#3--I DO HOPE THERE WERE RAYS OF SUNSHINE IN HER LIFE
Grace Anna Lemin
I first “met” Grace, age 7, on the 1851 English census living in St. Austell, Country Cornwall, England with her parents and seven siblings. Father William and her older brother, age 13, were farm labourers and her older sister, age 11, was a domestic servant. I imagine the family living in crowded, unsanitary conditions, hungry, always uncertain of the future. Cornwall was hard hit by the 1840s potato famine. But at least Grace and three siblings “attended” school; their older sister was illiterate and signed her wedding register with an x.
By her early teens, Grace was working in the tin mine as a “bal maiden”. These were female surface workers employed to dress the ore brought up from underground--a process that involved using a variety of different sized hammers to break rocks on anvils--while standing barefoot-- into smaller pieces and then sorting the ore from the surrounding rock. It was hard, physical work which took a toll on their health and appearance. While they tried to protect their faces from the sun, wearing cardboard hats (“gooks”) to shade their complexions, accounts from the time often mention their rough chapped hands. Teams of women were also employed to barrow ore around the dressing floors; they worked in pairs using hand barrows, often carrying over 68 kg. (150 lbs) between them. These women endured lives as hard as any miner; they were often rendered infertile by the arsenic or sulphur of their environment.
Grace’s three younger brothers also worked in the tin mine, likely shovelling and tending ore. One brother, Charles started in the mine at age 8 and soon went underground. “I used to walk six miles there and back, do a day’s work, sometimes two shifts”, he said. Miners would crawl down a shaft, on a rope or ladder, like a monkey. (It is estimated the average miner climbed down 1200 feet before he began his proper toil.) Having reached the bottom of the shaft, he then had to crawl, virtually naked, down a broiling tunnel—temperatures sometimes exceeding 100f—until he, at last, reached the seams of tin or copper glistening on the rockface. Now his shift officially began—in almost total darkness. Dust was everywhere. Often the tunnels extended for a mile under the ocean.
Even the most toughened miners were terrified of Atlantic storms which rolled boulders and threatened to break through the ceiling. Many drowned. If they weren’t killed by the awful labour, or lack of sun, they died of cave-ins, accidents or disease. Cornwall was peopled by men “with faces blackened and blinded in one or both eyes. Or else lacking two fingers of the right hand, from shooting the rocks with gunpowder.” In mining villages “hundreds of cripples were being led about by boys eking out a living by selling tea from house to house.” Unsurprisingly tinners died young, commonly before age 30, but Charles defied the odds; he was married for 72 years and died at age 92.
It is possible that Grace married in 1866 and maybe soon widowed. But after her daughter was born in 1870, Grace was listed under her maiden name and as single; daughter Lydia took her mother’s Lemin surname. For a few years, Grace and Lydia lived with her mother, Martha. Both Grace and Martha were charwomen which was a part-time worker who went into a house for a few hours to clean; they were considered the lowest of all domestic servants. “She slaves, and yet never gives satisfaction. She is expected to do the work of six days in one. She pleases no one. Even the servants take a pleasure in finding fault with her…her characteristics are so patent…The dirty mob-cap, the battered bonnet, generally black, that perches on the top of it, the soiled ribbons, the tucked-up gown and bare arms, that are of an unpleasant redness all the way up to the sleeve…The charwoman can eat anything...and has a penchant towards snuff… There are many speculations as to the honesty of the Charwoman, but she is poor..[and thus suspected]. The “Ladies” downstairs lock up their tea-caddies, the butler counts his spoons, Cook hides her kitchen-stuff. Whatever is missing, the Charwoman is sure to be the thief and everything broken is without fail the handiwork of her fingers." (from Punch Jan 1850)
English charwoman
Grace moved in with her 89 year old father, but when he died in 1903 (and Lydia had married in 1902), there was no one to care for Grace. She went into the St. Austell workhouse. People landed up in a workhouse for a variety of reasons—they were too poor, old or ill to support themselves or they had no family willing or unable to provide care. Workhouses, though, were never prisons and entry into them was generally a voluntary, albeit, painful decision. Admission required an intimidating interview of the applicant to justify their application. After all the paperwork was completed, paupers were stripped, bathed and issued a workhouse uniform. For women, like Grace, this was likely a blue and white striped dress worn under a smock. (in defence of this practice: the inmates often arrived in vermin-infested rags and the two sets of serviceable clothing they received were likely welcome.)
A popular image is that inmates ate thin gruel three time s a day with an onion twice a week and half a roll on Sunday. This is not accurate. A typical parish workhouse meal was a breakfast of bread with either gruel or broth and supper of bread with cheese or butter. Midday dinner could be meat and broth, pease pottage, baked puddings or hasty pudding (oatmeal boiled in milk). Quite likely the food was of poorer quality. The elderly, like Grace, could exchange their gruel for a weekly ration of butter, tea and sugar; they often received a weekly ration of smoking tobacco or snuff and were provided with books and newspapers.
Workhouses had only a single entrance. The main workhouse building housed various wards and workrooms linked by long corridors to improve ventilation and lighting. St.Austell’s was built in 1838 and could house 300 inmates.
Women inmates were assigned duties like laundry, sewing and weaving, cleaning, scrubbing walls and floors. They worked in the vegetable gardens, profits of which helped fund the facility. Some women were taught how to knit, embroider or make lace and these goods were then sold. The daily routine of the typical workhouse was tough, with inmates rising early to begin a 10 hour working day, seven days a week. Much of the work was deliberately demoralizing, repetitive and unfulfilling.
Discipline was strictly enforced—for offences as swearing, feigning illness, insubordination or violent behaviour, punishment was typically a reduced diet.
Grace lived in the St.Austell workhouse for over twenty years. She died there in 1930, the year workhouses were officially closed. She was 86 years old; cause of death was Senile Myocarditis.
GRACE ANNA LEMIN
b. Dec. 31, 1843 in St.Mewin, Co.Cornwall, England
d. Oct. 12, 1930 in St.Austell, Co. Cornwall, England
my 1st cousin, 3x removed (Homuth-Harper line)
What a sad life!
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