Jam, Jelly and Marmalade by Sarah B. Hood

Author:Sarah B. Hood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

9

The Workers Boil Over: Labour Unrest in Edwardian London

As jam and marmalade factories proliferated through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – especially in England and Scotland – the workers who made and bottled the products faced a bittersweet situation. On the positive side, preserve-making offered a whole new employment sector. Some jam factories operated seasonally, overworking employees during the short summer-fruit season and leaving them without employment for long stretches of the year. But others could operate year-round by making marmalade in the winter, jam in the summer and other types of foods such as chutneys or sauces in between. These companies were a boon for the lowest-paid workers, who were most susceptible to being laid off.

Between 1890 and 1914 in Glasgow, for instance, workers ‘benefited from the emergence of integrated jam, preserve and pickle-producing factories which effectively ironed out the worst excesses of seasonality of production’, writes researcher J. H. Treble. Opportunity for employment mushroomed there in the early twentieth century. Whereas the class of ‘Jam, preserve, sweetmakers’ was not even mentioned in the 1891 Census, by 1901 there were 146 men and 1,278 women listed as working in this category; ten years later, the numbers had risen to 455 men and 1,841 women, who together represented 1.83 per cent of the city’s total workforce.1

The high number of female workers was not unusual. ‘Throughout the nineteenth century much continued to be done by hand, for instance the sorting and grading of fruit’; vats were also stirred by hand, and workers often did not even use thermometers to judge when the preserves would set.2 Because the work required such homely kitchen skills, it was considered a natural employment for women. However, as the English social reformer Helen Bosanquet pointed out in her forward-looking 1902 article ‘A Study of Women’s Wages’, the general supposition of the times that married women needed less money than their single counterparts – or that women in general had less need of a steady wage than men – set up a double standard that has never quite been eradicated, even today.

But the increase in factory jobs was a double-edged sword for the poorest Britons. As women went to work, many of the time-consuming daily food-preparation duties, which had helped them feed their families on a shoestring in the past, fell by the wayside. Instead of baking their own bread, they were buying cheap baked goods that were frequently adulterated with chalk and other unpalatable additives to stretch the flour further. In fact, in late Victorian England, white bread, cheap jam (also commonly adulterated) and sweet tea became the filling but nutrient-poor staples of low-income women and children, with meat tending to be reserved only for the working men, and fresh fruit or vegetables being in short supply for all.

Nonetheless, low-skilled women were so eager for employment in the jam- and marmalade-making factories that they would take this dangerous and exhausting work for low pay, even though plenty of better-paid, less-harsh jobs were available. One

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.