Leyton & Leytonstone

Historical Society

Cooper’s Lane, Leyton

Laundresses

One striking feature of the census returns for Cooper’s Lane is the number of women working as laundresses.  That occupation also appears for some residents of nearby Skelton’s Lane and Beaumont Road.

Before piped water supplies and mechanical aids, washing clothes was of course very hard work and must have coarsened hand-skin terribly 4.  The laundresses in Cooper’s Lane were in middle or old age, perhaps not so worried about their personal appearance but less suited for strenuous work.  People of any wealth had their own servants to carry out the task, so customers for a laundry service were unlikely to have been able to pay much for it.  

Shown as laundresses in 1841 were Sarah Lockhart (aged 50), Elizabeth Murray (aged 60) and Elizabeth Ralling (aged 70).  The laundresses shown in later censuses were :

in 1851 Frances Allen (aged 36), Rachel Balch (46), Elizabeth Bonney (56), Ann Bugg (57), Elizabeth Graham (40), Elizabeth Murray (now shown as 63) and her daughter Hannah Williams (29), Ann Smith (27), Elizabeth Smith (64) and Frances White (57);

in 1861 Rachel Balch (56), Ann Bugg (67), Sarah Hall (31), Ann Harding (59), Catherine Hurry (49), Mary Smithen (42), Mary Turner (38) and Rachel Wood (49); and in 1871 Emma Bull (24), Louisa Dancer (57), Harriet Fincham (31), Catherine Hurry (60) and her daughter also called Catherine Hurry (23), Mary Murray (47), Catherine Parsingham (54), Mary Sanders (29) and Rachel Wood (57).

4  Kenneth Grahame published Wind in the Willows in 1908 {Wikipedia}.  Toad escapes from jail dressed as a ‘washerwoman’, a type of person expected to be of low social status, middle age and heavily built.