Ellen: An Act of Bastardy

Christchurch, Hampshire in the mid-nineteenth century was an impoverished place, a market town whose inhabitants, living largely in small, rented, mud-walled cottages in streets known as Pit or Rotten Row, eked out a meagre living.  The location, although on the coast, was a remote one and the most common ways of making a living were through shepherding, fishing, as a tradesman or labouring on a farm. But, these occupations paid hardly enough to allow a worker to support a family, so most inhabitants became regular participants in the illicit trade of smuggling.  This last occupation was enabled by the town's proximity to the English Channel and the heathland surrounding it, where contraband was stowed pending the times when detection by customs officers was least likely.  Similarly, it was enabled when a flock of sheep crowding a road delayed the passage of those same officers in pursuit of a wagon containing rum, tobacco and silk.

The townspeople had taken to smuggling as a strategy to survive in a harsh and ungiving environment.  It seems they were always alive to new ways in which to make a living and when a new manufacturing industry set up shop in Christchurch, it was embraced enthusiastically by its inhabitants

This was the fusee watch chain industry.  Commencing in Christchurch in the late eighteenth century, it required nimble fingers and accurate eyesight to rivet its tiny chain links together to produce a chain as fine as horsehair.  Young girls gained employment making these chains from the age of 8, in the local factory or working from home, often at a specially extended window sill at the front of their houses, to catch the best light.  Families encouraged their young to become watch chain makers; their wages were a valuable addition to family income, and often meant the difference between paying the rent or not. 

As a source of work, watch chain making was thus a godsend to the average Christchurch family.  Previously, occupations open to its female inhabitants had been flax spinning, knitting silk stockings and plaiting straw for hats; watch chain making was able to be performed by children who were going to school as they could perform it at home on a part time basis.  The local workhouses provided some of the child labour employed by the manufacturers, but many of its employees lived at home with their families where the breadwinner had an ill-paid or seasonal occupation.  It was ill paid work itself; even by the 1890s the most a worker could expect to receive was only 8s 6 d per week.*

The industry flourished in the early part of the nineteenth and continued until 1899, when Hart's Fusee Factory was closed and the one remaining watch chain maker, Rose Drover, became a nursemaid. The industry declined slowly; my great-great aunt Louisa Boyt, born in 1853 and a watch chain factory employee from an early age, only ceased work as such during the 1890s. 

With meagre earnings and little to occupy themselves other than a Nonconformist Chapel, the townspeople of Christchurch were a rowdy lot in general.  They drank, swore and regularly got into fights with each other, even (or especially) the womenfolk who often assaulted each other when drunk.  Apart from twice-yearly fairs, the main form of entertainment for Christchurch's population was frequenting the taverns and ale houses present in every street, lane and alley of the town.  Petty Sessions records show repeat offenders, such as a woman called Keturah Jeffrey who was found guilty of assaulting a 20 year old woman known as Love Ward outside an ale house where she and her friend Ionida had been watching a Mummers^ play in 1853:

 

 After the Mummers had done...We left...As we were going out Jeffrey struck me on the side of  my face and pulled the crown of my bonnet out, took my apron away and kept it.  Threw me over in the road, tore the tail of my dress from my body...a young man named Duffett came out of the Halfway House, picked up my things for me...She had a baby on her left arm all the time.

Shrove Tuesday was a particular source of rowdiness, when a rabble regularly assembled and threw brickbats, potsherds, glass bottles and other dangerous missiles at the doors of the town's inhabitants.  Guy Fawkes Night saw similar behaviour and the Magistrates Court records are full of public order offences as well as those relating to the desertion of families, along with another offence known as bastardy, the act of giving birth to an illegitimate child, and as such, levelled only at women.

Bastardy usually came to the attention of the relevant authorities by the admission of a pregnant, unmarried woman to the local workhouse, there being no hospitals available at this time. The unfortunate woman was questioned by the court as to the identity of the father of her child, who was then pursued by the parish for maintenance for his 'bastard'.

