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Note: NI494 chr 1781 May 13 William s. of Ellen Aughton of Birkdale base born
Date of Confirmation 17 O. 16 Jul 24 G iii 1781, date of order 16 July 1781, Putative father William Roughley, Township Birkdale, Occupation Husbandman, Child's name or sex male, Mother Ellen Aughton, expenses due1 0 0, amount of payment due 9d wk.
marriage 1802 February 1 William Ruffler & Jenny Meadow
Birkdale township owned a building on Little Common which consisted of four cottages for the poor. The appalling state of these in 1814 has been described in Chapter Six. Two of these cottages were occupied by day loabourers--that is, labourers in casual employment, taken on for a day at a time -- their wives, and families. The first cottage contained William Roughley, his wife Jennet, and five chidren, aged from 11 years to 13 weeks; and the third John Wright, his wife and three children. A handloom weaver, William Bradshaw, and his family occupied the fourth cottage. The family consisted of William, his wife Alice, and seven children, aged from 16 years to five months (and they had four more children after this). Each of these families received from the town ship the cottage, rent-free, and no other payment. It is interesting that Alice Bradshaw and Jennet Roughley were sisters; and this and the history of the Roughley family, shows how poverty tended to run in families, and to be passed on from one generation to the next.
The first Roughleys in the area were a family living in Ainsdale in 1755 who were ordered to be removed to Halsall under the Settlement Laws. Then in 1781 William Roughley of Birkdale, husbandman, possibly a son of this family, fathered an illegitimate male child. it was this 'male child' who married Jane Meadow in February 1802 and who appears in the Town's Cottages in 1814. He was obviously in work at that time; but there were also periods when he must have been out of work, or sick, because in the previous year he had received £4. 2s. 6d. from the poor account, including 12 s. 6d. for brick and making an oven; and in 1816-17 he received £5. 18s. 4. for coals and weekly pay of 6s., and in the following year 1s. per week for 16 weeks. In 1841 he was still an agricultural labourer, in Ainsdale. Amazingly, all his children appear to have survived into adulthood.
Township Cottages, Birkdale
The quaint cottages still standing in Sandon Road, contrasting so sharply with their surroundings, give no hint of the part they played in the history of Birkdale. Sometime in the eighteenth century the township of Birkdale had built this row of cottages, then comprising four tiny dwellings with brick walls and thatched roofs, to house its needy poor. There is no record of their condition before 1814, but by then the recipients of the help were living in the utmost squalor. They had literally just a roof over their heads, and that of minute proportions, sometimes leaking through the thatch. Families of up to nine in number lived in this space, which comprised a living room of four yards by three and a sleeping area of four yards by two. Within the walls, blackened by smoky chimneys and with windows broken, the floors were mostly earthen, with a few bricks begged from the township's Poor Relief Fund to form some makeshift hearth or oven.
Following the report of 1814, giving such a graphic account of the situation, a sum of £3 17s 0d. was spent on repairs to the cottages. It was a time of rapidly increasing calls upon the township for help, but another twenty years passed before the 'New Poor Law', as it was called, was introduced. Local Guardians of the Poor were elected in each parish, working through a Union, Birkdale being part of the Formby Union and nine such Unions being centered at Ormskirk. There was no longer any function, therefore, for the 'Town's Cottages for the Poor', as they had been called, and they were sold off. In 1840 Mary Rimmer owned them, since she left them in her will to her children. The new private owner, Mary or her predecessor, had made the cottages more habitable by converting the original four into two; and they have remained as such ever since, though with extensions and modernization. Their connection with the unions was brief, but the name 'Union Cottages' clung to them for many years - for example, in the census returns of 1861 and 1871.
In 1814 those unfortunate souls obliged to accept the meager housing available were listed in the report. The first named was William Roughley, the illegitimate son of William Roughley and Ellen Aughton, who was born on the 13 June 1781, and married in 1802 to Jennet Meadows. They and their five children lived in one cottage, and no doubt their other two children born after 1814 also. William was a day labourer, or casual labourer: these, unlike regular workers, could not join a friendly society to see them through hard times, and they found themselves, together with the widowed, sick and elderly, amongst the poorest in the community.
