̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - occupations

Exhibition highlights the untold story of Nazi victims in the Channel Islands

sjr81 — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 11:18:26 +0000

On British Soil: Victims of Nazi Persecution in the Channel Islands, opens today at the Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide, London, and seeks to highlight the stories often omitted from the British narrative of ‘standing alone’ against Nazism and celebrations of the British victory over the Germans.

̽��ֱ��exhibition draws upon the Library’s wealth of archival material, recently-released files from the National Archives, personal items belonging to the victims themselves and current research from Dr Carr.

“For anyone who wants to come and learn about the last untold story of the German occupation of the Channel Islands, this is the exhibition to visit,” said Carr, a senior lecturer in archaeology at St Catherine’s College and the Institute of Continuing Education (ICE).

“ ̽��ֱ��Islands were the only part of British territory to be occupied and the victims of Nazism are almost entirely overlooked by those who prefer (incorrectly) to see the islands as a hotbed of collaboration. There are so many heart-breaking stories. We think of the Holocaust or Nazi persecution as something that happened only on the continent – but it happened on British soil. British citizens experienced the most horrific concentration camps, and Jews were deported from British territory to Auschwitz.”

From the experiences of a young Jewish woman living quietly on a farm in Guernsey and later deported to Auschwitz and murdered, to those of a Spanish forced labourer in Alderney, and the story of a man from Guernsey whose death in a German prison camp remained unknown to his family for over 70 years, the exhibition highlights the lives of the persecuted, and the post-war struggle to obtain recognition of their suffering.

Other exhibits going on display in London include a Christmas card made by a little girl and given to Frank Tuck from Guernsey as he suffered in Neuoffingen hard labour camp and a key of a prison cell from the notorious Cherche-Midi prison in Paris, belonging to Henry Marquand, deported for his role in sheltering two British commandos to Guernsey.

“ ̽��ֱ��search for these unknown stories continues,” added Carr. “ ̽��ֱ��exhibition coincides with the launching of a new website https://www.frankfallaarchive.org/ which is dedicated to finding and reconstructing the full journey of all deported Channel Islanders through various Nazi prisons and concentration camps. Theirs is the last untold story of the German occupation of the Channel Islands.”

Frank Falla, the Guernseyman after whom the archive is named, was a former prisoner and survivor of Frankfurt am Main-Preungesheim and Naumburg (Saale) prisons. In the mid-1960s, Frank took it upon himself to help his fellow former political prisoners in the Channel Islands get compensation for their suffering in Nazi prisons and camps.

In 2010, Frank’s daughter gave Gilly her father’s extensive archives – the most important resistance archives to ever come out of the Channel Islands – and the project was born. Falla’s briefcase, used to collect the testimony of those persecuted by the Nazis is also on display in London from today.

“I’ve been writing the background stories for the website of islanders deported to Nazi prison, concentration and labour camps,” added Carr. “So far I’ve written 75 out of 200 plus. Every story is a labour of love. I see each as a form of ‘rescue’. While I can never go back and rescue any of these people from their camps and prisons, I can rescue their story and experiences for their families and for the Channel Islands.”

Carr says the experience of researching these stories brings about a strangely bonding experience with her subject matter as she becomes a co-witness to the horrors they faced – and responsible for making their stories more widely known.

“Each person whose story I trace becomes a kind of ‘friend’ in a strange way. You get to know them so well and I have been lucky enough to meet many families of those deported. I feel I can be a link between the living and the dead and tell the living what the dead were never able to.

“I’m interested in hearing from anyone in the Channel Islands or further afield who had a family member sent to a Nazi prison or concentration camp from the Channel Islands to help supplement the journeys we have reconstructed from archival materials. Please contact me via the website with photos, documents and stories. I'd love to hear from you.”

On British Soil: Victims of Nazi Persecution in the Channel Islands until 9 February 2018, has been supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

̽��ֱ��untold stories of slave labourers, political prisoners and Jews who were persecuted during the German occupation of the Channel Islands during the Second World War will be revealed from today at a new exhibition co-curated by Cambridge’s Dr Gilly Carr.

Each person whose story I trace becomes a kind of ‘friend’ in a strange way. You get to know them so well.

