Category Archives: Essex history

Dr Nick Barratt at the Essex Record Office

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Ahead of his keynote speech at our Discovery Day on 8 September, Dr Nick Barratt recently dropped in for a chat. Here he is in the Essex County Council chamber, talking about Essex history, and why archives are so important:

Dr Barratt’s talk, ‘Why do we still need archives when we’ve got the internet?’, is at 1.30pm, and entry is free. Places are limited, so guarantee your seat by pre-booking on 01245 244620. See our events page for more details about the our Discovery Day and other great events.

The Discovery Day is part of Heritage Open Days.

‘To make a good cake’

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Today, not only is it Julia Child’s 100th birthday, but last night the third series of The Great British Bake Off began on BBC2, and we thought that this was a good excuse to delve into some of the recipe books in our archive. People in the past enjoyed their cooking (or their eating) just as much as we do today, and went to great lengths to produce elaborate edible creations.

In this first of a special series of posts about some of the handwritten recipe books which are held at the ERO, we begin with one of the earliest recipe books in our collections, dating from around 1680 (D/DU 138/2).

Unfortunately there is no name inscribed on the book to give us a clue to its author, but we do know that it was handed down between generations of the Clapton-Rolfe family of Rayne Hall.

The first recipe in the book is for a cake of enormous proportions:

(Click for larger version)

Take 6 pound of fflower & 5 pound of butter and worke or rub it into your flower then take 3 poynts of ale east [yeast] and putt itt in the meddle of your flower and butter, 3 nutmegs, beate & sett it by to rise then take a poynt of Milk or Creame & half a poynt of Sack [white whine], make a possett [made by boiling the milk or cream before mixing it with the wine] & put 5 yellows of Eggs into your possett & Suger according to your pallet, then take a graine of Musk and Ambergrease [a waxy substance that originates in the intestines of the sperm whale, with a pleasant smell, which is also used in perfumery], and grinde itt with a little Suger well together, then mix all this together & worke it with your hande till itt bee prety stiff, then worke in 8 pounds of currantes & a pound of Carrawayes and sume Candied Oringe and Lemon peale & scitterun [citron] slices & soe worke itt till it bee all alike, butter your hoope and papers well, & putt your Cake into it, & bake itt.

And for the icing:

Then take 5 whites of Eggs & double refined Suger sifted throu a Sciprus Sive [a sieve made of cypress wood, which was durable and had a nice smell] & put into your whites of Eggs till it bee thick enough to spread with a knive, & beate itt till itt looke glassy & clare [clear], you can’t beate it too much, when your Cake is drawen spread your Ice one itt with a knife, & lett it dry: but put itt no more into ye [the] Oven for itt will make your Ice yellow.

As well as making us grateful for the modern use of full stops, this recipe uses fairly staggering quantities used – 6 pounds of flour, 8 pounds of currants – and must have been quite an extravagant affair.

Eliza Vaughan, who wrote about the recipe book in the 1930s, imagined the cake as an ‘ice-coated monster’ crowning the tea table at Rayne Hall, or being prepared perhaps as a wedding cake.

The book also includes a recipe for a pound cake, which is much more recognisable to modern eyes:

(Click for larger version)

Take a pound of fflower & drey itt by the fire, & A pound of butter & wash itt in Rose water, & A pound of suger well beten, & worke your butter in ye suger a grate while; then take 6 yelkes & 4 whites of Eggs & halfe a Nutmeg grated; then worke all together A grate while & you mush bake them in such pans, & bake them in A slow oven.

The book includes just 12 recipes in total, but also covers the art of pastry making and the preparation of certain meats, including chicken, rabbit, veal, lamb, pigeon, and turkey.

You can view digital images of the rest of the book on Seax here. Look out for more baking-themed posts over the next few weeks!

