James Wood’s Scrotum

Family history can become a fairly tedious list of names, dates and places, with very little turning up in the records to add context or colour. But just occasionally something leaps out to add detail to an otherwise anonymous ancestor’s life.

James Wood was my great-great-great-great-grandfather on my mum’s side. The body part in question features in a surgeon’s report from the 5th page of James’s army discharge papers dated 1839. Now I will confess that I have had this record saved to my computer for well over a year. I had skimmed it, determined it was repetitive, discovered the handwriting was difficult to read, and filed it away for later on the mistaken assumption that it would contain nothing very unusual. Lesson learned.

Here’s an extract from the army surgeon’s report:

And this is my best attempt at a transcript.

“I certify that James Wood 7^thHussars has suffered for many years from Chronic Rheumatism. His scrotum is so much [?] with enlarged veins as to prevent his riding Regimentally without crushing his testicle and he is considered by the commanding officer unfit for the active duties of a soldier in which opinion I concur. His disabilities are the effect of Constitutional Infirmity and not of vice or Intemperance. His conduct in Hospital has always been good.”

Poor James. At least they didn’t think he had venereal disease. The army has long been concerned with ‘vice or intemperance’ in its ranks, with good reason.

James was born in Leeds around 1798. He joined the 22nd Light Dragoons in 1815, when he was 17, transferring after a year to the 7th Hussars.  His discharge papers include the original attestation record from when he joined the regiment.  It records that he was five feet six and three-quarter inches tall, had a fresh complexion, grey eyes and light brown hair. He was also illiterate, leaving a mark instead of a signature – something that he did again when he left the army 23 years and 170 days later. Evidently his army training didn’t include learning to write.

17-year-old James was a cropper by trade. A cropper was a skilled worker in the textile industry, responsible for finishing woollen cloth by ‘cropping’ the nap using a huge pair of shears (the Leeds City Museum has a pair on display, I was surprised at how big they are). The Luddite riots were in full swing in the early 19th century in response to technological developments of the Industrial Revolution. Workers in the woollen trade, particularly croppers and weavers, protested the loss of their livelihoods as textile manufacturers began to introduce efficient new machinery that was quicker and cheaper than employing skilled men. The Luddites became violent, smashing machinery and even committing murder. In 1812, three years before James joined the army, 17 men were hanged in York for the new crime of machine-breaking, and a further 60 were tried the following year in what was widely seen as a show trial.  While the violence had died down by 1815, skilled textile workers didn’t stand a chance of maintaining their livelihoods in the face of rapid industrial developments. James may well have decided to cut his losses. He enlisted in the military for the sum of six pounds.

Both the 22nd Dragoons and the 7th Hussars had been involved in the Napoleonic Wars, fighting with Wellington against the French. Perhaps the army also offered a more glamorous lifestyle than staying in Yorkshire and cropping woollen cloth.  The British Library cites Jane Austen’s 1813 novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’ as a prime example of the glamour attached to military men at this time. Alongside Colin Firth’s wet shirt, the story features a couple of breathless teenage girls who chase charming but dastardly soldiers around the countryside and nearly ruin their families in the process. While it’s unlikely that the illiterate James Wood ever read ‘Pride and Prejudice’, he may well have been swayed by the level of female attention men in uniform could attract on the streets of Leeds.

So back to James’s scrotum. I’d wondered, from the way the medical report is written, whether the rheumatism mentioned in the previous sentence might have caused his problem.  According to Alan Humphries, the Thackray Medical Museum‘s highly knowledgeable librarian, they were probably two separate conditions.  The Arthritis Foundation rather unhelpfully tells me that the term ‘rheumatism’ is no longer in use but that historically it referred to a range of muscle and joint conditions.  The Hussars was a mounted regiment, meaning that James would have been in the saddle for a lot of his 23 years. That in itself might have been enough to cause the ‘enlarged veins’ in the scrotum referred to in the report. It seems that James was discharged from the army on health grounds, though he might have felt by then that he had served his time. The record gives very little information on his actual military service. It states that he served in France from 1815 until 1818, where he was presumably part of the occupying army after Wellington’s victory at Waterloo, and the rest of his time ‘at home’.