GIlly Carr

Marianne Grunfeld was born in Poland to a German-Jewish family before taking a farm job in Guernsey in 1939. She was deported in 1942 and was murdered in Auschwitz

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike

Can she bake? ̽��ֱ��Bake Off back story

amb206 — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 08:00:00 +0000

More than 10 million of us are watching it and we’ve bought the recipe books: once again Great British Bake Off has taken the nation by storm with the high drama of pastry, pies and profiteroles. But how many of us keep our households supplied with home-made bread and cakes, let alone have the skills to rustle up a perfect gooseberry tart or a faultless chocolate roulade?

In his book Cottage Economy, first published in 1821, the reforming journalist William Cobbett laments the decline in baking. “As to the act of making bread, it would be shocking indeed if that had to be taught by means of books. Every woman high or low, ought to know how to make bread. If she does not, she is unworthy of trust and confidence: and indeed a mere burden on the community. Yet it is but too true, that many women, even those who get their living from their labour, know nothing of the making of bread.”

Cobbett’ was a farmer as well as a writer. His purpose in writing Cottage Economy was to promote self-sufficiency in the rural labouring classes. Elsewhere in the book, he counsels readers to ensure that their daughters learn to bake in order to command a better wage as servants. “’Can she bake?’ is the question that I always put. If she can then she is worth a pound or two a year more.”

Sophie McGeevor, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History, is studying women’s work in mid-19th century England as part of a major longitudinal study of employment. In particular, McGeevor looks at the use of time, building a picture of the ways in which women divided their waking hours between paid and unpaid work as they carried out essential but often overlooked household tasks such as laundry, caring, mending and cooking.

She says: “What interests me about Cobbett’s writing is that in advocating self-sufficiency, he was calling for a way of life which was both home-based and incredibly time intensive – and which was, in many ways, incompatible with remunerative work available to women in this period.”

Home baking was central to the kind of wholesome and resourceful domesticity that Cobbett promoted. It was an activity far removed from today’s image of baking as a fun and fulfilling hobby – and it was undertaken almost exclusively by women. McGeevor’s research into a collection of autobiographies held by the British Library shows that many households baked just once a week when the oven would be lit especially for the purpose.

A batch of loaves that was fresh out of the oven on a Wednesday would be eaten stale by the following Tuesday. Heating an oven to exactly the right temperature for baking, and juggling the baking of various products, was an art. For many families, burnt or undercooked goods would be a disastrous waste of precious resources – ingredients, fuel and time - not simply a question of a petulant Bake Off binning.

An autobiography written by Louise Jermy, who was born in 1877, illustrates just what an undertaking ‘baking day’ was for households adhering to what were already old-fashioned traditions. Sent from London to the country to recover from an illness, Louise describes her Aunt Anne baking once a fortnight, producing rabbit and hare pies, fruit tarts and batch cakes, as well as bread. All these are cooked in a brick oven heated by “three large faggots of thorns” … “when the oven is white hot it was scrapped out, and then mopped to clean the ashes and the door was fastened”.

Notes made by Louise show the times involved in baking various items: batch cakes 1 ½ hrs; buns “about a quarter”; “sweet cakes and pies about one and a half to two hours”; “the large loaves were left for two and a half hours”. Such was the hard work and time involved in this task that Aunt Ann has made a neat arrangement with her daughter-in-law. ̽��ֱ��two women bake on alternate weeks “whichever one baked would make a good supply of batch cakes, each sending fresh ones, exchanging every week so that we had some fresh bread”.

A stove was not just expensive to heat but, in summer especially, it made a small house uncomfortably hot. Nellie Hoare, born in 1898, remembers: “There was a bakery not far from us and often I have taken a dough-cake Mother had made or a bread pudding and they would bake it. They would do this for anyone if it was taken in before nine in the morning and it could be fetched about three hours later for the price of one penny. People used to take more things to bake in the summer time as no-one wanted to keep up the fire enough for baking at home then. Of course we had to keep some sort of fire going at home winter and summer as we had nothing else to boil a kettle or do any cooking.”

It’s notable that at the end of the 19th century Louise’s aunt is making cakes and Nellie’s mother is sending her out with puddings to cook. Widespread evidence for working class consumption of baked sugary cakes and puddings cannot be found until the 15th century and they remained luxury items well into the 1800s.

