Our Collections (which includes SoG Data Online) are packed with a variety of directories, which members can explore from home. Taking time to investigate the world behind the entries can reveal fascinating details into our ancestors’ lives and experiences.
One example is The Yorkshire textile industry: a directory of wool, worsted, cotton, silk etc., published by John Worrall.
Not only does this contain a directory of addresses and telephone numbers, but it is packed with colourful advertisements like this below of Lyon Works, Oldham in Lancashire, which can help us picture where ancestors worked.
As we move into the last weeks of summer, many of us may be thinking about staycations or trips away.
It was at this time of year that the thoughts of our working class ancestors would fill with dreams and plans for their much-needed annual summer holiday.
Each year, from around the time of the Industrial Revolution to the mid 20th century, factories and mills such as the Oldham Lyon Works closed across northern England and the Midlands, for Wakes Week. In Scotland, the annual workers’ holiday for city dwellers is known as Trades Fortnight.
The name ‘Wakes Week’ originated from the ‘wake’ (from the Old English waecan) – or the Saturday night of prayer for the dead on the date of a church’s festival for its saint’s day (or inauguration). Wakes thus grew from a night of prayer vigil to a more raucous weekend of celebrations, including sports, drinking, and dancing.
As industry spread across the UK in the late 18th and early 19th century, the wake tradition adapted to an annual summer holiday for the workers. The owners of factories, mills, and mines would take the opportunity of their workers being away to undertake necessary maintenance.
Originally, the holiday was unpaid. Each local area designated its own week. Glasgow, for example, has held a Fair Fortnight since the 12th century on around the second half of July. All the factories closed and workers headed off ‘doon the watter’ to the beaches of resorts like Rothesay on Bute.
In Lancashire, towns took holidays on different weeks between June and September. This enabled work to take place in the county throughout the summer, even though workers would all be able to take a week off. Those at the Lyon Works of 1924, for example, would have gone away from the Saturday before the last Saturday in June. By the 20th century this was when Oldham Wakes traditionally began.
Sadly, however, some of our ancestors experienced a darker side to Wakes Week. In 1832, cholera was spreading uncontrollably through the United Kingdom. For much of the year, though, Bilston in the Black Country had managed to stay free of the recent outbreak.
In her book, Cholera: The Victorian Plague (Pen & Sword, 2015), Amanda J Thomas writes of the once isolated town:
Bilston’s population had swelled to around 14,500, thanks to the nearby deposits of iron, coal and limestone then in huge demand. The town’s infrastructure was fragile and the only water source, Bilston Brook, had become an open sewer, ‘the receptacle of all manner of impurities and loathsome filth disseminating disease and death in all directions.’
Bilston’s new accessibility meant that in June 1832 ithad been inundated by at least a thousand people attending the Bilston Wake, part of the traditional annual Wakes Week celebrations . . . The influx of people from surrounding areas was to prove disastrous for Bilston in the summer of 1832. Elsewhere cholera was already established and the Wakes Week visitors brought the disease with them, tainting Bilston’s water supply and infecting the indigenous population. When cholera swept through the town in August and September, 745 died -around one in twenty of the population. Such was the speed at which the disease struck, Bilston could not keep up with the burials and cart loads of coffins had to be brought in from Birmingham.
By the twentieth century, Black Country residents could enjoy their Wakes Week, with many opting for a trip to Blackpool for rides, donkeys, vast golden beaches, and sea air.
Today, the views and experience of a summer visit to Blackpool are not all that different from those experienced by workers in the early 20th century.
Unfortunately, we can’t see all the beautiful holiday vistas that our ancestors enjoyed. Not all popular Wakes destinations remain.
In the same year the Worrall’s Textile Directorywas published, the Halifax Evening Courier promoted a day trip to Dean Head then in the West Riding of Yorkshire.
The advertisement celebrates the area’s ‘glorious scenery’ and ‘invigorating air’. In the early 1960s, a motorway and dam were proposed to cross the Dean Head Valley.
Work began in 1964, and by the end of 1969 most of the village buildings had been demolished or submerged in a reservoir.
Bibliography
Our Collections (which includes SoG Data Online); Occupations > Textiles > Worralls Textile directory 1924
Halifax Evening Courier, 11 August 1924, page 1 (Findmypast.com; British Newspaper Archive)
Susan Barton, Working-class organisations and popular tourism, 1840–1970(Manchester University Press, 2005)
John Walton, Leisure in Britain (1780–1939)(Palgrave Macmillan, 1983)
Scammonden Dam, Engineering Timelines http://www.engineering-timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem.asp?id=1142(retrieved 28 July 2021)
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