We shouldn’t feel too sorry for James, despite his unfortunate ailment (and the fact that even death isn’t enough to keep his genitals from appearing on the internet without his consent).  He married Isabella Mackie on 29 September 1833 at Hamilton, Scotland, and fathered at least 7 children between 1835 and Isabella’s death in 1850 (she died aged 37 of ‘disease of the brain’, but that story will have to wait for another day).  Five of the children were born after 1839 when the scrotum condition was diagnosed.  It clearly didn’t do him any lasting damage.  He appears on the censuses in 1851, 1861 and 1871, working in a range of horse-related jobs (groom and coachman, for example). Helpfully one of the censuses lists him as a ‘Chelsea Pensioner’, meaning he was entitled to a military pension. This is the only reason I knew to look for a military record in the first place.

On 20th February 1867 James’s daughter Elizabeth Harriet Wood married my mum’s great-great-grandfather Haydon Rushworth at Leeds parish church. This time both bride and groom signed their names.

The 1939 Register

I’ve recently been browsing the 1939 Register on Find My Past. This is the national register of about 41 million civilians living in England and Wales taken on 29 September 1939, less than a month after Britain declared war on Germany. Its purpose was to enable the authorities to issue identity cards, organise rationing, and manage other administrative tasks associated with the war effort. There’s more on its rationale and importance on the Find My Past blog.

The register has been available for a while and to be honest I didn’t take much notice of it when it was first released. I haven’t had much time for research lately and tend to get sucked into pushing my family tree further back rather than focusing on more recent periods of history. 1939 is within living memory, it’s my grandparents’ lifetimes, and I suppose I didn’t think such a recent record could tell me much I didn’t already know. However, as with any area of research, making assumptions tends to be unwise!

The one person I really wanted to find, my paternal grandfather Leo King, has in typical fashion remained elusive. I’ve written about Leo in previous posts. I’ve found more information than I thought I would on his early life but the years between 1918 and his marriage to my grandma in 1940 remain a mystery I have yet to solve. I had better luck with my paternal grandmother, Leo’s second wife Sarah Dodsworth. Sarah was born in 1915 in Middlesbrough to her father George, a bin man, and mother Minnie. She met Leo during the Second World War when she had joined the WAAF and he was stationed with the RAF in the North East. Despite the age gap (he was 17 years her senior) they married during the war and had my dad in 1947, their longed-for and adored only child.

I remember grandma talking about her upbringing when I was a child. She was the middle one of three siblings with an older sister Ida and a brother Raymond who was five years her junior. Their mother died when grandma was 21. She often told me that, after her sister had left to get married, she lived with her father and brother and had to ‘keep house’ and look after them. She made it sound like a hard life with a lot of responsibility for looking after others.

The 1939 register gives a slightly different impression.  When I first looked at the transcript I was not surprised to find a household with George, Sarah and Raymond living at 196 Linthorpe Terrace in Middlesbrough. What did surprise me when I looked at the original image was to find three further people at 196 Linthorpe Terrace whose details have for some reason not been transcribed. There is another Sarah Dodsworth, who is my grandma’s own grandmother born in 1860. There are also two of my grandma’s aunts, Sarah’s daughters Eva Dodsworth and Florence Norman. Sarah Senior and Florence both have ‘unpaid domestic duties’ written in the ‘personal occupation’ column, while Eva’s listing says ‘Nurse (S.R.N). A potential household of six begins to look very different from a household of three.

Of course it’s dangerous to infer anything about people’s personal relationships or feelings from one single factual record, and indeed these women could have been visiting rather than living at the address. However this does cast at least some doubt on grandma’s account of her youth. For her part, her occupation is given as ‘Shop assistant (Head Sales, fancy-furnishing dept)’ which is a lovely level of detail to have. Grandma was often nostalgic about her time working in a department store before she got married. To her, stores like Marshall and Snelgrove in Leeds were the height of glamour. She was very proud of being a head of sales on the glove counter and even in her old age always prided herself on her nicely kept leather gloves.

Grandma’s story isn’t the only puzzle my family have thrown out from 1939. My maternal grandparents also appear in the register. Mum’s mother Irene was 17 in 1939 – she married my grandad a year later, in September 1940. In 1939 she’s listed living in Leeds with her parents Ernest and Hilda Brayshaw and her younger sister Joan. What’s puzzling about this entry isn’t my grandma’s details but her father Ernest.  I’ve got quite a few records for Ernest including the parish register entry for his birth, on 12 April 1900, and his baptism the following January. I was therefore puzzled to find his date of birth on the 1939 register listed as 13 April 1898, almost two years earlier. This seemed strange. I’m as confident as I can be that the parish register wouldn’t be wrong, so why did Ernest give the wrong date of birth to the registrar? Could it be possible that he didn’t know his own date of birth? I’m used to erratic ages and dates from 19th century records but hadn’t expected to find it in 1939.

