Phineas Stone has only one voucher in our project dataset, but he snagged our interest owing to the disjunction between his occupation, as a gunlock filer, and the typical purchases of the overseers of the poor.  What business did they have with a refiner of gun parts?

The parish overseers paid Stone for a ‘voice’ or vice weighing 36lb on 3 February 1789.  This equipment was for the use of Jonathan Addock or Haddock, and was costed by weight.  At three pence per pound, the total cost of the vice came to nine shillings.  Therefore the parish was buying a tool for use by Haddock, presumably to enable him to earn money.  Unfortunately we have no clues as to what Haddock usually did for a living.  He was a some-time pauper and who needed parish help to pay the burial fees when his wife Ann died 1793, but otherwise we are not really any wiser.  We can only speculate that, like many men in the parish and the wider West Midlands, Haddock was engaged in metalworking of some kind.

A rather tidy workshop showing the manufacture of metal buttons in the Netherlands: engraving by Prevost c.1751-72 image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The Stone family fortunes were also in decline, but not so drastically as to require the need for parish assistance in the vouchers we have catalogued.  Shortly before Phineas died in 1796, his son Phineas (1775-1811) got married and had a son of his own, unsurprisingly baptised Phineas (1797-1837).  Of the three men named Phineas, all of whom were lockfilers, the eldest left an estate worth under £300, but his son was worth under £100 at the time of his death in 1811.    The youngest Phineas was killed in 1837 by the throwing over of a coach.

Sources: baptisms of 1 May 1775, 12 March 1797, and 19 January 1834, marriage of 7 September 1796, plus burials of 30 August 1793, 6 December 1796, 4 July 811, and 8 August 1837, all Wednesbury St Bartholomew. Probate for the will of Phineas Stone granted 1797.  Probate for the will of Phineas Stone granted 1811. SRO D 4383/6/1/9/2/95 Wednesbury overseers’ voucher 1789; D 4383/6/1/9/3/111/4 Wednesbury overseers’ voucher 1793.

In 1831 Uttoxeter parish was paying for the support of one of its paupers, William Harrison, while he was living in Belper.  William was young, aged only 20, but very poorly and he died in October that year.  During his illness he was awarded a weekly sum of money between 3s and 5s, and when he died he was buried from the Belper workhouse.  The receipt of the money and the subsequent funeral expenses were receipted with the shaky ‘X’ of one Ann Peakes, despite the fact that Harrison’s father and namesake was also living in Belper at the time.  So who was Ann?

There are a number of options.  She was either the nurse who took the weekly money as a salary for the care of Harrison junior during his illness, or a workhouse employee, or merely an intermediary between the parishes of Uttoxeter and Belper and the Harrison family.  Genealogical research reveals no more, in that the only Ann Peakes discernible in Belper crops up on the 1851 census as the wife of an agricultural labourer.  If the author of the ‘X’ was the same person as the census entrant, then she was only 20 at the time of Harrison’s demise (ie already married and the same age as Harrison himself).  Parish nurses were typically older than 20, but it is not impossible that a young married women might make money from parish employment in this way. 

Source: SRO D3891/6/35/1/11.

James Sowter was born on 9 December 1783 to Samuel and Mary Sowter of Ashbourne in Derbyshire.  He was one of at least five children born to the couple, including older brothers John and Charles, older sister Frances, and younger brother Samuel.  James married Elizabeth Noble by licence in Ashbourne in May 1815, and was buried in the town in December 1832. The couple appear not to have had any children.

The Sowters were pig dealers or jobbers.  The brothers began in business with their father, but in 1808 the partnership between Samuel senior and his sons Samuel the younger, John and James was dissolved.  All debts owing to the concern were to be received by the same men with the exception of John, who presumably wanted to work alone.  The brothers all signed the dissolution agreement, while Samuel the elder merely made his mark.

The family supplied the parish of Uttoxeter with pigs between 1821 and 1829.  Their beasts sold for sums between £1 2s and £3 3s apiece, with variations presumably being based on age or size, and on whether adult sows were already in pig.  Samuel Sowter (who may have been the father or the son) supplied two pigs in 1823, but Samuel senior died in 1824 meaning that pig deals thereafter were with Samuel junior or, more regularly, James.  Uttoxeter bought nine pigs from James up to February 1829 but then the parish’s relationship with the family ceased.  Pigs were bought from a range of other men in 1831 including John Williams, Isaac Laban and Thomas Chatterton, but the Sowters had lost or given up the Uttoxeter parish business.

