Rectory Lane Cemetery, Berkhamsted

Sarah Wright

1845 –07/01/1865

Worked in rag mill; died age 20 years

SARAH WRIGHT: 1845 – 1865

Sarah Wright was born 1845 in Berkhamsted to Lowndes and Fanny Wright (née Welling). She had seven  brothers and two sisters. She wasn’t christened until 7^th January 1857.  The Wright family lived on Berkhamsted’s High Street. Her father was a gardener.

Sarah worked in a rag mill. For a short time during 1861 the firm of Curtis & Ulrich, wholesale rag merchants, operated a rag mill in Berkhamsted, and it must have been there that Sarah worked. At the time of the 1861 census William Curtis was living at Sarratt Mill where his father, a paper manufacturer, employed 44 men. Also present at Sarratt Mill was a visitor, Carl Emile Ulrich. However, in October 1861 William Curtis, rag cutter of the firm Curtis & Ulrich was declared bankrupt. In a matter of a few months William had set himself up in trade, found a partner and premises in Berkhamsted and was declared bankrupt, all by the age of 22.

Whilst today tons of discarded clothing are dumped in countries like Chile, in Victorian times, old rags and clothing were in fact imported into Britain to be cut up for a variety of uses. Rags were used to help make manure, poor-quality flock bedding and for making shoddy (shoddy was low-quality cloth remanufactured from woollens). However, the paper industry was the chief user of rag. Such work was mainly carried out by women aged from fifteen or sixteen years upwards, although a few boys might also take part. Some people might work for decades as rag-cutters, particularly those in rural districts.

The rags were often filthy and it was well known that consignments of rags sometimes included contaminated material, which led to a number of outbreaks of smallpox amongst rag cutters. In 1865 an eminent physician, Dr John Syer Bristowe (1827-95) produced a report on the rag trade for the Privy Council concentrating mainly on the use of rags within the paper industry. As one might expect, Bristowe found that working conditions were dirty and unpleasant.

‘The rag-cutters work for the most part in a large room or rooms, which of course vary much in their size relatively to the number of occupants, and vary much in their ventilation, in their other arrangements, and generally in their suitability for the purposes to which they are applied. They are always dusty, and always have a more or less musty if not more offensive smell. They generally, however, appear to me to be fairly ventilated. 

‘As regards cleanliness, it may be added that rags collected in country districts are, as a rule, cleaner that those collected in large towns…, that Irish rags are generally very filthy, and that many foreign rags (such as Italian, Spanish, Russian, and especially Egyptian) are often not only dirty, but stink’.

‘Each rag-cutter, while at work, stands at a board with a knife fixed in it in front of her vertically, with the cutting edge forwards, provided on the one hand with an adequate supply of rags, and on the other with a kind of bin furnished with compartments, into one or other of which she throws, according to their character, the rags as she cuts them’

(Friel, I., “The Victorian Rag Trade, Smallpox and a Sussex Paper Mill”, 2020)

Perhaps Sarah caught a disease whilst working as a rag as she died aged only 20 on 7th January 1865 and is buried in Rectory Lane.