William's wife, Jennet, had a sister, Alice who was also living at one of the cottages with her husband William Bradshaw and seven children. Alice had suffered extraordinary tragedy in her life before she married William. She had been married to Peter Barlow who, on the 11th April 1799, went out fishing with three sons of William and Betty Hodges. All four perished at sea, and at the age of 22 Alice was left with two young children. In 1803 she had an illegitimate child, Isabel, and shortly afterwards married its father, William Bradshaw, by whom she had another eight children. Several died as infants, one being named Richard on the day that his five-year-old brother Richard was buried. This same Richard emerged again in the story in 1851 and thereafter, as an occupant of Union Cottages for the latter part of the nineteenth century.
Richard and his generation of Bradshaws started a series of family connections with another recurring name at Union Cottages, that of the Balls. Richard married Alice Ball, daughter of James Ball, who was resident there in 1841, while his brother William and sister Mary also married into other branches of the Ball family. By 1851 James Ball was widowed and living with Richard and Alice and their children, continuing to do so throughout the 'sixties and seventies'. Another James Ball was also living with them, who was called a stepson of the Bradshaws, so the Balls and Bradshaws were well represented at the cottages throughout the years.
Having passed naturally from Bradshaws to Balls through their intermarriages, another of the original cottage-dwellers becomes linked into the chain that seems to tie nearly all the families together. The wife of James Ball (Richard Bradshaw's mother-in-law) was Margaret Rimmer, whose own mother, Margaret, herself lived in a Cottage for the Poor in 1814, with another old lady, Nancy Ball. It remains a mystery why the Rimmers and Carrs of the Ash Tree could not have supported her - and unusual, for the elderly stayed withing the family unit as a rule.
By another strange coincidence, in 1834 the first elected Guardian of the Poor for Birkdale was John Pye, a well-to-do man of property. His mother was a sister of Jennet, wife of William Roughley, and also sister of Alice, wife of William Bradshaw, both of whom lived in the cottages for the Poor in 1814. Their lives must have taken very differing paths.
Twentieth-century residents of the cottages remember the well, which used to be about three yards in front of the buildings. The privies, of the one-hole sentry-box type, were a good walk away, some twenty to thirty feet down the gardens at the back. It seems amazing that the Union Cottages have survived in spit of their history, and happily have seen much better days than those of their early years.
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Note: NF102
Note: «b»«i»Park Database«/b»«/i»
1. «u»«b»William ROUGHLEY«/u»«/b» (William ROUGHLEY«sup»1«/sup») was born in Birkdale, North Meols, Lancashire, England, was christened 13 MAY 1781 in St. Cuthberts, North Meols, Lancashire, England.
He married «u»«b»Jennet MEADOW«/u»«/b» 1 FEB 1802 in North Meols, Lancashire, England, daughter of William MEADOW and Jane BALL. She was born in Birkdale, North Meols, Lancashire, England, was christened 20 JUN 1783 in St. Cuthberts, North Meols, Lancashire, England.
Children of William ROUGHLEY and Jennet MEADOW are:
2 i.«u»William RUFLEY «/u» was born in Birkdale, North Meols, Lancashire, England, was christened 16 JAN 1803 in St. Cuthberts, North Meols, Lancashire, England.
3 ii.«u»Ellen RUFFLER «/u»was born in Birkdale, North Meols, Lancashire, England, was christened 24 MAR 1805 in St. Cuthberts, North Meols, Lancashire, England.
4 iii.«u»John RUFFLER «/u» was born in Birkdale, North Meols, Lancashire, England, was christened 23 AUG 1807 in St. Cuthberts, North Meols, Lancashire, England.
5 iv.«u»Edward RUFFLER «/u» was born in Birkdale, North Meols, Lancashire, England, was christened 14 OCT 1810 in St. Cuthberts, North Meols, Lancashire, England.
6 v.«u»Robert RUFFLER«/u» was born in Birkdale, North Meols, Lancashire, England, was christened 10 OCT 1813 in St. Cuthberts, North Meols, Lancashire, England.
7 vi.«u»Mary RUFFLEY «/u» was born in Birkdale, North Meols, Lancashire, England, was christened 30 JUN 1816 in St. Cuthberts, North Meols, Lancashire, England.
8 vii.«u»Henry RUFFLER«/u» was born in Birkdale, North Meols, Lancashire, England, was christened 15 DEC 1822 in St. Cuthberts, North Meols, Lancashire, England.
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