Then I got to wondering whether there might be a reason for Ernest to deliberately falsify his age. I read a bit more about military service and conscription in 1939. According to the UK Parliament’s webpage, “the National Service (Armed Forces) act imposed conscription on all males aged between 18 and 41 who had to register for service”.  A man born in April 1900 would be eligible for military service in September 1939. A man born in April 1898 might just avoid it.

Was Ernest’s entry in the 1939 Register an honest mistake or a deliberate attempt to avoid the draft? I’ll never know. I don’t have any evidence of Ernest serving in the Second World War, and he was just young enough to miss the First World War, so he was one of those lucky men of his generation who missed both of the 20th century’s global conflicts. Whether this came about by accident or design is impossible to tell.

On Fertility

One of the most striking things about family history is the difference in family size between modern families and those in the past. Once you get back more than two generations the change is clear – instead of two, three or four children, as has been the norm from the 1940s or 50s onwards, most families have five, six, seven, even ten or more children. Historians have estimated the total fertility rate – the number of children a woman might expect to have between the ages of 15 and 39 – at 5.75 in the early decades of the 19th century. However many of my female ancestors who reached old age had a baby every other year from shortly after their marriage until the loss of their husband or the menopause, whichever came first.

The 1911 census gives a great insight into family size and fertility a century ago because the census return form asked respondents for a specific set of information that hadn’t been included in previous censuses: how long their present marriage had lasted; how many children had been born to the marriage and how many of those children had died. I have several direct female ancestors for whom this information is recorded in 1911. Their data look like this:

• Katherine King (great-grandmother): 45 years old and widowed. She had been married for 25 years and had 10 children, of whom 8 were still living and two had died. She had four of her children living with her, aged between 9 and 22. I’ve written about Katherine and her children, including my grandfather Leo, in previous posts.
• Minnie Louisa Dodsworth (great-grandmother): 26 years old and married for six years. She had had four children in that time but only one had survived, a three-year-old daughter Ida who was my grandmother’s older sister.
• Alice Ellis (great-great-grandmother): aged 40, she had been married for 15 years and had had eight children, seven of whom were still living and aged between 1 and 14 years.
• Mary Ann Rushworth (great-great-grandmother): also aged 40, she had been married for 17 years and had 8 children, all of whom had survived and were aged between 1 and 17.
• Fanny Brayshaw (great-great-grandmother): she was 33 years old and widowed. She had been married for 11 years and had five children, of whom one had died.
• Harriet Jenkins (great-great-grandmother): 34 years old and married for 13 years. 9 children born of whom two had died.
• Sarah Jane Boyce (3rd great-grandmother, via my maternal grandfather Edward Rushworth): 57 years old and married for 38 years. Sarah-Jane had had an impressive 15 children, of whom 10 were still living. I know of 11 of those children through census records and can have a rough guess at the dates when other siblings were born by looking for gaps between the known births. Sarah Jane had the most children of any ancestor I’ve found so far.

These figures are striking because of the difference between the lives lived by my female ancestors and the facts of family life today.  Only one of the seven women – Mary Ann Rushworth – had reached her 40s without losing a child. Sarah Jane Boyce’s 15 children would be very unusual in 2016, as would the fact that a third of those children died, probably very young. Equally Minnie Dodsworth’s loss of three of her four children born within just six years would be a shocking tragedy. It’s also likely that census records underplay the extent of child mortality.  While the 1911 census gives a helpful insight into family size and child mortality, it only records the fate of those children who were born alive. I can only guess at possible instances of stillbirth or miscarriage.

These stories raise many questions about the extent to which women’s lives in the past were shaped by childbearing, child rearing and loss. Few of my female ancestors had an occupation recorded in the census after they married, probably because they had frequent pregnancies and always had young children in the home. The physical impact of subsequent pregnancies and births must have been significant, particularly before modern medicine (I have yet to find an ancestor who died in childbirth, but the statistical evidence of maternal mortality during the 19th century is eye-watering). The emotional impact, too, not just of the actual and potential loss of young children but of the relentless demands of decade upon decade of child-rearing, must have been significant for both women and men. I have not yet found a childless marriage in my family history, but in past societies where large families were the norm and the expectations of women were defined by their roles as wives and mothers, infertility must have been at least as traumatic as it is now.

