Research. Victorian BMD Records

You may have noticed that the researchers who work for the Clearwater Detective Agency, Duncan Fairbairn, and now, Will Merrit, often say they have to go to Somerset House. Why?

After it had been a royal palace and duke’s residence, Somerset House, as we now see it as a Georgian-era structure, was built to be a grand public building housing various government and public-benefit society offices. In 1837, following the establishment of civil registration in the United Kingdom, the Registrar General of Births, Marriages and Deaths set up his office in the North Wing of Somerset House, establishing a connection that lasted for over 130 years. This office held all birth, marriage and death certificates in England and Wales until 1970.

Somerset House in 1828 (Wiki)

That’s why my fictional researchers have to go there. However, I was writing a chapter last week in which Will Merrit says he has to visit Somerset House to find a record, and this made me think: how easy was it to find records of Births, Marriages, and Deaths (BMD records) in 1892. So, I asked a genealogist friend of mine, and this is what he said.


Brief History of British Birth, Marriage and Death Record Keeping

Funnily enough, I have had some experience of this, while I was in London with you. (We used to share a flat in Hackney, years ago.) I took the opportunity of being in London to make a personal visit to the Government Records Office (GRO) which in those days was opposite where the BBC World Service was based, near Fleet Street, after it had been moved from Somerset House. So I had to do what our Victorian ancestors would have done.

But you must remember that the BMD records were kept in two different places and there are always two copies, one in each place.

When a registration was created for a birth or a death, you went to your nearest local registration or sub-registration office, which was usually your local town or large village. Let’s say you registered a birth at a sub-registration office. 

Baptism record (my great-grandfather)

Your registrar had two identical books. He made an identical handwritten entry in each book. At the end of each quarter year, he sent both books to his main area registration office, probably the main town or city. The main registration office kept one book in its records and sent the other book to the GRO in London (in England and Wales). Scotland and Ireland had their own GROs.

In the London GRO they then made a quarterly alphabetical index. It was handwritten in a massive volume. Every Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, etc., the indices gave the full name of the person and some other details which varied over the years.

Modern copy of a Marriage certificate from 1838

When you wanted a certificate for a birth, death, or marriage, you had two choices.
You could either visit the local office where it was originally registered and ask them there to look it up. You would need a good idea of the date because they didn’t have indices there. They would get out the original volumes and leaf through until they found the correct entry. They probably wouldn’t search a decade, but they might search a year in the smaller offices. They wouldn’t let you do it. You would not be allowed to handle the books.

And then, once found, you could pay a fee, on two levels, and have either a short copy (cheaper) or a full certified copy which was just a handwritten exact copy of the entry in the book. The certified copy could be used in law cases, passports, and so on. The short copy was for your personal information but could not be used legally.

And that’s what many people did for passports. They went to their local office, told them their date of birth and got a certified copy. In the old days, poor families often hadn’t paid to have a birth certificate copy. You registered but went away without a copy. And even today you still aren’t required to pay. Registration is free, you only pay if you want a copy.

The other alternative was to go to the GRO at Somerset House or wherever. But there, you couldn’t ask them to go leafing through the books. You had to provide them with the full indexing details. So that is why the index volumes existed. The public were able to go to the shelves and get out the index volumes. These were big heavy leather-bound books, all handwritten. You got the volume for the quarter you thought was the right one, you went through and identified the likely entry and noted the GRO index references, then you took the details to the clerks’ desks and handed them in. You paid your fee for a certified copy.

What I’m not sure is what happened next in 1892. In 1995 I had to do all that, but I had to give my address and they would post it to me within a few days. Maybe in 1892 you were able to wait while someone did it.

Entry from a parish register 1604, possibly the earliest written record of one of my ancestors.

Basically, a clerk would go into the archives, look up the exact entry you had given in, and make a handwritten certified copy of the entry. Again, you yourself never got to see or handle the books. All you got was that clerk’s certified handwritten copy. He might easily make mistakes and misread them. 

In the 1990s things improved because they began photocopying the originals onto the certified copies, so you got to see a photocopy of the original and could interpret the handwriting yourself. Also, when they put the indices online, you were able to send off postal applications.

