Making your mark, the badge of illiteracy

Yesterday I reflected on how in 1874 Patience Whitelegg witnessed her sister’s marriage with her mark.

There can be no more telling evidence of the degree of illiteracy than coming across an official document where someone has provided a simple cross for their name because they could not write.

And along with the discovery that someone in the family was in the workhouse it will be a simple fact of family history that many of us will have relatives who had never learned to write.  In my case it was one of my great grandmother’s aunts and her daughters who were all illiterate.

So on documents ranging over the 1840s through to the 1860s they put their mark on a variety of official records from those announcing their marriage to those which registered the birth and deaths of loved ones.

In the case of Patience it seems quite late for her and indeed her husband to be denied such a simple basic entitlement.

And yet in 1874 Patience would have been 27 and Thomas Whitelegg 33, which means their school years would have been during the 1840s and 50s, which was not a time of universal education.

Indeed in the April of 1851 when she was 4 and he was 10 the census on education uncovered that nationally only 61% of all children were in a school.

Actual attendances varied enormously.  In private schools the number of children attending on any particular day was 91% of the number belonging to the schools, while in public schools which catered for the labouring classes the number in attendance was 79%.    Which the authors of the report on education calculated amounted to a loss of half a year’s schooling.

No attendance figures have survived for the township.  The best we have are attendance figures for south Manchester which formed the Chorlton Poor Law Union and included our school.  These showed that on Friday March 29th 1851 the attendance was 83%.

This is not a good attendance figure judged by the expectations of our modern schools and can still be misleading.  March is a quiet time in agricultural areas and a record taken in the summer or at harvest time might be more revealing of how many of our children had walked through the school doors.

This may in part have been due to children working rather than learning. An agricultural labourer’s child could earn between 1s.6d and 2s. [7½p-10p] a week which was an important addition to a family’s income and in the words of one government report was

“so great a relief to the parents as to render it almost hopeless that they can withstand the inducement and retain the child at school”

But in some cases this child labour would have been seasonal.   In one Devon school up to a third of boys over the age of seven were absent helping with the harvest, while in another school during the spring upwards of thirty were assisted their parents sow the potato crop and then dig it up in the summer.

It was just part of the rural cycle and which one contributor to the Poor Law Commissioners on the employment of women and children in agriculture in 1843 said would at least teach children “the habit of industry,”    which fitted in with the belief much held in the countryside that “the business of a farm labourer cannot be thoroughly acquired if work be not commenced before eleven or twelve.”

This along with the quality and range of subjects taught raised serious concerns about the standard on knowledge and understanding amongst the population.

And as a measure of that standard the authors of the 1851 census on Education fell back on the simple test of how many people were able to sign their marriage certificate as against those who put a cross or mark.

The “test of marriage marks” was not in itself an over accurate form of assessment as the report pointed out “the art of writing is with great facility forgotten by the poor who find no application for it, while for various causes some who can write nevertheless decline to sign the register.”

It did however show that the number of people signing with a mark had progressively been dropping from 1839, although this hid a disparity between the sexes. Men using their mark dropped from 33.7% in 1839 to 30.8% in 1851 while in women it fell from 49.5% to 45.3%,

So perhaps we should not be over surprised that Patience and Thomas along with members of my family were unable to read and write. Not I hasten to add that such a handicap fills me with any pleasure.

From The Story of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, published in November 2012 and available from Chorlton Book Shop, and other book sellers.
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20for%20Chorlton

Pictures; from the collection of Tony Walker