Richard Buxton was born in 1786 and died in 1865. He was one of those remarkable working men who were self taught. He became an expert on botany, wrote books and struggled against poverty before dying obscurely. “I am well aware” he wrote “that a narrative of the life of a poor man like myself .... is anything but interesting.” and yet it has proved to be so.
Buxton was a remarkable man living at a time when Manchester was fast becoming the “shock city of the industrial revolution.” During his lifetime the city became the centre of cotton manufacture and a huge sprawling place of overcrowded, mean and shoddy housing. He witnessed some of the great political events of the nineteenth century as the working class attempted to assert their share of the wealth that their labours had created and yet it appears he remained aloof from it. He was of a “quiet and retiring disposition” with a “humble opinion his own great powers.”
He was born at Sedgley Farm in Prestwich. In 1788 his father “became much reduced in circumstances and had to leave his farm”, moving the family to Ancoats . The Buxton’s were not alone. During the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century thousands left the countryside for the cities, exchanging open fields for narrow streets.
Buxton did not expand on the reasons for the family move. It may be that they overstretched themselves or were just unlucky. But rural life could be hard and unpredictable. The standard of living was if anything worse than conditions in the fast expanding industrial towns.
Many farm workers’ homes were little more than hovels with earthen floors, and thin walls. The traditional wattle and daub construction was easy to make and maintain, and if the walls were thick enough gave good insulation, but the porous nature of the material meant that damp was an ever present problem and the crumbling clay needed endless repairs. According to a Parliamentary report “Many of them have not been lined with lath and plaster inside and so are fearfully cold in winter. The walls may not be an inch in thickness and where the lathes are decayed the fingers may be easily pushed through. The roof is of thatch, which if kept in good repair forms a good covering, warm in winter and cool in summer, though doubtless in many instances served as harbour for vermin, for dirt, for the condensed exhalations from the bodies of the occupants of the bedrooms....”
As in Chorlton brick would slowly replace wattle and daub and slate take over from thatch but this would not be until long after Buxton’s family had left Prestwich.
Their food could be monotonous and often scarce. Here in the north things were better, because wages were higher and the locally produced food was more nutritious. There was a greater reliance on an oatmeal diet made more palatable with the addition of milk which was more easily available as were meat and animals fats because of the predominance of pastoral farming. Potatoes too formed a greater part of the diet than in the south. Lastly the farm labourer here in the north benefited from the persistence of the practice of yearly hiring of labour. It was customary with this system to pay the labourer partly in grain or meal irrespective of the fluctuations in market prices. He might also be granted cow pasture, potato ground, or accommodation for pigs and poultry.
And while farm wages in the north were better than the south and east they were lower than some of those in the new industrial trades. In 1824 a survey of agricultural wages in the south and east showed levels of wages as low as 3s a week for a single man and 4s 6d for a married man, and in some parts of Kent they were as low as 6d a day to 1s 6d a day. In the north wages were generally higher because of the need to compete with the opportunities from industrial employment. A brick layer’s labourer in Manchester in 1830 might earn 18s a week and a street labourer 16s. Locally here in Chorlton farm wages a decade and half later were still much lower. Cow men working for James Higginbotham on the Green earned between 4s 6d and 5s. Similar wages were paid to carters and those of farm servants who lived with the farmer ranged from 4s. down to 1s.6d. The lower pay of farm servants reflected the fact that their board and food came as part of their living with the farmer’s family.
William Cobbet in his Rural Rides compiled between 1822-1830 calculated that a family of five needed £62 6s 8d a year merely for bread meat and beer, yet with wage of 9s a week supplemented by an allowance of 7s 6d he could as best afford only half the minimum necessary for basic food. Finally however awful these new towns seemed to be they did as they had since the Middle Ages offered a chance of upward social mobility.
All this paints a very grim picture which the Buxton’s might not have experienced. He was after all born on a farm and farmers would have commanded a better style of life than the farm labourer. But at this stage without more research it is difficult to know the status of the family.
Picture;gravestone of Richard Buxton photograph taken in 1916 by T Badderley, m72545,Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council
References
Briggs Asa Victoria Cities Penguin Books 1963
‘Death of Mr Richard Buxton, the botanist’, Manchester Guardian January 5th 1865
Gauldie Enid Country Homes, page 531 The Victorian Countryside Vol 2 Rouledge & Kegan Paul 1981edited by Mingay G. E
British Parliamentary Papers 1893-4 XXXV V,1, page 103 qouted by Gauldie page532
Burnett John, Country Diet , The Victorian Countryside page 556
Burnett John, page 554 & Higginbotham’s Farm Accounts 1816-1849 Simpson A
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