But basically, in 1892, you either went to your local office (which was much simpler), and got a cooperative clerk to leaf through. But offices might vary, and you might get officious ones that were less cooperative and demanded more precise details. Some might even show you the original entry if there was some question of interpretation. 

But if you went to the GRO it was all down to you finding the correct entry yourself using only the public shelves indices. Then handing in the reference to the clerk and applying for the copy. They would not go searching for you, or let you do it. And you certainly couldn’t take any indices home with you.

Birth record of Marie Lloyd (not a relation of mine) from 1870. Marie Lloyd appears in the next Delemaree Files book, ‘Follow the Van.’

The indices gradually got replaced by typewritten copies over the years and the original handwritten indices were retired. But of course, the typewritten copies introduced their own copying errors.

I’m sure that even in 1892 you could pay professional researchers to do this for you. Lawyers did it all the time for clients who needed certificates for legal purposes. Detective agencies too. But they would only have the same access as the public. They would not get to leaf through the originals, except maybe as a favour in a local office where they had good relationships.

Churches did the same with marriages. Churches sent their books each quarter to the local registration office.


Fascinating stuff, and if you remember Fairbairn from the Clearwater and Larkspur Mysteries, you’ll recall he had a way of getting what he wanted from the clerks. I.e. he gave out sexual favours in return for being allowed access to the actual books and records. Will Merrit’s approach is different, but even he doesn’t find it easy to discover what he needs.

What’s pleasing for me though is to see that what I imagined to be the process was accurate. It was even possible that Will would wait for a copy of a record to arrive in the post, as I wrote only two days ago!

The images, btw, are from my family history collection and are real documents. These were all found online in the past 15 years. How the internet has changed things!

Let’s all go Down the Strand

Let’s all go Down the Strand

“Let’s All Go Down the Strand” is a popular British music hall song of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, written by Harry Castling and C. W. Murphy. It was first performed by Castling and was published in 1909. It was inspired by the Strand, a street in Westminster, Central London, that in the late 19th century became a centre for theatres, hotels and music halls. [Wikipedia]

It’s also the song that has the famous interjection, ‘Have a banana!’ Or, as I say here in Greece, ‘Have a moussaka.’ The interjection, however, was a later addition and apparently came from the audience, not the writer’s. The point of bringing this up is to introduce you to the setting for book three of my new Delamere Files series of Victorian, MM romantic mysteries. What happened to books one and two, you may ask?

Delamere Series

Book one, ‘Finding a Way’ is already out on Amazon, and is doing very well. Book two, ‘A Fall from Grace’ should be available before the end of October. While that is being proofed, and while I wait for the illustration and cover, I have begun research and plotting for book three, currently titled, ‘Silence and Limelight.’

Silence and Limelight

Silence and Limelight was the title of a musical I wrote for an amateur theatre company donkey’s years ago, but this story is completely different. I always liked the title for its paradox (I think that’s what it is), and it fitted well with the story I have in mind for Delamere three. The story takes as its background the London Music Hall, a form of entertainment which rose during the 19th century and lasted into the 20th century when it became more commonly known as Variety (Vaudeville in America). From there, it can be said, we saw the rise of the stage musical which has now, tragically, become a vaguely creative retelling of Disney stories or biographies of musicians with the core stitched together using unoriginal songs. Don’t get me started on that! Instead, let me start with a few words by a chap called F. Anstey, written in 1891, the year before ‘Silence and Limelight’ is set. The piece I am quoting from is titled ‘London Musci Halls’ and it is his experience of viewing such theatrical establishments, not all of which he approved or enjoyed.

London Music Halls

Ansty starts with this:

LONDON music halls might be roughly grouped into four classes—first, the aristocratic variety theatre of the West End, chiefly found in the immediate neighbourhood of Leicester Square; then the smaller and less aristocratic West End halls; next, the large bourgeois music halls of the less fashionable parts and in the suburbs; last, the minor music halls of the poor and squalid districts. The audiences, as might be expected, correspond to the social scale of the particular place of entertainment, but the differences in the performances provided by the four classes of music halls are far less strongly marked.

