'Pay-day' loans are nothing new

'The Accommodation Bill' 1864

As long as people have been short of money, there have been ways of borrowing it. And in general, the more desperate a person was for the money, the higher would be the cost to them of borrowing even quite small sums. That hasn't changed either. Many of us have heard of pawn shops, even if we have no experience of using them, and they feature quite a lot in literature. The plots of a number of Charles Dickens' stories revolve around debt, much of it based on his own experience - his father, John Dickens, was notoriously improvident, and Mr Micawber in David Copperfield is said to have been based on him. Mr Pickwick and Mr Dorritt even find themselves imprisoned for debt, and Dickens is by no means the only Victorian writer who returns to this theme over again.

Some of us have even found records of ancestors' appearances in the bankruptcy courts, or at least a notice in the London Gazette. While doing some research on the General Register Office I found a number of references to clerks who got into difficulties with money, particularly in the 1840s and 1850s. In 1847 the Registrar General, George Graham, wrote 'I daily find great inconvenience from the irregular attendance of clerks involved in pecuniary difficulties'. In some of the cases described the men are said to have been involved in 'bill transactions' and in 1855 one of the clerks, George Voules, was engaged in 'usurious dealings as a money-lender and bill discounter'. It is plain from the context that some of these men were not only in difficulties themselves but brought others down with them by means of 'bill transactions' or 'bill discounting'. I was intrigued, but I had no idea what these transactions involved, and none of the reference books I consulted was of any help.

I found the answer in an unexpected place, and like many of the best discoveries, I made it while I was looking for something else. Or, to be more accurate, I was at a book fair, indulging my weakness for second-hand books when I came across 'Commercial Tales and Sketches', one of those improving pieces of Victorian literature produced by religious organisations. This anonymous volume was published in 1864 from the Leisure Hour Office - the Leisure Hour was a 'family magazine for Sabbath reading'. The very first of the book's cautionary tales was called 'The Accommodation Bill' and described in detail how a young man took out a costly short-term loan which he could not repay, and then fell into an increasing spiral of debt until, in desperation, he embezzled money from his employers, was convicted of fraud and transported for his crime.

The scene above shows the young man, Wilson, and his friend Maxwell in a coffee-room where he is about to to take the fateful step of signing the Accommodation Bill.

'You will be able to meet this when the time comes round; and if not, we will get it renewed, that's all. the thing is done every day. It is for your good, you know. I shall get nothing by it, only the risk'   

Wilson faintly expressed thanks to his friend, who proceeded glibly with his pen to draw upon Wilson for the sum of twenty-five pounds 'Value Received' a bill at three months.
'Now just accept it, and it is done' 

'All but turning it into money,' replied Wilson, with an attempt to smile, as he wrote across the face of the bill. 

'That will soon be done. Wait here half an hour, and I will be with you by that time,' said Maxwell, putting the acceptance in his pocket-book, and leaving the table. In another minute Wilson was alone, his head buried in his hands...At length his companion returned. 

'It's all right,' said Maxwell, seating himself; 'and here is the needful.' 

He laid the money before his friend . It was considerably short of twenty-five pounds. Wilson counted it with a nervous hand, and recounted it. 'This is a heavy discount,' he said. 

'It is the best I could do for you, my dear fellow; those discounters will make us pay for it. I have known fifty, sixty and even seventy per cent taken for discount. This is only twenty-five; so you may think yourself well off.'...Wilson knew this, and in a more cheerful tone he thanked his friend for the assistance he had given.

So Wilson had agreed to repay £25 in three months time, but but had only received three-quarters of that amount, the 25% 'discount' effectively being the interest. Maxwell was acting as guarantor for Wilson's debt, on the understanding that Wilson would do the same for him one day. The story continues with Wilson's debt coming to the attention of his employers, since these accommodation bills could be traded by the original lenders, in the way that debts can still be bought and sold today. Inevitably, some borrowers would have been unable to make the payment on the due day, and so take sign another bill, often at even less favourable terms. Some may have realised that this would be a way to make easy money for themselves, once they were solvent again, and this may be what Mr Voules had been doing. One of his victims was another GRO clerk, William Owen, who was imprisoned for debt, but seems to have been allowed to return to his job later. For the record, Voules was 'allowed to resign' in 1855 and died two years later.

 

Goodbye Desperate Dan, happy birthday British Newspaper Archive

Statue of Desperate Dan in Dundee city centre.

Within the last few days the last print issue of the Dandy comic rolled off the presses, and the British Newspaper Archive marked its first birthday by adding the six millionth page to its site. The two events are not unconnected.

