My third-great-grandfather, Robert Hubbleday, was born in 1813, two years before the Battle of Waterloo. His father and grandfather were both shoemakers. William Hubbleday (1755 – 1788), Robert’s grandfather, had arrived in London from King’s Lynn and lived in Petticoat Lane. William Hubbleday (1784 – 1854), Robert’s father, had deserted his family and served a month’s hard labour in Newington House of Correction. The deserted family consisted of Robert, his two brothers and a sister. They were brought up by their mother, Elizabeth, with the help, it appears, of a man called William Hodges.

The eldest child was Mary, born in 1810, but there are no records of her after she was baptised which suggests that she probably died as an infant. This was not unusual; in the first half of the nineteenth century around 30 per cent of children died before they reached the age of five. The three brothers, David, William and Robert, on the other hand, left plenty of evidence of their existence. They all became shoemakers, married and lived relatively long lives. However, they were never far from the workhouse and although they had large families, girls outnumbered boys by two to one. Moreover, several of the boys died in infancy or did not marry. Of those that did marry, only one raised boys who went to on have healthy sons of their own. Consequently, the survival of the name remained precarious, especially as two of the brothers renounced it in favour of their stepfather’s surname.

David’s Life (1811 – 1891)

The eldest brother, David, was born in 1811 and remained in Southwark, London all of his life. He married Elizabeth Farthing in 1830 in the same church in Newgate that had witnessed his parents’ wedding. They had seven children before Elizabeth died in 1863. There were four sons but one died of smallpox and two left no records either because they did not marry or else died young. Only one of the sons, Henry, married. Although this marriage produced a grandson for David, the boy disappeared from the records after his birth in 1876. David had remarried by this time to a widow, Caroline Crouch, but there were no more children and so the name ‘Hubbleday’ disappeared from David’s line.

Throughout his life, David was variously described in the records as a ‘shoe maker’, a ‘boot maker’ or a ‘cordwainer’. The word cordwainer comes from the Spanish ‘cordovaner’, a worker of cordovan leather from Cordoba. This was fine leather and so the term cordwainer tended to denote that the person was more specialised or skilled than a straightforward shoe maker. The Worshipful Company of Cordwainers was a well-respected livery company and one of the oldest in the City of London but, sadly, there is no record of any Hubbleday belonging to it.

David lived a very long life and, like his father, finished his days in a workhouse. He was admitted to Christ Church Workhouse in the St Saviours Poor Law Union, Southwark in 1890 after the death of his second wife. He was probably in the infirmary, which would have provided him with a reasonable level of care. He died in the following year, aged 80. His name was recorded as David Hodges, alias Hubbleday, indicating his rejection of a surname which held little meaning for him.

Unlike David, his two younger brothers, Robert and William, both moved away from London for lengthy periods of time but returned to the capital towards the end of their lives. They lived in several towns and cities in the Midlands and the North and at one stage were residing in the same street in Dudley in the Black Country.

Their willingness to travel more extensively than any previous Hubbledays was almost certainly due to the arrival of the railways. By 1838, it was possible to go from London to Manchester via Birmingham in a day. Gladstone’s Railway Act of 1844 made it obligatory for railway companies to provide third-class accommodation at no more than a penny a mile so that journeys were within the reach of all classes. By the late 1850s, the trains were capable of travelling at 60 mph, reducing the time from London to Birmingham to under three hours.

William’s Life (1815 – abt. 1875)

William, born in 1815, left London as soon as he was in his twenties and went straight to the most important centre for shoemaking in the country: Northampton. In the 1840s, nearly ten per cent of that town’s population of around 20,000 were engaged in the trade. Upper Harding Street, where William lived, was occupied almost entirely by shoemakers. When his first child, Ann Elizabeth, was baptised in 1838, her page in the parish register at All Saints Church listed eight baptisms, five of which were for the children of shoemakers.

