The Plight of the Rural poor in around Falmouth

The villages around Falmouth in the 18th and 19th century bear very little resemblance to the villages of Devon North East Cornwall and the rest of the West Country where in those villages the Saxon influences are to be seen with the houses surrounding the village green, the graceful trees and the church close to the lodge gates and the demesnes(house) of the local squire.

For these Cornish villages owed little allegiance to the church of the parish because they were devoted to the chapels.But a large number of people lived in lonely farms and scattered cottages around Falmouth which were dumped anywhere in odd corners by the roadside. Hundreds of these cottages were built by the parishioners themselves. What is interesting is that many of these cottages were held under the terms of a ‘lease’ which depended on ‘lives’, a system which operated widely in Cornwall until the 20th century.

Under these ‘lives’ leases some waste ground could be rented for a small amount of money on the understanding that after the cottage had been built, at the death of the longest lived of 3 selected people, the ground together with all the buildings should revert to the original owner which in most instances they did.

In a manuscript by a J. C. Hoare he comments on the meagre income of the farm labourer during the 1850’s when to prevent starvation every member of the household was driven onto the fields to work starting at 5am in summer where they weeded corn, hoed turnips, planted potatoes, rolling barley and oats, hay making or reaping with a sickle. Children from 4 to 5 years of age received 3 or 4 pence a day according to their size and the women 6 pence or 8 pence making with the husbands wages about 12 or 13 shillings a week,

Of course the children who were unable to work were left to care for themselves, so that we read in the West Briton of the 25 December 1840 the district coroner held no less than three inquests on the bodies of children who had been burnt to death by accidentally setting fire to their clothes whilst left in the house alone during their mother’s absence.All of these children were under ten years of age.’

Apparently the doors of the cottages at this time were mostly designed as ‘hepse’, divided across the middle into two sections like a stable door. The upper half was usually kept open to let in light and air whistthe lower half was shut to keep out pigs and keep in the children.

Because of the poverty of those times the clothing was very scant indeed; to protect them from the cold and wet: a coarse shirt, a pair of ‘duck’trousers not quite reaching the ankles which has now become fashionable to some young men, a waistcoat and boots without socks or stockings. The boot leather were so hard that they were very difficult to put on and so were laced up by using a lace hook.

The men would walk on average 20 to 30 miles a day in the course of their work so that you can imagine the squeals of pain when prising off the boots at night. In winter where everything was usually wet, straw ropes were wound around the legs from the top of the boots to the knees, The upper part of the body was covered in an apron and an old sack served as a shawl.

Having only one suit of clothes for everyday wear, according to the book of Old Cornwall, ‘Remembrances of Life on a Farm’, the men had to dry themselves before the fire whilst the same suit of clothes had to be put on again in the morning often still wet and icy cold.

‘Rheumatism was the usual consequence of such a life and at fifty many a man had become practically a cripple having to walk on 2 sticks

Mention was made in the Western Morning News of the 1800s of children suffering from exposure who had to go to bed naked early on Saturday nights so that their mothers might wash and dry the underclothes they had to be ready for use again on Sunday morning.

During a frost, or in snowy weather, it was not uncommon to see boys of nine or ten years of age in the fields crying bitterly because of the cold and their hands so blue and numb that they were scarcely able to grasp the frozen turnips which they would try to pull up. After a day long work in the fields the women came home, worn out with fatigue still having to cook,bake, sew before retiring for the night.But a Dr Dunstan writing in the Western Morning News wrote again in the 1840s that when the wife was a slattern or a poor contriver the condition of squalor was beyond words to describe and he quotes a Mrs Pascoe who said,

‘Never did my eyes behold such a loose slammerkin, smiling, snuff-taking

slattern as Mary Anne Hodge with her red hair streaming down under her

tattered cap, her snuffy nose and chin, her light gown all in squads and

her ultra fashionable sleeves dipping every now and then into the

washing tub over which she was loitering, I caught sight of a girl

blowing the fire. She was a squalid looking little thing about 8 years

old, pale as ashes and marked with smallpox.

In most of these cottages the rooms were divided by wooden partitions

whilst the ill fitting door and open chimneys provided ’ draught Enough

to feed a pig’, to quote one of the writers.

