National Events and Everyday Impact: A Family Perspective
- 19th May 2025
In our series of blogs marking the publication of the 1921 census, Tom shares his story. There had always been questions over his great grandfather’s upbringing. What unfolded was a sad story but would have been familiar to many families of that period.
Sidney Guise had a unique surname in Nuneaton, where he grew up in the 1920s. What had happened to his other family members? With the release of the 1921 census on Ancestry, Tom found answers and was able to get a glimpse into Sidney’s early years.
In 1921 Sidney, 12 years of age, lived on Arbury Road, Nuneaton, Warwickshire.
The head of the house was Sidney’s grandmother, Emma Hubbard, who presided over a house with three grown sons (Tom, William and Frank), Mary Ann (William’s wife), two granddaughters, Hannah Hubbard and May Riley and grandson Sidney. Sidney was the son of Emma’s late daughter, also called Emma. Eight individuals lived in a house of only five rooms.
According to the census, both of Sidney’s parents had died. Indeed, Sidney was orphaned at the age of 9, his mother having died in 1911, and his father being killed on the Western Front in 1918. He had been cared for by his grandmother since his father went off to war in 1914. His uncle, Thomas Hubbard, had not long returned from the war himself and was employed as a miner. Tom had suffered severe shrapnel wounds during the First World War and was still receiving treatment in 1921, at the time of the census. Another resident of the household, granddaughter May Riley had also lost her father; he died in 1913, the year of her birth. May’s mother was not listed as living with the family but as an inmate of the Nuneaton Union Poor Law Institution, reason unknown.
Both of Sidney’s uncles, Tom and Frank, were employed by the Tunnel Colliery Company but were out of work at the time of the census. Only his uncle William was earning a regular wage, employed by a different coal company. It is possible that they were out of work due to ‘Black Friday’ and the lockout of 1921. Over one million miners were ‘locked-out’ and unemployed at this time having refused drastic wage reductions after the First World War. Most would have returned to work by July 1921. Interestingly it was the threat of a general strike in support of coal miners that saw the 1921 census delayed from April to June 1921.
Sidney himself, once he was 14 years old, ended up working in the mines too.
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