Month: Jan 2025

Tunstall Market in the 1850s

A 19th Century Meat Market

In his book, Old Times in the Potteries, published in 1906, William Scarratt describes the scene in Tunstall‘s Market Square. These scenes occur on Saturday nights during the 1850s.

Pottery workers worked a six-day week and were paid their wages at five o’clock on Saturday afternoon.

Saturday night was the busiest time in the market.

A score or two of butchers had stalls in the market square. Their tent-like stalls were lit by naphtha lamps. They were chopping up meat and haggling over prices with customers. These fat and smiling butchers seemed content. I do not think they liked covered markets. They were used to trading in the open air.

In the lower part of the square, in front of the town hall, were the hucksters and the poultry dealers. Stalls sold green groceries, fruit, and vegetables. A higgler from Cheshire was nicknamed ‘Cabbage’. His cry ‘Cabbage and cou’d (cold) lard’ was so loud that it was heard by customers at other stalls.

Between the higglers and the High Street were the fishmongers.

On Saturdays and Mondays, a quack doctor had a stall outside the Sneyd Arms. He sold patent medicines and displayed extracted teeth, charts and physic bottles on his stall. A real doctor who frequented the Sneyd Arms enjoyed teasing the quack. He sent notes to him asking difficult medical questions. These questions puzzled the quack, who couldn’t answer them.

Edited by The History Factory (2025)

 

The Chatterley Valley in the 1850s

William Scarratt’s book Old Times in the Potteries, published in 1906, describes the Chatterley Valley in the 1850s. 

Ironworks sprang up rapidly in North Staffordshire during the 1850s. I recall a workingman who was a forgeman. He predicted that all the land in the valley would be covered by industrial buildings of one kind or another. I have often thought of that visionary’s foresight when I look at the industries there today. 

It was a pretty valley. The Fowlea Brook, surrounded by meadows, ran through it. Willow trees called Osiers grew on its banks. Osiers were small willows with long, flexible shoots used to make baskets. They were grown commercially in damp, marshy fields near the brook.  

A shepherd looked after a flock of sheep in a field by the railway line. People in the valley heard the leading sheep’s bell tinkling. 

Men working on the night shift in local industries would leave work briefly to smoke their pipes. They would go into the valley to catch a breath of spring. Sometimes, they lingered there for a few minutes in the long twilight of a summer’s evening. 

Edited by The History Factory (2025)