George Alexander2 from Leith to London to Stalybridge

George Alexander was born in Leith North and lived at home until he married Ellen Robertson Mirk, daughter of Alexander Mirk and Jane Crawford, in Leith on the 27 September 1872. They were married at 23 Garden Street by the minister of St. Bernard Church, Edinburgh. One of the witnesses was Thomas T. Alexander, likely George’s brother. George and Ellen had three children, all boys:
       George born 11 July 1876 in Leith, Scotland
       Archibald born 5 August 1878 in London, England
       William born 18 September 1880 in London, England.

The new family left Scotland for England soon after George was born. In 1881, they lived on Nelson Street in St. Luke’s, Middlesex, London, where the other boys were born. George worked as a journeyman joiner, a skilled carpenter who did the finishing work on wood buildings.

The family story is that George was working on Government Buildings and was killed in a construction accident. He may have been injured in London but he did not die there. The family moved again north to Stalybridge near where Ellen’s sisters and their families were living. There was great growth in the cotton milling industry at that time in the industrial cities of Lancashire and Cheshire in Northern England. Job opportunities were plentiful in the burgeoning mills where raw cotton from the American South was woven into cloth and dyed.

In 1883, George was living in Stalybridge when he died at age 43 of tuberculosis. The official diagnosis on his death certificate is phthisis, another name for the disease, which he had likely contracted in the cramped and smoggy conditions in London or in the cotton mill. He was buried in Wakefield Road Baptist Cemetery in Stalybridge.

Ellen and the three boys continued to live in Cheshire. In 1891, Ellen worked as a charwoman and young George, 14, and Archibald, 12, found jobs in the print works. They were helped and supported by Ellen’s sisters and their families. According to Effie (a Mirk cousin)’s letters, the boys and their cousin John Aikman would go and sing for Ellen’s sister Roberta and stay for tea.

In 1901, Ellen was living at 1 Birch Street in Stalybridge and was a washerwoman. She died in Ashton-under-Lyne Union Hospital in 1910 of a dilated heart and dropsey.

Many of the conditions that Charles Dickens wrote about earlier in the 19th century still prevailed, but social reforms were being enacted to improve the terrible conditions in which urban working people existed. There was nothing resembling workmen’s compensation, employment insurance, healthcare, widow’s allowances, pensions or old age security. Infectious diseases were common and there were no wonder drugs or vaccines to fight them. The poor survived on their own, or else!

Jobs for women were few. A widow with three youngsters faced an almost impossible task in trying to support them. Archibald did not refer to life with his father and mother except for the lifelong reprimand to any pickiness about food – that when he was a boy, they had to share one egg for breakfast, one getting the top and the rest a spoonful each out of the middle.

Ellen had an excellent voice and tried to support them by singing but it wasn’t long before she had to arrange for the boys to stay with relatives in Stalybridge. Her three sisters had also married Scots and two of the families, the Dicksons and the Aikmans, lived in that area for many years. The boys were taken in by one of Ellen’s nieces, Jane Frost (nee Dickson), greatly helped and encouraged by her sister, Roberta Dickson, the Auntie Bertie with whom Archibald kept in touch until she died in 1945. They were poor too but they managed enough help so the boys survived and no doubt they also provided suitable moral instruction.

Archibald joined the Cheshire Rifles when he was 21 and served in South Africa. On discharge his C.O. noted his conduct had been very good, that he should do well as he was a steady, sober and reliable man. But Archibald never had a good word to say for the Army. He said they marched long distances in the heat and dust, chasing an enemy they could never catch.

Archibald Alexander and Mary Bailey were married in Staley Parish in 1907. When they were married, Archibald was working as a ticket collector in Sheffield.

In the last decades of the 1800’s, the economy of Great Britain was booming at home, and throughout the world as a powerful trading and colonizing nation. In Britain, the balance of power was shifting from the landed gentry to include business leaders and the vote was broadened in stages to include a wider base of working men. The secret ballot, introduced in 1872, decreased landlord control over how their tenants voted. The Victorian Education Act of the 1870’s, made schooling free and compulsory for boys and girls six to twelve. Women were given limited property rights.

At the same time, the concentration of power and wealth led to huge resentment among those who were not benefitting. Owners lived in luxury on large estates. Workers who had flocked to the cities to work in mills and factories lived in unsanitary and inadequate areas where disease and high infant mortality were the norm. Families like Ellen’s lived in a room or two in back-to-back houses near the cotton mills.

Discipline in the factories near Manchester, as in the rest of England was harsh. Children who were as young as four or five worked long hours leaving no time for play. They were beaten for tardiness or for falling asleep at work. Hours for everyone were long and the work dangerous and physically demanding.  The huge mills in Lancashire and Cheshire were polluted, noisy place to work.

By the time Archibald was ten he was working half time and he went on full days when he was twelve. Full time was twelve hours a day, six days a week. He worked as an apprentice in calico printing before he enlisted for the Boer War in 1900.

Mary Bailey, who was to become his wife, started to work in a cotton factory when she was ten, half time until she was fourteen, then full time. She said that she walked four miles to work before breakfast to be there at 8 a.m. Lunch was at the middle of a twelve hour day. She worked where the cotton was spun and processed onto large spools or bobbins, her job being to change the bobbins as they were filled.

In the cotton mills, raw cotton was woven into thread and then into bolts of cotton material. The material was printed and turned into products for domestic consumption and for export. The Industrial Revolution resulted in changes in many areas. Sewing machines mechanized book binding, glove making and clothing manufacture. The steam engine expanded mobility. Industrial chemicals like hydrochloric acid in chlorine bleach, and alkalis, replaced natural products. The dyes used by Archibald and his cousins were made from chemicals. Everywhere the industrial revolution existed, there was growth and development. Everywhere disparities lead to resentment.

Trade unionism found its roots in this discontent. Women who were denied access to opportunities and the right to vote resorted to activism and even violence in their demands for suffrage. The alternatives for women and children to make an income were few.

The world became a less certain place. Darwin had raised questions about belief in a scientific world. Nietzsche’s belief that rational thought led to a meaningless abyss and that God was dead lead to questioning of the world view. Painters and artists, Gauguin, Kandinsky and Munch portrayed that train of thought.

In the larger world, European countries, convinced of their superiority, embarked on aggressive expansionism. Autocracies in Europe, Russia, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, held on to power under increasing threat from new ideals of democracy. Ethnic tensions were evident. In Russia, Russian Jews blamed for the death of Tsar Alexander were fiercely persecuted.

Archibald lived in England until 1909. He and Mary did not feel they had the opportunity to advance or have a say in the working of the government. They resented the great gap between working people and the owners when they saw the fabulous profits reaped by manufacturers operating sweatshop factories, and the continuing wealth of the landowning gentry. They worked hard but were not benefitting from the system. They left England for Canada seeking a better life for themselves and their children.