Tracing a Ship’s Butcher
Q My grandfather, John Cooper, born 12 June 1879 in Waterloo, Liverpool, was a butcher. He normally worked in a shop, but on the birth certificate of a son in January 1916 his occupation is given as ‘Ship’s Butcher’.
How would I be able to find any details about his work during the war? I think he must have gone to sea as I have his old sea chest.
Maureen Evason
A There is good news and bad news here. The good news is that seafaring is one of the best recorded professions, with useful records going back well into the 18th century. I have had little difficulty in tracing my own seafaring ancestors and the boats they sailed back to 1790. There is a wide range of records both of seamen and their boats and ships. The bad news is that only a limited number have been indexed and are available online.
Searching crew lists
The main source for the period with which you are concerned is the crew lists of British registered ships. These were produced every six months and list all the crew members together with their rates of pay and details of former and subsequent ships. The nature of the voyage and places visited is also there. The problem is that no single repository holds all the records and very few are indexed by crew name – you need to know the name of the ship.
Where to look for crew lists
The majority of records are held at the Maritime History Archive in Newfoundland www.mun.ca/mha and they know the whereabouts of most of those they do not hold. They are indexing the 1881 lists online – the year having been chosen because it’s a census year. Lists for years ending in 0 and 5 are held at TNA or the National Maritime Museum.
The best starting point is the Crew List Index Project (CLIP) www.crewlist.org.uk – CLIP has indexed many of the crew lists that are at local record offices in the UK and also that for 1915. CLIP contains links to other sites which have data about seamen available online but in many cases there is a cost.
What can we tell?
Regrettably although there are many John Coopers I was unable to find one which matched your description either in the available online crew lists or the register of seamen’s tickets. I had hoped that maybe John would have been at sea in 1915 but apparently not. Only ships with a large number of crew or passengers would have carried a butcher whose job was to prepare joints of meat from carcasses, much as it is ashore. Smaller ships would have left the task to a cook. It points, therefore, to service with one of the companies running passenger liners from Liverpool such as White Star. That would enable you to narrow your search to the larger ships from that company. There will be a cost involved in obtaining the crew lists with no certainty of success.
Perhaps he was shore-based
More prosaically John may not have served at sea after all. Some companies supplying meat to ships described themselves as ship’s butchers. In that case he could have been working for a butcher dealing in victuals for ships and his job would not have been much different from ordinary butchering. If you look at street directories for the period that will give you an indication of which businesses he might have worked for. Generally it’s difficult to find out information about individual employees of a business but there’s always a chance the company’s records might survive in the local archive.
I had hoped the photo of John’s sea chest might provide a clue. Usually they’d carry the owner’s name and often more information and perhaps a painting of the ship but this is a plain one and may have been repainted at some time. As always local newspapers and the local family history society may be fruitful sources. DF