Some time towards the end of the 1860s, my distant cousin, Thomas George, moved from Llanwnda near Strumble Head in North Pembrokeshire to South West London, where he worked as a carpenter, married and brought up his large family. Had he remained in West Wales his boys would have probably worked as farm labourers or gone to sea and I’m not sure what the girls would have done. In London, however,  there was such a demand for schooled young people to administer the expansion of businesses and globalisation of trade that 1 in 10 of employed males worked as a clerk.*

In London the George boys found office jobs as soon as they left school at 14 and the girls started work as dressmakers’ apprentices. They worked hard as Llewelyn, aged 17, makes clear in this letter addressed to his younger sister’s employer and copied into his little notebook.

Ladies, I feel myself bound to call your kind attention to the following few remarks. They are concerning my sister Edith and her working hours in your employment. Knowing that my sister is rather timid and thinking myself that her timidity is imposed upon I think that it is only right for me to take this matter up. When

you 1st engaged her you informed her that her hours would be from 9 till 8 and till 4 on Saturday: she hadn’t been with you long before she came home at an average time of 8.30 and of late later still than that complaining that she had been sent out with a dress, about ten minutes or so before her leaving off time and of course having to go to the other end of Nightingale Lane or some other distant place she eventually arrived home at about 1/2 past 9 thus making her hours from 9 in the morning to

9.20 at night which working hours no young girl whatever of 15 years of age can endure.Then again if it is absolutely essential for her to work those hours weekdays she should at least have Saturday afternoons to herself but again many a time has she come home about 4 o’clock with a dress that has to be taken to St John’s Wood of course that means another 2 hours added on to her ordinary hours. Well in addition to all this you have now altered her hours to 8.30 in the morning

and I am directed to say that she must either leave off an 1/2 an hour sooner or at 8 o’clock punctual.

At 17 Llewelyn was a warehouse clerk, continuing his education at night school. He attended courses in shorthand, drawing freehand, reading, arithmetic, modelling in clay, wood carving, English grammar, botany and musical drills. At 27 Llewelyn was a solicitor’s clerk and ten years later, according to the census, ‘a lawyer’s clerk’, while his brothers clerked in banks, customs houses, estate agents and insurance offices. As clerks they were part of the largest single working group in the capital; there were plenty of opportunities for promotion and they did well for themselves.

*Work, income and stability: The late Victorian and Edwardian London male clerk revisited by Michael Heller