“Though labouring people had begun to consume sugar in increasing quantities over the course of the 18th century, it was generally eked out in weak tea and not used in everyday baking. It was not until the mid-19th century, with the push for free trade and the abolition of preferential duties for British Colonies beginning with the Sugar Duties Act of 1846, that a huge fall in the price of sugar made the eating and baking of cakes and biscuits more affordable,” said McGeevor.

“Today home bread-making is chiefly a matter of choice and privilege. It’s something people do as a leisure activity using a bread maker or a modern oven which heats up in minutes. In the 19th century, bread was the mainstay of the English diet, eaten several times a day, and baking was a heavy and laborious process.”

A common misconception, however, is that all women made bread for their families. Women who worked outside the home would not have been able to spend a whole day baking. Families who lived in areas where fuel was expensive showed a preference for buying ready-made bread.

Another big factor in the mix was fuel. Baking in an oven required substantial quantities of wood and/or coal. Coal was cheap in areas close to coal fields but more expensive the further it had to be transported. So that even William Cobbett admitted that for families in London making their own bread might be uneconomic.

In the 1870s, a French engineer called Frederic Le Play made a detailed study of the daily life of more than 60 labouring families. Four of these families were English. Comparing the household budgets of two cutlers with similar sized households – one in London and the other in Sheffield – he showed that the Sheffield family consumed 6,150 kg of coal against the London family’s 4,064 kg, reflecting the cheaper prices of the north.

“ ̽��ֱ��disparity in coal prices may explain why the family in Sheffield made their own bread while the London family brought their bread from a baker,” said McGeevor. “ ̽��ֱ��Sheffield cutler, his wife and three children consumed 1,272 lbs of flour per year which equates to at least three 2lb loaves each day, all baked by the cutler’s wife. This level of consumption seems staggeringly high to us but it fits with other evidence we have of per capita consumption of bread.”

Regional cookery is shaped not just by availability of ingredients but also by the source of heat available to cook food on or in – and by the time that can be devoted to the task. “Many regional specialities originate from baking not in an oven but on an open fire. In peat-burning areas, bread and pies could be baked in cast-iron pots, known as Dutch ovens, which were placed in the ashes,” said McGeevor.

“Oatcakes, griddle cakes, Welsh cakes and drop scones – as well as delicious pancake-like cakes still available in Derbyshire and Staffordshire – were cooked on a cast-iron griddle or bake-stones heated by an open fire. All these items are much quicker and less laborious to cook than bread – and they are cheap, tasty and filling.”

̽��ֱ��Bake Off phenomenon draws heavily on a brand of cakes-as-comfort-food nostalgia that has little to do with reality. “Many of us have embraced home-baking as a result of the show and some of us are encouraged by memories of our grandmothers’ creations. We would, however, be mistaken to assume that home baking was part of women's lives for several generations before,” said McGeevor.

“Women’s work has always been constrained by time and resources. How many of us would be enthusiastic about baking if we had first to light the oven with a pile of sticks and didn’t have the option of popping into a supermarket if it all goes wrong?”

Inset images: image from household guide (Smithsonian Libraries); oven featured in Cassell's Household Guide (Wikia); medieval baker (Wikipedia)

As Great British Bake Off sizzles towards tomorrow’s final, historian Sophie McGeevor reveals the less glamorous realities that faced working class women in the mid-19th century when home baking was already considered a dying art.

Today home bread-making is chiefly a matter of choice and privilege. It’s something people do as a leisure activity. In the 19th century, bread was the mainstay of the English diet, eaten several times a day, and baking was a heavy and laborious process.”

Sophie McGeevor

Wikimedia Commons

Painting of a woman making oat cakes by George Walker (1781-1856)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

Yes

What 19th-century women really did

amb206 — Sat, 08 Mar 2014 09:00:00 +0000

Alice Foley was born in 1891 and was so poorly that she was baptised soon afterwards; it was assumed she would die. ̽��ֱ��night of her birth, her parents did a moonlight flit from their accommodation as her father had lost his job and poor relief was denied. ̽��ֱ��family settled in Bolton where her mother took in washing to make ends meet, at the same time ensuring that her own small house was spick and span.

