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Profile: Now retired from full time
employment. Member of the organising committee of this Society; elected
Chairman 2006, Membership Secretary 2001-6, Member of the Prince of Wales'
Leinster Regiment (RC) Association, elected chairman 2007. Local History (Oxford), Religion in Victorian Britain (OU), Family & Community History (OU) Much of my personal research is centred upon the Cheshire village of Kelsall, some 8 miles (13km) east of Chester in England. I have published one project (1998), The Cheshire Township of Kelsall 1841-1891: An Example of Demographic Change, that examines the survival of this former agricultural village through the 19th century and a short report (1999) on the National School in Kelsall during 1874. Works-in-progress I have one project that can currently be classed as 'works-in-progress'.
A labour of Migration: A study into the distance travelled in search of employment. Completed as part of Oxford University study: Migration from Kelsall, where the focus was the examination of empirical data to determine distances travelled from Kelsall for those persons who identified their birth place as Kelsall during the 1881 Census. Each individual was then searched for in the respective CEB for the period 1851-1871. The outcome revealed that labourers unsurprisingly had maintained employment within manual labour, though occupation type had changed. What was interesting was that over a ten-year period the spread of travel was extensive with migrants securing positions around the four corners of the UK. The Cheshire Township of Kelsall 1841-1891: An Example of Demographic Change This work was originally prepared as part of the Open University's Social Sciences course Family & Community History and involved the full transcription and analysis of Census Enumerator Books for the township of Kelsall. These have subsequently been lodged with the Cheshire Record Office, and a copy of the extractions, together with various extracts from the publication, made available on my web site www.the-dicksons.org. This project started from the basis that English agricultural villages, because they experienced massive migration to new industrial towns and cities in the 19th century, were limited in their potential for growth and experienced severe depopulation. A simple population count of Kelsall for each of the census years appeared to indicate that this was not the case for Kelsall, and appeared to support at least one opinion, that of Elrington (1980) in his work The Victoria History of the County of Chester, that rural Cheshire was unaffected by the sharp population growths in the industrial conurbations. The project tested a hypothesis that out migration did in fact take place, but that growth in Kelsall was achieved by a fundamental demographic change in the village. St. Philip's National School: Kelsall Public Elementary School 1874. This work explores the impact of village life and the pressures of rural life upon the village schoolmaster in 1874. A short work, this report draws heavily upon a transcription that I made of the schoolmaster's log books. The original grammar and spelling have been faithfully transcribed to provide an opportunity to read the frustrations experienced by the schoolmaster, as he struggled to deliver a performing school. |
Last Updated 22-Aug-2007 |
