Robert Marshall - Huntley shoemaker (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Sunday, June 09, 2013, 23:15 (4190 days ago) @ Griffin-lady

Hi again, welcome back.

After some searching I found the PR you mention, Robert's Baptism from 1867. Now I'm sure you've seen other related PRs or Census' saying otherwise, but this just states Robert's father Robert is a "shoemaker"...

Do you know Huntley ?. I have family there, even nowadays with considerable 1970s housing expansion it's still a small, quiet, one pub/one shop village.
http://www.francisfrith.com/huntley/photos/

In Robert's time apart from the local Manor House the vast majority of the relatively few inhabitants were relatively poor land workers spread over a large area. On that basis I see no reason to imagine it was capable of supporting a fulltime maker of high class shoes. Regardless of what Robert perhaps claimed to be, or indeed what his skills were, I think the vast bulk of his work was making & repairing working people's footwear, fairly simple work (for him) so not particularly well paying within a relatively poor area. He would perform this job long into old age, so not much scope for his son to also work locally in the same business. If he had called himself a cordwainer a few centuries earlier then yes he may well have been a top shoemaker
http://privat.bahnhof.se/wb910410/8c0af07e-3deb-45e7-9bf7-830a964ac76e-9.html

However by his time I suspect despite his skillset his Huntley setting meant he was "just" a fairly typical shoemaker/cobbler. I've seen plenty of examples of all sorts of workers claiming via a Census form to be higher up the social ladder than they were, including bottom-rung agricultural labourers claiming to be farmers and so on; many shoemakers called themselves cordwainer long after the true meaning of the word was irrelevant. Indeed, in modern times we find "bin-men" sometimes called "refuge collection engineers", for example. As someone who devoted eight years hard- studying while completing a shop-floor apprenticeship to qualify as an engineer I find this mis-use of a word annoying, and that's not in any way denigrating the important and unpleasant work the bin-men do.

I've spent years since childhood building increasingly complex & intricate engineering models & still have those skillsets now. Sadly, and in spite of my long efforts teaching him and his real enthusiasm trying to learn, my own son is indeed "cack-handed" and lacks the required dexterity, care, patience, co-ordination etc to produce hand-made work like mine. Sometimes such "skills" cannot be taught & don't run in the veins despite a father's best efforts at nurturing it.

Finally, you ask why the work wasn't passed down. I surmise that by his time, the late Victorian age, everything including shoes and working boots was available from factories, no doubt far cheaper mass-produced than individually handcrafted. I don't know when mail-order buying was available but I suspect that was possible in Huntley in Robert's day, with the close proximity of the GWR railway etc etc. If not, only a few miles away towns like Newent and Cinderford had more shoe & boot shops particularly for the colliers within the Forest, so maybe the occasional people in Huntley who needed new shoes shopped further afield, there were daily road carriers to Gloster even in those days. For a working man a pair of boots was a major investment, and once bought would be expected to last years, helped by covering the sole in hob nails; so yes Huntley might need one shoe repairer, but I cannot believe the village c1880 could support more than one at a time and just making topclass shoes even if he could. Many traditional old village jobs like this have been stopped by mass-production & fast transport links.
This photo of just one of the shoe shops in Cinderford, for example, shows a range of presumably factory-produced boots available c1900. In my youth in the 1970s Cinderford was a shopper's paradise compared to "little" Huntley, 100 years before the difference was greater still.
http://www.forest-of-dean.net/gallery/cinderford/pages/page_71.html

Of course, it's also possible your Robert's son just didnt want to spend his life cooped-up in a one-man workshop, maybe he yearned for fresh air and company, we just don't know ??.

I do hope this helps.

All the very best to you and yours, keep researching, Jeff.

ps sorry for not replying to your last email,
You asked what "Biddy" was short for; if you havent already Googled it then Biddy is apparently short for Bridget, does that fit ?.