Rectory Lane Cemetery, Berkhamsted

William Grover

1794 –01/12/1846

Born in Berkhamsted, an agricultural labourer portrayed by artist Robert Barnes

• Christopher Dolton

WILLIAM GROVER: 1794 – 1881

The February 1878 edition of The British Workman, a penny monthly news sheet intended to bring the temperance message to the working classes, contained a large engraving entitled “Four-score, or former days called to mind.” The subject was a somewhat pensive old man, sitting in church and wearing the smock traditionally worn by agricultural workers. The engraving was the work of Robert Barnes, an artist, who until 1876, lived in Berkhamsted.

The Bucks Herald commented on the engraving on 2^nd February 1878, noting that the man depicted “…is a striking likeness of a well-known man named Grover, now living in Great Berkhampstead” and when William Grover died at the age of 86 in 1881, his death notice referred to the fact that “He was a favourite model of Mr. Robert Barnes, the artist, and his portrait has appeared many times in the British Workman.” (Maidenhead Advertiser, 31^st August 1881.)  It therefore seems to be beyond doubt that the elderly man in the engraving is indeed William Groves.

Baptismal records tell us that William was born in 1794 and was baptised in Berkhamsted on 17^th May 1795. His father was also named William and his mother was Ann. William was the fourth of nine children born to William and Ann. We also know William married at the age of 22 on 23^rd June 1816. His bride was Mary Loader and the wedding was celebrated in in Berkhamsted.

Other than those brief facts, little more is known of his early life. William and Mary’s first child, a son, George, was born in either 1816 or 1817. The couple went on to have nine children in all, the youngest, also named William, being born early in 1841[1].

The 1841 census is earliest document we have in which William’s occupation is identified. Under the column identifying occupation we find “Ag. Lab.”- i.e agricultural labourer. He was then 47 years old. He was still working as a labourer twenty years later when the 1861 census was taken, by which time he was 66 years old.

Agriculture provided work for a large number of men in the Berkhamsted region. At the time of the 1851 census, even in Berkhamsted, a market town offering a wider range of employment opportunities than in the surrounding countryside, 13% of the working male population was engaged in agricultural work. In the more rural areas that percentage was higher; in Northchurch and Frithsden it was 50% and as high as 70% in Wiggington. By 1851 the overwhelming majority of agricultural labourers in Hertfordshire were hired rather than living in as farm servants, Hertfordshire exhibited the lowest proportion of servants in husbandry of all the counties in England. (Goose, N Population, economy and family structure in Hertfordshire in 1851, Vol. 1, The Berkhamsted region, 1996.)

Hertfordshire was essentially a corn growing county, being described in 1795 as “the first corn county in the country.” Close proximity to London provided ready access to markets and prior to the development of artificial fertilisers the city provided a valuable source of manure. Sheep and cattle were not unknown, but Hertfordshire was not noted for animal husbandry, land being predominantly used for arable farming rather than pasture. In 1851, shortly before the census, James Caird toured the county and found the “the common Hertfordshire course” of five rotating courses of turnips or fallow, barley, clover, wheat and oats.

The lot of William and other agricultural labourers was hard. Farm labourers invariably started their working life as children. When experienced and working full time, the labourer was expected to turn his hand to a variety of tasks, seed sowing, hoeing and weeding, spreading dung, threshing after the harvest, and hedging and ditching in the winter months. Pay was poor.

“It was customary for unmarried men to let themselves for twelve months as ploughmen and horsekeepers, for a few pounds as standing wages, and a few shillings weekly, which in some cases was hardly sufficient to provide them with bread; and those were considered fortunate who could add to it a small portion of fat bacon – any other luxury was out of the question. On Saturday night these men and boys would make their way into town to spend their few shillings in the purchase of their supplies for the following week. After completing their marketings, if they had a few pence to spare, they would resort to a well-known public house…” (Nash, Reminiscences of Berkhamsted, 1890.)

It became common practice for farmers to reduce their labourer’s pay below subsistence level, knowing the overseer of the poor had an obligation to make it up out of the poor rate. Farmers relied on this to offer only casual employment. Nash commented on this practice:

“It was a common practice with the farmers, immediately after harvest, to discharge most of the men under pretext they had nothing for them to do, advising them to apply to the overseer, who was bound to find them employment or relieve them if there was no work to be done. This was a practice well understood by the overseer, and he would send them back to their masters requesting them to find employment for the men at reduced wages, the deficiency to be made up from the rates. Nash noted that whilst “…honest working men were pauperised against their will,” others, who were disinclined to work, “…found this state of things suited their inclination, and these, under the pretext of seeking work, would absent themselves for days together, probably spending their time in some remote village ale-house.”