The inside of the cob walls which was usually a building mixture of clay and chopped straw were usually whitewashed The floor of the older cottages was trodden down earth which was levelled once a week with a shovel. Later floors of lime ash were introduced. Mostly, according to the Cornish writer Hamilton Jenkins, who incidentally has just died, the single downstairs room served, as a kitchen, wash house, and sitting room combined, whilst the crude furniture commonly consisted of a rude table, resembling a carpenter’s bench; and in some cases three of 4 straight backed chairs.

The majority of people had to be content with a long form and 3 legged stools whilst the children sat on blocks of wood. The grand seat for the head of the household was often formed out of an old tree trunk.

Dr Dunstan writing in the WMN of that time described the tiny bedrooms consisting of a couple of bedsteads with crossed ropes tosustain the mattress. which was little better than a straw mat abouta half an inch thick. In cases where there was but one bedroom the 2 youngest children lay with the parents, the infant on the mother’s arm, and the next youngest outside the father’s whilst a mattress placed on the floor sometimes accommodated as many as 6 other children, four lying side by side and across their feet. Very frequently both the mattresses and bedding were rotten and filthy.

In the cold of winter, coats, dresses petticoats and even sacks were used for bed coverings, a fact which tended to increase the normally fetid atmosphere. The thatched roof sometimes leaked on to the beds which added still further to the discomforts of the family quotes the Cornish Magazine No 2 .

And according to R. Polwheles’s History of Cornwall the only sanitary arrangements was a ‘dung pit which lay immediately before their front doors’.As water was often a scarcity in the mining districts because the wells had been drained dry by the pumping engines, women had to find water sometimes 3 miles away.

In towns like Falmouth the consequences of overcrowding and lack of sanitation and a proper water supply were piles of offal and manure with the only drainage, an open catch pit. It was inevitable that typhus was endemic and that when cholera broke out in Falmouth in the 1800s many people died with some households losing 6 out of the ten living there.

As the poor people could not afford a doctor they resorted to remedies oftheir own which W. Bottrell in ‘Tales of the hearthside of West Cornwall’in 1826, says that there is a doctor in every hedge. And if you were to look in the shop window of M Allison, Bookseller, on the Market Strand of Falmouth in 1762, you would find amongst 18 other herbal remedies; Dr Hills Balsam of Honey, Tincture of Valerian, Essence of Water Dock, Dr Walker’s Jesuits Drops, Turlington’s Balsam of Life and Perfumed Wash balls.

J C Hoare in ‘Traditions and Recollections’ describes how cottage doctors would prescribe mallow prepared as an ointment for inflammations, and coltsfoot prepared as a smoke for Cornish miners as a precaution against lung diseases. Earache was commonly treated by applying a piece of cooked onion to the affected parts, whilst a pounded up mixture of bullorns (snails) and groundsel was used as a poultice for poisoned wounds.

In the Journal of the Royal Institutions of Cornwall of 1875 mention is made of the way the cottages of the poor were illuminated, similar it seemed to me to Rome of the First Century for an ’iron chill’ was used which was a little dish holding the wicks up at the built up corners hung from a nail on the wall or placed on a table. Another device was the ‘stonen chill’ which I understand was an earthenware lamp shaped like a heavy candlestick but having at the top some oil with a wick. Another lamp the burning ’train’, was also the name given to the oil from the pilchard which was sold as paraffin. It was brought to market by the fishwives in big jars and retailed to the country people. Usually they used this tiny glimmer of light for most occasions, but for closer work the more expensive candles were adopted which were made from a pith of rushes dipped in tallow held by a clip attached to an upright stand, when sometimes both ends of the rushes could be lit, an extravagant thing to do, from which we have the saying ‘burning the candle at both ends’. The hempen wick candle replaced the one which later was replaced by the paraffin lamp. But can you imagine the smell from all of these different methods from the use of pilchard oil to hempen wick candles and tallow dips?

