The Leather and Boot Trade

The Burbidges of Northamptonshire

In the English Midlands, between the green valleys of the Nene and the Welland, lay a different kind of industrial country than the mills and collieries of the north. Here, farming was the foundation, but laid over it ran a set of trades that had made the region prosperous for centuries. Northamptonshire was boot and shoe country. From medieval times the town of Northampton had made fine leather goods, and by the nineteenth century the trade had spread into the villages and workshops of the county, an army of skilled workers who stitched by hand in cottages and small workshops, their needles and tools the only machinery they needed.

The Burbidges belonged to this world. They were a Northamptonshire family, rooted in the valleys of the Nene, their fortunes tied to the leather that came into the county from the tanneries and to the army contracts that kept the boot-makers in steady work. James Burbidge, my great-great-grandfather, was born in 1816 at Wellingborough, the market town that sits on the Nene a few miles east of Northampton. His son, James George Burbidge, was born in 1838 at Abbey Houses in Duston, a village then just west of Northampton. He carried the family from the leather and boot trade of nineteenth century Northamptonshire into the railways of India.

Boot-and-Lace Country

Northamptonshire in the 1830s was a prosperous county for those who understood it. The red sandy soil of the parishes west of Northampton, Duston among them, was reckoned the most fertile in the county, deep enough to grow heavy crops of corn and roots. Around it lay the grazing pastures of the Nene valley, where the great herds of Short Horns were fattened on the rich grass before being driven—and later, shipped by rail—to Smithfield. A grazier allowed about two acres of grass to a beast, turned it out in May, and sold it off fat at the end of summer. It was a mixed and busy economy.

But it was leather that gave the county its particular character. Northampton had been a boot-and-shoe town since the Middle Ages, well placed for it with cattle for leather, oak bark for tanning, and the waters of the Nene for the work. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the figures made the grip of the trade plain. At the census of 1851, Northampton counted about eighty shoemakers for every thousand people—four times the figure for the country as a whole, far above London or Leicester. The trade rested on the army. Large orders for boots had come to the town since the time of Cromwell, and the Crown had never stopped ordering. Northampton’s place on the old London road and its reputation kept that government custom, and the work was still hand-work in those years, carried on by small masters and by men who stitched at home before the factory took it over.

The work was skilled, but like all hand trades it was under pressure. A man’s day-wage had stood at ten to twelve shillings a week, and by 1850 it had fallen to eight or ten, paid on a Friday with a quart of small beer a day and ale at harvest. A cottage was often one room below and one above, built of mud and thatch. When work ran short the parish looked to thin its numbers, and in these years several hundred labouring families were sent out from Northamptonshire villages to the colonies, to ease the poor-rate at home. The Burbidges left the county too, but their road ran the other way—not to Australia or Canada, but to India, and to a future no one in Duston could have imagined.

A Boy in the Boot-and-Lace County

James George Burbidge was born in the heart of this world. Duston, where he was born in 1838, was a village of farming families and leather workers. The parish church stood at the centre, and around it lay fields and cottage workshops. The boy grew up in a county whose ordinary working families were already tied, through the leather trade and the regiments, into the wider workings of British power. The boot that a Northamptonshire man stitched might end up on the foot of a soldier in India. The contracts that kept the workshops going came from an empire that was taking shape across the world.

What trade the early Burbidges followed, the records do not quite say. Wellingborough and Duston in their day were places of exactly this sort—agricultural at the core, with the boot and the lace-pillow filling the gaps. A family living there in the 1820s and 1830s lived inside that pattern. We do not know if James Burbidge was a shoemaker himself or a farmer or something between the two. What we can say is that he lived in one of the few corners of England where a working man could find work beyond a single trade, and where the skills of the hand were still valued.

But his son did not stay to make boots. James George Burbidge belonged to the generation that found its opening overseas.

The Crossing to India

How and when James George came out to India the records do not say. Nothing has been found of his passage, and the registers give no hint. The Allahabad marriage register of October 1863 is the first trace of him in the country. There he married Elizabeth Moore, a girl of sixteen, daughter of the soldier Joseph Moore. He was listed as a ticket collector for the East India Railway—the lowest grade of the railway’s traffic side, a man who stood at the barrier checking the tickets of passengers.

