#122 NECESSARY EMPATHY
Alfred Jolley (1877-1916) was the middle of the three children born to James Jolley (1843-) and Sarah Litchfield (1855-1885). His sister Laura Elizabeth was born in 1873 and his brother Frederick Litchfield was born in 1880. It was when mother Sarah died, aged 30, that the family began to disintegrate. Father James moved often to find work but eventually he was unable to support the children. Alfred was 12 when he entered Barnardo’s Stepney Causeway in London. Alfred remained there for seven months before he emigrated to Canada as a Home Child and it most likely that that he never saw, perhaps never heard, from his sister ever again.
Laura was born May 2, 1893 in Rushden, Northamptonshire, the
eldest of three children. She was 12
years old when her mother died and her father was unable to care for her and
her two brothers, aged 5 and 7. Laura really had only two options to make a
living. One was domestic service and the other factory work.
DOMESTIC SERVICE—NOT!
Domestic service was the least preferable as it required a
young girl to live in her employer’s household under close supervision,
maintain a reputation for respectability and to forfeit much of her autonomy, social
life and family contact. Dismissal was common and could occur without notice,
particularly in cases of pregnancy or perceived misconduct. A maid-of-all-work (aka scullery maid) was the lowest rung of service, almost always hired by a
shopkeeper’s family, a small farmer’s wife, a tradesman (like grocer,
carpenter, baker, tailor) or a modest middle-class family in town. These
households did not employ a full staff—only one girl who did everything. Typical
work included the filthy, exhausting work of fetching water and fuel; this
involved carrying heavy pails of water from pumps or well, hauling coal and
firewood for kitchen ranges and fireplaces, laying fires before dawn, scraping
grates and removing ashes. The most brutal and dreaded job was laundry; this
involved boiling linens in a copper tub, using lye soap that burned the skin,
scrubbing the washboards, wringing heavy wet sheets by hand and drying
everything on lines and frames. Very few homes had carpets so long hours were
spent on knees scrubbing and washing floors with coarse bristle brushes,
cleaning stone floors with cold water and sand and polishing wood with beeswax
until it shone. Food preparation would have been one of her major daily duties;
she would peel potatoes, carrots, turnips, skin rabbits and pluck chickens,
scrub pots blackened by chimney soot, clean ovens, brew tea, make puddings,
pies, broth and bread. The maid might walk miles every day on errands such taking
clothes to the mangle, fetching bread, milk or meat, carrying messages, delivering
parcels, picking up the children. If the employer had infants or toddlers, the
girl would become nursemaid, cleaner, occasional babysitter, play companion;
young servants were often praised for their patience with children, but blamed
if anything went wrong. Other domestic work included emptying chamber pots,
washing basins, making beds, shaking out straw mattresses, cleaning privies, dusting.
A maid-of-all typically worked from 5 am to 10 pm, six days a week. Sunday
could involve church and work. There were no labour protections and almost no
breaks. The maid would have eaten in the kitchen, not with the family. She
would rarely eat meat unless it was scraps, but instead have porridge, bread,
broth, leftovers. She would have slept either in the attic or in the kitchen
beside the fire or on a cot in the scullery. She would earn 4-6 pounds per
year, plus board and lodging; her clothing was often provided second-hand by
the mistress. Broken items would be deducted from her wages. She was on-call
every moment of the day and would, no doubt, experience loneliness, grief and
exhaustion.
SHOEFITTING--YES!
For many logical and practical reasons, Laura chose shoemaking over domestic service. In the industrial landscape of late 19th century Northhamptonshire, shoemaking was one of the most significant sources of female employment, particularly in towns like Rushden and Wellingborough. The shoe industry there relied heavily on women and girls as young as 12 in the stitching and fitting rooms. Shoefitting was a semi-skilled role requiring dexterity, precision and familiarity with industrial sewing machinery. Factory work allowed women to remain in their community; it also offered comparatively better wages, and more predictable hours than domestic service.
