Imagine it is a year sometime within the first three quarters of the 19th century. Imagine too, that you are walking up West Street and into the area around what we would call Henley Road and Spinfeld Lane. There is a very good chance that of all the people you meet riding or walking in your direction, one or two will be a market gardener. And furthermore there's a good chance that one of them will be a member of the Piggott (Pigott /Picket) family or will be someone working for them. This area of town, along with areas off Station Road, has a strong horticultural tradition. The link gets diluted as the century moves along.
When you look through the winners of local mid Victorian horticultural shows, the same individuals tend to come up often. Most are, as you may presume, male and when the rules allowed, professionally employed as head gardeners in the local "big houses." But there's another name to be found regularly amongst the winners - Miss Jane Piggott. She is the subject of today's post.
Jane's father Thomas (born at Marlow c1779) was a market gardener with "large gardens" off Majaws Lane (AKA Madge Hawes Lane, now known as Spinfeld Lane), along with a house. In 1833 the two are assessed to have a reasonable value of £7. This slightly out of town and out of sight location meant the gardens were not infrequently the subject of petty thieving of crops. For example, some potatoes were stolen from him in 1844. One newspaper denounced such a loss to a "sober and industrious man." A particularly audacious raid in 1847 saw some 300 plus cabbages lifted from his land. This made news far afield. Marlow in 1840s suffered something of a crime wave, with field crops, domestic fowls and agricultural and horticultural tools favoured items. So Thomas was far from alone but this can't have been much comfort to him!
Jane was born around 1816. As a young woman she was a "cap worker" as was her sister Agnes. This industry was a huge employer of Marlow's young ladies in the regency and early Victorian period in particular. There were several large manufacturers of these caps (mostly for babies here) within Marlow, some of whom like the Washbournes had a workshop building (first in Chapel Street then Quoitings Square), others such as the Flint family employed mostly outworkers who completed their embroidery and finishing work within their own homes. Two of the most established cap work and satin stitch employers were based in West Street and West End, not far from the home of Jane and Agnes. So whether they walked into work each day, or went to collect fresh materials to work on, they probably didn't have to travel too far.
So far, so conventional. But by the time of the 1851 census, Jane's occupation has changed. She is now described as a "market gardener". Ten years later she is called a "fruiterer". In 1841, father Thomas was now aged 72 years old, and no doubt welcomed the help of his unmarried daughter to manage his business. How many garden labourers the Piggotts employed at once is not always easy to gauge, not least because of seasonal variations. But we can certainly find example of men who described themselves as working for the Piggotts during this time. It was common to employ casual labourers as you needed them. Most of the Great Marlow gardeners whose markets we know of for certain sold at Covent Garden or to the local middle men who themselves took the produce to London, rather than to local markets. This is why so many people worked as a fruiterer or vegetable dealer in Marlow, compared to the number of greengrocers and fruit monger shops here.
After her father's death, Jane did not marry but continued to manage the market garden at Majaws Lane initially. Her nephew Henry Slade, born 1841, worked as a garden labourer for Jane at this time. (Son of sister Agnes and Henry Slade.) It's in the 1860s and 70s that she began to make herself well known in the world of horticultural shows. The history of these events in Marlow is fractured, with shows and societies coming and going. Hopeful beginnings and high ideals nearly always gave way before long to squabbles or declining interest. But when the shows were at their height, they and the "rural fetes" could attract an incredibly large audience from all around Marlow. One of the latter contests, held at Danesfield in 1867 saw Jane winning a number of prizes. She is entered as the name of the winner specifically. This does not however mean she did the physical labour of growing the crops. It was usual at this period for produce to be entered under the name of the person whose garden they grew in - so the work of the gardeners at the big houses would be listed under the name of their wealthy employer. Where the work came from a market garden, the items entered were credited to the boss of it. Either way, Jane is unquestionably recognised by the event organisers as the person in charge of the business in her own right. She is not the only female entrant in this era, but she is probably the most successful one. The prizes were usually money. For example Jane won 2s for her parsnips, 1s 6d for green peas (second prize) and 1s for onions (3rd prize) all at one show in 1863. Jane seems to have had particular success with vegetables such as marrows and dwarf beans, and of course cabbages which had seemed so inviting to those thieves a couple of decades before. But she also scooped regular firsts for fruit such as plums, pears and apples.
Later on professional gardeners (and their wives) were excluded from entering many of the local shows. Luckily by this time Jane was now able to enter the Cottagers classes as she was working as a fruiterer which was not an excluded occupation. Now it's very likely that Jane was personally growing the vegetables, as any hint of someone showing produce other than their own was soon investigated. After the mid 1870s the number of female entries in horticultural shows also declined rapidly. When female only classes were reintroduced in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, they were seen as a modern stride forward! (And they were nearly always for things like flower arranging or for posies of wild flowers.) Jane must have smiled when she considered her own success in the world of horticulture.
To find every mention of an individual or family here, use the A-Z person index in the top drop down menu. There's over 4,000 people listed there.
To find other posts related to West End and the Spinfeld Lane area see this index
For posts about other gardeners in Marlow history, see the index here
SOURCES:
1833 Parish Assessment - transcribed by Charlotte from the original notebooks held by our family.
Census - 1841-1881, transcribed from the microfilm by Jane Pullinger and Charlotte Day. Census information always remains Crown Copyright.
Bucks Gazette 13 March 1847, British Library Archive, accessed via the BNA partnership.
Bucks Advertiser and Aylesbury News 30 November 1844. Thanks to Mr Ende for a copy of this.
Reading Mercury, 27 June & 12 September 1863 & 14th September 1872. As above.
Bucks Herald 17 September 1864, Courtesy of Mr Ende.
Written and researched by Kathryn Day.
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