Hilary's Diaries - Hilary Townsend President of Stalbridge History Society
 Hilary Townsend
I promised last time that I would write about the darker side of life in our agricultural community. Poverty among the workers was intense particularly after the Napoleonic war ended in 1815. Riots, rick burning and destruction of the new threshing machines in the Blackmore Vale were punished harshly and for an excellent history of this see Barbara Kerr’s "Bound to the Soil" (1975).
Sickness was related to the nature of agricultural work, rickets in children was caused by an inadequate diet, TB (consumption) was widespread, sometimes in whole families and when I spent time in the Orthopaedic Hospital in Bath as a child many children were being treated for tubercular limbs, the result of drinking milk from contaminated cows. Healthcare in Stalbridge the 1930s came from being on the doctor’s Panel (at subsidised cost), a knowledgeable chemist and an excellent District Nurse living in Gold Street, oh and folk remedies of course (my mother was often consulted about these, particularly regarding babies).
Sometimes old superstitions persisted. A young curate in Stalbridge in the 1880s found a parishioner giving her baby Sherry in the belief that it could cure a birthmark. My mother, married in 1920, was assured by a local farmer whose piglets had died in the litter `Somebody has put the Black Sticks on me`. Thomas Hardy relates in the Return of the Native` how a woman, who ill wished another woman, had made a wax image of her and stuck it through with pins. A cottage was pulled down in Stalbridge Weston around the time of the last War. The workmen found a wax image lodged in the cottage chimney and it had not been there for very long. Before the First World War agricultural labourers’ wages were generally 12 shillings a week with some payment in kind such as milk. Labour was very plentiful then of course and reading the Census for that time I am always astonished to see how many men living in Silk House Barton were marked `ag. lab. My aunt Mrs Aish, who lived at Hill View, Thornhill Road, from 1946 told me that her father at Cooks Farm never paid wages of less than 14 shillings a week. Sometimes, she added great pride, if her father knew the family was struggling he would go out at night and put groceries on the doorstep. That way the householder would not know where they had come from, for he knew that Stalbridge people were very proud. 
19th Century Agriculture Labourers (Stalbridge Archive Society)
© Hilary Townsend
October 2020 |
Discover Dorset – Blackmore Vale Dovecote Press 2004
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Blackmore Vale Childhood Dovecote Press 2006
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One Woman’s Fight for Architectural Heritage 2012
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Stalbridge to Siberia and other places - Silk Hay Books 2018
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Titles by Hilary Townsend
Hilary, from a family of yeoman farmers, grew up in Dorset. As a personnel manager in industry, and later lecturer in management subjects, she wrote magazine and newspaper features for UK and North American markets.
Hilary, from a family of yeoman farmers, grew up in Dorset. As a personnel manager in industry, and later lecturer in management subjects, she wrote magazine and newspaper features for UK and North American markets.