The 1830s saw an increasing use of small factories in the trade, with owners specialising in one aspect of the process rather than manufacturing a complete shoe. However, most shoemakers still worked at home in a room adapted as a workshop and they were famous for liking their independence. They enjoyed operating as small, one-man businesses and as they had to keep track of orders and be careful about standardised measurements, they were often more literate than other workers. It is notable that William signed his own name on his marriage certificate whereas his wife was only able to make her mark with a cross.

In 1840, William and Elizabeth had a second daughter, Martha, in Northampton and then, at some point after this, left the town and moved to Dudley in Worcestershire. We know this because in 1843, they registered the birth of a third daughter, Mary Jane. William’s occupation was given as a cordwainer and he was living in Campbell Street, which was in Brockmoor near Brierley Hill. Two years later, his brother, Robert, registered the birth of a daughter, Betsy Elizabeth, and gave his address as the same street as William’s. It is very likely that they were living in the same house.

William and Elizabeth only stayed in the West Midlands for a few years. In 1845, they were back in London in Holborn where they had a son, William. In 1847, they arranged to baptise three of their children on the same day at Holy Trinity Church, Gray’s Inn Road.

William and Elizabeth were clearly restless spirits because three years later they were in Manchester. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly at this point in their lives, they got married three days after Christmas in 1850. They were living at 50 Silver Street in the centre of the city. Nowadays, it is a busy section of road backing onto the Britannia Hotel but in the early Victorian period was an area of back-to-back housing with closed courts and narrow alleys. The wedding took place in Manchester Cathedral, which was the parish church for the centre of the city.

The 1851 census shows that William and Elizabeth had had another daughter, Alice. They had chosen to drop the name ‘Hubbleday’ and were living as Mr and Mrs Hodges and all of their children were given this surname. The decision is an easy one to understand as William had been an infant when his father left home. It was his stepfather’s surname of ‘Hodges’ that would have meant more to him. The census gave William’s occupation as a shoe maker and listed three lodgers staying in the family home, all of them also shoe makers. One of William’s daughters, Elizabeth, who was only 12 years old was working as an ‘end mender’ in the cotton industry which, notoriously, depended on cheap child labour.

William’s wife, Elizabeth, died within a few years of the census, having had no more children. In 1856, William, as a widower, married a young widow, Catherine Tonge, who had four children. The marriage took place in the cathedral and William signed himself, ‘William Hodges Hubbleday’, and named his father also as William Hodges Hubbleday, a cordwainer. This appears to be an amalgam of his real father, William Hubbleday, and his stepfather, William Hodges.

A few years later, William was on the move yet again and left Manchester for London. He took his family back to the area he had known as a boy. Unfortunately, Catherine’s first experience of the capital was not a pleasant one as the family had nowhere to sleep and they had to resort to staying in Newington Workhouse for the night. Presumably, William was looking for lodgings because the next day Catherine was able to take her family out of the workhouse. Interestingly, she gave her surname as ‘Hubbleday’ despite having lived as Mrs Hodges for four years!

The page below from the Newington Workhouse register indicates the ages of Catherine’s family by showing which diet they were entitled to. Catherine was ‘5’, which was an able-bodied woman over the age of 13; Alice was ‘7’, which was girls aged from 9-13; Emily and Georgiana were ‘8a’, which was girls aged 2-5; and Hannah was ‘9’, which was infants. Alfred Tonge, Catherine’s youngest son by her previous marriage, was ‘4’, which was boys aged 5-9.

By the time of the 1861 census, the family had moved north of the river and were living in Shoreditch, near where William’s grandfather had lived. William’s occupation was given as a cordwainer. His only son, born in 1845, does not appear in the 1861 census or any other records after the 1851 census so it is likely that he died as a boy. In 1871, most of the family were still together and that year’s census shows that Catherine’s son, Alfred, had adopted the surname ‘Hodges’ and had followed his stepfather, William, into the shoemaking trade as a cordwainer. His stepsisters, Emily and Georgina, were both book folders.

