Credit for this piece should be given to the people named below who once lived at the Ratcatchers Row and spoke to me about life in Cawston in the Victorian Age: Cecil Dunn (grandfather,born 1896), Bessie Dunn (grandmother, born approx 1898), Beatrice (Bee) Etherington (great aunt, born 1889) and May Monsey (born in the 1890s).

1.  Houses

Many of the cottages and farm houses in Cawston during the late 19^th century dated back to the 17^th and 18^th century when the housing construction was simple.  These houses have therefore disappeared due to the short term nature of the construction.

I remember my grandmother who lived at the Ratcatchers Row telling me about the cottage where her parents lived in the 1870-1890s.  The main living room was the kitchen where the fire was kept burning all year round in order to cook and bake, to dry the washing and to boil the black kettle for hot water.  The main pieces of furniture in the house were a large wooden table for preparing the food, a few wooden chairs and a large cupboard.  The floors were made of stone or boards which were not level.  They were kept clean by scrubbing them with simple brushes, some which were self-made from the twigs of trees.  In the front room the floor was covered with linoleum with a small rugs in front of the fireplace.  The cottage had a scullery with a built-in stone sink.  This was a luxury as some had merely a bowl on a stand or table for personal washing and washing up the dishes.  The dirty water that accumulated was tipped into a bucket and thrown into the back garden.

Mrs. May Monsey once described his mother’s bedroom as follows:  A door led upstairs by a winding staircase to two bedrooms directly from the living room.  Each bedroom had beds with iron bedsteads and brass knobs that were polished regularly.  In one corner of the room there was a washstand with a matching set of bowls on a small table near the bed.  The essential chamber pots were under each bed.  Clothes were kept in wooden chests of drawers.

The villagers of Cawston collected water from wells that were mostly situated near their cottages.  Normally each row of cottages had its own water well.  May Monsey once told me about the wash-houses which her parents had to share.  Each family was allocated a certain washing day each week to do the family washing, irrespective of the weather.  The copper was filled with buckets of water that was collected from the well.  Under the copper was a fire that was lit and kept hot to heat the water.
TOP OF PAGE   HOME    SITE MAP

2.  Work

Cawston was a rural community in the second half of the 19^th century and farming was the main source of work for most of the inhabitants.  A few people owned small shops and businesses (bakers, shoemakers, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, carpenters, bricklayers) and many women and children could earn a small wage by helping with the harvest and other seasonal work, particularly in the summer months. 

The majority of men in Cawston worked on the local farms which offered diversified jobs some of which no longer exist: catching moles, carrying stones, horse-collar making, hoeing turnips, keeping pigs, mending sacks.  The farms mainly had cattle, pigs and poultry as well as the fields with wheat, barley and oats. 

My Aunt Bee told me that his father frequently talked about her ancestors who worked on the land.  She often explained to me how two horses would draw a plough in the fields that followed the muck-spreading.  The plough was small and the ploughman could only cover about an acre per day.  She also told me how life in the late Victorian Age was hard for farm workers and labourers as the men had to walk to worked, in many cases starting after sunrise and not finishing work until it started to get dark.

The construction of the railway in 1880 that passed through Cawston brought a high degree of prosperity to the village.  Some men found jobs building the railway line and afterwards at the railway station.

As it was not always easy to find a job in Cawston some of the folk in the Victorian Age went to Yarmouth to work in the fishing and shipping industry.  Later as the railways developed they found jobs in the holiday-making sector.  May Monsey had an uncle who went to work in a factory in northern England and she never saw him.  My great Aunt Bee told me about a few of her aunts and uncles who went to London to work in the building trade and domestic services.  She herself did the same before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
TOP OF PAGE  HOME    SITE MAP   Related Link: Past Businesses

3.  Children and Schools

I do not recall anyone telling me about Cawston school in the 19^th century but I do remember being told about a handful of private people who gave school lessons.  In the second of the 19^th century some children learnt the basic skills of reading and writing with private tutors in the mornings and would then joined their mothers in the afternoons to help with the housework or with the harvest in the summer months. 

Child labour was common even in Cawston in the second part of the 19^th century.  As children May Monsey’s parents had to work on farms e.g. weeding and marigold pulling after attending school lessons for a few hours each day.
TOP OF PAGE     HOME    SITE MAP    Related Link:- Education/Schools

4.  Health and Sickness

Due to the sanitary conditions there were frequent outbreaks of whooping cough, measles, mumps, diphtheria and smallpox.  Several people of the older generation have told me about a brother, sister or parent of theirs that had died when the an illness was particularly bad.

