils from the ages of 2 to 12 years. According to an early inspection⁶ there was also a kitchen, scullery, store, a small playground, a workshop, a lavatory and a bath. In addition to basic literacy and moral improvement, boys were taught trades. Girls learned to cook by helping in the kitchen. They also kept the school clean and tidy, and were taught needlework. From Monday to Saturday, the school was open between ten in the morning and noon. On weekdays, it also ran from two in the afternoon until seven in the evening. It accepted those of all religions and none.

By 1887 the school was full to bursting again. The Bristol School Board acquired a new site for it on Temple Back. This was ready by May 1889. With room for 200 children ranging in age from 6 to 14, the new school had two good workshops, improved lavatories, bathing facilities and a swimming bath.⁷

At the time, teaching was one of the few respectable ways women could earn a living. Mary Carpenter’s improved type of ragged school provided role models to pauper girls, as well as a possible escape route from poverty – if they were allowed to attend school in the first place. The poorest families needed their children to bring in money as soon as they could. Girls stocked up with