Looking back on her early life with five older siblings, and a father who was frequently absent or inebriated, Alice described in her autobiography, A Bolton Childhood, how her mother supported the family: “We were brought up mainly out of her washtub earnings. Frequently I accompanied her to various better-off houses and sitting on the floor amongst a pile of dirty clothes played games and prattled aloud whilst she silently scrubbed shirts and mangled sheets.”

Foley’s autobiography and other memoirs written by working class women in the long 19th century is the subject of a talk by Sophie McGeevor, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History, on Monday March 10. In her presentation, she will show how this niche literary genre can help to shine a light on millions of women’s lives and, in particular, illustrate how their time was spent in a mix of paid and unpaid roles, in the home and in the workplace.

She will argue that women’s roles as paid workers was largely determined by their unpaid work as mothers, and that access to childcare or the lack of it determined what paid work they could do. Without relatives to look after their children, women who lacked the money to pay for childcare were limited in the choice of paid work. Alice’s mother could bring Alice to her employer’s home, other mothers sought work which could be done from their own homes, or which could fit in around school hours – characteristics of flexible working that parents of young children today will recognise.

McGeevor is a member of a 30-strong research group – the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure - which links the Faculty of History and Department of Geography. She is part of a project which is mapping the occupational structure of Britain from 1379 to 1911. In her presentation, she will explore the ways in which autobiographies can answer the seemingly straightforward question: how did working class women in the 19th century spend their time?

“In the 21st century, government statisticians and social scientists routinely collect data on how men and women divide their time between paid work, unpaid work and leisure. This data is seen as crucial for understanding the economic role of the household, and individual household members, within the wider formal economy. However, with the exception of domestic servants, we know remarkably little about time-use before the 20th century,” said McGeever.

“This lack of information creates a big gap in our knowledge because a large proportion of the goods and services consumed and used by a single household may have been produced by the unpaid labour within that same household, typically the labour of women and children. Examples are goods such as hand-made clothes and home-cooked food and services such as the care of children, the sick and the elderly. These goods and services are completely invisible in historic estimates of GDP and this absence has significant consequences for our understanding of living standards in the past.”

One of the key sources for historians studying patterns of paid work is the census, first taken in 1801 in England and Wales and carried out every ten years since. While individual adult male occupations were first recorded in the 1831 census, it was not until 1851 that household heads were instructed to record married women’s occupations and only then, the instructions from 1851-1881 stated, if they were deemed to be ‘regularly employed’. This rule means that the part-time, seasonal and ‘odd jobs’ which may have constituted much of women’s work would not have been captured by the census. From the 1891 census onwards, the distinction between the recording of male and female occupations was apparently removed altogether; the householder’s instructions merely asked that ‘the occupations of women and children, if any, are to be stated as well as those of men’. However, the belief that the irregular paid work of women was not akin to an ‘occupation’ may have remained.

In a quest to fill this gap, McGeevor is examining 50 published autobiographies written by women born before 1900 and held by the British Library, that tell, in a variety of styles and viewpoints, the stories of women whose voices are seldom heard. Many were written as memoirs towards the end of their authors’ lives in order to tell the next generations what life was like. Over the course of the 19th century the British reading public was increasingly avid consumers of fictional and to a lesser extent non-fictional, tales of the life of the working poor, as demonstrated by the wide appeal of Charles Dickens’s novels and Henry Mayhew’s journalistic account, London Labour and the London Poor.

“There were lots of reasons why female autobiographers were greatly outnumbered by male autobiographers,” said McGeevor. “Women were less likely to be literate which meant that they represented a smaller proportion of the reading public and it was assumed that men wouldn’t want to read about women’s lives. Perhaps most importantly, male autobiographers were often men who had risen from humble origins to public roles in politics and wider society. Working class women had fewer opportunities to do this.”

̽��ֱ��picture that emerges from the autobiographies McGeevor is studying challenges many of our preconceptions about class and the way people lived – and also charts the radical changes that took place in the course of the century in terms of the ways in which women (and their families) organised their lives.

Details of life in London recorded by Mary Ann Ashford, born in 1787, makes surprising reading today. At only four months old she was sent to Camberwell to live with a nurse called Mrs Long. It was common at this time among families who lived in cities, and had the means to pay, to have their children looked after by women who lived in what was seen to be the relatively healthful air of the countryside and suburbs. Mary Anne’s parents jointly owned an inn in the City of London, and while Mary Ann stayed with Mrs Long they only saw her on evening visits and in the holidays.

