Week 36 - Labour
It is only since my father’s generation that there have been
people in my family who did not work with their hands. My grandfathers, and their forefathers back
as far as I can see – into the 17th century – were almost all labourers. Most of them were agricultural workers and
very few of them owned the land they were working.
My great grandfather Anthony Whitten was an exception in
that his father was a landowner. The
problem was that there were several sons and a finite amount of land. Anthony and two of his brothers left Ireland
to seek their fortune here in Australia in the 1860s. All of them became land owners, but they
nevertheless had to labour hard on their land to make a livelihood.
More typical of my Irish forebears was my other great
grandfather James Patrick Gleeson who left County Clare with two of his
brothers and a sister in about 1885. His
father worked all his life as an agricultural labourer and the family was very
poor. When I spent time in the Family
History Society of Ennis in 2017, we found only one reference to Michael, which indicated that he had owned no land and
paid a pittance for the hut where his family lived. James worked as a labourer
in Australia, including on the railways, before finding a mid-life career as a
publican.
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| This 19th century farmhouse is bigger and better than the one Michael Gleeson lived in. |
The English immigrants on Dad’s side of the family were also
labourers. Charles White landed here in
1853 with his wife and four children under the age of 6. They knew nobody in the colony, but Charles
was a gardener and was clearly confident that he would find work. When he died in Lismore in 1898, his obituary
recorded that he had carried on a “market garden in South Lismore and was
renowned for the excellence of his produce, which he exhibited at Spring
Shows”.
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| Charles White |
James Golding and his wife Eliza also came as Government
assisted immigrants from England. James
is described as a labourer – the Goldings form a long line of agricultural
labourers who lived in two Suffolk villages – Glemsford and Cavendish.
The immigration papers of another pair of my 3 x great
grandparents, Patrick and Mary Power, tell a similar story.
His business is stated as “Farming” and his heath is
assessed as “Very Good”. Mary’s business
is “Dairywoman” and she to is in “Very Good” condition. Considering that they were fleeing from
Ireland in 1840 (pre- famine but always poor) this is a good report.
There is some evidence that Mary Power’s father, Bernard Murphy,
was a “Hedge teacher”.
Hedge Schools sprang up in Ireland in the 18th and 19th
centuries to secretly provide the basics of an education to the children of
Catholic and other non-Anglican families, for whom there were no other
provisions. Under the penal laws, only
schools for those of the Anglican faith were allowed.
The name implies that the classes took place outside (next to a
hedgerow) but in fact they were usually held in private homes or barns. Subjects included reading writing and
grammar of the Irish and English language, and maths (the three “R’s”). In some
schools the Irish bardic tradition, Latin, Greek, history and home economics were also taught. Payment was generally
made per subject. It is unlikely that
this was enough for Bernard to support his family, so he probably also worked
on the land.
“The people of Ireland
are, I may almost say, universally educated:…. I do not know any part of
Ireland so wild, that its inhabitants are not anxious, nay, eagerly anxious for
the education of their children.” [Wakefield, Account of Ireland, Vol. II P
307].
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| A surviving hedge school |
In 2020, I can’t name one member of
my extended family who works as a labourer.
Machines and robots are increasingly making manual work a thing of the
past in first world countries. Such
manual work as we do – like gardening or woodworking – is done for pleasure and
personal fulfillment rather than as a means of keeping a roof over our heads
and food in our mouths.
But to find a teacher amongst all
the labourers is very exciting. There have been teachers in the family from the
1920s to the present day – now we know that this honourable profession was
recorded in our family as long ago as the 1750s and as far away as Ireland.
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