KINGSWEAR BEFORE THE RAILWAY CAME.

In this article from the Dartmouth History Research

Group Mike Emms explains the fascination of finding

out about Kingswear from the 1851 Census returns.

Do you ever ask yourself what a place was like fifty years ago? You can probably find someone around to tell you about it. What about a hundred years ago? “Well, my granny always used to say ....” but when we try a hundred and fifty years ago there are very few even fifth or sixth generation memories which can be prompted, and, for a small place like Kingswear, very few pictures. Fortunately there is some published evidence available even if it needs a little interpretation. It is provided by the Census Returns for 1851, which required people to say what their jobs were and where they had been born. It was made parish by parish.

Kingswear had only recently (1837) become a separate parish. Previously it had been part of Brixham (a chapel of ease) and the 1851 census still had a separate section which was headed “Brixham/Kingswear” and which together with Kingswear Parish covered approximately what is now the Civil Parish, stretching up to Bridge Road, Noss, Lupton House and Raddicombe.

In 1851 the parish of Kingswear was small. The inland boundary did not reach beyond the head of Waterhead Creek and ran down to Lighthouse Cove. The river then provided the western boundary which extended back to the mouth of that creek. Within these confines - and mostly clustered round the church - were 77 dwellings of which only one was not occupied on the night of the census, March 30th/31st. When the next census is taken, in 2001, I wonder how many empty houses there will be in Kingswear. In the 76 dwellings there were 307 people that night. Our first real surprise might be about the ages of the occupants. Of the 307, 83 were under ten years old! In fact more than half of the villagers, 155, were under twenty five but only thirty eight were over sixty.

The idea that people did not move around very much before the railways made travel easier is clearly less relevant when there was the chance to move by river or along the coast but even so more than one in three of all the people in Kingswear in 1851 had been born there. About another one in three came from the nearby towns and villages: Brixham, Dartmouth, Stoke Fleming and Dittisham, - but only six of these from Churston/Galmpton, six from Torquay/Torre and none from Totnes. The rest came in ones and twos from thirty three different places in the County or from a scattering of twenty four different places through the British Isles.

How then did the breadwinners gain a living? The largest single form of employment in the village was domestic service - mainly in the houses of the few people of ‘independent means’: the ‘fundholders’, annuitants etc. In addition there were two governesses, four gardeners, six dressmakers, three tailors, a shoemaker, a laundress and a mangler all of whom presumably would have had much of their living from these houses.

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From the way that the information was presented it is clear that mariners were a more important part of the village than the nine present in the village census might suggest, as there were also eight mariners’ wives whose husbands’ were not at home - and the pilot’s wife too. The unknowable factor is the number of unmarried young mariners who were at sea, as they cannot show up anywhere in the census. There was also, and obviously associated with the mariners, a shipbuilder with his own yard, a shipbuilders’s apprentice and five shipwrights plus two ferrymen and three coastguards.

The village had two innkeepers, for the Ship Inn and the Plume of Feathers (in later years the Royal Dart Hotel), to serve its needs along with two bakers, two blacksmiths, a grocer and a cooper, which implied that the Innkeepers brewed their own ale.

The two masons resident in the village could be expected to see to any maintenance, along with the carpenters, joiners and their apprentices (five in all) whilst in an area without much brick clay the two quarrymen would have plenty to do.

In 1851 there was no compulsory education. There were dame schools and in Kingswear the room at the top of the newly reconstructed Trust Houses was known as the Schoolroom or Sunday school room, but it is impossible to know who, from the five school mistresses and the schoolmaster, worked there.

This leaves the job which I had expected to dominate. However, there were only thirteen agricultural labourers living in the village. Why? There were no farms in the parish. The local farms were all in Brixham or Churston Ferrers. The village was surrounded by farmland but the tithes even from the nearest farms, Hoo Down, Croftland, Nethway or Boohay belonged to the Rector of Brixham.

Even so a look at the “Brixham/Kingswear” section of the census modifies some impressions a little. Most of the farm houses were clearly big houses, accommodating up to 18 people on census night. Seven of them held over a hundred people between them that night. Most of the farms had numerous farm servants. Most of these were young unmarried people. The farm cottages and other properties around held 33 aagricultural labourers and many of their families were represented among the young farm servants, some of them as young as eight or nine years old. Most children in this Brixham/Kingswear area were expected to work. Only 17 were listed as scholars, i.e. attending school, whereas in the village itself there were 70 scholars from a very similar sized population.

The only mariners involved in this “Brixham/Kingswear” area were a shipowner and a ferryman although the four properties referred to as Preventive Stations held four coastguards and their families. They and all but their youngest children had been born outside the county.

There were four millers in this area, at Woodhuish Mill and Waterhead Mill, and two gamekeepers at Lupton.

The age distribution was slightly different from the village but in the 49 properties listed there were 297 people and well over half of them were under twenty five, while only nineteen were over sixty. The overall impression is also of a slightly more static population. One or two of the labourers’ families show evidence of the ‘hiring’ fairs with four of five children each born in a different but often adjacent parish, but even so about two out of five were born in Brixham. If you add in the Churston-born and the Kingswear-born then more than half of these Brixham/Kingswear people were born locally. Apart from coastguards only eight of them came from outside Devon.

The railway reached Kingswear in 1864 and by the time of the 1891 census - the most recent available for study - the situation had changed radically. There were by then almost 800 dwellings in the village and the railway was the single largest employer, but that is a different story. (1186 words)