When I started this post a month ago, it was well in line with the themes of the month - graduation and education. Life got busy, and fast. The remainder of June was overtaken by interviews, switching jobs, and moving. Now that life has finally slowed down a little bit, I am able to return to blogging - or at the very least finish this post!
Access to education is something that so many of us take for granted. During the Victorian era, children spent fewer years in school and often times the quality of their education was governed by their family's wealth. When I was researching my own ancestors, I was fascinated by the diversity in their school records. For this post we are going to examine a family that I have previously discussed on my blog. I have linked the previous posts here, and here.
The Sword family is of particular interest to me because their economical situation fluctuates quite frequently while the father (David) was alive, and then very quickly collapsed following his early and untimely death. The family had a total of eight children - one of which died during infancy. Of the seven surviving children; the eldest five were daughters. Their education records suggest that the eldest two received a fairly traditional Victorian schooling, where as their five younger siblings (in particular the two boys) had it much tougher.
The first record I found was for the eldest daughter - Ellen. She was being discharged from Peterborough National School because the family was moving. Based on my research this school required no tuition and serviced many of the children who lived in the slum of little hell. A few years later I found another discharge record - this time Ellen was joined by her little sister Bessie. They were leaving the St Paul's School. What surprised me was that the school was noted as one that required a tuition. I had previously believed that the family was extremely poor (despite David coming from a successful family of Scottish iron moulders) because of where they had lived several years prior, however this made me question that. I decided to consult the Charles Booth's poverty maps and see what it was like to have lived on Distillery Lane (highlighted in yellow on the map below).
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that although the street was poor, it was a major step up from the slum of little hell. Their short move across the Thames meant that the family was no longer forced to live in one of London's most horrid slums. David was clearly earning more money during this time, and thus they were able to send their daughters to a school that required tuition.
David died in 1889, within weeks the family had went on relief, and within a year they had entered the workhouse. When Mary (the mother) filed for relief, part of that entailed her school age children (Maud and Kate) getting sent to Forest Gate district school. More information about the school can be found here. I was surprised to learn that there had been a fire in one of the boys dormitories only four months prior to when the girls started attending the school. Although they were not enrolled at the time of the fire, it no doubt would have played on the mind of their mother who had no choice in what school her children were sent to. These education records were nothing like the ones that I had previously found for Ellen and Bessie. They contained details such as the number that was affixed to their uniform, and the assigned "grade" for the kind of meals they were to receive, which felt cold and almost like that of a prison. Industrial schools were known for training poor children for service rather than teaching book based skills such as math and literacy. Boys were taught how to serve in the military where as girls were trained for service. Maud and Kate were 8 and 7 respectively when they were sent to Forest Gate. They were children. Children that had just suffered the loss of their father, then were taken away from their mother and siblings and sent to live a government institution. I wish that I knew more about their brief time at Forest Gate. Their experience there, followed by the workhouse no doubt had a major impact on their lives. I have reason to believe that both girls ended up in service, however I lost track of them after they left home - both at relatively young ages compared to their brothers.
Their younger brother James experienced life in a truant school followed by an industrial school. In July 1900 he is sent to a truant school but at the time of his admission his mother's whereabouts were unknown. This is the most likely reason why, in 1901, he was living at St John's Industrial School in Walthamstow, Essex. The entry in the census record makes note of him being a student, as well as the name and address of his mother. This was of particular interest to me because the quality (or rather focus) of the education that he received would have been the main driver for him ending up in the militia at the age of 16. This is also the place that he is most likely to have contracted small pox - something that his military files noted as leaving scars on his face and body. Once again, the details about his stay at St John's were almost non-existent. I was unable to find even the most basic documents such as admittance and discharge records (based on newspaper articles, I believe he left around 1902). Without the 1901 census, I never even would have known he was there.
When we compare how the eldest three daughters faired with that of the other four children, we can clearly see how their education impacted the career paths that they followed.
Both of the boys ended up serving in the military (however both boys did briefly work as a labourers). In James' case, he learned how to be a soldier and was clearly respected by militia because they described him as a "smart hardworking man" when he was transferred to the army. I believe that part of his success can be attributed to the training he received through the industrial schools. James' brother David was never referred to with the same level admiration. David struggled in the military which may in part have been that he didn't attend an industrial school (I am yet to find a record that confirms this). He frequently went AWOL and is believed to have deserted his battalion during WW1. He was raised by a single mother in a home where there was rarely enough food to go around. He had frequent run ins with the police, many of the crimes can be attributed to poverty. For example, he was arrested at the age of 17 for stealing butterscotch candy from a vending machine in an arcade. At the time of his arrest he told the officer that "he would not have done it had he not been so hungry".
Maud and Kate are both believed to have entered service relatively young, and little was found of them afterwards. Their two elder sisters Bessie and Mary both managed to evade such fate. I find it most impressive that Bessie evaded service (I have not found records of this) as she was in her mid-teens at the time of her father's death. She would have been the perfect age to have moved away and started working as a servant, yet that is not what happened. After the family left the workhouse, she started working as a match girl in London's East End. In 1897, she married a bricklayer. At the time of her marriage, she did not list an occupation; however this can be explained by the fact that the couple had their first son nine months prior. Mary also went on to marry a man who had a steady income, and together they raised a family in north London. Whatever she had, she was willing to share. She took in her widowed mother and any of her siblings who needed a home. Her home would have been crowded, but that never appears to have been enough for her to close her doors.
In conclusion, my once bleak view of such institutions had became blurred into one where I am able to see the glimmer of hope they offered while also being able to see the high price that came with it. I am not trying to defend the practice of forcibly taking children from their parents, but rather trying to provide an objective view with historically accurate facts. Whether, you agree with it or not, the institutions did help children break the poverty cycle. The industrial schools gave them opportunities to learn skilled trades and in turn allowed them to break the cycle that they were born into. All of the Sword children went on to have prosperous lives and (as far as Im aware) none of them had to rely on relief or needed to be admitted to the workhouse.
The industrial schools were able to offer the younger children in the Sword family an opportunity they otherwise would not have had. They would have been raised in abject poverty by a single mother, and had little prospect of finding a viable source of income due to lack of technical training. The poor living conditions they would have been raised in would have increased the entire family's chances of death from disease as their single mother would have had more mouths to feed and the house would have been severely overcrowded. Conversely, their reputation as being unsanitary and exploitative institutions is not completely inaccurate. While in an industrial school, James likely contracted small pox - had he stayed with his mother, he may have never contracted the disease. Upon looking at the career paths that children followed, they all offered rather bleak futures. James died during WW1, and his brother David went missing. Both Maud and Kate likely entered service and little is known about them past that point.
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