Jarratts Buildings

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Jarratts Buildings

A Few Facts and Figures 1861 - 1939

The ten-yearly census returns and the 1939 Register provide a snapshot of how the Jarratts community lived and developed.

In 1881 some of the houses in Jarratts began to be enumerated in High Street and others in Green Street. I have regarded these houses as still being part of the Jarratts site.

The numbers of people living in the houses varied greatly. Although many would have been uncomfortably overcrowded, others had only a few occupants, indicating that a healthy and skilled hewer could earn enough to keep a small family without having to supplement the household income by taking in lodgers.

In 1861 and 1871 there was a degree of transience with several families moving on. From 1881 - 1901 a distinctive community emerged with some families staying in the same home for several decades. One couple lived in the same house from 1871 through to 1920, dying within two months of each other. In some cases children who had grown up in Jarratts married and took on the tenancy of their parents' home. Three generations of the Booth family lived there from 1861 to 1939 and unmarried Alice Booth took over the tenancy of her father's house when he died in 1912. Sometimes a child grew up, married and moved into another house within Jarratts when one became available.

In 1911 several new names appeared in the census. Most of these were young couples with a growing family. Some of the long-standing residents had either died or moved in with relatives in the first decade of the twentieth century, freeing up homes for new occupants. In 1861 the average age of a Jarratts head of family and spouse was 36 years. This gradually increased until it was 46 in 1891. It fell to 42 in 1901 and then to 40 in 1911. Although there were some young families, several houses were occupied by elderly people who had lived there for a decade or longer.

Between 1911 and 1921 several of the long-standing, elderly occupants died. Although new surnames start to appear in parish records,some of the apparently new residents were young women who had grown up at Jarratts and whose husbands had moved into the community. In 1921, Nos 27 and 51 were occupied by a grandchild of the tenants of 1861,the tenancy having continued in the family in an unbroken line for three generations. Half of the occupied houses (26/52) had a head of household or spouse who had been connected with the site for at least twenty years.

The site had an older age profile than previously. The average age of the head of household and spouse had increased from 40 to 44 years and there were only three tenants who were under thirty. This explains the reduced number of children under fourteen. The decline would be more marked were it not for widowed families with young children who were living with a sibling or a parent.

An indicator of change was the reduction in the number of lodgers who had come from a different part of to country to work. With four heads of household and several members of families classified as 'out of work', jobs were not abundant in Worsborough at that point. Of those who were listed as lodgers, more than half were close relatives of the host family, or young adults whose family home was too full to accommodate them.

As the 1931 census was destroyed by fire in 1942, the figures for occupancy at that point are my best estimate. The Electoral Roll lists the names and addresses of people who were over 21, the voting age at that time. Where possible, I traced all households in 1931 to the 1939 Register or BMD records. This enabled me to infer residents under 21. The totals are slight underestimates, as I cannot locate two apparently non-local families.

The number of adults and children continued to fall. Younger couples were having smaller families than previous generations and there were fewer lodgers. The highest occupancy was ten, comprising a couple with eight children. Another house had nine, with the householder and his wife accommodating their youngest daughter and a grandson along with a married daughter, her husband and young family.

Three quarters of the householders had lived on the site for at least ten years, and some had been there for several decades, with the tenancy passing down generations on a quasi-hereditary basis. Some new surnames were those of men married to a girl who had grown up at Jarratts. The young couple then settled on the site. Occasionally, the surname of a family who had moved from the site a generation or two earlier reappeared.

Electoral rolls were compiled annually and these show a small number of new families who stayed for one or two years before moving away. As the physical condition of the site deteriorated, Jarratts Building was a more attractive location to occupants who had family there than it was to outsiders.

The 1939 Register reveals that the population of Jarratts had declined substantially. A former resident has indicated that in the 1930s Jarratts had the cheapest rents in the area and was home to those on the most limited incomes. The Register shows that there were 9 male householders who were unemployed and one who was incapacitated. Six of the houses were rented by an older widow or an unmarried older woman. The link between living at Jarratts and working at the pit no longer existed. Tenants worked in a range of industries. Almost half of the households were young couples starting out in married life, perhaps with one or two children. Around a quarter of the tenants were elderly, and some had lived on the site for decades. Relatively few were in mid-adulthood. Families who could earn enough to move out of Jarratts and into another home in Worsborough did so. Electoral rolls from the mid-1930's onwards show a rapid turnover of occupants in around a third of the houses, with new surnames arriving and then moving away.

Some families moved around the site. In the twentieth century, the poor condition of some houses meant that a new tenant had to accept one in bad condition and then move when one in better repair became available. The steps to the upper part of the site would have made access difficult as residents aged and may explain the moves made by some of the older occupants.

Electoral rolls for 1945 – 1948 show the site after the end of World War 2. A small number of families reunited, as husbands returned from the armed forces. The number seems low, but as mining was a reserved occupation, some 1939 residents may have opted to be Bevin Boys rather than join one of the military services. About a third of the houses in 1945 were occupied by families who were not on site in 1939, possibly indicating that some of them were Bevin Boys who needed accommodation. A few of these surnames had left the site by 1948.

Another third of the houses were occupied by ageing long-term residents. There appears to have been an increase in the number of houses with lodgers, whether related to them or not. This may reflect pressure on housing stock, and the fact that newly demobbed men may have initially become lodgers before obtaining their own home.

By 1948 (the last electoral roll I have seen), some new surnames had recently appeared, suggesting that some young couples preferred married life in their own home rather than as lodgers, despite the undoubtedly challenging conditions that now bedevilled most houses.

Jarratts stopped being let out to new tenants in Autumn 1951. I have seen a few newspaper reports from the 1950's involving residents whose names are not in the 1948 electoral role, further evidence of the many short-term tenants, who lived alongside an ageing and declining number of long-standing occupants.

Produced from analysis of censuses, electoral rolls and 1939 Register by Denise Bates.The 1939 split between adults and children as shown on the graph is necessarily a best estimate as some records on the 1939 Register are officially closed.