When James died, his widow Elizabeth turned to inn-keeping.  She had been the daughter of Mr Noble of the Red Lion Inn of Ashbourne, and so presumably knew the business.  In the period 1849-53 she was listed as a widow and publican at the White Lion Inn. She died in Ashbourne in 1855.

Sources: Ashbourne St Oswald baptism of 22 February 1784, marriage of 2 May 1815; London Gazette 14 May 1808, p. 685; SRO D 3891/6/8 and D 3891/6/9; SRO D3891/6/37/4/4; Derby Mercury 5 December 1832; Post Office Directory for Ashbourne (1849); census 1851; Staffordshire Advertiser 8 October 1853; Derbyshire Advertiser 28 September 1855.

Ralph Bagshaw was a grocer in Uttoxeter who supplied the poor law with both everyday items like rice but also spices and other goods like nutmeg and dried fruit – and not necessarily just at Christmas time. His bill-head represented him as a global trader, with barrels carrying his initials prominent in a non-specific but probably eastern location.

Bagshaw was born in approximately 1772, married Maria Taylor in Uttoxeter in 1796, and went on to run his grocery business in the town with his two eldest sons, Edward Stanford Bagshaw and Thomas Bagshaw. His third son and namesake Ralph became a solicitor.

Bagshaw was prominent among the grocers supplying the poor law, but his importance could fluctuate quite significantly from year to year.  In 1821-2 for example he was paid £18 0s 2d for groceries, which represented nearly a third of the parish’s outlay on similar goods.  Other grocers in the town such as James Smith, Lewis Hall, and Michael Clewley, along with the firm Porter and Keates, competed with him to supply the workhouse with groceries, but none of them were paid so much as Bagshaw.  Compare this with grocery suppliers in 1823-4, and the picture had utterly changed.  Bagshaw was paid just £5 19s 6d, less than a tenth of the total outlay on groceries, whereas Michael Clewley was paid £20 1s 4.5d.  Clewley had supplanted Bagshaw for the supply of rice and other goods, but it is not yet clear whether this was simply because firms took equitable ‘turns’ in different years, or whether the well-connected churchwarden Clewley had more leverage.

After Ralph senior’s death in 1841 the grocery was carried on by Edward and Thomas. The will was witnessed by surgeon George Alsop whose biography (along with Clewley’s) is included in this blog.

Sources: Uttoxeter St Mary marriage of 20 October 1796; D 3891/6/8 Uttoxeter volume of parish bills, 1821-4; D 3891/6/35/3/41 Uttoxeter overseers’ voucher for groceries 27 January 1831; D 3891/6/40/7/29 Uttoxeter overseers’ voucher for groceries 31 October 1833;  Ralph Bagshaw will proved 1841.

John Beard was one of at least six children born in Wichnor parish to Thomas Beard and Mary (nee Smith).

John was a tailor who also, at the age of 60, took on the task of salaried or ‘assistant’ overseer in Whittington for twelve guineas a year.  As a result he is a signatory to many of the receipts paid for relief to the poor, and to numerous other parish documents such as apprenticeship indentures.  He also took apprentices himself into the tailoring business, including towards the end of his life twelve-year-old William Birch.  He did not receive an apprenticeship ‘premium’ or payment with this child, suggesting that he took the lad on willingly without financial inducement as mutually beneficial: Birch obtained training, while Beard continued in work into old age.  It may have been significant for Beard’s personal finances that the role of assistant overseer came to an end in the mid 1830s with the implementation of the reformed poor law.

Beard died from ‘schirrus of the stomach’, a form of stomach cancer, in early December 1839.  His will left everything to his niece Elizabeth Elson, daughter of John Beard’s younger brother Thomas Beard and the wife of Joseph Elson.  William Birch’s apprenticeship had years left to run, so he was transferred to a Joseph Elson, possibly a different man to John’s nephew-in-law, for the completion of his term.

This story looks relatively simple, but it has had to be disentangled from that of another John Beard, a younger man, whose relationship to the parish officer is unclear (possibly a nephew or cousin).  John Beard junior owned land in Whittington adjoining that of John Beard senior, according to the Tithe Award, and was described as a ‘retired tradesman’ shortly before his death in 1861.

Sources: Tatenhill marriage of 27 June 1756; Wichnor baptism of 26 January 1766; Staffordshire Record Office D 4838/9/1/1-3 appointment of assistant overseer 1826-34; D4384/9/7/51 apprenticeship papers 1839-40; death certificate of 14 December 1839; PC 11 (1840) will of John Beard; tithe award index for Staffordshire; 1861 census for Whittington.