How Britain Worked Read online

  The Wardian Case became a feature of Victorian parlours, ferns and even orchids being grown in houses where this would previously been unthinkable. A plant hunter named Robert Fortune successfully used twenty-six Wardian Cases to send back hundreds of plants from China in 1843. Five years later Fortune caused a sensation when he disguised himself as a Chinese merchant in order to sneak out of the strictly controlled areas that foreigners were allowed to visit in China. He then managed to buy 20,000 tea plants – something that foreigners were absolutely forbidden to do – and 17,000 germinated seedlings, shipping them to India in Wardian Cases. Along with the tea, he hired eight Chinese tea growers who helped to establish the tea plantations in India.

  A TOUCH OF GLASS

  In a way, it’s a quite surprising that nobody came up with Ward’s idea a bit sooner. The Wardian Case was, after all, just a kind of portable greenhouse and these had been built in Europe since the thirteenth century, with the Italians using them to house exotic plants that explorers brought back from tropical locations. They called them giardini botanici – botanical gardens. In the sunny, warm climate of Italy, these greenhouses, no doubt, did their job just fine. In Britain, though, where it can get a bit chilly of an evening, keeping a greenhouse warm was more of a problem. In fact, for many years people thought that plants needed heat more than they did light. Gardeners kept plants in what they called ‘stovehouses’ – well heated outbuildings with thick walls and small windows. Needless to say, plants that gardeners tried to store over winter in stovehouses didn’t do too well. Early attempts at greenhouses in Britain weren’t hugely successful because gardeners struggled to keep the heat in them during the long winter nights.

  Another problem with the idea of a greenhouse was its cost. Glass was pricey stuff to make and a glass tax that was introduced in 1746 during the reign of George II made it three times more expensive. That tax, described in the medical journal The Lancet as ‘the most cruel a Government could inflict on the nation’ because it was causing health problems by denying people light, was scrapped in 1845. Not only that, but glassmaking was becoming more efficient, and therefore cheaper, with the introduction of cylinder blown glass.

  The way that glass was made prior to the introduction of the cylinder technique was to heat silica, commonly found in sand, in a furnace. Molten silica, mixed with other ingredients such as powdered lead, is what makes glass. A blob of the molten substance was scooped up on the end of a long, hollow iron tube. The glassmaker, or glass blower, then blew down the tube to turn the blob into a bubble. The bubble was enlarged until the glass was the desired thickness, then transferred from the blowpipe onto a solid pole called a punty. The glass was spun rapidly, forcing the bubble to reshape itself as a flat disc that could be around five feet in diameter. When this disc cooled, panes of glass could be cut from it.

  Making cylinder blown glass was different in that once the bubble, or bulb, had been blown, it was dipped back into the furnace to add more molten glass. The heavier bulb was then reheated in a smaller furnace and blown again to make an elongated balloon. This was then swung gently from side to side to make it even longer, forming it into a cylinder. The cylinder was then allowed to cool, with the temperature controlled very carefully as it did so. Uneven cooling over the surface of the glass would cause the glass to crack. The ends were cut off and a slice was removed from the wall of the glass cylinder. The open cylinder was then fed into a furnace on a flat bed, the sides uncurled to fall flat and a sheet of glass was formed.

  It’s a beautiful process to watch and you can’t but admire the skill of the glassmakers as they tease the molten glass – it wobbles around like jelly – into the shape they want. Like so many other industrial processes, however, it was hot, hard, dirty work and the conditions that the nineteenth century glassmakers had to work in were every bit as bad as those who worked in any other kind of factory. Glassmakers worked at least forty-eight hours a week in six-hour shifts – six hours on and six hours off. They worked Monday to Friday to keep the furnaces in constant production and over the weekend the furnace would have more raw materials added so that a new batch of molten glass was waiting for the first shift on Monday morning.

