Social mobility in the early 20th century
What I learnt from some blacksmiths in my family
The familiar narrative of social mobility in England is that it didn’t really happen until after the second world war. Yes, there were famous self-made men in the 1800s who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, the rough-edged wealthy mill-owners of the north who’d started out in a very small way, or the ingenious inventors who managed to exploit their talent and rise from humble beginnings. University education, though, was not something generally available to working class youth until that rash of grammar school scholarship recipients who landed in higher education as it expanded in the 1960s. On both occasions when I’ve met an apparently ordinary person of my age or older with a grandfather who went to university, I’ve been amazed, and school-leavers are still routinely asked, ‘Are you the first in your family to go to university?’
My dad was one of the grammar school scholarship boys who landed at a red brick university in the 1960s, but apart from his younger cousin who emigrated in the 1950s and (I think) went to a Canadian university at a similar time to my dad, that was it until the 1980s. My dad’s two nieces went to university and polytechnic respectively at the end of the decade; on my mum’s side there were two great-nieces of my Grandpa that went to medical school; and Big Brother did some kind of short course via the Open University. When I was a teenager I knew, or knew of, a pretty wide range of second cousins and the like, but I’m pretty sure there was nothing else on any side until I went to university in 1996.
Imagine my surprise then, when I started running across distant cousins of my Nana, from the next village, who were going to university a hundred years ago.
It all started with a newspaper article from 1897 which described the recently-deceased and much-missed Richard Oddy as being the veterinary surgeon of the village of Tong. The Oddy family were blacksmiths in Tong from the 1660s to the 1960s or thereabouts, with occasional offshoots that were carpenters or gave it all up to concentrate on farming (many people had what would now be thought of as smallholdings alongside their trade). My Nana was descended from a female Oddy who married another blacksmith named Booth and moved to the neighbouring village of Drighlington (where I’m from) in the mid-nineteenth century. The Booths were still blacksmiths in Drighlington when my mother was a child.
The point is, as far as I’d ever known, the Oddy family and its descendants were solid working class all the way1. Master blacksmiths, yes, but a vet? That seemed like a big leap. Despite this particular Richard Oddy being not even a brother of one of my direct ancestors, I was intrigued. Disappointingly, I found that although he was often referred to as a vet, census records showed him as a blacksmith and farrier, and I found other newspaper articles from the time of his death that referred to his being a blacksmith. It looked like he was the village vet in the same way that other blacksmiths in the family had been treating horses for common ailments2. His son, however, was a different matter.
Because nineteenth century Yorkshire families are not known for their originality in naming, the son is also called Richard, but he does at least have a middle name. So, Richard Herbert Oddy — son of the Richard Oddy who had initially caught my eye — was an actual vet, an MRCVS3 and is listed as such on the 1911 census. I assumed that meant he’d been to university, but although I think he would have had to take a test, the university degree doesn’t seem to have become compulsory until the 1940s. However, aged 19 on the 1901 census he has no occupation given: he’s certainly not down as an apprentice blacksmith as you might expect. In 1911 he’s a boarder in Cambridgeshire, and in 1921 he’s working at a veterinary practice in Lancashire. He didn’t stay in Tong and treat sick animals as part of the family blacksmith business like his father did. Richard Herbert’s son — also called Richard, obviously — was a medical student in 1939, so whether or not the blacksmith’s son went to university, his grandson definitely did and before the Second World War.
After that, I was on the lookout for more highly educated blacksmiths’ offspring. Another Oddy blacksmith, this one called Frederick, has a son called that’s listed on the 1921 census as a 19 year old full-time chemistry student! It doesn’t say where he’s studying, and I don’t know enough about technical colleges of the 1920s4 to know whether he could have studied chemistry full-time at one of those rather than at a university. However, the family can afford for him to go on past compulsory education, which is notable in itself, and chemistry seems to me a bit more speculative than obviously vocational. By which I mean, if you go to teacher training college like Frederick’s older sister Annie, or train for nursing like one of his other sisters, Honora (clearly they’re a branch of the family that value learning), you’re lining yourself up for a specific job at the end of it. Chemistry is one of those ‘should be useful in an industrial context somewhere’ kind of things.
To cap it all, Frederick’s nephew Harold, son of yet another sister is also a 19 year old full-time student according to the 1921 census. And because he misread the instructions that only asked for your place of employment (not your place of study) we have, crossed out but clearly legible, ‘Leeds University gas engineering’. Leeds University was formed in 1904 out of the Yorkshire College of Science, which had been intended to provide the necessary technical education for local industry. In the early days of the university most students were from Yorkshire, so Harold wouldn’t have been as much of a fish out of water as if he’d ended up at Oxford or Cambridge. Still, it’s a very different life from sweating over an anvil all day.
While I’m aware of the current lower rates of progression to higher education from working class backgrounds compared to middle/upper class, this has been a salutary lesson in lazy assumptions and generalisations. Because I could see around me a pattern that fit the general narrative, I assumed everything that came before did, too. I had reckoned without the amazing drive and educational aspirations of my nineteenth and early twentieth century antecedents.
Nana’s father and both grandfathers were coal miners
I know this partly from a Booth being sued by someone who claimed he’d made the horse worse and had hastened its death. The judge disagreed. There is also a Joseph Oddy on the 1851 census as ‘farrier and cow doctor and blacksmith’.
Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, for those of you who either don’t have pets or are based outside the UK.
I feel like this is a real failing which I ought to rectify.