The subject of today's post is one of those former Marlow residents whose name we pick at random to research and feature. We do this to tell the story of as many people as possible, rather than focusing just on the famous or wealthy. It was all the interconnected lives of our past residents that made Marlow what it is today. As always, even someone picked at random proves to be interesting.
Emily Frith of Gun Lane
Emily was born in the early 1830s in the surprisingly populous Gun Lane, Great Marlow, to Henry and Susannah. Henry worked mainly as a sawyer and carpenter. (Properties mostly demolished, now known as Trinity Road.) The cottage the family occupied was on the side later occupied by the Victorian Police station and petty sessions court, and it is now under the Dean Street carpark. The family had at least three other Frith households in the lane. Their home was one of the smallest there, with a assessed value of £3 10s in 1833. It was a fairly crowded area, with a relatively poor population, and as such many newly married young working class people took the opportunity to rent a affordable if unglamorous property within it. There are not many long standing Marlow families that won't have a Gun Lane resident amongst their members if they stayed long enough! Henry was lucky though to have a small garden attached to his home. Later he moved to the Common Slough (aka Spittal Square, where Chapel, Spittal and Dean Streets meet). Emily however, stayed in Gun Lane and at the age of 19 was lodging with her sister and brother in law Fanny and William Stroud in Gun Place. Gun Place was a little court of houses, all now vanished, off Gun Lane, and now under the Dean Street car park on the side of Rookery park. This was even more compact than Gun Lane, and suffered not infrequent problems with poor sanitation.
Rag Sorter
Around this time Emily was working as a rag sorter while two sisters she lived with were satin stitch workers. The girls were therefore employed in two classic Marlow occupations of the time for young Marlow women. Neither role was well paid but both were at least steady jobs. Emily was almost certainly working at the Marlow paper mills, as they employed a good number of rag sorters, as rags were required in vast numbers to make paper at the time. It was not the easiest job as rag sorting was regarded as a frequently dirty and smelly task but it was a very highly skilled one. They needed to sort rags by type, before they could be washed and pulped and were required to work at a furious pace. Emily's hand and eye co ordination must have been excellent as would be her ability to concentrate. Most of those employed with her were also young women as females were regarded as better suited to the skills involved!
Working Mother
In 1852 she married agricultural labourer Job Jones (of Forty Green by birth, later Great Marlow and Bovingdon Green). Job was lodging in West Street at the time of the 1851 census. Job had spent a month in prison with hard labour in 1850 for damaging a tree. This means Job was most likely supplementing his income as very many Marlow men did, by gathering wood for the purpose of skewer making. The skewers were used in the meat industry. Making them obviously wasn't illegal but cutting bits off suitable trees or bushes to use as raw materials was, if you did not have the right to do so from that specific tree. (You can read about the skewering / "skewerter" trade in Marlow here). Plenty of Emily's Frith relatives had similar convictions as did many others in Marlow. Her father Henry had found himself in court at least once charged with theft (of a duckling from a farm) but that case was dismissed when the prosecutor failed to turn up in court. And her teenage brother Henry was fined for a "gross assault" on a young woman on a country footpath near Marlow Bottom.
In 1861 Emily and Job were lodging with three young children at the Jolly Maltsters in Dean Street. (AKA the Jolly Malsters). As is true of many of the properties that would have been familiar to Emily, The Jolly Maltsters has been demolished. It was one of the larger and older drinking places in Dean Street and took in longer term lodgers for much of its history. While it started life as one of the more respectable Dean Street pubs and beer houses, it's reputation declined in the 1860s and by 1872 was in trouble for harbouring "people of notorious character" including poachers and prostitutes. (You can read about the history of the Maltsters here) Most of the trouble related to those drinking there, rather than living in so let's hope Emily and Job got plenty of peace! Emily was now working as an embroiderer, a useful job that many mother's could do at home around their endless domestic and child rearing responsibilities. I have noted that many Marlow women who were previously rag sorters go on to work as embroiders too. Job was still working as a farm labourer, usually for the Wethered family. This was possibly the reason the family moved a mile or so out of Marlow to Bovingdon Green a short while later.
In 1865 Job spent a few days locked up in the police station on suspicion of stealing coal from the brick kiln at Bovingdon Green. He was caught crossing the Green with a lump of it under his arm. When accosted by a constable, he said he'd picked up the coal from the grass. This was enough for the arrest of Job, despite the fact that Mr Corby had not missed any coal. Corby said he certainly could not identify it as belonging to him and Job was released. The JPs were not impressed by the case having been bought before them especially as the coal had a value of 2d!
Rough Music
Rough music involves a group of people going outside someone's home and making a cacophony of noise and disturbance to register a protest at the conduct of someone inside. It's often associated with alerting cuckolds or those engaged in relationships when unmarried that the community knows what's going on. I've noticed that many protests were directed at those suspected of violence towards their wives or habitual drunkenness but some also to those who had dobbed in someone else for committing an offence. It was getting to be a little old fashioned in 1874 and associated more with rural communities but it was not abandoned in our area for some time - especially around Bovingdon Green, Marlow Common and Lane End.
