Employment

_{Women polishing gold chains at a factory in Birmingham, c. 1909. © Getty Images}

The 1901 census identified prodigious population growth in two distinct types of region.

The first were the Derbyshire, North-east and South Wales coal fields. In Wales, the mines workforce had doubled in two decades to 148,000. Nationally 780,000 now worked in the pits. The second chief growth point was London’s suburbs. Places like Tottenham had been rural villages in living memory, while East Ham had tripled in size to nearly 100,000 people in ten years.

Docks and gasworks were major employers, but many of East Ham’s workers commuted into London. Each day 4,250 suburban trains steamed into the capital and every year 600 million passengers used the termini and underground network. Railways employed 320,000 people nationally (just 2,000 were women). Yet road transport employed substantially more than half a million. That meant working with horses, for lorries and motor-buses were still a few years off. However, by 1901 in backstreet Midlands workshops, pioneers like Henry Daimler and the Great Horseless Carriage Company were turning out a trickle of vehicles. In 1904, there were 8,456 cars on the roads.

Outside London, the majority walked to work. Most were men. Even among the over-75s, 40 per cent of men still worked. There were just a handful of occupations where women dominated: laundry work was almost totally female. Around three-quarters of workers in the hosiery, straw hat and glove-making industries were women, as were schoolteachers.

At 100,000, the number of female secretaries had more than doubled since the previous census, though male clerks substantially outnumbered them six to one. The cotton industry was the bastion of female employment: 77 per cent of unmarried women worked in Blackburn, and 40 per cent who were married. Redditch in Worcestershire had the highest proportion of married women in paid employment – needle and pin making occupied 43 per cent of married and widowed women.

The census reveals surprising female occupation elsewhere in the West Midlands. Women constituted up to a half of the workforce in chain making. Robert Sherard, visiting Cradley Heath in 1898 was astonished to find “sheds with five or six women, each working at her anvil… frightened infants hanging to their mothers’ breasts, as they ply the hammer”. Chain making was one of the most poorly paid jobs in Britain, at no more than six shillings for a 54-hour week. “I worked up till five”, a Cradley Heath mother told Sherard, the day “our little Johnny was born at a quarter past seven”.

Malcolm Chase