In 1841 William, Mary and family were living on Berkhamsted’s High Street. The 1841 census does not provide house numbers, but the entry relating to William’s family comes shortly after the census entry for the Hall, so we can place William at the east end of the High Street, somewhere near where the Hall, since demolished, then stood. William and Mary’s two oldest children, George and Anne, who would have been about 25 and 21 respectively in 1841, were no longer living with the family but the seven younger children, ranging from Charlotte, then 17 years old to 4 months old William were. With 2 adults and nine children living in a small cottage, the conditions must have been cramped and overcrowded.

Eliza and all but the two youngest children, James and William, who at 3 years and 4 months of age would have been too young to work, worked as straw plaiters.

Straw-plaiting was a profitable cottage in the Berkhamsted region in Victorian times, supplying plaited straw to the hat makers of Luton and Dunstable. It was work predominantly, but not exclusively, undertaken by women and children. In 1851, 45% of women working in Berkhamsted were engaged in plaiting straw and in the more rural areas, as one might expect, the percentage was even higher; in Frithsden, it was 89%.

The work was well paid and a woman working at home could earn more than a labourer.   “…it was a profitable occupation and in the first half of the 19^th 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.” (Birtchnell, A Short History of Berkhamsted.)  Nash commented that without the income to be earned from straw plaiting, “it is hard to say what would have been the condition of the labouring class had not their incomes been supplemented by this means.”

In 1851 in Berkhamsted and the surrounding areas,16% of all boys between the age of 5 and 9 were working and 26% of all girls. Of those, 13% of the boys were plaiting straw and 24% of the girls.  Between the ages of 10 and 14, 44% of boys worked, of whom 15% were straw plaiters and 56% of girls worked, 45% of those being engaged in plaiting straw. (Goose, N Population, economy and family structure in Hertfordshire in 1851, Vol. 1, The Berkhamsted region, 1996.)

Whilst the straw plait trade had a positive impact on family incomes, it had a deleterious effect on the education of children. The craft was passed on from generation to generation. Children started straw plaiting at the age of 5 and were sent to dame schools to learn the craft. Straw plait schools were commonly held in ordinary cottages, and Mrs Wimbush’s school in Northchurch was probably typical in that the Children’s Employment Commission of 1864 found it to be overcrowded, close and heavy in atmosphere. In Berkhamsted at one time there were three plait schools in Bridge Street alone.

Little attention was paid to the education of the children. Parents, understandably preferred to put their children to work to supplement the family income rather than sending them to school. The Second Report of the Children’s Employment Commission, published in 1843, reported that “This plaiting is a complete bar to anything like education, for as soon as children can use their fingers they are put to it” and that the only way to encourage school attendance was by inclusion of plaiting in the curriculum. Some schools in an effort to encourage parents to send their children to school permitted “half-time plaiters” but were plagued by disruptive behaviour and repeated absences during busy times of the plaiting trade. In 1866 the managers of the then new National School in Northchurch reported that “The unsatisfactory experiment of admitting straw plaiters among the infants be discontinued” and “that for the future the plaiters be separated and placed in the classroom of the infants School.” (Hosier, Hedgehog’s Northchurch.)

Whereas in the 17^th century literacy rates had been lowest in Northern England, by the 1840’s this was reversed. By then, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire had the lowest rates of all the counties in England, with Hertfordshire being the worst. This was the price paid for the additional income produced by the straw plait trade.

Ten years later at the time of the census of 1851, William and family had moved to Prospect Street. Two of their daughters. Charlotte and Mary were still living with their parents and occupied plaiting straw. The youngest children, James and William, then 13 and 10 years old, had escaped the fate of their older siblings. They were not engaged in straw plaiting; both were at school, being noted in the census as “scholars.” We learn from the 1861 census that James went on to become a sawyer and William a labourer and in 1861 these two were the only of their children still living with William and Mary. William was then 66 years old and still working as a labourer.

Mary died in 1861 and we next find William, 76 and widowed, living in the High Street with his daughter Charlotte and her husband John Adams. William was still living with them ten years later, shortly before his death in 1881. With no state pension and no doubt too old and infirm to continue with the hard physical work of an agricultural labourer, William, like many other elderly people, was dependent on family members to support him. Without such support, he would have found himself destitute and facing the remainder of his days in the workhouse.

William died in the third quarter of 1881 and he was buried in Rectory Lane Cemetery on 3^rd August year. Despite a life of hard physical labour and poverty, he lived to the ripe age of 86 years. No headstone stands today, if one ever did, to mark the spot where he was buried and like many other of Berkhamsted’s poorer citizens, his life would otherwise have been forgotten were it not for Barnes’ striking portrait by which we can still remember him.