A quiet but interesting day...

Well today’s plan was to swan about until around 3pm, then spend the afternoon with a friend, at our place, who we had invited for tea. 

Was being the operative word because the poor chap has been laid low with what sounds like a nasty tummy bug…and all before he tried my cooking too.

So what did we do with a whole unplanned day at our disposal?

To be honest not a great deal, I know so unusual for The Man and me.

He pulled out a book he has been reading, David Attenborough’s’ Life in The Undergrowth’, and settled down on the couch for a quiet read. Periodically he would share interesting tit bits with interesting facts about different critters, including some very fascinating facts about spiders and their webs.

Me? Well no prizes for guessing how I occupied myself. Why I pulled out the genealogy of course.

I’m still in the process of going back to square one with my Harvey ancestry.

He was born in 1890 in what was one of Britian's hottest summers. Somewhere back in the archive of this blog is a story I wrote about set just prior to him being born.

The family lived on the Isle of Dogs and that is what I have been researching today.

During my googling I discovered a couple of websites devoted to the Islands history

It was fascinating to discover that, back in granddads time, the population on the Island was divided into three communities. They were separated by the docks themselves and the factories that clustered in the centre of the ‘island’

In those days unless they worked on the docks themselves few of the inhabitants would even see the river. The docks police would deal very firmly with any that trespassed there

I also discovered that saying that someone has a chip on their shoulder actually originated on the docks.

See for yourself

This relates to working practices in the British Royal Dockyards in the 18th century. In Day and Lunn's The History of Work and Labour Relations in the Royal Dockyards, 1999, the authors report that the standing orders of the [Royal] Navy Board for August 1739 included this ruling:

"Shipwrights to be allowed to bring [chips] on their shoulders near to the dock gates, there to be inspected by officers".

The permission to remove surplus timber for firewood or building material was a substantial perk of the job for the dock workers. A subsequent standing order, in May 1753, ruled that only chips that could be carried under one arm were allowed to be removed. This limited the amount of timber that could be taken and the shipwrights were not best pleased about the revoking of their previous benefit. Three years later, for this and other reasons, they went on strike.