1839 –1914
Straw plaiter and wife of Joshua Daniels.
Relatives
Research:
MARTHA DANIELS; 1839 -1914
Although Martha was born during the second quarter of 1839, she was not baptised until nearly three years later on 11th December 1842. Her parents were Benjamin and Sarah Horwood. Benjamin was an agricultural labourer. The 1839 Tithe Map records Benjamin Horwood as occupying one of four cottages on Berkhamsted’s High Street owned by Edward Harris. However, two years later in 1841 the family had moved and was then living on White Hill. Martha was the third of eight children born to Benjamin and Sarah; her older sisters were Elizabeth, born about 1835 and Maria born about 1837. She also had a younger sisters, Ann, born about 1842, Sophia, born about 1846 Lydia, 1849, and two brothers, Charles, born 1851 and Henry, 1853. In 1855 Martha’s mother, Sarah, died and four years later in 1859 Benjamin married Ann Horn.
By 1851 the Horwood family had moved again, this time to Castle Street. Martha, only 11 years of age was already earning money for the family. She and three of her sisters were straw plaiters. Straw-plaiting was a profitable cottage industry for women and girls in Victorian times, supplying plaited straw to the hat makers of Luton and Dunstable. The craft was passed on from generation to generation and children were sent to dame schools to learn the craft. Children started straw plaiting at the age of 5. The work was well paid. Percy Bitchnell wrote in his book, A Short History of Berkhamsted, “…it was a profitable occupation and in the first half of the 19th century many women and children earned more than men who laboured in the fields. A good hand at Berkhamsted could earn about 15s a week – then a handsome wage -…Farmers complained that straw plaiting “did mischief, making the poor saucy, rendering the women adverse to husbandry and causing a dearth of indoor servants and field labourers”.
Martha married Joshua Daniels in 1859. They were to have only one child, William, who was born in 1870. Joshua and Martha had set up home in 1861 in Red Lion Yard and were still living in the Yard ten years later in 1871.
By 1881, Joshua and Martha had escaped the poverty of Red Lion Yard and had moved to 21 Cross Oak Road, where they were both to live for the rest of their days. In 1891 their son William had moved on and the couple had taken in a lodger, no doubt to help make ends meet. Ten years later in 1901, the lodger had been replaced by Martha’s step mother, the then 70 year old Ann Horwood who was working as a launderess. Joshua was then age 71 years and still working in the physically demanding job of a labourer, described in the census return as a builder’s labourer rather than the general labourer he had been before.
Joshua died at the age of 75 in December 1905 and was buried in Rectory Lane Cemetery. The burial records reveal that Martha’s step-mother, Ann Horwood, also died in December 1905 at the age of 75. She was also buried in the cemetery on the same day as Joshua, albeit in a different plot.
The first state pension was not introduced in Britain until 1908. Whilst Joshua may not have lived long enough to receive a state retirement pension, Martha did; she is noted in the census of 1911 as being a 72 year old widow and “Old age pensioner.” Martha died in Berkhamsted in the first quarter of 1914. She had moved from Cross Oak Road and at the time of her death was living in the High Street. She too was buried in Rectory Lane Cemetery. Whilst we might expect her to have been buried with Joshua, it appears from the records that she was buried in a plot on her own.