Historical records only give facts, and often only partial ones at that. Part of the challenge of family history is trying to fill in the gaps using inference, contextual research and sometimes imagination.  It seems plausible that our ancestors’ relationships, whether marital relationships or those between parents, children and siblings, were very different from our own.

 

Military misdemeanours: John Rushworth’s war

It’s been ages since I posted. So long I’ve had to fathom WordPress all over again. The demands of the living have outweighed those of the dead, which I guess is how it should be, but recently I’ve picked back up on the family history trail. I’ve got two more First World War ancestors to talk about before I follow some different stories.

In my last post I talked about my great-grandfather, Edward Rushworth, who served in the Middle East during the First World War then in India in 1919. I’ve also been researching Edward’s brother John. Four years older than Edward, John was born in about 1894 and was living at the family home in the 1911 census, a single man working as a courier’s labourer at the firm of J. W. Stocks in Leeds.

John is so far a rare find among my family in that his wartime service record has survived and made it to the online family history sites. I therefore have a record of his service that takes some of the guesswork out of my research. John attested for the army in May 1913 aged 19 years and 5 months and joined the 1/8th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment, known as the Leeds Rifles.  He was still working for J W Stocks, now as a leather finisher. The description on attestation lists him having good vision and good physical development at five feet five inches tall and with a chest measurement of 33 inches – possibly not something that would earn him that description today! He was mobilised to France on 16 April 1915, probably with the 49th (West Riding) division which mobilised on that date and went to France and Flanders, taking part in the Battle of Augers Ridge on 9 May 1915 and in the defence against the first phosgene attack on 19 December. The 49th was involved in phases of the batle of the Somme in 1916 and in a phase of the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917.

At some point John was moved into the 3/5th Battalion which was a reserve and reinforcement battalion, and from there into the Labour Corps. It seems likely that these moves could have been due to wounds or sickness, though his disability form – which is undated but contains his Labour Corps details – states that he was not suffering from a disability caused by his military service. I do have a record of him being hospitalised in June 1915, after two months with the field force, though this was due to an eye complaint rather than for any military cause. The record, on the Forces War Records website, notes that John had “Compound myopic astigmatism right eye. Defective eyesight none due to any war cause other than fatigue”. He spent a week in hospital then was discharged back to duty.  John would have seen his first major action a month earlier at the Battle of Aubers, where the 49th Division got off lightly with only 94 casualties. It’s tempting to speculate whether his eye condition might have been related to the shock of war.

John’s service record is relatively innocuous apart from one incident on his conduct sheet dated November 1917. The record describes the offence: “whilst employed at C.T.S.C., taking a tin of Maconochie rations from a crate without permission”. According to the Imperial War Museum this watery tinned stew was “more blamed than praised and many considered it only edible if mixed with something else”.

Tin of Maconachie ration, First World War. (c) IWM (EPH 4379).

The offence was witnessed by a Lance Corporal Chapman M.F.P and earned John two weeks of Field Punishment No. 2. This would have involved him being shackled or restrained and doing extra duties – a military historian friend told me it may have involved pack drill, being made to walk around a track for hours fully laden with equipment. Either way it sounds like a serious punishment and a lot to go through for a tin of watery stew! I hope he at least managed to eat it.

John survived the war and received the 1914-15 Star, the Victory Medal and the British War Medal. He died in 1973 aged 79.

There was another brother in between John and Edward whose war record I have yet to trace. Charles Haydon Rushworth will have been about 19 when war broke out in 1914, so was definitely the right age to have been conscripted in 1916, but I haven’t been able to find him in the military records. There are numerous Charles Rushworths on the medal rolls but without an address, regimental number or some other form of identifier I can’t pin mine down. He married Mary Ann Davidson at St Matthew’s Church in Leeds in March 1918 when his profession is listed as ‘Bookbinder’, so he had remained in the leather trade but moved on from his days as an errand boy (interestingly his name is spelt, and signed, ‘Charles Aden’ not Charles Haydon as it appears on the 1911 census form signed by his father). Bookbinding was surely not the kind of profession that would lead to someone being exempted from military service, so it’s possible to speculate that Charles had served and been discharged perhaps due to ill health or wounds.  Perhaps this also enabled him to train for a skilled occupation in the leather trade rather than a labouring job. There was a Charles Rushworth discharged from the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry due to wounds in 1915 after serving overseas but I’ve no way of knowing whether it’s the same one. Given that two of Charles’s brothers volunteered, his father served at home in the Volunteer Force and his father-in-law was a soldier,  one imagines there might have been a certain amount of family pressure for Charles  to do his duty and there must be an explanation for him being in a civilian occupation, living in the family home, aged 22 in 1918. Another puzzle to solve!