  Glassmakers worked in teams called ‘chairs’ which, depending on what they were making, might consist of four men. If they were making a goblet, for example, the gaffer, the most experienced man, would be the one in charge. The servitor was his first assistant, the foot-maker was below him and the taker-in was the lowest of the low. The servitor would blow the first balloon to make the bowl of the goblet, and then hand the job over to the gaffer. He would be seated in the glassmaker’s chair, which had long, sloping arms on which he could roll the blowing tube to keep the shape of the bowl, while also forming the base from a blob of molten glass brought to him by the foot-maker. A solid rod of glass called a pontil was then stuck to the base and the bowl cut off the blowing tube to be attached to the pontil. The gaffer would finish off the goblet using a variety of hand tools before the taker-in took it to the annealing chamber – the kiln where the glass could cool under controlled conditions.

  The taker-in might also be sent out from time to time to buy jugs of beer. Blowing glass by a furnace, with other furnaces also churning out heat nearby, was thirsty work. Some factory owners even gave the chair a beer allowance to keep them going through the shift. It was in everyone’s interest to keep up the work rate through the whole shift as glassmaking was piece-work, with the works’ managers deciding how many goblets (or whatever the men were producing) should be made during a six-hour shift. If a chair produced twice as many, they would be paid twice as much. A gaffer’s share of the proceeds could earn him up to £3 a week, while the others would get significantly less.

  A glassmaker served a seven-year apprenticeship. It was traditional for fathers to pass on their skills to their sons, keeping the secrets of the glassmaker’s trade in the family. Strangers seldom found their way into the industry: glassmakers closed ranks very effectively, to the point where their brotherhoods would pay a ‘pension’ to anyone who left the trade, on condition that he did not teach their skills to anyone other than a glassmaker’s son. There were quite a few who were forced to leave the trade due to illness or injury – a glassworks where lead powder was being used and molten glass was being worked in furnaces was an unhealthy and hazardous place.

  IT’S GETTING HOT IN HERE...

  Dangerous they may have been, but Victorian glassworks were churning out glass faster and cheaper than ever before. With their furnaces burning day and night to produce high-quality glass and those in the ironworks working just as hard to produce precision metalwork, greenhouses came into fashion on a grand scale. Conservatories were attached to houses so that people could entertain in style in their ‘indoor gardens’, where tropical plants thrived. Wrought-iron frames, which could be made far slimmer and stronger than wooden ones, allowed light to flood in. Huge glass structures were built to create tropical or Mediterranean paradises at botanical gardens like the one that opened at Edgbaston in Birmingham in 1832.

  Designed by John Claudius Loudon – a Scottish botanist, landscape gardener and writer – the Birmingham Botanical Gardens were established in 1829 on eighteen acres of land, formerly Holly Bank Farm. Three years of construction and planting, funded by the Birmingham Botanical and Horticultural Society, whose members’ subscriptions provided the cash required, saw a range of trees and plants introduced to the garden. Many of these were donated by other societies all over Britain and Europe, including the London Horticultural Society (later to become the RHS) and the Berlin Botanic Garden, while a consignment of rare orchids came all the way from Brazil. Exotic plants need to be looked after in greenhouses and Loudon proposed a spectacular circular glasshouse, although his design was ultimately rejected because it would have cost too much. A simpler glasshouse was built to begin with, with others coming along later – the Tropical House in 1852, the Subtropical House in 1871 (eight metres tall so that i
t could accommodate tree specimens and also known as the Palm House), and the Terrace Glasshouses in 1883. The Terrace Glasshouses, which are now home to the gardens’ Mediterranean and Arid collections, replaced the original greenhouses.

