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Archiver > ENGLISH-FENS > 2002-02 > 1013673455


From: "Kath Senior" <>
Subject: Re: [FENS] Fellmonger.
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 07:57:35 -0000


>Hi Philip
>
>Sorry to come to the fellmonger discussion a bit late, but I had something
>to add that may be of interest:
>
>My great grandfather Thomas Strangward was a fellmonger. He was born in
>Huntingdon in 1854 and was apprenticed by the age of 16. I don't know what
>work he did in Huntingdon, but his mother's family owned a fish and game
>shop in Huntingdon High Street - her family were Campbells and her sister,
>Mary Ann Reed, nee Campbell ran the shop after the death of their father
>until the late 1920s.
>
>In about 1890, my grandfather moved north with his family, ending up in
>Pontefract in West Yorkshire. He got a job as a fellmonger and I have found
>quite a few details of the company he worked for - CWS Fellmongers. This
>company got in the pelts and skins of animals and the workers there had to
>remove all the hairs and other bits and clean up the skins. There was a
>tannery nearby, and the treated skins were passed on to them. The work was
>backbreaking. There is a photograph in a book published by Pontefract
Museum
>of the fellmongers at work - I will try to dig it out and scan it for you
if
>you are interested (let me know, I won't post it to the list). The men tied
>the pelts on one side of a sort of fence and then stood on the other side.
>They worked away at the skin bent double over the 'fence', scraping the
pelt
>from one end to the other. The positions of the men in the photograph would
>put any yoga expert to shame and their fitness must have been incredible -
>they did this to one pelt after another for hours on end.
>
>The smell of the place was well known - it didn't close until the 1960s and
>I remember as a child visiting my mother's friend who lived nearby and I
can
>still smell that smell! My great grandfather worked there for nearly 40
>years - the only photograph I have of him shows him in Sunday best with his
>wife Lucy. But the tell tale giveaway of his daily trade are his hands.
Even
>the old sepia photograph can't hide the ingrained black dirt in his
>thumbnails.
>
>Best
>Kathryn
>Pollington, East Yorkshire
>

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