Laura was a shoefitter; this referred specifically to the preparation and assembly of the upper part of the shoe before it was lasted and attached to the sole. The shoefitter assembled the various leather or fabric pieces which involved aligning and stitching together the pieces, shaping them to ensure correct contours and sewing on eyelets and decorative stitching; accuracy was essential since poor fitting of the upper would ruin the entire shoe. By the 1880s, factories used industrial sewing machines; shoefitters needed dexterity and speed to operate these machines safely and efficiently. Shoefitters added inner linings, stiffeners and reinforcements to ensure strength and comfort. Factories used patterns for each size and shape so shoefitters matched the correct pattern pieces and checked for consistency across pairs. The fitting room was predominantly female, noisy and fast-paced. Pay was typically piecemeal where faster workers earned more.
Shoefitting appealed to younger women like Laura because it offered a rare combination of wages, autonomy and social connection when other types of female employment were isolating and heavily supervised. Young women usually quickly required the dexterity and speed that was an economic advantage in a piecemeal system. And shoefitting also placed women in a busy, communal workplaces where they worked beside friends, family and neighbours.
DAUGHTER
Around age 17, Laura became pregnant and she delivered in the Wellingborough Union Workhouse Teenage girls were routinely admitted to workhouses for confinement.
A daughter, Jessie Jolley, was born in the Workhouse on March 24, 1891 and is listed on the 1891, age 1 month, along with her
mother. Typically a mother stayed in the
workhouse for 1-2 months. Laura almost certainly returned to shoework with no
meaningful difficulty. The shoe industry was a pragmatic employer and unmarried
mothers were common industrial labour; illegitimacy, while sometimes gossiped
about, was not a barrier to employment. It
was Laura’s skill, reliability, turning up for work and meeting production
expectations, not her marital status, that mattered.
GEORGE
On April 18, 1893, Laura married George Ellis in Rushden
(whether he was Jessie’s father is unknown). He was a 26-year-old shoemaker,
Laura a 20 year old shoefitter. Workhouse
girls rarely married within 3 years so it is to Laura’s credit, that she had
managed to regain her stability and was not “marked” by her workhouse past. And
it seems that she kept Jessie with her, rather than have her fostered out.
Laura’s marriage to George in 1893 appears to have been short
and unsuccessful. The couple are never found in records living together, no
children were born to them, George continued his life as a solitary shoemaker
and Laura disappeared from his world altogether. (A George Ellis, correct age
& shoemaker, appears on both the 1901 and 1939 censuses, living alone. He
died in 1957, aged 86.)
MATTHEW
By 1901, however, Laura was living in Leicestershire with
Matthew Mees Woodcock, using his surname and raising their children (including
Jessie whom she kept with her, rather than having her fostered out). Matthew, a
widower, worked as a general agricultural, then construction, labourer. Their household
seemed stable, committed and socially recognized. Matthew and Laura did not
legally marry until October 1913 (in Lincolnshire), a year before the birth of
their last and eighth child. Laura was 40 years old and Matthew 52.
Bigamy is the act of marrying one person while still legally
married to another. The remarriage of Laura in 1913, while her first husband,
George Ellis, was still alive is a case study of working-class marital practices
in Victorian-Edwardian England. Although in strict legal terms, Laura remained
married to Ellis from their wedding in 1893 until his death in 1953, her
eventual formal remarriage to Matthew was shaped more by social, economic and practical
factors than by legal technicalities.
For a working-class woman as Laura it was virtually
impossible for her to dissolve her first marriage. Since 1857, divorce in
England was no longer a religious matter but a civil one, but it was still very
expensive and complex. A woman was required to prove not only her husband’s
adultery, but additional aggravating offences like cruelty, desertion or bigamy—criteria
difficult without legal representation or much documentation. Because the costs
of divorce routinely exceeded the annual income of a labourer or domestic
worker, it was something only the upper and middle classes could afford.