In 1874 Emily was involved in just such an incident as a "musicker". A member of the household of Joseph Meade(s) in Bovingdon Green had "turned approver" in a court case relating to stolen corn. This means the "approver" had confessed to his involvement in the crime, and gave full information as to others involved, in exchange for a full pardon himself. The community of Bovingdon Green was very upset at this, and decided to let the Meade / Meades family know (or rather some members of it as some Meades were actually performing the music themselves!) Emily, along with her sister in law Eliza and several others created a hubbub outside the Meades home over two nights. Two policeman from Marlow tried to disperse them but they just came back repeatedly in circumstances described as "almost amounting to a riot". In the end 4 women including Emily and 3 men were arrested and charged with "unlawfully, wilfully and maliciously damaging the house and property" of Joseph Meades. Emily had to appear before the magistrates at the Marlow police court. Luckily for her, the magistrates were baffled as to why the charges bought were relating to property damage for which they felt there was no evidence, rather than "tumultuously assembling of the disturbance of the public peace". So the case was dismissed! It was alleged that Eliza had kicked the boards of Mead's pigsty and that all the women threw buckets of water at and into the house and banged on the window shutters with stones.
Smallpox
In 1870, one of Emily's daughters returned from London where she had been in domestic service. The girl had felt ill before leaving, and shortly after arriving back in Bovingdon Green she came out with smallpox. Another case was reported around the same time, also in a young person who had recently returned from London. Job's employer Mr Wethered was saluted for continuing to pay him while he was unable to work due to staying in precautionary isolation and helping to care for his daughter. The victim appears to have made a recovery although it is not stated if she was disfigured in any way by this dreadful disease.
Death at the Brewery
In 1884 tragedy would intervene in the life of Emily. Husband Job was still working for the Wethered as a farm labourer but he was sometimes also employed by them to do casual work at their brewery. On one such day, poor Job would suffer a fatal accident in the yard. There was loaded dray there, awaiting a horse, along with a cart loaded with a couple of barrels. Reports on the event contain some contradictory information as to what exactly happened but it seems most likely that Job tripped over the shafts of the dray and in attempting to steady himself grabbed the tailgate of the adjacent cart. This then tipped up crushing him with two barrells falling down. His son John was present and along with another lifted the cart off Job. He was placed on a horse blanket until the yard clerk David Rush told someone to fetch the stretcher from the armoury along with Dr Culhane who worked from the High Street close by. He was taken into the Brewery office before the decision was made to take him home to Emily, with Dr Culhane accompanying the injured man. Sadly his internal injuries were severe and Job died the following day. He had according to his wife remained conscious to the last and had prayed unceasingly.
At the inquest the verdict was accidental death but recommendations were made to the brewery to improve their procedures for immobilising loaded drays and carts. Some of those present said the wheels of the cart had been properly "scotched" that is wooden blocks or stones had been put under them to prevent movement, but others could not remember if it had been done and also it was admitted the stones were often slippery and wet and could easily be dislodged. It was also said by some that a two barrels had been placed under each end of the cart to prevent tipping up, or that one had been placed under the centre of the cart, and that the shafts were also resting on an empty hogshead for the same purpose. This last point was strongly denied by other witnesses and it's obvious from the questions asked at the inquest that some felt sceptical that a barrel placed under the cart could have been dislodged when Job stumbled given the weight of both that and the cart. At other times it was said the shafts were held by men while the cart was loaded which does not sound very safe either. Job was just 52*. His son John who was present at the Brewery was only 17.
Goodbye Emily
A death notice for Emily, wife of the late Job Jones, appeared in the South Bucks Standard in May 1895. It tells us she was then living in Cambridge Place in Marlow. This is yet another entirely demolished address, which was previously located between Eton Place and Oxford Road, off Queens Road. I hope the last year's of her life were peaceful.
NOTES:
There was another Emily Jones in Marlow of a similar age to our featured Emily. She was married to William Jones, who also worked at the brewery and lived in Bovingdon Green at times. This "other" Emily is most likely the one who took to casual nursing in the 1890s, working as an uncertified midwife. Uncertified was not the same as illegal, it meant she had not received formal training or qualifications which she was not bound to do at the time.
Related Posts:
To find every mention of a family or individual here, use the A-Z Person index in the top drop down menu. There are thousands of people listed there with more names added weekly. We do try and indicate which families will soon be featured in published content, but the order can change if requests are made.
Another death of a brewery employee in 1884 features here
To find other posts relating to Bovingdon Green see here
Written and researched by Kathryn Day.
Sources include:
1833 Parish Assessment - our transcripts from the original notebooks in our possession.
Census transcripts from the microfilm by Jane Pullinger and Charlotte Day.
Bucks Herald, April 1850, January 1874 and November 1884 - British Library Archive.
South Bucks Standard November 1884, May 1895 and clippings related to the Job Jones inquest, courtesy of Miss Morton.
Berkshire Chronicle November 1884, British Library Archive.
Buckingham Express November 1884, as above
Bucks Advertiser and Aylesbury News April 1850.
"England and Wales Death Registration Index 1837-2007," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:2JGT-KGC : 31 December 2014)
Emily Jones, 1895; from "England & Wales Deaths, 1837-2006," database, findmypast (http://www.findmypast.com : 2012); citing Death, Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England, General Register Office, Southport, England.
© MarlowAncestors