Further reading: Eliza Vaughan, ‘High baked meates and patty pan past’, in Essex Review, 1937, vol. 46

New accession: Old Harwich in photographs

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The ERO has recently acquired a photograph album which contains some fantastic pictures of Harwich in the 1850s. Here we bring you an exclusive sneak peak at its contents before it is treated in our Conservation Studio and digitised. 

The album, although rather dilapidated, contains 47 rare salt paper prints of Harwich which seem to date from about 1855. Many of the photographs have faded, but despite this the images remain remarkably sharp.

 

They capture a moment when Harwich was being transformed by the rebuilding of the quay, the arrival of the railway and new developments such as Orwell Terrace. The album seems to have used the new technology of photography to deliberately create a record of these momentous changes.

Harwich was – and is – a busy port on Essex’s north sea coast. In the 1850s, the town’s quays were extended through land reclamation

The railway arrives in Harwich

An Atlas Works locomotive

The album includes images of the High Lighthouse, St Nicholas’s church, Orwell Terrace and Cliff House. They also show the short-lived first station in Harwich and works to reclaim land in Bathside to extend the quays.

Harwich’s short-lived first station

The album may have some personal connection with Robert Bagshaw who was the investor who built Orwell Terrace and Cliff House, and who was instrumental in bringing the railway to Harwich. Unfortunately the album does not have any contemporary indication of ownership. 

 

Orwell Terrace

Top-hatted men, probably investors in the new developments, in one of the streets of Harwich

The album also includes a photo-montage of many different people, almost exclusively men, who are possibly a mixture of local residents and people involved in the building works. The identification of the faces featured will be a challenge for dedicated enthusiasts!

The album has been catalogued as A13438, and we will now do everything that we can to preserve the images.

The album was purchased for the ERO by the Friends of Historic Essex, and we would like to thank them for this fascinating addition to the ERO’s collections.

Evacuees’ voices at ERO

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By Martin Astell, Sound and Video Archivist

The Essex Sound and Video Archive has recently added to SEAX a collection of oral history interviews which focus on childhood experiences during World War II (SA 48).

The collection includes a number of interviewees who were evacuated from their homes to ‘safer’ parts of the country. The evacuation of children can be portrayed as an example of how the nation ‘pulled together’ during World War II to help one another through the crisis. However, the individual stories told by those who experienced evacuation can help to present a more complex narrative.

The recordings in this collection include an account of being treated very poorly by the family which had taken the interviewee into their home (SA 48/1/1) and another of the local children being told not to mix with the evacuees from London and being strictly segregated within school (SA 48/8/1). This interviewee also states that she and her siblings returned to Chingford despite the clear risk of being bombed because her mother, who had accompanied the children in their privately arranged evacuation while her husband remained at home, was in danger of falling into an affair with another man.

This collection has been catalogued with the help of volunteers, and joins our existing Sound and Video Archive sources material on the Second World War. You can download a guide to these sources by clicking the link below.

ESVA Sources on the Second World War

All of the recordings in the source list can be ordered in the Searchroom, and listened to or watched in the Essex Sound and Video Archive.

 

Stories from the stores: Anthony Carr, ERO’s Brain of Britain

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At ERO, we pride ourselves on the expertise on our staff, but it seems like none of us could compete with one young archivist who worked here in the 1960s.

In 1962, Anthony Carr, then 24 and an assistant archivist at the ERO, won the accolade ‘Top Brain of Britain’ on the BBC’s radio general knowledge quiz ‘What Do You Know?’

(Essex Weekly News, 13 July 1962. Click for larger version)

Despite his youth, this was actually the third title which Carr had won on the quiz.

In 1956, at the age of 18, he had won the ‘Brain of Britain’ competition, beating a schoolmaster and a headteacher. He was the youngest ever winner, a record he maintains to this day.

Mr Carr had just left school and was working as a paper boy at the time, inspiring national headlines.

In the same year, he also won the 3-yearly competition ‘Brain of Brains’, beating the winners of ‘Brain of Britain’ from 1955 and 1954.

