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The last Victorian census from which, at
the time of writing, the curtain has been drawn back was that taken in
1871. By then the parish looks to have become, in some respects, a
little more prosperous. At the least, no Pied Piper had again been at
work and the number of children, as compared with 1861, had increased by
more than forty. Education was not yet compulsory, but things were
moving that way and already one hundred and eighteen Ash children went
to school. No doubt they mostly attended the National school at Ash
Street. The mistress of that school seems to have been a young woman
named Amelia Kemster, who lived nearby. Competition rather than
assistance is suggested by the fact that two members of the Fletcher
family, Susannah and her niece Emily, who were living at West Yoke, were
both schoolmistresses. Miss Kemster had the edge on the Fletcher ladies
in at least one respect. Susannah was a native of Ash and her niece a
native of Poplar, but Amelia Kemster had been born in Oxford.
Youth was again in the ascendant. Of the recorded |
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population of six hundred and fifty-five,9
more than seventy-eight per cent consisted of people under the age
of forty-five. Only sixty-nine persons were aged sixty or over. The six
octogenarians were down to three.
There were only two paupers, both elderly widows living in
Mr Lance’s almshouses. That may give a misleading impression of
affluence, since the Union Workhouse offered alternative, if less
pleasurable, accommodation for the aged. A contemporary account of that
place describes it as every cheerless and miserable’. ‘The
vagrants’, it says, ‘were allowed to mix with the inmates; the food
was as little as possibly could be, and the general idea was to make the
Workhouse as uninviting as possible’.10 That
was In 1870. Later, things much improved, as well they might.
It was not unknown in the district for a parish hamlet to
outstrip in size the original village, hut it was exceptional, as was
the case in Ash, for the village to take only third place. On the
census, night in 1871, there |