For her parents, and particularly her mother, not having to care for the young Mary Ann on a day-to-day basis meant that she could be an active partner in the family business. However, for Mary Ann the consequences seem far from ideal; she noted that Mrs Long ensured that she looked clean and tidy when her parents were expected but otherwise sent her charge to school in “an unwashed and slovenly manner”. McGeevor notes that: “Noticeably absent in Mary Ann’s account of her mother is a sense of emotionally intensive parenting, a phenomena which appears to emerge only in the later 19th-century autobiographies. Of course, the vast majority of mothers loved and cared for their children, but they did not seem to think their presence was necessary for what we would now call their psychological wellbeing.”

For Mrs Long perhaps the cleanliness of her boarders was overlooked in the midst of her additional work. Mrs Long took in washing as well as child boarders – and wash days were busy. Mary Ann writes: “As she had the whole of the washing from the City Arms, she requested that my governess to let me bring my dinner and stop with her on busy days.” In the popular imagination, governesses are associated with the upper classes so it’s disconcerting to read references to Mary Ann’s “governess”, who was in fact her day-school teacher.

“It’s no coincidence that laundry features in so many of these women’s stories. Taking in washing, or going out to other people’s houses to do washing, required a great deal of strength but a minimum of skill or expensive tools or materials not already owned by women – and it could be planned to fit around women’s work at home and childcare responsibilities. Working class women had to be flexible and they had to multi-task, they had to be resilient and resourceful – all qualities that are valuable for working women today, particularly in developing economies,” said McGeevor.

There are a number of developments in 19th-century society which had many positive benefits for the wider population while conversely increasing the burden of unpaid work for women. As standards of hygiene improved, medical advances were made and urban infrastructure grew, child mortality rates fell and women found themselves caring for ever larger families. Mass manufacturing enabled the less well-off to buy cheap household goods and clothing. More consumer goods meant more things to look after – clothes to keep clean, food to be cooked at home on a stove rather than purchased ready-made or eaten cold.

McGeevor commented: “There are two key stories emerging from my research. ̽��ֱ��first is that the paid work which women did was constrained by their access to childcare – childcare and work had to be either combined or childcare had to be outsourced. ̽��ֱ��second is that children’s living standards and development were determined not just by the paid work of their fathers, but also by the paid, and crucially the unpaid, work of their mothers. While men’s wages were rarely elastic – and did not increase each time there was a new mouth to feed – women’s time, within the limits of the 24 hour day, typically came increasingly under pressure as they took on more paid work or spent more time, cooking, cleaning and caring for their families.”

In a seminar on Monday 10 March, 1pm in Seminar Room 5 at the Faculty of History, Sophie McGeevor will explore the question: ‘What can autobiographies tell us about women's time-use in 19th century England?’ All welcome.

For more information about this story contact Alexandra Buxton, Office of Communications, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673

Inset images: Magdalen Laundry, Ireland, early 20th century; Cook with Red Apron by Léon Bonvin, Walters Art Museum; ̽��ֱ��Butter Churn by Ralph Hedley, Bonhams; Old Lodging House in St Giles by Hubert von Herkomer, 1872 (all Wikipedia Commons)

In a talk on Monday (10 March, 2014) Sophie McGeevor (Faculty of History) will explain how her research into a collection of autobiographies by working class women is helping to fill a gap in our knowledge of the occupational structure of 19th century Britain.

It’s no coincidence that laundry features in so many of these women’s stories. Taking in washing, or going out to other people’s houses to do washing .... could be planned to fit around women’s work at home and childcare responsibilities

Sophie McGeevor

Wikimedia Commons

Yard of a tenement New York, c 1900

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Cambridge Ideas - Forgotten Heroes

bjb42 — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:47:39 +0000

̽��ֱ��project they are working on aims to document the history of protest and resistance in the Channel Islands. She described the collection as: "the single most important resistance archive ever to emerge from the Channel Islands."

A Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� archaeologist, along with two other researchers in Guernsey, has uncovered a previously unseen archive featuring the testimonies of people who were deported to German prison camps during World War II.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

St Peter Port harbour

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

SMS id:

1080737