Trade directories relevant to Louth up to 1856.

The Trade Directories and the Rating Lists

The information in the rating lists can often be compared with that provided by trade directories; but is important to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the directories.¹ The best local directories, of which Akrill’s Lincoln directory² was a good example, aimed first to list all householders street by street and then give a selected listing of those that had at least some degree of social prominence or were commercially significant because they were employers or occupied trade premises. Unfortunately nineteenth century Louth did not have a directory of this type.

Early National Directories Covering Louth

Universal British Directory 1794³ This national directory included a very brief description of the town with a list of about 200 of the “principal inhabitants”, with occupations but without streets. Persons of independent means were generally not included.

Holden 1811⁴ This was on the same model as the previous, but less detailed, with only about half the number of names.

Early County Directories Covering Louth

Pigot 1822 ⁵ This was, for Louth, the first attempt at a systematic trade directory that listed persons under trade headings and usually gave the streets where they conducted business. However it was incomplete: for example butchers, farmers and clergymen were omitted; and private residents not engaged in trades or professions were not listed. There were some obvious mistakes in this directory (eg “Haswell Lane”, “Water-gate”).

White 1826⁶ Produced by William White,⁷ this was the first important directory covering Louth. It followed a pattern then used by this firm. White had antiquarian tastes and his early directories gave much more local history than those of his competitors. There was first a general description of the town and its history, then a miscellaneous list of residents, then the main commercial list, divided into a series of trade categories, running from “Academies and Schools” to “Woolstaplers”. The miscellaneous list included some private residents, some tradesmen that did not fit into the main categories and a few others that had houses separate from their trade premises. Street addresses were usually included.

The advantage of this method was completeness; the disadvantage was that the same names may appear in both lists and under more than one commercial heading, which could lead to uncertainty about whether one person was referred to or more than one. Trade entries were almost entirely restricted to those on business on their own account; and low status occupations (eg laundresses, rat catchers, hawkers) were not included. The more substantial farmers and market gardeners were included. Entries for (selected) private residents were restricted to householders; and so women appeared only if widows or spinsters.

A list of carriers (too short to be complete) was appended. These served the villages around Louth, but usually did not live in Louth. A number of street names appearing in this directory were not used in R1823, but this is more a weakness of the rating list than the directory.

Pigot 1828⁸ This was a great improvement on Pigot 1822 and arranged in a similar way to White 1826. It was slightly less detailed than the latter: in particular the preliminary description of the town was much shorter, the unclassified list of residents was shorter and farmers were not included. This directory was also published with a title page dated 1830; the text for Louth was the same.

County Directories Helpful in Relation to R1838

Pigot 1835⁹ This was a revised version of Pigot 1828 and had the same features. It is possible to examine the entries in this directory by reference to other documents; the result is, for the most prosperous residents, encouraging. The list below examines residents that both (a) voted in the Vestry poll in 1834 and (b) were listed in R1838; it takes the top 50 in terms of rateable value recorded in the poll (which used the R1823 values).

Category	No	Inclusion in Pigot 1835
Clergy & private residents	9	One omitted.
Farmers	7*	All omitted.
Other commercial and professional	34	All present but often in the form of partnership names that do not show forenames.
Total	50
* including Richard Cox, listed as prison governor, but he was also a farmer.
It is evident that the omission of farmers was a deliberate policy, indicating the use of an urban template.

Pigot 1841¹⁰ This was a revised version of Pigot 1835 with similar strengths and weaknesses.

White 1842¹¹ For Lincolnshire as a whole this was an important directory, because it was the first to cover the whole county, rather than just the towns and a few of the larger villages. Unfortunately in his sequence of towns and villages White neither followed alphabetical order nor used the then current divisions, the poor law unions, but instead used the ancient divisions (in Lincolnshire mainly called wapentakes) that had long ceased to be significant. The entry for Louth followed the general format of White 1826 but expanded the description of the town to include more general information and recent local history (particularly the downfall of the Old Corporation).

Some comparisons of the listings in Pigot 1841 and White 1842 are made on separate pages: see Commercial Listings and Private Residents.

County Directories Helpful in Relation to R1851

Three directories were published in 1849.

Slater 1849¹² This was the last Pigot/Slater directory to cover Lincolnshire. Pigot died in 1843 and his work was taken over by Isaac Slater, previously a partner in the firm. Slater’s directory covering Lincolnshire was published in 1849. It followed the standard Pigot format. Norton states that the original was published in 1849, but there were reissues with only the date on the title page changed. A version republished on CD has the date 1850 and one digitised by Google is dated 1852.

