Butchers in 1841

Introduction

This page deals with Louth’s butchers in the period around the census of 1841. It concentrates on retail butchers, who were trading on their own account. The butchers were concerned with the sale of beef and mutton to cater for the needs of the town and of nearby villages.

For most families pork, often preserved by smoking or otherwise, was the principal meat. By the close of the nineteenth century there was a clear division between pork butchers and other butchers. Indeed, as early as 1791 Thomas Colton of Lincoln appeared to be operating as a pork butcher, offering bacon, ham, fresh spareribs and sausages.¹1. Mercury 14.10.1791. However, in Louth in the first half of the nineteenth century the retail pork trade seems to have been in the hands of grocers and eating houses rather than butchers. The earliest specific reference to a pork butcher not associated with an eating house appeared in Kelly’s 1855 directory.

The absence of refrigeration meant that, except in the depths of winter, there could only be a short delay between the slaughtering of cattle or sheep and the consumption of the resulting meat. (In the mid-nineteenth century a “refrigerator” meant an ice box, the ice being imported from Scandinavia.) The development of the railway network facilitated the transport of carcasses to London and other large centres of population, but the railway did not reach Louth until 1848 and probably had little initial effect then.

The meat trade was heavily protected by import duties until the tariff reforms of the Peel government in 1842-6. In 1842 it was noted that the town crier of Spalding had announced the arrival (probably from Canada or USA) of “several barrels of excellent salted beef”, which had prompted the local butchers to lower their prices.²2. Mercury 4.11.1842. But the demand for salted beef was limited and it was not until much later that “fresh” meat imports via ships with refrigerated holds became important.

Sources

The available sources are insufficient to give precise quantitative results but do give indications of the economic position of butchers. For property matters the principal source is R1838, sometimes supplemented by information from R1823 and R1851. The deficiencies of the rating lists are discussed elsewhere on this website. The occupations and rateable values given in the 1834 vestry poll sometimes provide assistance, but not all ratepayers voted.

The enumerators’ books for the census of 1841 provide more detailed information. The main problem with them is that, although respondents were asked to state whether they were employees (“journeymen”) or masters, most did not.

Trade directories listed those butchers that were on business on their own account, but these directories were not always reliable. The earliest useful directory covering Louth butchers was White’s 1826, but one person appears to have been wrongly listed as a butcher, when he was a saddler; and three names cannot be traced anywhere else, possibly they were itinerant traders without premises.

Other occasionally useful sources include parliamentary voting lists, Church registers and press reports, although in relation to the last of these it should be noted that butchers rarely advertised.

Number of Butchers

In the 1841 census of Louth 44 men stated that they were butchers. This excludes persons under the age of 20, a dividing line used by the census. No doubt a significant number of women were involved in the trade, but they generally cannot be traced. The number 44 may be compared with (eg) 106 tailors. This may seem surprising, since more money was undoubtedly spent on meat than on male clothing; but the ratio of butchers to tailors was similar to that for Lincolnshire as a whole (963:2074). Most of the sale price of a piece of beef was accounted for by the farmer that bred the calf and the grazier that fattened it; the value added by the butcher was relatively small.

Trading Butchers

Not all of the identified butchers were trading on their own behalf. Trading butchers could be expected to be listed in the trade directories; employees were not so listed. Pigot’s 1841 directory listed 30 Louth butchers and White’s 1842 directory listed 28. Neither was completely accurate.

In many cases an alternative source of information is provided by the R1838, which showed the occupation of shops, slaughterhouses and open land, none of which would be occupied by an employee. However, the gap in time limits the usefulness of this source. For example a former prominent trading butcher, West Mawer, who was shown in 1838 as occupying valuable premises in the Market Place and over 37 acres of land, had left town and was farming in Surrey on the census day; the 1842 directory wrongly showed him as still in Louth. Good butchers liked to buy their beef on the hoof. R1838 recorded 14 slaughterhouses, but the property descriptions were not always comprehensive, and there may well have been more. Similarly, not all shops were explicitly recorded.

Some marginal traders worked from ordinary houses. They must have obtained their meat entirely from bigger butchers and probably worked as employees for part of the time. For example, Charles Hubbard called himself a butcher in the census and was so listed in the 1842 directory, but he occupied an ordinary terraced house in Newmarket and the 1841 directory listed him as a shopkeeper. Thomas Hobbins, previously a failed publican and bankrupt horse dealer, was listed by both directories as a butcher in Northgate, but he occupied only a small house.