Bigamy was technically a criminal offence, but the law was
applied unevenly. Prosecutions were usually only pursued in cases of deception,
fraud or the maintenance of many concurrent households. Deserted wives in new
unions were rarely targeted, local clergy and registrars seldom checked out the
marital histories of working-class couples and documentary evidence of earlier
marriages was neither expected nor required.
Given all this, Laura’s inability to formally end her
marriage to George Ellis was typical rather than exceptional. Her first
marriage could not be terminated in practice.
Movement between towns or counties helped erase public knowledge
of an earlier marriage. Once a woman relocated, particularly if she cohabitated
with a new partner, her prior marital history became invisible to her new
community. Communities tended to accept a woman’s declaration of widowhood when
a spouse had not been seen or heard from for years. In Laura’s case, her
relocation from Northamptonshire to Leicestershire and her long-term
partnership, and nine children, with Matthew placed her beyond the social reach
of the Ellis marriage. By 1901, she had already assumed the Woodcock surname in
everyday life and was raising many children with Matthew. In her new community,
she would have been regarded as his wife.
By the late 19th century, English common law
considered that a spouse not heard from for seven years was widely presumed
dead, providing the surviving partner had a reasonable basis for that belief.
This doctrine did not require proof of death, just that the remarriage was undertaken
in good faith. Laura had been separated from George Ellis for about twenty
years when she legally married Matthew Woodcock. There is no evidence of any
contact between Laura and George after their 1893 wedding, they never appear together
in census records, had no named children, and lived in different counties for
the rest of their lives. Laura could reasonably have believed that George was
dead or permanently absent. Even if she lacked formal proof, her belief would have
been considered sufficient to justify remarriage.
Laura’s move from Northamptonshire to Leicestershire (about
100 miles) effectively severed the social networks of her first marriage. Rural
mobility often complicated the tracing of former spouses; this was a time when
local familiarity was more important than documentation. In her new community,
Laura’s identity would have been shaped almost entirely by her relationship with
Matthew Woodcock. Distance and the absence of any contact with George Ellis made
it unlikely that anyone would challenge her claim to be free to remarry.
Economic realities also likely shaped Laura’s decision to
remarry. By 1901, she was living with Matthew Woodcock and they had many
children. For working-class families, legal marriage provided essential
protections; it legitimized the children, formalized paternal responsibilities,
ensured inheritance rights and gave the household civil and religious
recognition. A formal marriage could protect a woman’s standing within her
community and within charitable or parish systems.
In the absence of divorce, women in similar circumstances,
as Laura, waited until the first marriage ceased to be socially or practically
binding—through long-term desertion, geographic separation or presumed death—before
formalizing a long-established domestic partnership. Laura’s 1913 marriage to Matthew
gave her family stability, legitimacy and a recognized status that her informal
union could not fully provide. Her marriage to Matthew reflects not a
deliberate violation of the law as much as a pragmatic adaptation to a system
that offered her no formal alternatives.
Laura was technically a bigamist for forty years (from her 1913
marriage to Matthew to George Ellis’ 1953 death) but really who cares?
Matthew died, aged 87, February 25, 1949 in Leicester,
England. Laura, aged 82, died in Leicester in February 1956.
Laura was survived by 5 of her children, including Jessie.
In a somewhat ironic twist, in 1954, one of Laura’s daughters, Clarice, was unsuccessfully
sued for divorce by her husband on the grounds of desertion.
LAURA ELIZABETH JOLLEY b. May 2, 1873 in Rushden, Northamptonshire, England m. George Ellis (1867-1953) on April 18, 1893 in Northhamptonshire, England m. Matthew Mees Woodcock (1861-1949) in October 1913 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, England d. February 1956 in Leister, England (sister-in-law of my 2nd cousin 2x removed--Harper-Lemin line) thank goodness to computer programmes that can figure this out)
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