The Dandy and its companion the Beano hold a very special place in the affections of many Brits. These two  comics were part of our childhood (and adulthood too, come to that!). The Dandy was first published in 1937, and the Beano (which continues as a weekly print title) dates from 1938, both published by D C Thompson. This is a long-established Dundee firm that also happens to be the parent company of brightsolid who are responsible for a number of websites familiar to genealogists including...the British Newspaper Archive.

So in the space of a single week I have found myself looking back fondly at the Dandy and Beano of the past, and looking forward expectantly to the appearance of even more online newspaper resources, both courtesy of the folks in Dundee.

I know you can't believe everything you read in the papers, and you never could, but they still provide tremendously useful source material for local and family historians. You might find an item in a newspaper that leads you to follow up a story in official sources, but that you would never have thought of looking for otherwise. I have followed the progress of the British Newspaper Archive with interest, ever since I heard brightsolid's Chris van der Kuyl at Rootstech 2011, describing how the project would unfold. In November of that year the site was open for beta testing, and shortly after that it was launched for real.

As well as passing the 6 million page mark, the BNA also marked its first birthday by making its contents available to holders of British and World subscriptions to Findmypast.co.uk While this is a great addition to Findmypast, I won't be giving up my separate subscription to the newspaper site, because it allows for much more refined searching and browsing, and a few other goodies that I think are worth paying for. All the same, some kind of discount for holders of subs to both sites would be much appreciated (hint, hint).

 

Something about voting...

Judging from my blog statistics, about half of my followers might have had just about enough of voting in the here and now. But we genealogists are interested in the records left by ancestors when they voted too - assuming that they could vote of course, which most of them couldn't.

If they could vote you might find them listed in an electoral register or a poll book, Electoral registers are official lists of people eligible to vote, and they were required to be produced annually following the Reform Act of 1832. Poll books could be very different. They were independently published and were only produced where a publisher felt they would be commercially viable. But the main difference is that a poll book  tells you which candidate each person voted for. This came to an end in 1872, when the secret ballot was introduced.

Some poll books are very factual and neutral, recording only the bare facts, but others include detailed accounts of the election campaign, and can be highly partisan (and entertaining).

Some records are now online, but the great majority still have to be consulted in record offices and libraries. You can find local holdings by searching online catalogues like Access to Archives (A2A) for England and Wales or the Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) for Scotland. The Society of Genealogists library also holds a good selection of poll books. The British Library holds the largest single collection of electoral registers and poll books, and their comprehensive guide to the collection Parliamentary Constituencies and their registers since 1832 can now be downloaded from their website as a PDF file, all 371 pages of it!

Remember the civilian casualties

Like most people I have family members who were involved in the First and Second World Wars; my grandfather David Donaldson served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, the Royal Naval Division and the Royal Navy in the First World War, and my other grandfather, Henry Collins, was in the Royal Artillery in the Second World War, most of the time as a prisoner. Both survived, but Grandpa Collins' own grandfather Thomas Cross was not so lucky. He was a merchant seaman whose ship had been commandeered by the Royal Navy during the First World War, and he was killed at sea in 1917, when he was in his in his 60s.

My family is from Glasgow (I have to go back to my great-grandparents' generation to find anyone who was born outside the city) which was heavily bombed during the Second World War. No-one in my family was killed, but they spent many a night in the communal air-raid shelters, and there were some near misses. My mother told me about a bomb that fell during the day while she was at school. They heard the explosion and could tell it was nearby, and as the children were assembled for safety in the school hall, in the centre of the building, she was able to see that her street, directly opposite the school, was untouched. Pupils from streets that weren't visible had an agonising wait for the all-clear before they could find out if their families were safe. My grandfather was a driller in one of the shipyards, and raced home as soon as he could when he heard a bomb had fallen near his home. In the event, the bomb fell on a playing field and a sports pavilion was destroyed, and there were no casualties.

Just a few miles away in Clydebank, just outside Glasgow, another working man was not so lucky. Patrick Rocks was working a night shift in one of the many factories there on the first night of the Clydebank blitz, 13 March 1941, and returned home the next morning to find that his wife, his daughter, six sons, daughter-in-law and five young children had all been killed when a bomb hit their home at 78 Jellicoe Street. Their names, along with many other civilians killed in Second World War bombing raids, were recorded by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

London was of course a prime target for German bombs, and although children had been evacuated from the capital to the countryside, a number of them drifted back, against all official advice. One of them was Charles Ellis, a pupil at Loughborough Central School in Brixton, South London. The school had been evacuated to Langton Matravers, near Swanage in Dorset, and despite the upheaval had managed to produce a school magazine, with articles and drawings by the children. Charles drew this picture of St Mary's Church, Swanage for the magazine which appeared in 1940, but by the spring of the following year he had returned to his home in Loughborough Road. On the night of 17 April 1941 he and his parents were killed in a bombing raid.

