This is a photograph of my grandparents, Donald and Elsie PARRY, taken at a special wedding anniversary. My 2018 post had concentrated on my grandfather, Donald, but my second post this year was always intended to be about my grandmother, Elsie May, formerly THOMAS, and her family. So it seems ideal to include this photograph again now.
In some ways, I feel I missed out on getting to know my Nana. With my Dad in the RAF, we'd moved away from the area where Nana and Grandad lived when I was six, and only "day visited" for most of the time after that. Talking to one of my cousins recently, she revealed how it had been Nana who taught her how to knit. I can just imagine the relationship such shared activities would have created.
I do remember seeing Nana knitting - she was one of those ladies who could hold one needle under her arm as she knitted, which is a very fast and efficient method of knitting, unlike my own technique, which takes me quite a while to finish anything.
Elsie was born in 1902, in Collington, Herefordshire. She was the fourth of ten children to George THOMAS and Rose Hannah HAYNES. Her siblings were Edith, Ernest, Hilda, Ada, Matilda, Emily, George, Olive and Dorothy.
What were the conditions that she grew up in? George THOMAS was described as a "farmer" when Elsie was born, which might conjure up an image of a fairly comfortable life, in a landowning family. But, for the births of subsequent children between 1904 - 1915, his occupation appears on their birth certificates as "General Labourer", which creates a rather different image, one of someone lacking skills and maybe just taking any work that's available.
The truth is probably somewhere in-between those two images. In 1901, his occupation was given as "Ordinary Agricultural Labourer". The school admission register entries for six of the children over the same time period as the above births describe him as a farmer, with a seventh entry recording his occupation as "Woodman". In 1911, he's a "Farm Labourer" and when Elsie married Donald PARRY in 1927, her father was described as an "Agricultural Labourer". Finally, in 1939, he appears as a "Farm Labourer retired*.
So the overall picture painted is neither that of a well-to-do landowning farmer, nor one of an unskilled labourer, but of someone employed working on the land, carrying out a range of farming tasks, all of which probably required a certain level of skill, but also, potentially, could have been for the same employer for many years, providing stability for the family.
In such circumstances, though, I imagine the family didn't have much spare money and all of the children would have grown up helping out in some way, at least until they were old enough to earn money through other means. For example, in 1911. Elsie's oldest sister, Edith, aged 14, appears to be working as a domestic servant for a PRICE family in Bromyard.*
However, from the National School Admission Registers & Log-Books 1870-1914 on FindMyPast, I know that the first seven children, at least, attended the Tedstone Wafer School (the last three would have begun after 1914, when the online records end). So they were clearly educated, and in some cases, beyond what appears to be the leaving age for compulsory education*. Elsie herself started at the school on the 17 March 1908, just before her sixth birthday, and left on the 18 June 1915, when she was 13.
I have no evidence for what work Elsie might have done in the twelve years between then and when she married, and there is no occupation given for her on the marriage certificate. However, according to my Dad, she was employed as a children's nanny at the time she met Donald. As with many women, their work after marriage goes largely unrecorded but I am sure she was involved in many instances of working on the land, particularly during harvest times, so the "Unpaid domestic duties" reported in the 1939 register is probably a wholly inadequate description of her activities.
I remember my mother (brought up in Dagenham, so very much a "townie") being in awe of Nana's practical abilities (especially her ability to walk to the hen house and have a chicken caught, killed, and half plucked even before she got back up the garden path!)
So my image of my grandmother remains one of a very practical, and hard working, country lady.
* Sources
1901: RG13/2491/8/7
1911 (Elsie as "Elise") Class: RG14; Piece: 15795; Schedule Number: 20
1911 (Edith) Class: RG14; Piece: 15787; Schedule Number: 50
1939: (George) RG101/5813J
1939: (Elsie) RG 101/5807I
It seem unclear from online sources whether compulsory education ended at 10, 12 or 14 during 1900 - 1918, eg
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