The Rushworths in the First World War

Today I’m staying with the First World War but heading over to the other side of the family. My mum is a Rushworth and I’ve been looking into the experiences of my great-grandfather Edward Rushworth, born in 1898, and those of his brothers who served during the war.

Edward was the third of eight children born to Charles Rushworth and his wife Mary Ann, nee Green. Charles worked in the leather trade: in 1911 he was a tanner and leather currier at the firm of J.W. Stocks in Leeds where his eldest son John, aged 17, also worked as a labourer.  Two other sons, Charles Haydon and my great-grandfather Edward, worked as errand boys in the leather trade.  The family were from Leeds and lived there in 1911 but seem to have moved around a lot, spending a few years in Northampton at the beginning of the century. They can’t have been well off: tanning was a notoriously unhealthy industry and according to the census return, in 1911 the ten of them were living in three rooms.  They lived at no. 6 Gresham Street which was derelict by the 1950s, as seen in this photograph on the Leodis website, and was included in the slum clearance programme in the early 1960s.

I thought that Edward Rushworth would probably have served in the First World War due to his age: he would have been 18 in 1916 just as the National Conscription Act made military service compulsory for single men aged between 19 and 41.  I found proof that Edward had served on his marriage certificate. He married Emily Ellis on 24 May 1919 and was still in the Army at that time: under ‘rank or profession’ his marriage certificate states ‘Private No 82975 M.G.C. (Boot Operator).

Unfortunately, as with many of those who served during the First World War, Edward’s official Army records don’t seem to have survived.  His medal index card shows that he was entitled to the British War Medal and the Victory Medal, but I couldn’t find anything in the online family history sites to add to that.

My main sources of information for his war service are an entry in the National Roll of the Great War cut from a newspaper by someone in the family years ago, and family memories. I’m very grateful to whoever decided to cut this clipping from the newspaper presumably in the early 1920s.

I know it refers to the right Edward Rushworth as it gives his address, which is the same as that on my great-grandfather’s marriage certificate from 1919. I had imagined he might have been conscripted in 1916 but the clipping shows he actually volunteered a year earlier, when he was possibly only 17, though why he would have joined the Durham Light Infantry rather than a local Leeds regiment is something I have yet to explain.  He served in the Middle East during the war – something else I need to research further. It also shows he stayed in the army after the war’s end and served in India, probably in the Third Anglo-Afghan War, though he must have come home on leave in May 1919 as that’s when he married Emily.

I was able to flesh out Edward’s story a little bit by talking to my uncle. Born in 1940, he and my grandma lived with Edward and Emily during the Second World War while my grandad was away. My uncle remembers Edward talking about his time as a Lewis gunner during the First World War.  Edward had apparently talked about using guns cooled by water which got so hot that the water boiled and they could use it to make tea.  In this instance he must have been talking about the Vickers, which was a water cooled gun used by the Machine Gun Corps (the Lewis gun was lighter,  air cooled and was issued to infantry units because it could be carried and used by one soldier) though Edward probably used both.  This photo from the Imperial War Museum collection shows a Vickers machine gun crew in action during the Battle of Menin Road Ridge in September 1917.

A Vickers machine gun crew in action. (c) IWM (Q2864).

Edward also talked about being at the Khyber Pass, which must have been during the Third Afghan War in 1919 (more on that from the National Army Museum here). My favourite anecdote, however, is about Edward’s tattoo. My uncle remembers him having a huge tattoo of a cross on his chest, big enough to stretch from neck to waistband. Edward said he got the tattoo in India but couldn’t remember how – he just woke up one morning and there it was.  That must have been an impressive night out.  I imagine there are squaddies still having similar experiences today.

In later life Edward was apparently a round, jolly man who liked a drink. The photos we have of him certainly fit that description. He died in March 1972.