 

'Welcome to GOV.UK...simpler, clearer, faster' allegedly

OK, it's not GOV.UK's fault that I had finished checking a number of links to the old direct.gov.uk site on Tuesday last week, and then GOV.UK went live on Wednesday, so I have to do them all again.   This is part of a periodic review of online guides that I have to do as part of the day job - if only I'd left it to the last minute as usual I'd only have had to do it once!

Since this is the official government site for information on birth, marriage and death registration I thought it would be worth looking at in a little more detail. I was not a great fan of way this information was presented on the old direct.gov site (which you can still see on the Government Web Archive). This wasn't entirely due to the over-use of orange on its pages, but it certainly didn't help. The new site is at least a bit easier on the eye, with good-sized print and a decent amount of white space. The home page has a link 'Births, marriages, deaths and care - Includes civil partnerships and Lasting Power of Attorney' which leads to a page entitled 'Certification, register offices, changes of name or gender' consisting of a list of links, 5 of which are of interest to family historians.

The first link, Order a copy of a birth, marriage or death certificate is actually rather good, since it gives you essential information up front before directing you to the GRO online ordering system. It also includes other ways to apply if you don't want to do it online, and links to the General Register Offices in Scotland (GROS) and Northern Ireland (GRONI).

Unfortunately, the second link Register offices is very poor. It is subtitled 'Find a register office (registry office) - records of births, marriages, civil partnerships and deaths - you can register these or order certificates' but all it will allow you to do is search by postcode, and only a full postcode at that. I tested this by entering my own postcode, and then the postcode of my last address. They each returned a number of results, starting with the nearest. For my current address this is the Buckinghamshire Register Office in Aylesbury, which is the correct one for my address, although the weblink didn't work. For my last address it listed the offices in Harrow, Barnet and Brent, in that order. The correct one is actually Brent Register Office, and although the Harrow one appears to be nearer, this is because GOV.UK has the wrong postcode for Harrow Civic Centre, so the automated links on Google Maps, Bing Maps and Open Street Map all go to the wrong place. They seem to have used some sort of 'branch locator' software package, the kind of thing you might use to find your nearest Starbucks, but which is completely inappropriate for this purpose. The small print also asks you to 'enter a UK postcode', so naturally I couldn't resist putting in Scottish and Northern Irish ones, which directed me to Carlisle and Anglesey, respectively!

Much further down the page are links to contact details for the GRO and the National Records of Scotland, but not for GRONI, although there is a link to its contact details from the GRO contacts page. For some reason the numerous Contacts pages throughout the site give postal addresses, phone numbers and email addresses or online contact forms, but not links to official websites or key landing pages within them.

The final link on this page looks the most promising - Research your family history using the General Register Office and this is an improvement on the old site where information was duplicated on a number of pages and the arrangement was not very logical. For some reason GRO references are referred to as 'index numbers' but at least the link to FreeBMD is prominent, and the list of the 7 places holding full sets of the indexes on microfiche is just below. This is good, but it doesn't make it clear that these are the only complete sets, or that they are on microfiche, it just says 'Finding index numbers in person - you can also search for index numbers for free at:'  and then lists them, but without addresses or weblinks, other than a link to the online registration page for a British Library Reader Pass. This is followed by a downloadable pdf document 'Where you can view the GRO index numbers in your area'. This is supplied by the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) the parent department of the GRO, and is actually called 'Public holders of the General Register Office indexes'. This is much more helpful, with full addresses and details of the actual indexes held, and their coverage dates. They even include holdings outside England and Wales. It also lists the sites other than FreeBMD where the indexes can be found, referred to only as 'commercial companies' on the main page. You can also download the GRO's own list of its holdings. There are contact details for the Principal Registry of the Family Division for divorce records, but only a postal address and phone number, although there is a much better page Get a copy of a decree absolute elsewhere on the site.

The final section is 'Further information' which suggests you consult local archives or The National Archives to help research your family history. This is good advice, and the link to The National Archives is OK, but the Local archives link is just as bad as the Register Offices one - very handy if you happen to know the full postcode of the house where your ancestor lived in 1851, I'm sure! A link to ARCHON would have been much better.

The best part of the 'Certification, register offices, changes of name or gender' page is right at the end, a link to a downloadable pdf of the GRO's 24-page booklet Discover your family history which is excellent.

I would like to have seen some information about wills and probate on this page, but although there is some information about wills and probate in the Death and bereavement section of Births, deaths, marriages and care, there is no link that I have been able to find to the informative  Guide to obtaining copies of probate records pages on the Justice site.

No doubt the site will be developed and, hopefully, improved over time - it only went live a week ago, after all. For one thing it needs to learn that England and Wales has register offices, not registry offices. Overall it's an improvement on direct.gov, but those postcode searches really have to go!