Hi All

Does anyone know what the average wage was for the working class person in 1895 Britain?

The link below is a pdf extract from Pawson & Brailsford 'The Sheffield Directory of Sheffield 1895'.

The pages relate to tramcar charges, distances travelled and departure times etc.

Would the working class person have been able to afford these fares, to travel to and from their place of work; or would they have had to walk?

Link: https://gofile.io/d/vDKoob

Kind regards

Leipzig

Leipzig
the link below shows that in the early 1900s the tram fare from Nottingham to Sherwood (2.3 miles) was 1d.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham/features/2003/05/tram_tickets_from_1900s.shtml
Dave

Leipzig
On the assumption you are still interested, there are other extant Tram tickets from around the country which consistently indicate that the cost of tram travel at the end of the Victorian era was something between a farthing and a halfpenny per mile.
The average annual wage was £42.7 in 1900.
Dave

Hi Dave

Thank you for your reply

If the annual average wage was £42.70, then this would be approx. 16 shillings and 5 old pence per week in pre-decimal UK currency I believe. Although lower paid working people would have made up a large proportion of the working population the average weekly wage I presume would have been lower than this for the lower paid when offset by the higher income of the richer people. I struggled to find any information Dave, regarding average income in the UK, can you tell me where you found it please.

The nub of my post was basically to try and form an opinion as to whether paid for transport was affordable on a daily basis to the lower paid working man around 1895, after they had paid their rent, paid for food, clothing, etc.; a difficult assumption to make probably after all this time.

Thanks again for your input.

Kind regards

Leipzig

I just asked the q what was average wage in UK in 1900 and up came the info from Ntional Archives. It added that one half of the income went to one ninth of the population.
Dave

Hi Dave

Thanks for getting back.

So if one half of the income went to one ninth of the population (the richer portion?), do you think I would be correct to assume that the low paid workers in the country would have been on considerably less than the average wage stated, assuming that they made up the largest sector of workers at the time (I believe).

There is the 1902 Sheffield Tram ride video on YouTube which is very interesting. I watch it and think who are the people on the trams? Could my great grand parents have been one of them, using them to get to work and back? Also in industries such as mining, did they have to start work and return home at times when the trams were not running; did they have no choice but to walk. This might not have been such an issue in small mining villages around the country but in the Sheffield area there were mines at Attercliffe (Nunnery), Treeton, Orgreave, Manor etc, which may have been a long distance from where you lived in Sheffield.

Kind reagards

Leipzig

Hi Leipzig,

My late father once told me that one of his uncles - who lived on Waller Rd in Walkley - used to walk to Intake and back every day, to work in a pit there. It must have taken him more than an hour and a half each way and he was doing heavy work, so I think you’re right about the timetables for the trams. Regarding affordability, my grandma (born 1900) and her siblings were occasionally allowed a penny train ride from Attercliffe to Sheffield as a special treat. The funds never ran to a return ticket and so they would have to walk all the way back home. Their mother was a widow with 6 children. If she could afford the tickets as a treat for the children then probably a working man would be able to afford them to go to work.

Heths

Hi Heather

Thank you for your info and opinion.

My great grandfather was a miner all his working life as far as I am aware. He was born in 1882, lived Yarborough Road, Burlington Street, and also Franklin Street, Sharrow. On the 1921 Census form in the 'Place of Work' column he has recorded 'Handsworth Nr Sheffield' (The employer is Orgreave Colliery, Treeton).
With hind sight and with a different perspective, as a youngster I didn't ask the questions I should have to satisfy my present curiosity; however I do remember my great grandmother saying that he used to come home from work and then have a bath in the tin bath in front of the fire (back-to-back house). Whether the mine had washing facilities or not at this period I don't know.

Kind regards

Leipzig

Leipzig,

A professor called Arthur Bowley published a book on wages of working people in the 19th century (Wages in the United Kingdom in the 19th Century, [1900] Bowley, Arthur L., Cambridge University Press). It’s possible to find a link to the book with a bit of googling.

Wages varied a lot by different trades of course, and within the categories that Mr. Bowley used. He said it was very hard to know what cutlers in Sheffield on piece rates might make because there were few published records.

He had a category called “Iron Trades” which would have covered a lot of people in Sheffield. It included a big range of jobs, some highly skilled and highly paid, others not so much; it included puddlers and labourers at blast furnaces but also engineers.

Wages in the “iron trades” were apparently highly variable depending on market conditions.

The average wage for the “Iron Trades” was higher than the average for the whole working population though. (People working in wool and cotton got a lot less, less even than agricultural workers).

A few specific figures he mentions are skilled mechanics in Manchester in 1886 being able to pull in up to £1/18/- a week, and “general labourers” getting under 19s a week. Squinting at his graph of average wages, I think that his estimate of an overall average for the “Iron Trades” comes to very approximately £72 a year or somewhere in the region of £1/7s/9d a week in the 1890s.

As another little data point, during WW1 my Grandad was making £1/5/- a week at Sanderson Brothers & Newbould, which was considered very good money for a young teenager in 1916 (wages were high because of the war of course, the experienced blokes having signed up and gone to the front).

Cheers,

Andrew P.

Hi Andrew

Thank you for your research, a very helpful insight, and as you say there is the factor of demand which might affect wages in general. Wages over time might not generally progress in a steady upward direction.

Thanks again

Leipzig