  The gardens underwent a continuous programme of development with, for example, a bandstand being erected in 1873 and the Nettlefold Alpine Rock Garden coming along in 1895. I know the rock garden really well as I was involved in restoring it as part of the TV series. It was built by Backhouse and Sons of York, using 250 tons of millstone grit. James Backhouse, now he was a proper interesting bloke. He started a nursery business with his brother, Thomas, in 1815 when he was twenty-one and, as the business began to thrive, he married seven years later. Sadly, his wife, Deborah, died in 1827 and within three years, once his two children were old enough to be left with family, James set off on a ten-year missionary tour of Australia, Mauritius and Africa. As well as spreading the word, James also collected plant specimens to be sent home, helping to keep the Backhouse family business competitive in what was an emerging new industry.

  The demand for new plants during the Industrial Revolution was such that nurseries began to spring up all over the country. Some sent out their own plant hunters, who could be quite ruthless in stripping valleys in the mountains of China – a collector’s paradise because of the thousands of varieties available – of bulbs to send home. Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson, a highly respected plant collector who worked for Kew Gardens and had trained as an apprentice at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, once gathered 18,000 bulbs that were lost on the voyage to Britain, so he returned to the same site the following year and dug up another 25,000 bulbs. He was caught in an avalanche in the mountains and his leg was crushed by rocks. Wilson had his porters splint his leg using the tripod of his camera so that he could be carried on the long trek back to safety. His leg never healed properly and, as he had been hunting for lilies, he called his injury his ‘lily limp’.

  As time went on, the nurserymen became better at growing their own stock and creating new hybrids in order to meet the ever increasing demand for garden plants. But just what was the cause of the gardening boom? The answer lies with men like John Loudon, whose many books about gardening promoted a style that was different to the very formal ornamental gardens and lawns that had gone before. His ‘gardenesque’ style introduced exotic plants displayed so that the planting could be admired from all angles and involved creating less rigidly defined flowerbeds. Loudon’s gardening ideas generated a lot of interest amongst the green-fingered brigade, but he was also attracting attention with his ideas about town planning. He wanted more open spaces for ordinary people to escape from the grimy, polluted, cramped environments where they lived and worked, to enjoy the greenery of parks and gardens and breathe clean air. Loudon called for public parks in the cities and green belt zones around built-up areas where, as he put it, ‘the exhausted factory operative might inhale the freshening breeze and find some portion of recovered health’.

  PARK LIFE

  Loudon was not alone in thinking that Britain’s cities desperately needed parks and gardens. Captains of industry all over the country began to donate land where parks could be established, especially near schools or hospitals, for the benefit of the community. But that community still tended, in many cases, to be the same sort of people who enjoyed places like the Birmingham Botanical Gardens – basically, the middle classes. When the Botanical Gardens first opened, they were there for the enjoyment and education of those who had subscribed, namely the members of the Birmingham Botanical and Horticultural Society. This was not a place where a factory worker could take his family for a picnic in the sunshine.

  Even when public parks began to appear during the course of the nineteenth century, there were strict opening times and strictly enforced rules: no walking on the grass; no ball games; dress codes that meant if the gatekeeper didn’t like the look of you, you couldn’t come in; and admission fees that meant the working man and his family probably couldn’t afford it anyway. On Sundays, the only day when most workers actually had any free time, many parks were closed. Slowly, though, things began to change. When Regent’s Park opened in London in 1820, it was a ‘members only’ establishment but by 1835 the general public was allowed in (if only on two days a week ... and they still had to pay). The first park to be laid out for use by everyone, funded by the taxpayer and with no entrance fees, was Birkenhead Park on Merseyside, which opened in 1847. As well as flowerbeds, lawns, paths to stroll along and views to admire, there were boating lakes and sports pitches that the workers from the local shipbuilding and ironworks could enjoy whenever they had the chance. There were still plenty of rules that you had to stick to, as you would expect in Victorian England: anyone found gambling, boozing or swearing was asked to leave and would probably never be allowed back in again.