Kelly 1849¹³ Frederick Kelly held the post of inspector of letter carriers at the Post Office at the modest salary of £350 pa and made about £1,300 pa extra (his version; his critics said much more) from directories. Kelly published his Post Office London Directory in 1836 and gradually spread his activities throughout the country, reaching Lincolnshire in 1849. The directories were published by his brother, William, and continued to be called Post Office directories, even though there was no official connection. ¹⁴ He aimed to include all settlements, even small villages, with a format different from those adopted in other directories. For each town and village there was an alphabetical list of the more important private residents followed by an alphabetical commercial list. In a separate section there were commercial lists for the whole county classified by trade. There was a good deal of supporting information including the names of members of the borough council; but the account of local history did not equal White’s. The Louth entry for this directory is reproduced in Robinson & Sturman 2001.

Hagar 1849¹⁵ In 1849 Hagar & Co also published a directory of Leicestershire, which was largely a pirated copy of one of William White’s (Norton p 143), but this was certainly not the case for the Lincolnshire directory. It was the most ambitious directory covering Louth in the mid-nineteenth century. It had no general history or topography of the town but started with an alphabetical list of selected local residents, including many not found in the other directories, followed by a classified trade list and a great deal of supporting information, extending to a list of streets (containing a number of errors and misconceptions), the membership of council committees, the dates of the magistrates’ licensing sessions and the times of Sunday services in churches and chapels. Reproducing this mass of information required great care and tight editorial control, which was not always present. There was no subsequent edition; probably the directory was not profitable. Unlike Kelly, Hagar covered only towns and a few of the larger villages.

In addition Louth was covered by a directory of Hull: Francis White 1851.¹⁶ This was a skimpy, unreliable document but occasionally produced checkable information not found in the other directories. Francis White claimed to be the brother of William White senior, who appears not to have acknowledged the relationship. Press accounts of litigation show that Francis was dishonest both in the way he manufactured directories and the way he sold them.

Accuracy and Completeness of the 1849 Directories

Of the three directories Slater 1849 is the hardest to use and had the fewest entries. Hagar 1849 had over 200 more names than Kelly 1849; but some of these were outside the borough boundary. Hagar’s listing was more inclusive of the small tradesmen that operated from ordinary working class houses. However there were some obvious omissions from Hagar’s trade lists. These included William Ashton, ironmonger, Henry Coulam, joiner and builder, James Hunter Ryley, stonemason and William Parkin, accountant, seed merchant and registrar of births and marriages; all four were listed in White 1842 and in both of the other 1849 directories. All of the directories had difficulty in achieving consistency in listing the less prominent private residents.

The 1855/6 Directories

Kelly 1855:¹⁷ This was a revised version of Kelly 1849.

White 1856¹⁸ This was a revised version of White 1842. It is the best known of the Lincolnshire directories, because it was reprinted in 1969 and in the days before electronic publication was widely available in second hand bookshops.

Comparison of Kelly 1855 and White 1856

The following points can be made in comparing the two directories.

Independence The substantial differences between the two directories, in content as well as format, show that they were genuinely independent publications.

True date White 1856 was genuinely later. For example it included the 1855/6 mayor, a different person from the 1854/5 mayor; and it showed as a miller James Griffin, whereas Kelly 1855 showed his elder brother, John, who died in August 1855.

Omissions Kelly 1855 was too heavily based on the previous edition. For example it listed as town crier a man that had died in late 1849. It also sometimes disregarded persons of marginal importance that were not included in 1849. For example, White 1856 listed 42 boot and shoemakers including seven that (a) were not listed in either edition of Kelly and (b) appear not to have been new arrivals because they were listed in R1851. In addition Kelly had little interest in gardeners, dairymen and other small occupiers of land.

Accuracy That said, the format of Kelly’s directories was more conducive to careful editing. For example, White 1856 showed in the Market Place “George Clark, butcher”, and “C Clarke”, licensee of the New Rein Deer; apparently different people. More helpfully Kelly 1855 had “Clark George, New Reindeer, and butcher”.¹⁹

Later Directories

Directories published after 1856 are of little assistance in the interpretation of R1851. The next Lincolnshire publication by Kelly & Co was in 1861; the next by White not until 1872. However, particular mention should be made of Morris 1863,²⁰ because it was the first directory to include the new house numbers that had been allocated in most Louth streets in 1860. Morris was also somewhat more willing than the other compilers to list low status occupations, including, for example, laundresses, lodging house keepers and an increased number of employees, such as clerks. (However the inclusion, as a private resident, of Sarah Burton, who kept a brothel in Northgate, must be put down to the malicious act of an underpaid local agent.)