Victorian
Every Christmas, the household at Hall Place remembered not only its own family but the men and women who kept the estate running. The Morley family had a long-standing custom of giving gifts to their staff at Leigh, and it is likely that Samuel Morley was already distributing Christmas presents to his workers back in the 1870s and 1880s. The tradition continued through three generations of Morleys, touching many Leigh families over the decades.
The earliest written evidence of these generosity lists that survives today dates from 1892, when two documents were drawn up: a coal list and a meat list. The coal list names fifty-six people who together received fifteen tons of coal. At £2 a ton, this was a substantial outlay, and the value of a household's coal allocation could amount to roughly three or four weeks of rent — a welcome relief in the depths of winter.
The 1892 coal list shows how the gifts reflected a person's standing on the estate. Chas Davis, the Head Gardener, and Alf Sales, the Engineer, each received 15 cwt of coal, the largest allocations. Further down the scale, estate worker Albert Stubbins and gardener A. Pankhurst each received 8 cwt. Alex Campbell, who worked in the stables and was probably the head coachman, received vests instead — a reminder that clothing featured among the Christmas gifts too. Indeed, Campbell appears again in the 1893 lists, this time receiving a cardigan.
The meat list of 1892 had fifty-two recipients, sharing 209 lbs of meat between them. At 9½d a pound, the estate's butcher's bill was considerable. Rank again mattered: Heads of Departments received 8 lbs each, while lower staff received 3 lbs. The list also paints a picture of the estate's workforce, recording eighteen gardeners, three keepers, ten general estate workers, twelve people at Home Farm, six in the Stables, two builders and two members of the Engineering Department.
Neither the coal nor the meat was carried away by the recipients themselves. Instead, the deliveries were made by a local coalman and a local butcher, who brought the goods round to each household. A third list, for tea, appeared in 1893, totalling 232 lbs of tea at 1/6d a pound.
The custom carried on into the twentieth century. By 1922 the lists had grown to as many as sixty-four names, including three laundry maids and seven pensioners, while the number of keepers on the payroll had doubled. Around the same time a pheasant list was added, with the gamekeeping staff usually receiving two brace of birds. By 1938, however, the list had fallen to forty-seven Estate staff, though it still included eleven pensioners.
The Second World War drastically reduced the staff at Hall Place, and by 1942 only twenty-five names appeared on the Christmas Lists. Even so, the tradition endured, a small annual mark of the connection between the big house and the village.
This article was published in the Parish Magazine in December 2001. The gift lists on which it draws were provided by Alfie Houghton.