  A park like Birkenhead needed a team of gardeners to look after it, just like the teams that worked in the gardens on large country estates. Working as a gardener at a big house was a far healthier option than working in a factory, but the same kind of hierarchy existed. You might start work as a potboy at the age of just ten – cleaning and repairing pots, spreading ash on paths, and following along behind the under-gardener, picking up all the deadheads he had just cut from a flowering plant. Once you had served your time as a potboy, if you had kept your nose clean you might be promoted to under-gardener and start to learn a lot more about gardening. Under-gardeners had to know about different types of plant, what kind of soil they preferred, how much light or shade they needed, and how to deal with weeds and moss in the lawn – basically everything about the garden. Because gardens in different parts of the country can grow some plants more successfully depending on how well suited the plant is to the location, under-gardeners would aim to move every few years in order to accumulate the knowledge that they needed to become a head gardener.

  The head gardener was well schooled in the art of horticulture and would know the Latin names for the plants he was expected to grow, or that he recommended should be grown, in the garden. He would understand about soil types and drainage, the best place to site a greenhouse, the right time of year to tackle all of the jobs in the garden and how many men he needed to get those jobs done. He might not actually dirty his hands in the garden himself, but would give precise instructions to his under-gardeners and, when blooms or vegetables from the garden won prizes at the local show, he would take all of the credit. A head gardener would have to keep himself up to date with all of the latest developments, reading the latest journals in the evening after supervising his workforce all day. Gardeners made maximum use of daylight, working from dawn until dusk.

  Head gardener was a position that would command some respect, yet the staff who worked indoors would still look down on those who worked in the garden and, even though a head gardener in the late 1800s might earn as much as £2 a week, the butler would still be earning more than him.

  VEGGING OUT

  The public parks and gardens of private mansions certainly helped to keep the nurserymen busy, but the massive interest in gardening was taking hold elsewhere, too. In the countryside, farm workers had once grown food for their families on common land but, as I found out when we were learning about how farm labourers became factory labourers, the common land was gradually taken from them under the various Inclosures Acts. In 1845, however, The General Enclosure Act stipulated that land had to be made available to the poor in the countryside so that they could cultivate what were called ‘field gardens’. Very little land actually seems to have been passed back to ordinary people living in the countryside under this Act, but it did encourage people to start thinking about what very quickly came to be known as ‘allotments’.

  The allotment idea soon caught on in urban areas, too. One of the first cities where small patches of ground – Loudon reckoned that a quarter of an acre was sufficient to grow onions, cabbages, parsnips, leeks, beans and potatoes – were made available to
rent as urban allotments was also one of Britain’s most industrialised areas. Birmingham had been an important industrial centre since the sixteenth century, when metalworking developed there – the town being close to iron ore and coal deposits. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Birmingham had a population of around 5,000 people but a hundred years later this had grown to 25,000. By the beginning of the nineteenth century 73,000 people were living there and in the 1860s the number rocketed to a quarter of a million. Workers were flooding in to the city to find jobs in the factories and their living conditions were, for the most part, quite appalling. Sewage-ridden slum areas saw repeated outbreaks of smallpox and scarlet fever in the 1870s and 1880s.

  Yet Birmingham was also responsible for establishing the cult of the allotment, with ‘gardens for rent’ available all round the most heavily developed areas of the city. In the 1830s, there were over 2,000 allotments being cultivated mainly by people who worked in the city’s factories and shops. Edgbaston Guinea Gardens, taking its name from the price of the annual rent, is still there just two miles from the city centre, having survived the years of building developments that saw the city spread out around it. On parcels of land like these, people didn’t simply grow vegetables; they also planted flowers. The flowers not only looked pleasing, but they attracted insects that were vital for the pollination of the food crops. Allotment gardeners became skilled at gathering seeds, storing and propagating their own plants, but the nurserymen could still rely on them for a fair bit of business. The biggest contributors to the growth of the nurseries, however, were those who had the chance to escape from the city streets to the suburbs. The owners of suburban homes with gardens became enthusiastic gardeners, keen to grow all sorts of plants, flowers, fruit and veg.