Ever since I saw you in our family tree, I've wanted to cut it down

April 2010

As you would expect, there are quite a few and varied occupations

 belonging to many of the persons in the Nickisson Family Tree.

For the Men these included Miners, Labourers, Journeymen, Engineers, Joiners and Sailors, to name just a few.

For the Ladies, Domestic Servants, Milliners, Silk Workers, Nurses and most of all, Housewife.

Some other occupations were more obscure and strange, see a couple of those below.

Lighterman

The Lightermen conveyed goods between the ships and the quayside. They took their name from this process of ‘lightening’ the ship. The picture above shows the silhouette of a London lighterman. St Paul's Cathedral can be seen in the distance.

The boat, a 'Lighter' was similar to a barge, the above picture shows one loaded with packing cases. The lightermen had an important voice in the running of the Port of London right up until the final closure of the docks in the 1980s. Entry to the trade was tightly controlled and each man had to serve an apprenticeship of between two and seven years.

Doffer

The above photograph gives an indication what a cotton mill was like. A 'ring spinner' would look after at least four "sides", that is two complete ring frames. They would make sure that all the ends were pieced up, and keep the frames as clean as possible. That was about 1000 spindles. The doffers worked in teams of five or six (boys or girls) removing the full bobbins from the frames, and replacing them with empty tubes. The lead doffer was called the coppice winder (they were paid more a week than the other doffers), the coppice is the mechanism that raises the ring platfoms. Once the rings had been lowered, the coppice winder would release the ratchet stops and rewind the coppice. then doff their section of the spinning frame. They were usually the fastest workers in the mill. Doffing around one hundred bobbins in under two minutes.

The picture above shows a Sweeper and Doffer Boys in a Lancaster Cotton Mill 1908

 

More on the Nickisson Family Tree later.

Hold on, about Family Trees!

Can a first cousin once removed..RETURN?
"Crazy" is a relative term in my family.

Heredity: Everyone believes in it until their children act like fools!