My Great Uncle Ernest spent much of his career working underground as a ‘coal getter’ and ‘hewer’ but in retirement he described his former profession as ‘Farmer’.
Ernest Bell was born at Blaco Hill Cottages, near Lound, Nottinghamshire on 22 August 1869. In the 1881 census, aged 11, he is already working as an agricultural labourer.
Mexborough
On 9 November 1891 he married factory hand Elizabeth Cunningham of Mexborough, daughter of Harriet Cunningham, widow, and her llate husband John, a waterman. Mexborough lies 20 miles to the north-east of Blaco Hill in the Don Valley, mid-way between Sheffield and Doncaster. Ernest is working as a ‘miner’, later (1901) describing himself as a coal hewer.
The witnesses are John’s brother George William Bell and Elizabeth’s younger sister Edith, 18, who worked as a servant in a beerhouse.
He and his wife Elizabeth have five children, Ellen aged seven and her four younger brothers: Ernest, 5, George William, 3, Charles, 1, and James, aged 4 months. All were born in Mexborough.
In addition to the children, they have lodgers: fellow coal hewer Harry Smith, a widower from Worcestershire, and his seven-year old daughter Harriet.
Ernest and Elizabeth were married for 18 years and had 9 children, of which 6 survived but by 1911 George is a widower with a fifth son, Robert, aged 4 to look after. Agnes Knott, 50, born in Belper, Derbyshire, has moved in as ‘housekeeper’.
The Barnsley-British Cooperative Society
By 1921 Ernest has married Agnes and they’ve moved to Church Street, Mexborough. Ernest now works as a labourer for the Barnsley British Cooperative Society. The society had a warehouse at Mexborough and a pencilled note on the census form suggests to me that Ernest worked on the ‘Engine’ – presumably a stationary steam engine – there.
In the 1939 Survey Ernest is now married to Edith, born 16 April 1891. They’re living at Arnold Crescent, Mexborough, and he describes himself – despite spending so many years as a coal hewer and as a labourer at the co-op – as ‘Old Age Pensioner, Farmer’. Edith is a ‘Housewife’.
Ernest died on 1 January 1957.