Family relationships sometimes made it difficult to establish the number of separate businesses. At times the Barnes family occupied premises in three different streets and comprised five butchers: Thomas, his estranged wife Mary (a rare female butcher) and their three sons, Joseph, Thomas junior and Shadrach. Another example was the Gowthorpes. Joseph Gowthorpe was a long-established butcher with premises in Eastgate. His son, William, was listed in R1838 as merely having a shop in Mercer Row; but was this really a separate business? In 1839 William married the widow of a publican and became the nominal licensee of the Ship & Horns but he kept his butcher’s shop. By 1841 he had moved to the Royal Oak, a larger pub, where he described himself as a publican and butcher and where he appears to have employed Thomas Barnes senior. A few years later Joseph died and William took over his father’s business and gave up the pub.

Where did the Butchers come from?

The appendix lists 22 butchers apparently trading in Louth in 1841, though there are a number of uncertainties. Where the origins of these butchers can be traced, it is clear that, with one exception (born Lincoln), they came from Louth itself or other places in east Lincolnshire. About half are known to have been the sons of butchers. Training in the trade began early, though I have not found a Louth equivalent of the London meat inspector and former butcher, Robert Pocklington, who stated that he had killed his first sheep when he was four years old.³3. Report of the Smithfield Commission 1850, Minutes of Evidence para 595.

Prosperity

It is evident that none of butchers was a major employer. Typically an established Louth butcher seems to have worked with (at most) one adult male assistant and a teenage apprentice/delivery boy. Being a butcher was hard work and even a successful trader had a poor chance of a prosperous retirement. An exception was George Arliss, who in 1830 advertised that he was “retiring from a business which he has carried on for forty-five years”.

Some long-serving Louth butchers had money troubles. For example, Nathaniel Tharratt had been trading in Louth since about 1790. The 1823 rating list showed him with a solid business: he owned and occupied buildings rated at £15 (NB a half value) and land rated at £6 and was the tenant of additional land. But he left Louth shortly afterwards, presumably for financial reasons, traded from four different London addresses and eventually went bankrupt. After his discharge from bankruptcy in 1831 he returned to Louth and worked in smaller, rented premises until his death. As with most other nineteenth century business failures, it is not known whether Tharratt’s problems lay with the business (eg allowing customers too much credit) or resulted from personal extravagance.

For butchers an attractive alternative that involved less work and potentially higher profits was operating as a grazier. In 1841 John Bond was perhaps Louth’s most prominent butcher. His house and main business premises were in Upgate; he a shop in Market Place and he occupied over 30 acres of land, ample for holding animals before slaughter, perhaps even enough for some longer term fattening. In about 1846, when he was in his late 50s, he transferred the butchery business to his son, John junior, but kept a good deal of the land. However, the position of the Bond family was strengthened by their ownership of the buildings and some of the land; both were probably inherited from John’s father, who was recorded as a butcher and freeholder in 1794.

Another, but less successful, butcher/grazier was William Mager, the only substantial Louth butcher with premises at Riverhead, well away from the town centre. The 1841 census showed him with one adult male employee and two apprentices; and in 1838 he was the tenant of about 44 acres of land. However he was insolvent in 1847 and then had to work as an employee.

Other options were illustrated by Elias Fields, an Upgate butcher, who took to property development, including the Dog & Duck beerhouse, which he briefly occupied himself. The small houses of what was known as “Field’s Yard” (but renamed “Robinson’s Yard” in the 1880s) survived into the 1940s. He seems to have left Louth in the early 1840s and died in 1848 as the landlord of a pub in Finkle Street, Hull, not a select neighbourhood. ⁴4. “I can earn a new gown as soon as any wench in Finkle Street” – Hull Packet 30.8.1850 reporting a fight between two prostitutes.

A safer way of maintaining independence was found by Henry Campion. When the sale of game was legalised in 1831 he obtained a licence and continued for some years as a butcher and game dealer. However in 1841 his landlord sold the premises and Campion took a smaller shop and traded as a fishmonger; the new business was continued by Campion, then his widow, then his son into the twentieth century.

A possible trading difficulty in Louth, as in many other towns, was religion. In the 1834 debate on the Church rate it was asserted that “Churchmen have hitherto traded with Dissenters as well as Churchmen; whereas, Dissenters have, with few exceptions, traded with each other only”. But it was also asserted, amidst cries of protest, that this was the opposite of the truth. The resulting poll showed that 10 butchers voted for the Church and 11 against.

