John Bellshaw is my wife's great great grandfather, and currently the earliest traceable member of her family.John Bellshaw was born between 1820 and 1823 and married Elizabeth Cunningham on the 5th October 1849. At the time John was a police constable. Together they had ten children; Jane, William, John, Helen, Samuel, Elizabeth, Johnstone, Christina, Joseph and Mary.
There is a strange asymmetry to the survival of John Bellshaw’s children. His first six children survived into old age; his three youngest died before their first birthdays. Is there anything in the available evidence which might account for this?
Birth, death and census records show occupation and residence. From 1857, when John Cunningham Bellshaw was born, to 1864 when Elizabeth Bellshaw was born, John’s occupation was listed variously as lamplighter, police lamplighter, Clyde police lamplighter, or quay lamplighter.
This can't have been skilled work, but it would have been regular. Glasgow had been very forward thinking in its provision of policing. There had been a Glasgow police force since the 18th century and as Glasgow grew it incorporated the police forces of the burghs it absorbed. In 1858, the Clyde Police was formed to police the growing dock areas of the Clyde, and this was merged into the Glasgow Police in 1866.
At some point between 1864 and 1867 however, John’s employment, changed to 'day labourer'. Labourers had nothing to sell but their physical strength, and day labourers were the least fortunate of all. They worked for a day’s wage at a time and no work meant no wage.
Quite what caused this change in employment isn’t clear, but by now John was in his forties and that must have made the job of bringing in a family income harder still. It must surely have reflected a significant downturn in the family's fortune. By 1872 John was recorded as being a shipping company porter on his son Joseph's death certificate. This may have provided a little more security but probably not much.
Another change in the Bellshaw's fortunes around this time was their residence. Before the birth of Johnstone Sanderson Bellshaw in 1867, John and his family had moved house frequently within Glasgow. Shortly after Johnstone’s birth the family moved to 10 Norfolk Court. John and Elizabeth never moved house again. John was to live there twenty four years until his death in 1890 from chronic bronchitis.
It would be nice to think this provided some stability to the Bellshaws, and to some extent this may have been true, but it must have been a bleak kind of stability. All John and Elizabeth's children born after the move died of chest complaints within months. The dwelling, presumably a tenement, would have been tiny. We know it only had two rooms with windows because that information is recorded on the censuses, and at times it must have been packed. In 1881 John and Elizabeth were living there with two adult sons and three adult daughters. I suspect they did not move because they couldn’t afford to move up, and they were at the bottom of the housing ladder.
However, two points stand out. The first is the longevity of the Bellshaw's residence at 10 Norfolk Court; they never descended, at any point, into homelessness. The second is that none of the birth, death or marriage certificates, or census records, on which John Bellshaw's name appears, is John ever recorded as being unemployed. Even on Elizabeth’s death certificate, recorded when he was sixty three, John is employed as a bonded store labourer. The Bellshaws may have been at the bottom of the ladder, but John Bellshaw seems to have ensured that his family did not drop off that ladder altogether.
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