There is no record of William after this date but it is highly probable that he died in the 1870s as I have not been able to find him in the 1881 census. He would have been in his sixties but whether he was buried as a Hubbleday or as a Hodges, we cannot tell. The fact that he left no sons carrying the name ‘Hubbleday’ meant that, yet again, the continuation of our surname hung by a thread. It was only through the family of the third brother, Robert, that it survived.

Robert’s Life (1813 – 65)

At some point in his twenties, my third-great-grandfather, Robert, moved from London to the Black Country in the West Midlands. It is likely that his brother William was already there or it may have been Robert who made the journey first. The following description of the area from an 1851 guide book, Rides on Railways by Samuel Sidney, makes you wonder what made either of them think it was a good idea.

In this Black Country, including West Bromwich, Dudley, Darlaston, Bilston, Wolverhampton and several minor villages, a perpetual twilight reigns during the day, and during the night fires on all sides light up the dark landscape with a fiery glow. The pleasant green of pastures is almost unknown, the streams, in which no fishes swim, are black and unwholesome; the natural dead flat is often broken by high hills of cinders and spoil from the mines; the few trees are stunted and blasted; no birds are to be seen, except a few smoky sparrows; and for miles on miles a black waste spreads around, where furnaces continually smoke, steam engines thud and hiss, and long chains clank, while blind gin horses walk their doleful round. From time to time you pass a cluster of deserted roofless cottages of dingiest brick, half swallowed up in sinking pits or inclining to every point of the compass, while the timbers point up like the ribs of a half decayed corpse. The majority of the natives of this Tartarian region are in full keeping with the scenery – savages, without the grace of savages, coarsely clad in filthy garments, with no change on weekends or Sundays, they converse in a language belarded with fearful and disgusting oaths, which can scarcely be recognised as the same as that of civilized England.

In 1843, Robert registered the birth of his first child, William Robert, and gave his address as New Hall Street, which is in Princes End midway between Coseley and Tipton. His occupation was recorded as a boot maker. The mother’s name was given as ‘Mary Hubbleday, formerly Ward’. Two years later, when Robert was living in Campbell Street near Brierley Hill, Dudley, the same street as his brother William, he had another child, Betsy Elizabeth, and the mother’s name was given as ‘Mary Hubbleday, formerly Christy’. The confusion about the former names of Robert’s wife was because she had been married and then widowed before having children with Robert. She had been born as Mary Ann Ward and had married a William Christy in 1834 in Bethnal Green.

After the death of her first husband, Mary lived with Robert for several years before they married in 1847. They had moved from Dudley to Wolverhampton some time in the previous two years and the wedding took place in St Peter’s Collegiate Church in the centre of the town. The marriage certificate states that Robert was a cordwainer and that he was the son of W. Hubbleday, a cordwainer. Furthermore, the certificate possibly reveals that Mary Ann’s father was also a cordwainer. We can’t be certain about this because the registrar seems to have muddled her father’s name with that of her first husband! Neither Robert or Mary were able to write their names and instead both put a cross rather than signing the certificate.

By 1851, they were back in London and they had another son, Robert. They were living at 46 Eagle Street, Red Lion Square in Holborn, which was a more salubrious area than the Black Country. Unbeknown to them, for instance, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, founder of the Pre-Raphaelite school of painting, and his friends William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, also lived in Red Lion Square in the 1850s.

However, it was an unhappy period for Robert and Mary as two of their daughters died and the family’s fortunes declined. They moved to Reading in Berkshire, presumably looking for work, and it was here that their last child, Jane, was born in 1855. However, by 1856, they were back in London, but south of the river in Southwark, and on 8 March they were all admitted to the Newington workhouse and listed as destitute.

It seems that Robert managed to find work quite quickly as he was able to bring his family out of the workhouse on 14 March. In the 1860s, they were north of the river again, living in Wilton Street in Finsbury, but Robert was becoming sick and was admitted to the famous St Bartholomew’s Hospital (Barts) in Smithfield. An 1850 guide to London praised the hospital because it ‘. . . gives relief to all poor persons suffering from accident or diseases, either as in-patients or out-patients. Cases of all kinds are received into the Hospital, . . . cases of urgent disease, may be brought without any letter of recommendation or other formality at all hours of the day or night to the Surgery, where there is a person in constant attendance.‘ Sadly, however, there was little that could be done for Robert and he died in 1865, aged 52, from peritonitis caused by stomach ulcers. He was buried on Christmas Eve at the City of London and Tower Hamlets Cemetery where his father had been buried.