The ‘Top Brain of Britain’ competition which Mr Carr won in 1962 while working at the ERO was a 9-yearly title, in which 3 winners of the ‘Brain of Brains’ competition battled it out.

Not only did Mr Carr win, he scored more points than both of his opponents combined. His prize was a five guinea book token.

Mr Carr was very humble in his victory; interviewed afterwards he was reported to have said:

I take no special steps to acquire this sort of knowledge. I haven’t got a photographic memory. It’s largely a matter of luck whether you can answer the questions asked.

Despite his modesty, he was clearly a highly intelligent man and very widely read. Mr Carr has in recent years said that his time as a paper boy helped him to do well in the quiz, as reading the headlines as he delivered the papers helped him to stay well-informed on current affairs.

After four years at the ERO, Mr Carr returned to the University of Bangor, where he had previously studied, and eventually became a professor of medieval Welsh history.

Down and Out in Thaxted and Barnston

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Ruth Selman blogs for us about her research for her PhD ‘The Landscape of Poverty in Later Stuart Essex’…

Essex Record Office has just launched a small exhibition on poverty in Essex in the late seventeenth century which can be viewed in the Searchroom at Chelmsford. This is based on my research into the scale and nature of poverty in Essex between 1660 and 1700 for a PhD at the University of Roehampton. I am studying records held by Essex Record Office and The National Archives with the aim of identifying who was poor at that time and how the experiences of being poor differed within communities and across Essex as a whole.

The records of the hearth tax, which mainly date from the 1660s and 1670s, give us a glimpse into the varied circumstances of Essex residents at that date. Every liable householder was required to pay a shilling for each hearth in their dwelling twice a year – at Lady Day (25 March) and Michaelmas (29 September). In an attempt to ensure that all revenue due to the Crown was collected, even those exempt from paying the tax were recorded in the returns. Exemption was granted to those who lacked the wherewithal to pay local church and poor rates, and to those who paid twenty shillings or less rent for their houses and whose goods were worth less than ten pounds. With three hearths or more, however, there was no avoiding the tax collector even if you met the other criteria.

This extract from the hearth tax return for Michaelmas 1670 lists some of the householders in Thaxted and notes that there were also 40 people in receipt of alms (charitable payments or parish relief). 

Q/RTh 5 – hearth tax return for Thaxted, Michaelmas 1670

The proportions of householders exempt from the hearth tax varied greatly across the county. The parishes closest to London tended to exhibit the lowest rates of exemption with an average of about 23%, possibly reflecting the relative prosperity brought by proximity to the London market. Those in the north and north-west of the county saw much higher exemption rates averaging about 63%.  This may well have reflected the vulnerability of the many workers in the cloth industry who were based in that area.  Interruptions to trade caused by wars, disease and local crises could result in a rapid change to dependent workers’ economic circumstances. 

The Michaelmas 1670 hearth tax returns for Essex have been transcribed and analysed by the Centre for Hearth Tax Research at the Universityof Roehampton and are to be published this month by the British Record Society and a conference is being held to mark the launch.  See http://www.hearthtax.org.uk/ for further details.

Comparing the lists of those exempt from the hearth tax with recipients of poor relief, recorded in the few detailed sets of accounts produced by overseers of the poor, provides us with greater detail about what poverty meant and how people survived.  Support was provided to those unable to work by parish officers under the Poor Relief Act of 1601.  The Act also required that the unemployed should be put to work on tasks such as spinning and that poor children should be apprenticed to learn a useful trade.

In practice,Essex parishes took different approaches to the problem of their poor depending on the particular local circumstances. Some poor, particularly widows, were paid regular pensions, although often the amount they were paid would have been insufficient without additional resources. In many cases, support was provided in kind, with clothing, fuel and food given directly to the poor. Sometimes the parish employed the poor to carry out odd jobs such as repairing the almshouse or digging graves. The care of orphaned and abandoned children often took up significant resources, with payments made to foster parents and the frequent supply of replacement clothing for their growing bodies.