A ticket collector was not a grand post. But he had stepped into something that was just beginning to grow. The East India Railway had run its first train out of Howrah in 1854, barely nine years before James George married. By 1863 its rails were climbing up the Ganges plain toward Delhi, and the Company was hiring faster than it could build. A steady English-speaking man from the right sort of background could rise in it quickly, and the records show exactly how quickly because each of his children’s baptisms names his occupation beside his name, and with each child the title changes.

When his first son was born at Howrah and taken to church to be baptised in 1866, James George was listed as a goods clerk. He had risen from ticket collector to goods clerk in a little more than two years. The goods side was the real business of the railway. The passenger trains were better known and more glamorous, but the coal, grain, and cotton in the goods yards earned most of the line’s money. A goods clerk was a step up—a man with responsibility, with access to the accounts and the manifests. By the time his fifth or sixth child was baptised, ten years after his marriage, he was station master at Cawnpore.

A station master had charge of a station and everyone in it. Cawnpore was no small charge. It was a great junction on the trunk route from Howrah toward Delhi, a garrison town and a growing mill town, the place where the trains stopped and the goods were transferred, where the post was sorted and the passengers changed trains. A station master answered for the trains that stopped there, the goods that passed through, the staff, the cash, and the safety of the line for miles on either side. It was as high as the domiciled service usually ran—the service open to men born and settled in India, as distinct from the covenanted men brought out from London on contract.

Ten Children and the Calcutta Years

The family stayed at Cawnpore through the late 1860s and 1870s. The babies came almost yearly: Lizzie Ann in 1871, Frank Walter Moore in 1873, Albert in 1875, Herbert Harry in 1876, Lilian May in 1878. Cawnpore was a garrison town full of soldiers, and the family was at the heart of the railway world. The church registers of St John’s and Christ Church record each baptism, each death. Frederick Walter, born at Howrah in 1867, died at Allahabad in April 1869, aged one and a half. Arthur Alfred, born at Cawnpore in November 1869, died in June 1871 at Mussoorie, twenty months old. Mussoorie is a hill station, and the family had probably gone up for the hot weather to escape the heat. Of the ten children Elizabeth bore in fifteen years, three sons died small. It was a proportion the community around them would have recognized as ordinary.

But the children who lived did well. By 1878, when the last child was baptised, James George had been promoted again. He was now Superintendent of the Goods Department. The family went home to London in his last years, to a terrace house at 13 Wontner Road in Balham, where he and Elizabeth lived out their retirement. The last of the children was born away from India, and the family’s connection to the railway—that thing which had raised them from the ticket barrier to respectability—was carried into England by their children and grandchildren.

When James George died in 1920, his will was brief. Everything went to his unmarried daughter Lizzie Ann: the house, and a life policy with the British Empire Mutual. The policy was the whole of his Indian estate. Herbert Harry, acting as his sister’s attorney, took out administration at Fort William in Calcutta, and the inventory filed at the High Court listed one asset: the proceeds of the policy, Rs 13,650. It was enough to live on for a time, a pension earned by a lifetime on the railway. The Northamptonshire boy who had come out as a ticket collector on a line not yet complete had risen to a superintendent’s rank and left his family secure.

The Next Generation

But his children did not all stay in India. Some went further, carrying the family into the twentieth century. His daughter Lilian May married into the Robinson family at Kidderpore in 1901, and that marriage—between the Cawnpore railway superintendent’s daughter and the Dorset fireman’s son—joined two of the threads of this family history together.

The Burbidges and the Moores had lived inside the railway world, and when they married into other families, it was usually into other railway families. The boots of Northamptonshire had been left behind, but the discipline of the trade—the care, the precision, the respect for skill—seemed to carry forward into the meticulous world of railway schedules and goods manifests and punctual train arrivals. The leather that had built a county’s prosperity had taught its people something about the value of work well done. And when that lesson met the empire’s need for reliable men, the two things fit together. The Burbidges rose because they brought the habits of the craftsman into the service of something much larger.

Updated 12 August 2026
Non-commercial use permitted with attribution

Print 🖨