Class and Career

In the 1881 Census Battersea’s Ward Two housed a varied population. On Lachmere Grove, for instance, the family of Fred Wilding, a grocer and general dealer, lived next to the Deacon family, a couple in their thirties with four children. Mr. Deacon was a laundry manager and his wife a laundress. Also on the block were the family of a bookkeeper, an egg salesman, a plasterer, an upholsterer and upholstress, an omnibus conductor and a steamboat stoker. Nearby on Wayford Street lived James Kneller, a railway signalman whose daughter Ellen was an assistant teacher and whose son Charles was a railway porter. On the same street lived Harry Rogers a ‘Professor of Music,’ as well as such different people as a painter, an unemployed ‘Equestrian,’ a carman for a miller whose wife was a laundress, and, among others, the family of Joseph Brooks, a railway train examiner whose wife, though the mother of children aged 6 and 5, was listed as a ‘Forewoman Milliner.’ The Brooks family also included a woman lodger who worked as a dressmaker. Other blocks in this area were home to bakers and bank clerks, letter carriers and confectioners, schoolmasters and coffee house keepers. Most wives did not have occupations listed, but some did. Sons and daughters in their late teens and twenties tended to have as wide a range of occupations as could be found among their parents. Among this diversity there were some similarities: children 14 and under were almost universally in school, and there were no household servants (although some servants lodged in the neighborhood and some daughters were listed as servants and charwomen). ¹