In the Victorian Age there was no state insurance coverage against sickness.  Various charities tried to provide for the needs of these people.  The sick went sent to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital that had been founded a century earlier.  The famous opera singer Jenny Lind made possible the opening of a hospital for children named after her in the early 1880s.

I once visited Mrs. Monsey and noticed that she had cotton wool fixed to a finger.  She said that she had burnt her finger and used an effective relief her mother had taught her.  She covered her finger with flour, put cotton wool over it and applied a plaster to keep it firm and from air contract.  I remember my grandfather telling me that he had an uncle who always smoked a pipe with caraway seed when he had a toothache.  Mrs. Monsey had another method which she learned from her parents.  She would relieve pain by applying a small bag of salt heated in the oven to the affected part.  Florence Nightingale, the famous nurse who did wonders at a military hospital during the Crimean War (1853-56) was a household word for many and taken as an example for self-healing in the absence of health coverage.
TOP OF PAGE     HOME    SITE MAP

5.  Shops, Food and Clothes

Shops in the Victorian Age were different from what we know today.  It was common to barter and exchange goods.  Gradually, specialist shops were started in the front rooms of the cottages, e.g. bakers, grocers, shoemakers and tailors.  In grocery shops life was leisurely as each loose item had to be weighted or counted and wrapped individually.  This continues until the late 1950s.  I remember this myself in the 1950s in Rileys shop (near the Westleyan Reform chapel) where e.g. cheese was weighed and each piece was individually wrapped in greaseproof paper.

Mrs. Monsey’s parents always bought sacks of flour from the farmers in Cawston after the harvest.  She told me that mice frequently used to make their way into the sacks.  The purchasing of large sacks of flour indicates that people in the Victorian Age made their own bread.

I do not recall anyone telling me about butchers shop in Cawston in the Victorian Age.  Several ancestors of the people named above kept their own poultry and pigs in their gardens which they slaughtered from time to time as meat was expensive to buy.

My grandfather often talked about the fruit and vegetables that his uncles grew in their gardens and on allotments.  The surplus was exchanged between neighbours. 

Milk was available from any farm which had dairy cows.  Mrs Monsey remembered collecting fresh milk from the local farm in long tall cans and told me that their parents did the same. 

As a child I was always fascinated how quickly Mrs Monsey’s rhubarb grew behind her garden shed.  She would tell me how her parents would make rhubarb wine and gooseberry wine in the summer which would be kept as a treat for Christmas.  I recall once how I had the hiccups and Mrs. Monsey gave me some rhubarb mixed with syrup, an effective old remedy.  Mrs. Monsey also told me how her parents pickled plums, made chestnut jam and elderberry chutney.  Food in the Victorian Age was perceived more as a fuel for the body than as something to be enjoyed for its own sake. 

Mrs. Monsey had lots of Victorian tips which she inherited from her mother and grandmother.  She would rub some soap on door hinges to prevent them from creaking.  On the jars of her home made jams she would add a little honey to flour paste to make the labels stick to the jar.  These are tips that have long been forgotten but were common more than 120 years ago.

Clothing was mostly home-produced or made by the increasing number of dressmakers who worked at home.  Although my Aunt Bee left Cawston for London at a young age she would often talk about her parents and grandparents making her clothes and gloves as birthday presents when she was a child in Cawston.
TOP OF PAGE     HOME    SITE MAP

6.  Christmas

I was told on various occasions that there was often deep snow and sparkling frost at Christmas in Cawston in the late Victorian Age which added to the seasonal pleasure.  My grandmother told me that as a child she, as well as her parents, had no luxuries.  Colourful home-made paper chains and holly and ivy decorated the front room and piles of wood filled the hearth.  There were home-made cakes, puddings and mince pies which filled the pantry shelves and were brought out on Christmas Day.  Towards the end of the 19^th century a few dates and figs as well as a selection of nuts became available.  There was a wide range of home-made wines, but no Christmas tree.  The saying was, “Eat, drink and be merry”.  And that is exactly what they did.

Mrs. Monsey always remembered her parents talking about the little white and pink sugar mice and watches that hung on a Christmas line that stretched from one corner of the room to the other.  The children were blind-folded and were lifted to pick a present from the line.  This replaced a Christmas tree and had been tradition in her family for several decades.  In fact, it was a tradition in many families at that time.
TOP OF PAGE   HOME    SITE MAP

7.  Entertainment in the Victorian Age

There was not much time for entertainment in the Victorian Age.  Men worked for long hours and the housewives looked after the family and cooking.  On Sundays the men spent the free time in the gardens and looking after their animals.  My grandfather also told me about the touring menageries and circuses that visited Cawston when he was a boy.  They were always big attractions for the village. 

Such was life in Cawston in the late Victorian Age.