When we turn to the subject of food at that time, one writercomments that the devil never came into ‘ Cornwall for fear of being made into a pie, for, and here I quote Hamilton Jenkins, ‘it is certainly no exaggeration to say that in times past, pies were pre-eminently the medium through which the culinary art of theCornish housewife was revealed, and though latterlytheir place has been somewhat usurped by the ‘pasty’ for which Cornishmenare now famous, pies still figure largely in the diet of the natives.’

Apparently the Cornish housewife thought that everything could be used to flavour their culinary dishes which included mackerel pies, pilchard pies, conger pies bream pies, ram pies muggety pies, taddago piesNattlin pies, curlew pies, sqab pies, leek pies and many more.

‘The pilchard was cooked whole with the head projection through the crust, whilst the taddago pie were made from the prematurely born ‘veers’ or sucking pigs, The contents of the squab pie are described by Charles in Hereward the Wake and I quote ;

‘consisting of layers of apple, bacon, onions, and mutton and having at the bottom a squab or young cormorant which diffused through the pie and the ambient air a delicate odour of mangled guano and polecat’.

In the History of the Parish of Mylor by H. P. l Olivey he quotesthe author of The Old English Gentleman mentioning what was, to those outside the county, the bizarre custom of adding to the savoury dishes, cream or sugar. And he writes in verse:

Dear to Cornish palates, one and all,

Appeared in crusted pomp to grace the hall,

The pie, where herbs with veal in union meet,

The tasteful parsley, the nutritious beet,

The bitter mercury wild, nor valued less,

The watery lettuce and the pungent cress;

When ravishing with odours every nose,

The leek o’er layers of the pilchard rose,

Or, in a gentler harmony, with pork,

Ere yet of mouths it claim’d the playful work,

Attack’d the nostril with a tempting steam,

As opening, it ingulphed the golden cream.

The fire place in these old cottages usually consisted of ‘an open hearth, 5 to 6 feet wide and deep and somewhat more in height. The fire burnt in the centre of the hearth . There were no bars to keep it in like an ordinary grate. Within the hearth stood the chimney stool, fromwhich you could look up to the sky above. Before the use of coal in the 18th century and indeed sometime after its appearance the furze(gorse) and bog turf were used as fuel and placed in the wood corner.

In 1799 the overseers of Mylor Parish were paying 9d a hundred for furze faggots , ‘Each night the embers were banked up before bed and the kettle hooked on the cross bare in the chimney to give hot water for breakfast. As the furze burnt too quickly the dried bog turf was used on top of the furze and with this fuel and the use of a kettle for baking and a crock for boiling all the cooking could be done. The kettle was different from ours as it was an iron bowl with 3 legs placed on the ground. When baking had to be done a heavy iron trivet, which was a large iron tray on 3 legs called a brandis was used on which a similar tray but without legs called a baking ire was carefully wiped and greased on which the bread and other food was carefully laid to be protected by the inverted kettle. The bread was left to cook for an hour and a half and hopefully tasteful loaves of bread and if room enough pasties and pies were prepared.

I have mentioned in previous talks the devastating effects of thesalt tax on everyone but this tax was removed in 1825 so that in towns like Falmouth there was an increase in the consumption of fish by allowing greater quantities to be cured for winter use. At that time most homes had a large ‘bussa’ or earthenware pot. In this pilchards were laid in salt to last the family through the months when fresh fish was scarce.

‘Jousters’ would, after a large big catch of pilchards hawk the fish through the town and villages where they were commonly sold at the rate of sixpence a hundred. The villagers outside Falmouth would hang the fish outside the door to dry on a stick and were then cooked over an open fire when they were known a scroulers.

I shall stop here with the thought that all of us listening to the life of the poor in and around Falmouth at that time think ourselves lucky that we weren’t born at that time .

Brinley Morris January 2009

References:

J. C. Hoare

Book of Old Cornwall ‘Remembrances of Life on a Farm’,

Western Morning News -Dr Dunstan

Richard. Polwheles’s History of Cornwall

W. Bottrell ‘Tales of the hearthside of West Cornwall’ 1826,

J C Hoare ‘Traditions and Recollections’

Journal of the Royal Institutions of Cornwall of 1875

Hamilton Jenkins

History of the Parish of Mylor by H. P. l Olivey

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