Co-operation

Though the Louth butchers were in competition with each other, the relatively small scale of their operations and, for much of the year, the need to sell meat quickly, lest it become unfit for human consumption, dictated some degree of co-operation. Evidence of this is hard to find, but in a County Court case in 1855 it emerged that two Louth butchers (each of whom had his own slaughterhouse) “were in the habit of joining at killing beasts” and a third butcher subsequently agreed to take a share of the heifer that was in dispute.⁵5. Chronicle 18.5.1855

The marginal butchers, who lacked land or slaughterhouses and could not buy their meat on the hoof, were probably able to negotiate sharing arrangements, but their bargaining position must have been relatively weak.

Public Health and Safety

Potentially slaughterhouses presented a public health problem in that the refuse from them created nauseating smells and a risk of disease. There were many press comments about nuisances in Lincoln. For example “…it was agreed to abate the ‘butchery nuisance’ by laying a fourteen-inch barrel tunnel from the slaughter-house to the river” and “…the stench from the sewers of the Wednesday evenings was intolerable, which arose … from the blood and refuse coming from the slaughter-house on killing day”.⁶6. Chronicle 4.5.1838, 17.7.1846. However the position in Louth seems to have been better, perhaps because the Improvement Commissioners had been quicker in providing sewers for pouring filth into the Lud. The possibility of selective reporting must be recognised, but the Louth reporter for Mercury, William Brown, made repeated complaints about the smell and dirt of the Fish Shambles and, if butchers’ refuse had been a seen as a problem, it is unlikely that he would have failed to say so.

Public safety was a separate issue. Driving cattle and sheep down urban streets was acceptable but “one of the greatest nuisances of which the inhabitants of Louth have to complain is the practice followed by the butchers generally of driving fat bullocks through the streets to their several slaughter-houses.” One bullock in Maiden Row had attacked four people. The reporter commented that in other towns “knee-banding (ie fastening the animal’s head by a cord to one of its fore-legs)” was used to restrict the animal’s freedom of movement.⁷7. Chronicle 3.6.1842. . Similarly in 1851 it was reported that a woman walking down the pavement in Northgate and carrying a small child was attacked by a cow in Northgate. The report was almost casual: “The cow ran directly at the woman and by its violence threw the child out of her arms” but “it was providentially found that neither the woman nor the child had sustained any material injury”. There was no hint that the owner of the cow was thought to be in any way to blame.⁸8. Mercury 22.8.1851.

Associated Trades

In addition to the meat used for retail trade butchers with slaughterhouses produced large quantities of fat for rendering down into tallow, which was then used for manufacturing soap or candles. The extent to which the Louth butchers did the rendering down themselves is not known. In 1840 market reports gave prices (about five shillings per stone of 14 lbs) for “rough fat for tallow in the Lincoln Butchery”, which implied that the butchers there were selling the fat rather than dealing with it themselves. The trade of “tallow chandler” was normally coupled with that of grocer. In London, but apparently not elsewhere, there was a distinct trade of “tallow melter”. In Louth the main soap and candle manufacturing was carried out by the Hyde family (also wholesale grocers) and they probably bought much of the fat from Louth butchers.

The hides of cattle and sheep went to tanners, either direct or sometimes through fellmongers. The trade of tanner was different from that of butcher in that it was capital-intensive. The tanning process involved using urine and sulphuric acid to clean and prepare the hides and then leaving them to soak in a liquid derived from oak bark; this meant that there could be many months between the purchase of a hide and the sale of the resulting leather. An advertisement in 1841 stated that one Louth tannery contained 116 pits for the treatment of hides. The directories of 1841 and 1842 listed three tanneries but only one of these seems to have been run by a tanner by trade, John Gelsthorpe in Walkergate. The other two were owned by farmers or merchants, who presumably employed foremen to supervise the unpleasant, unhealthy work. A by-product of tanning was the production of glue. (Chapter 22 of Richard Gurnham’s People of the Panorama (2018) contains a good account of tanning in Louth.)

After the meat, fat and hides had been taken, the bones were left. Crushed bones provided a valuable form of manure. In 1841 bone crushing was well established in Louth and Robert Norfolk, a Riverhead merchant with extensive interests, had recently installed a bone mill powered by steam. Unfortunately some millers used the same machinery for grinding bones and corn; in 1837 it was reported that some flour had contained “a bone black with decay”. ⁹9. Mercury 23.6.1837.

The availability of these associated trades must have helped Louth butchers. In an article in 1975 Richard Perren suggested that, even after the railway network had developed, the lack of local supporting industries deterred butchers from slaughtering animals locally and sending dead meat to London; instead they continued to send live animals for slaughter in London. ¹⁰10. Economic History Review xxviii pp 385-400.