A Pair of Shoes for a Poor Child – The Everyday Histories of West Devon

What can a pair of shoes tell us about life in West Devon more than two centuries ago?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

One of the most intriguing talks in this year's Tavistock Heritage Open Days programme comes from Dr

Sue Andrew of the Devonshire Association, who will take us away from kings, abbots and great estates and into the lives of the people who much more rarely appear in our history books.

Her wonderfully evocatively titled talk, A Pair of Shoes for a Poor Child, traces the fortunes of three generations of a West Devon family between 1762 and 1903.

It is difficult to imagine a subject better suited to this year's Heritage Open Days theme of Everyday Histories.

History from the bottom up

The title itself provides a clue to what makes this story so compelling.

A simple reference to providing a pair of shoes for a poor child might appear an insignificant detail in an old document. But follow that thread and it can lead us into a very different historical landscape: one of poverty and illegitimacy, agricultural labour and education, family relationships and the precarious circumstances in which many ordinary people lived.

These were people whose births, marriages, deaths, brushes with authority and occasional encounters with charitable institutions might provide the only documentary footprints they left behind.

Dr Andrew uses those fragments to reconstruct something much richer: the lives behind the records.

And in doing so, the talk asks us to think about whose stories we traditionally choose to call "history".

A remarkable Devon tradition

Dr Andrew brings to Tavistock a connection with one of Devon's most venerable learned societies.

The Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and the Arts was founded in Exeter in 1862 by William Pengelly. Its purpose was deliberately broad, encouraging research and scholarship relating to Devon across subjects ranging from history and literature to geology, botany, buildings and folklore.

More than 160 years later, that tradition continues. The Association publishes research, organises lectures and visits, holds an annual conference and supports research into Devon and its people.

Dr Andrew was its most recent past Chair, making her visit a particularly welcome addition to this year's Tavistock programme.

The people behind the statistics

A Pair of Shoes for a Poor Child also provides an important counterpoint to some of the other stories we are telling during Heritage Open Days.

We begin our festival with powerful Anglo-Saxon families, the foundation of Tavistock Abbey and England's first crowned queen. Elsewhere we encounter great architects, wealthy landowners and the men who transformed Tavistock during the nineteenth century.

But history didn't happen only to the powerful.

It happened in cottages and farmyards. It happened to agricultural labourers struggling to support families, to unmarried mothers, to children whose education depended upon their circumstances and to those for whom something as apparently ordinary as a new pair of shoes mattered enormously.

That is what makes this talk such an important part of Everyday Histories.

By following three generations across more than 140 years, Dr Andrew allows us to watch society changing through the experiences of individuals who lived through it.

The result promises to be social history at its most immediate: not simply dates and institutions, but real lives recovered from the archive.

Join us for A Pair of Shoes for a Poor Child

BOOK YOUR FREE TICKETS BY SCANNING OR CLICKING THE QR CODE

If you enjoy family history, social history or simply discovering the stories of people who have almost vanished from the historical record, this should be a fascinating evening.

And perhaps, after hearing Dr Andrew, none of us will ever again dismiss a tiny detail buried in an old document as insignificant.

Sometimes a pair of shoes is much more than a pair of shoes.

A Pair of Shoes for a Poor Child Dr Sue Andrew, Devonshire Association Tuesday 15 September, 6.30pm

The talk is FREE as part of Tavistock Heritage Open Days, but places are limited. Please book your place in advance.