You have to understand the Victorian zeitgeist and not be offended by words such as ‘poor and squalid.’ If you are offended by such historical descriptions, you shouldn’t be reading about history. Only, you should, because without all the triumphs and horrors of history, we would not learn how to emulate or prevent them in our future. But don’t get me started on attempts to erase history and make everything ‘woke’ either!

Ansty then tells us about a first-class music hall venue and it sounds terribly smart and very you, and he approves. He even approves of the clog dancer and the ‘serpent man’ (a contortionist) perhaps because squeezed between the two was a young lady reciting Tennyson and other poets.

However, then he comes to the next tier of music hall venues, the smaller and less aristocratic West End halls of which he says:

It is unnecessary to describe the second class of music halls, in which neither audience nor entertainment presents any characteristic features.

Right, so that’s that then! What’s interesting to note is that he is as interested in the audience as he is in the entertainment.

The third tier of London’s music halls, he introduces thus:

Both externally and internally the bourgeois and suburban music hall differs considerably from its more fashionable rival. For one thing, it is generally dingier and gaudier of appearance; the entrance is covered with huge posters and adorned with tea-garden plaster statues bearing coloured lamps; the walls are lined with tarnished looking-glass, gilded trellis-work, or virgin cork. Sometimes there is a skittle-alley or a shooting-gallery in the “Grand Lounge.”

The Roman Road music hall, preserved.

Then we come to the world of Jack Merrit’s father, that well-known (for all the wrong reasons) and not much lauded music hall entertainer, Samson Merrit, who famously died on stage in March 1891, and, according to the press, died while singing with Marie Lloyd.

As my first draft of my first paragraph of Silence and Limelight reads:

When, on the night of the thirteenth of March 1891, Samson Merrit dropped dead on stage, the only person in the Griffin Music Hall who knew it wasn’t part of his act was Mr Merrit himself.

As another aside, H. Chance Newton, writing in 1902, says of the Griffin, by then under a new name and management:

Round the corner in Shoreditch is the London Music-Hall, wherein the stranger who pays his first visit will undoubtedly fancy for the nonce that he has lost his way and has by accident strayed into one of the best West- End halls.

(In those days, for the nonce meant for the one purpose, and only meant what we now know it to mean in slang.)

Meanwhile, back to Mr Ansty. Having described various acts and venues of his first three tiers of the music hall, he comes to the lowest of the low (in his opinion), and the kind of music hall my character Samson Merrit appeared at. Mr Ansty says:

Music halls of the fourth and lowest class are perhaps the most characteristic, and certainly not the least entertaining, although a visit to one of them makes a stronger demand upon one’s powers of physical endurance.

He follows this with an often-amusing description of what he saw and heard while his nose was upturned, but also praises the place for its honesty and lack of pretention. Of the audience, he says:

They rock with laughter, the whole pit swaying like a field of wheat in a breeze. Those who assert that the London poor are a joyless class, incapable of merriment, should see this crowd when genuinely amused, and consider whether there is not some exaggeration in descriptions of their hopeless gloom.

Marie lloyd

This is all fodder for my research canon, and I am very much enjoying reading such articles. I am also reading a biography of Marie Lloyd, one of the most famous stars of the time, and awaiting an out-of-date copy of a book about the Gaiety Theatre in Aldwych, London, as more background reading.

Meanwhile, I have made a basic plot outline of ‘Silence and Limelight’, mapping not only the mystery but also the relationship between Jack Merrit and his attraction to men, Larkin Chase in particular. If you have read ‘Finding a Way’, you will be pleased to know that what was left hanging at the end is cut down and dissected in ‘A Fall from Grace.’

That’s all I am saying about book two, except: Its background world is a British public school, and I will write more about it on my blog on Wednesday as I continue to work on book three.

Dictionary of Victorian London

The above quotes are taken from Dictionary of Victorian London, a massively researched collection of all things Victorian in print, created by Lee Jackson, and launched in 2001. It is one of my main resources for writing of the time.

Lee Jackson has published many books about Victorian London, and you can find them on his Amazon Page.

The online resource quoted here can be found in Dictionary of Victorian London.