This extract from the accounts of the overseers of the poor of Barnston in 1671 shows a range of expenses incurred in support of the poor. A major expense derived from the last illnesses of husband and wife, Goodman and Goody Brown, with payments for nursing them and digging their graves (D/P 153/12).

The Barnston overseers reclaimed some of their expenditure by disposing of the household goods of the Brown family after their death, although there were some debts to pay with the proceeds. The inventory was recorded with their accounts (D/P 153/12).

The list of goods suggests the Browns were not destitute, but nevertheless they were unable to survive in their final months without support from the parish and their neighbours.  They were not alone.  It must have been a frightening existence, knowing that illness, disability, fire, flood or theft could result in dependence on parish relief and charity, often grudgingly given.

On that note, I am very grateful for the ungrudging funding awarded to this project by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the Friends of Historic Essex and the help and support provided by Essex Record Office and The National Archives.

Find out more about the hearth tax records at The Hearth Tax in Essex, our first conference of 2012, on Saturday 14 July. See our events page for more information.

A summer holiday on Essex’s ‘Sunshine Coast’

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Where are you planning your summer holiday this year? Essex is possibly not the first place you would think of, but in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Essex’s ‘Sunshine Coast’ was one of the destinations of choice for the discerning British holiday maker.

The historians of the Victoria County History of Essex have been hard at work over the last few years researching the pasts of Clacton, Walton and Frinton, and their research has now been published as volume 11 in the Victoria County History of Essex series.

I/Mb 387/1/4 Print of Walton-on-the-Naze as a seaside village, 1829, just as it was starting to be developed a seaside resort

From the 1820s, Walton and later Clacton and Frinton were promoted as high-class residential and holiday resorts. After a slow start, hampered by poor communications and low demand, growth was stimulated by steam ship companies which landed visitors on newly built piers in Walton and Clacton and by the railways that reached Walton in 1867, Clacton in 1882 and Frinton in 1888.

I/Mb 387/1/13 Photograph showing new resort bulidings at Walton-on-the-Naze constructed c.1860, juxtaposed with the surrounding rural landscape with cows grazing on the cliff tops. Photograph by T. E. Freshwater

 

I/Mp 86/1/3 Clacton Pier – a key element in the growth of Clactonas a seaside resort, since it enabled steamship to bring visitors to the town

However, the working-class excursionists newly attracted to Clacton, and to a lesser extent Walton, then irrevocably changed the social tone of both resorts. By the 1920s and 1930s Clacton had become a highly commercialized holiday destination and its pier’s funfair-style facilities rivalled those of any other British resort.

   I/Mb 86/1/29 Postcard of the bandstand, Clacton-on-Sea, c.1910

Nearby Jaywick was established as a cheap and cheerful plotland development and Butlins opened its popular Clacton holiday camp in 1938. While Walton remained popular with families, Frinton continued as a ‘select’ resort, with building development and commerce strictly controlled to protect its exclusive character. 

After 1945 camping and caravanning increased in popularity, but from the later 1960s the growth of overseas holidays led to a steep decline in the domestic tourism economy. The coast remained popular for retirement and subsequent diversification has led to large dormitory-style housing developments, light industry and shopping centres.

The volume which tells this story is part of a grand tradition: the distinctive big red volumes of the Victoria County Histories have graced the shelves of archives and libraries across England since 1900. Founded in 1899 and dedicated to QueenVictoria, the Histories aim to produce ‘an encyclopaedic record of England’s places and people from earliest times to the present day’. The Histories are still being written by historians working in counties right acrossEngland, and the Essex Record Office is home to the Essex VCH Trust.

Volumes of the Victoria County of History in the ERO Searchroom

Volume 11 of the Victoria County History of Essex, Clacton, Walton and Frinton: North-East Essex Seaside Resorts, will be available in the ERO Searchroom shortly, and can be ordered from Boydell & Brewer Ltd here.