Nat Gould

Ruth Middleton 1850-1909

Ruth Middleton was born in 1845 at Tideswell in Derbyshire, the daughter of John Middleton and his wife nee Elizabeth Collis 1818-1885.

In 1861 she was living with her parents and siblings at Back Lane in Tideswell. Her father had been a carrier, running a weekly service between Tideswell and Chesterfield, but his business had gone and he was then employed as a railway labourer.

Aged only eleven years Ruth Middleton was working in a cotton factory, presumably one of the mills established in the nearby Wye valley, and was similarly employed when the Censuses were taken 1871 and 1881

By 1891 she was in the Bakewell Union Workhouse, recorded in 1901 as being a domestic servant, and was there until she died in 1909. She was 58 years of age.

The Bakewell Union Workhouse had been built in 1841. When Ruth Middleton was first recorded there in 1891 there were 73 male inmates and 66 females, totalling 189, plus twelve vagrants. Although it can hardly have been pleasant to live in, Bakewell Workhouse was less gloomy and forbidding than many such places. The building still stands in Baslow Road, and is today the Newholme Hospital.

Bakewell Workhouse in about 1905