Pay Day in Portsmouth, 1910: The Dockyard Man and the Sailor’s Wife

On the last day of October 1910, a sailor’s wife in Portsmouth queues at the post office with two pieces of paper: a numbered Admiralty slip and her marriage certificate. The money is her husband’s ‘half-pay’, earned weeks ago on a ship far away, and it has to last a month. Next door, a dockyard man is paid every week, and a bell at the Main Gate rings him in and out of the yard that built the Dreadnought. The two households are put together from the records of those years: dockyard pay tables, a Board of Trade rent survey, the Admiralty’s figures in Parliament, a Landport priest’s memoir and the memoir of Agnes Weston of the Royal Sailors’ Rest. One street, two clocks — from the terraces of Portsea and Landport to the bombing of 1941 and what still stands today. 📌 What you’ll learn • Two houses, two budgets: four- and five-roomed terraces at 5s–6s a week (Board of Trade, October 1906), a dockyard labourer’s 19s–21s and a shipwright’s 33s–34s 6d (1905), an able seaman’s 1s 7d a day, and an average allotment of 30s a month in 1906 • The dockyard day: the muster bell of 1791 at the Main Gate, in-muster and out-muster, the 48-hour week, why an ‘established’ man with a pension earned less than a hired one, and the Dreadnought’s 69-hour weeks and her ‘year and a day’ • The waiting household: ‘half-pay’ and the two-month gap, the old walk to the dockyard pay office and the move to the post office in 1894, the Monday meetings at the Royal Sailors’ Rest, corsets and the Colour Loft, and three real Portsea households in the census of 1901 • What came next: separation allowances and weekly payments in the First World War, Jutland and the twenty streets of Buckland, sirens instead of the bell in 1922, the bombing of 1941, the post-war estates, and what still stands on the Hard, at Victory Gate and in Old Commercial Road Educational and historical content. 📚 Key sources • Robert R. Dolling, Ten Years in a Portsmouth Slum, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1896 • Agnes Weston, My Life Among the Bluejackets, London: James Nisbet, 1909 • Hansard, House of Commons debates, 18 March 1912 (Dockyard and Naval Employment) and 17 March 1914 (Mr Churchill’s statement on the Navy Estimates) • Melanie Bassett, The Royal Dockyard Worker in Edwardian England: Culture, Leisure and Empire, PhD thesis, University of Portsmouth, 2014 • Naval Dockyards Society, Twentieth Century Naval Dockyards: Devonport and Portsmouth Characterisation Report, part 3: Portsmouth Dockyard in the Twentieth Century, 2015 — and other sources. #BritishHistory #Portsmouth #Portsea #Edwardian #RoyalNavy #EverydayLife #Documentary ℹ️ About this video Educational and historical content. The script, research and editing are original work, based on the sources listed in the description. Some images are illustrative reconstructions created with the help of AI, not authentic photographs or recordings; archive photographs and stock footage are used where they exist. The narrator’s voice is AI-generated. The story is simplified for a general audience and may contain small approximations. Our aim is to tell it — and to keep it from being forgotten. 🕰️ Historical context The events described took place under legal and social conditions very different from today’s. They are presented to help us understand history, without any intention to justify or condemn any person, community or group.