Reason to move to west Wales in 1900?

[meaty]

How could two young persons from many miles away end up working on farms in west Wales around 1900?

James Seeley was born 1878 Clapham, but by 1904 hes in west Wales working on a farm -which must have been a polar-opposite experience to life in Clapham.

In 1904, in west Wales he married Amelia Ashman who in 1901 is down as being born Sussex 1882, but by 1901 she too was working on  a farm in west Wales.

I'm just wondering how might young people find themselves heading extreme west around 1900?There obviously was work but how did they know this before travelling or if the accommodation/work was satisfactory, I didn't know that hiring fairs had such a wide catchment?

Thanks

[Mabel Bagshawe]

It was well established by then that many posts were advertised in newspapers. They might have to take a punt on the conditions or how they'd get on with the employer.  it might also be arranged through connections of family or friends. For example there was a whole set of people from welsh farming families in the west who went up to London and ran dairy businesses

Much later I know but my mother went from Berkshire to work as a mother's help on a Pembrokeshire farm in the early 1950s

[Cas (stallc)]

1891 it looks like James & brother Thomas (from 1881 census) is in Somersetshire Certified Industrial Home for Boys, at Lyncombe and Widcombe, Somerset. (Registration District Bath)

1921 Amelia gives pob as Bath Somerset, which would fit with late September birthdate given in 1939

ASHMAN, AMELIA       - 
GRO Reference: 1882  D Quarter in BATH  Volume 05C  Page 589

Maybe this is how the couple met...

Cas
 

[Gadget]

As Mabel has said, Newspapers  were an important sources of employment ads.

In the early 1890s, with both parents dead, a cousin who lived in West Wales found a job in Cranbrook, Kent via this method. The opposite to your example.



Gadget

[KGarrad]

My grandparents were from Wiltshire and Kent; met and married in South Wales.
Married in 1918.

Grandfather and his brothers left Wiltshire (they were Ag Labs) to go firstly to coal mines in Bristol, then to Monmouthshire.
Grandmother's father couldn't find work in Kent, so moved to Monmouthshire after reading an ad in a newspaper.

In both cases, local jobs were hard to come by.

[Wexflyer]

Purity of Essence.

All that pollution and smog in London.

[meaty]

Thanks for your replies, which have shed light on the possibility, suggested by Cas, that they may have met in Bath! I had not considered that. If Amelia had responded to a newspaper ad, and headed west and found there to be vacancies, she could have informed James, by letter I guess?  And looking at details of the Somersetshire Home for Boys he may very well have been taught how to farm which will have made him very employable.

By the time of their marriage they were on farms only a few miles apart, so had they not met in Bath then presumably they would have learned of each others existence through word of mouth.

[coombs]

Adverts in papers or even in shop windows for work in another area, or word of mouth.

Mobility from one area to another in the country in our ancestors is much more common than you think.

[Top-of-the-hill]

  Like Gadget, I have an opposite example. My great aunt, who was locally in service in Kent around 1900, had a great friend there from Wales and they kept in touch for some time after the friend went home. (To Dolwyddelan, one of the few Welsh words I can pronounce.)