Robert and Mary had had two sons and four daughters. Two of the daughters had died as young girls, and the other daughter and the two sons had left home by the time of Robert’s death. This left only the youngest daughter, Jane, still at home with her mother. As an impoverished widow of nearly 60 with a young girl to look after and before the days of state pensions or income support, the future was bleak. Their lives from this point onwards are reminiscent of depictions of the Victorian poor in the novels of Charles Dickens, such as Oliver Twist and Hard Times.

In 1867, Mary and Jane were admitted to the workhouse in Holborn, less than a mile from Charles Dickens’s home in Tavistock Square. This would have given some respite but was not a long-term solution, particularly for a young girl. Rather than risk her child becoming just one more street urchin surviving by begging and stealing, Mary gave her up. We don’t know exactly when this happened but it was probably soon after they had to leave the Holborn workhouse when Jane was aged twelve. At the time of the 1871 census, Jane was listed as an inmate of a home for destitute girls in Broad Street (now the Western end of High Holborn) in Bloomsbury.

The home was funded by voluntary contributions and the girls were trained in household work so that they could be found places as domestic servants. As well as washing and cooking, they were taught needlework and how to make and repair their own clothing. The only condition for admittance was destitution.

Although Jane had lost her father and, to all intents and purposes, her mother, she was probably better off as an inmate of the refuge than if she had stayed with her mother. She was looked after in a benevolent educational institution and was able to make a decent marriage to a Bethnal Green chair maker in 1873 when she was 18. She did not, however, escape from living perilously close to the poverty line. At the time of the 1881 census, she gave her occupation as ‘a cats meat purveyor’, which, surprisingly, was quite a common job. It involved collecting horses’ meat from the slaughterhouses and threading it on skewers to sell to cat owners. The writer of a magazine article in 1868 had this to say: ‘. . . this branch of street trade numbers among it . . . women, who can just manage to crawl along from house to house with their scanty baskets of horseflesh. It is impossible exactly to state the number engaged in this business in our streets, but there must be many hundreds.‘  Ten years later, she was a widow and working at a factory in Tottenham. She remarried in 1892 to a labourer, George Bull, who was ten years her junior. The last record we have of her is the 1911 census when she was still in Tottenham, but apparently without her husband, and working as a charwoman.

During most of this time, Jane’s mother, my great-great-great-grandmother, was trying to eke out a living as a street hawker and rag sorter in central London.

Mary endured a solitary downward spiral of destitution for an astonishing thirty years until her death in 1901 at the age of 91. She became well known in the workhouses of Holborn, Southwark and Bethnal Green, depending on them for food and somewhere to sleep, sometimes for months on end. She would have become very accustomed to repetitive manual work such as picking oakum just as her father-in-law had had to do when sentenced to hard labour in the House of Correction. Workhouses were designed to be forbidding places to discourage people from claiming poor relief. The huge wealth of the British Empire during Queen Victoria’s reign (1837 – 1901) did not soften the harsh living conditions of the working class. The elderly, infirm and unemployed often had little option but to embrace, as many of our ancestors knew from firsthand experience, the rigours of the workhouse. However, given Mary’s situation, the workhouse was quite probably more comfortable and secure than her life outside it.

The story of the Hubbledays in nineteenth-century London has not been a happy one, marked, as it has been, by early deaths, illness, family break-up and poverty. The next blog will deal with the lives of Robert and Mary’s two sons who I have deliberately not mentioned other than to note their births in 1843 and 1851. They both looked to the army for a way to better their lives and their experiences merit a chapter to themselves. Events did not turn out as they, or we, might have expected but the survival of the Hubbleday name, at least, began to look more hopeful.