And so it was that Ellen Boyt, unmarried, aged 19 of Christchurch, Hampshire, watch chain maker, was charged with an act of bastardy (or 'misconduct') in 1857.  She had given birth to a baby girl she named Charlotte on 26 February of that year in the Christchurch Workhouse before going back to the house of her parents to live with the baby. She could not write her name as she signed her daughter's birth certificate with an 'X.'  As Ellen was unmarried, the baby's surname was recorded as "Boyt."

It may have been that Ellen's baby was conceived at the May Fair held in Christchurch.  It appears this sort of thing mainly went on in the warmer months, or in stables, when the woman concerned was a single one and did not have access to a marriage bed.  One said her 'connection' happened in this way throughout August, "generally in the afternoon."

The father of Ellen's baby was not forced into a shotgun wedding organised by the parish, as had been the case in the previous century when the father of a bastard was taken into custody and guarded while a marriage licence was purchased for the mother of his child and a parson paid to perform their marriage.  Ellen stayed living with her poor, but generous parents and younger siblings as well as her baby in the down-at-heel location of Purewell for the next few years, apparently having no continuing relationship with the child's father.  If he was a typical Christchurch man, and Ellen told Charlotte he was a 'sawyer', he would have had little money to give to her for their baby's upkeep.

'Connections' were always liable to take place.  Young men who were apprentices were not allowed to marry until they were 21.  It appears the fathers of bastards were not all callous or irresponsible; they were simply hamstrung by the laws of the time. 

But Ellen's sawyer did not come to her rescue.  She was to remain living with her family and working as a watch chain maker until she left Christchurch for London with her daughter some time between 1861 and 1863.  It was to Islington, in north London that she fetched up, perhaps unsurprisingly, as Islington is adjacent to Clerkenwell, a long established watch making location where the 1861 census recorded 877 manufacturers of clocks and watches.  Her migration was no doubt based on economics; she and Charlotte must have been a burden to the family, her father having died prior to the 1861 census.  There were four younger children still living at home and her mother was working as a cook and domestic in 1861.  Although Louisa and Eliza, the two youngest children aged 9 and 11 were 'scholars', it is likely they too worked as watch chain makers when not at school.

By 1871, Eliza and Louisa, their mother having died, were still living in Purewell as boarders with the Rose family.  Hannah and David, their older sister and brother, a watch chain maker and bricklayer respectively in 1861, no longer lived in Christchurch.  Hannah, and later Eliza, may have moved to Bournemouth, only five miles from Christchurch which, with its newly built hotels and villas, gave opportunities for employment to former chain makers as servants and chambermaids.  Ellen and Charlotte clearly felt themselves to be a burden on their family, but Ellen may also have felt there was little future for Charlotte as a watch chain maker, with its low pay and the fact the work was becoming increasingly less available.  In any event, Charlotte went to school; she was eventually able to write reasonably well and as a member of the poorer classes, Ellen may have reasoned that employment as a servant would always be available to her and more available in London, with its growing upper middle class.

And so Ellen and Charlotte joined the mid-19th century exodus of poor, working class women from country England to its capital to try their luck in that teeming metropolis where the streets, if not paved with gold, held better paid opportunities for willing workers than watch chain making in the impoverished, crowded, hand-to-mouth melee that was Christchurch.

Reference: The Christchurch Fusee Chain Gang Sue Newman, Amberley 2010
*The Christchurch Fusee Chain Gang, page 69
^Mummers were troupes of actors who performed seasonal folk plays.  These plays often contained plots based on the underlying themes of duality and resurrection.  A battle, representing good against evil, often took place between two or more characters. Main characters included a Hero, his chief opponent, a Fool and a quack Doctor.  Either the Hero or his opponent (generally the Turkish Knight in southern England) are killed during their battle and the Doctor restores the dead man to life, with  much conjecture from minor characters, such Little Devil Doubt and Robin Hood along the way.

The writer is the great granddaughter of Charlotte Boyt.