While pottering about with research, I came across an
interesting little story which I shall share with you. It concerns Ann and Emily Lockyer, mother and
daughter, who were seamstresses. In
1902, they found themselves up in Worship Street Police Court, Bethnal Green, on a charge of
stealing trousers…
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| Stitch! Stitch! (1876) John Evertt Millais |
Now, I don’t have to tell you that the lot of a seamstress
was not a happy one. It was well known
that women who sewed often did so because they were widowed or orphaned and had
children to support. Home-sewing ensured
you could mind your little ones while making money, however the sums involved
were pitiful. Thomas Hood wrote his
famous poem ‘The Song of the Shirt’ in response to the sad case of Mrs Biddell,
who sewed trousers and shirts for an employer who provided the materials for a
£2 deposit (that’s around £100 in today’s money). Mrs Biddell could probably expect a couple of
pence pay per item and would no doubt have to pay for her own needles and
thread out of that. On the brink of
starvation, Mrs Biddell pawned several of the items she had sewn and was sent
to the workhouse in debt. So moving was
this account that Hood’s poem seems as a siren call to end such inhuman labour:
‘Stitch – stitch – stitch,In poverty, hunger and dirt,Sewing at once, with double thread,A shroud as well as a shirt.’
Art at the time turned to reflect this struggle, showing
women sewing in sad little rooms, poor and desperate. Whilst feminine sewing had been seen as a
proper pastime for lovely ladies, it became more apparent that for some it was
matter of life and death, most probably death.
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| What Victorian Men think I do... (Girl in a Blue Skirt, Sewing J B Marchais) |
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| What I actually do... (Song of the Shirt (1850) G F Watts) |
So you would hope that 50 years later, things would have
improved for home-sewers. Enter Ann and
Emily Lockyer. Ann, 60 years old, was
the widow of a cabinet maker. Until the
1890s, the Lockyers had been reasonably comfortable in their work, and Ann was
described in the census returns as a ‘Tailoress’, which suggests a certain
level of skill. Mr Lockyer had learnt
the trade of cabinet making from his father and he, unlike his wife, was literate and of a certain standard of education (if the marriage register is anything to go by).
They lived in Bethnal Green, raising their children and leading a decent, uneventful life.
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| Widowed and Fatherless (1888) Thomas Kennington |
When Mr Lockyer died in
1898 all that changed. Emily was unmarried and she and her mother obviously could not afford to keep a
house of their own. They appear in the
1901 census, living with their son-in-law, who was a postman and head of his
own sizable household. It seems
unsurprising that they had to move into rooms of their own, but it does not
seem to be an upward move. The rooms
were described as ‘miserable and squalid’ (a more honest way of saying ‘a
property with character’, possibly…)
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| Song of the Shirt (1877) Edward Radford |
They worked for Shadrac, Schneider and Sons, a wholesale
clothing manufacture of Durward Street, Bethnal Green. Emily seems to have been the main employee
because it was she that took in the pairs of trousers for ‘finishing’. Finishing entailed a sewer putting on buttons,
hemming the garment, sewing in bands and pockets and that sort of thing. For each garment ‘finished’ the women
received 2d, which equates to around 48p of today’s money. When several of the pairs of trousers did not
arrive back at Shadrac, Schneider and Sons in October 1902, they sent the
police round to Ann and Emily’s rooms and found the pawn tickets relating to
four pairs that Ann had taken to the pawnbroker. The two women were hauled up in court on 15th
October 1902 and it was reported in the Daily News the day after.
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| The Seamstress (1881) Christian Krohg |
Under the headline ‘STITCH! STITCH!! STITCH!!!’, the paper
spoke of the pair’s ‘pitiable appearance of poverty’s struggles’ and how they ‘wailed
out their defence’. Emily was reported
as saying ‘We had no food.’ Her mother added ‘It is slow starving to work on
these things at 2d and 2¼d a pair. We
did it to get food and light.’
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| The Young Seamstress (1907) Harold Knight |
Such emotional pleas fell on deaf ears. In response the Magistrate, Mr Cluer
(probably not on 2d per case) said ‘it might be starvation, but it was not
sense to throw away the chance of earning even the small sum they got.’ They
were each ordered to pay 10 shillings, an equivalent of around £28 or serve
five days in prison for unlawful pawning.
They were taken off to prison because where on earth would they get 10
shillings from?
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| Jane Morris, seated in a chair, sewing (1860s) Dante Gabriel Rossetti |
Enter the reason I came across the story. Reading the Daily News on Thursday 16 October 1902 was another woman, famed for her talent with a needle. She was so horrified by the
plight of the women that she wrote immediately to the newspaper:
Sir, I enclose 10s towards paying the fine to extricate those two poor needlewomen sentenced at Worship-street court, as reported in your issue of yesterday, Oct. 16. Yours etc. (Mrs) Jane Morris, Kelmscot (sic) Manor, Lechlade, Oct. 17, 1902
[The above has been sent to the Court Missionary. – Ed. D.N.]
The reason I found this so surprising and touching is
because we often think of Jane as quite aloof and uninvolved in real life. While her daughters and husband held the
Socialist banner high, Jane is conspicuous by her absence and it has struck
people as noteworthy that she did not involve herself as wholeheartedly as May,
for example, in pursuing and upholding her husband’s principles.
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| Hammersmith Socialist League, with William, May and Jenny Morris present |
Little did I suspect that Jane favoured a bit
of direct action and in freeing at least one of the women (possibly both with
time served) and broadcasting her actions publically in the newspaper, she
might have highlighted the continuing plight of needlewomen which does not seem
to have improved a jot since Mrs Biddell in 1843. It could be that she was purely motivated by
the awful plight of the women, it could be that her husband’s socialism had
also been her own, but it could also have been that she was smart enough to
realise that whilst she had the luxury and time to do this…
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| Detail of Bedcover (1910) Jane and May Morris |
…others were also sewing, but in ‘slow starving’ and squalor.
Whatever her reasons I think I appreciate Jane Morris a little bit
more today because of it.
