The Pitt and Osman family – a life in service

Today few occupations can guarantee a job for life but in the 19th century it was quite different. In 1871 there were 1.4 million women in domestic service – 6.5% of the total female population. One in three girls between the ages of 15-20 worked as kitchen maids and housemaids – and one record breaking Swindon family notched up an incredible combined service of over 160 years extending across three generations.

In 1818 James and Elizabeth Pitt moved to their new home, one of three stone built tied cottages in Mannington Lane. An agricultural labourer, James was first employed by tenant farmer Richard Dore King at Mannington Farm and later by Richard Strange who in 1835 signed a 12-year lease on the 237-acre farm.

The Pitt couple had five daughters, Eliza, Leah, Jane, Mary Ann and Martha, all baptised at St. Mary’s Church, Lydiard Tregoze and of whom four were destined for employment at Mannington Farm.

Eldest daughter Eliza worked as a ‘house servant’ for over 24 years. In the 1860s the going rate for a housemaid was £14 per year, all found, the hours were long and the work hard. Leah served the Strange family at Mannington Farm for just two years due to her untimely death at the age of just 18. She died on October 26, 1841 in Cricklade where she was then working in service. The cause of her death was given as ‘Visitation of God.’

Third daughter Jane put in an impressive 24 years’ service at Mannington Farm. She began work in 1839, first as a house servant then after her marriage to groom Thomas Osman in 1859, as a dairymaid. Fourth daughter Martha also began her working life as a house servant at Mannington. By 1871 she had been promoted to Lady’s Maid to Richard Strange’s daughter Julia.

Elizabeth Pitt died in 1871 and her husband James in 1882. An elaborate and expensive memorial, probably erected by their appreciative employer, marks their grave in the churchyard at St. Mary’s, Lydiard Tregoze.

Julia Strange took over the running of the farm after her father’s death and by 1891 there was a whole host of Pitt descendants employed in the household, including Martha aged 52 and Jane Osman’s two daughters, 21 year old Julia who is a housemaid and Louisa 28, cook. The Mannington Farm tenancy changed hands in the late 1890s ending over seventy years of Pitt/Osman family service to the Strange family.

Julia Strange moved to Didcot. She died at Acland Home, Oxford in 1911 and was buried with her parents in Radnor Street Cemetery in a grave spanning three plots.

Jane Osman died aged 73 at her home, Mannington Cottage, in 1899 by which time the ancient churchyard at St. Mary’s was closed. Her husband Thomas died in 1909 and her sister Martha Pitt in 1909. All three are buried in Radnor Street Cemetery, close to the Strange family grave, neighbours in death as in life.

The Strange family grave

James and Elizabeth’s grave in the churchyard at St. Mary’s, Lydiard Tregoze.

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The Old Congregational Church

The re-imagined story …

Tomorrow I will hang up my check at V Shop for the last time. I’m looking forward to retirement with some trepidation. My body has had enough of the hard graft but I will miss my mates and the camaraderie. Fifty-five years I’ve been ‘inside.’

I left school at 13 and worked for a local builder until I could begin my apprenticeship in the Works. Some dates stick in your mind. On March 23, 1883 I was sent to join a group of labourers excavating the burial ground in Newport Street. The old Congregational Church had been demolished almost twenty years earlier, but the burial ground had been left intact, until now when the area was required for redevelopment. We were to locate and exhume the graves for reburial in the new Swindon Cemetery on Kingshill.

It had rained for most of the previous week and the clay soil was heavy and claggy and difficult to dig. You had to use a lot of force to shift the earth but all the time I was worried about what I might be disturbing. Some of the burials were more than 60 years old, the coffins rotting away. Every time my spade made any contact, I gave out an involuntary noise, something between a cry and a yelp. The men got angry with me and told me to have some respect for the dead. I was only a lad, I hadn’t known what to expect and I feared hitting a decomposed body, I tried not to look too closely, frightened of what I might see.

Eventually the foreman gave me a different job to do while the men transferred the exhumed remains to the mortuary in the cemetery. The new grave had already been dug by the cemetery Sexton.

A few weeks later I went to pay my respects at the graveside of the Strange family whose remains had been re interred. I stood by the large plot with the tall cross and made my apologies.

The facts …

The extended Strange family were prosperous members of 18th and 19th century Swindon society. They were farmers and salt and coal merchants, grocers and drapers and they even opened the first bank in the town in 1807 Strange, Garrett, Strange and Cook.

Richard Strange junior was born in 1799, the son of banker and grocer Richard senior and his wife Mary. Richard married his cousin Martha, youngest daughter of Uncle James and Aunt Sarah Strange at Holy Rood Church on January 9, 1834. Richard farmed at Mannington Farm from 1841 until his death in 1883 when his daughter Julia took over the tenancy of the farm.

The Strange family were prominent non-conformists in the town and Martha’s father James founded the Congregational Church in Newport Street where members of the family were interred in the small burial ground. The Newport Street Church was demolished in 1866 but the burial ground remained intact for more than 15 years. However, in 1883 the graves of Richard Strange’s immediate family were exhumed for re-burial in Radnor Street Cemetery. The remains of his mother Mary who died in 1829, his father Richard who died in 1832 and his 16-year-old sister Sarah who died in 1820 along with those of Richard’s wife Martha who died in 1858 and a one-day old baby son also called Richard, were re-interred in plots E8463/4/5.

Richard Strange junior died at Mannington Farm on June 23, 1883 aged 83 and was buried in this large family plot. He left a personal estate of £4,775 1s 6d to his only daughter Julia who took over the running of the farm. Julia was buried in the family plot when she died on August 30, 1911.

A stained-glass window is dedicated to Julia in St Augustine’s Church, Rodbourne. The dedication reads ‘a devoted worker in this Parish.’