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farmers, one gamekeeper and one hundred and
twenty-two agricultural labourers. Six people were engaged in primarily
agricultural trades and eighteen in other trades, On the domestic front,
there were a governess, two nurses, three male servants and twenty-one
female servants. Of one hundred and eighty-two adults for whom no
occupation was entered, forty-one were credited with independent means.
Those lacking such affluence were mostly housewives.
By this time, the affairs of the poor of the district had
for some years been supervised by a Board of Guardians; the Board had
held its first meeting in 1836, when William Hodsoll had attended as the
representative of Ash and, if it was the same William Hodsoll, of
Kingsdown as well.1 The needs of the poor were catered
for by the hospitality, if that is the right word, of the Union
Workhouse, which had been formed by extending the old town workhouse on
West Hill at Dartford. Otherwise, the parish still remained very much of
a little self-governing republic, operating under the |
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aegis of the vestry and appointing its own unpaid
officials to attend to such matters as the policing of the parish, the
maintenance of the highways and the assessment and collection of the
various local rates.
The higher echelon of local government at that time was
constituted by the justices sitting at Quarter Sessions and there
dealing with matters administrative as well as judicial. The justices'
administrative functions continued until the formation of county
councils in 1888. Some civil functions of the vestry, which nowadays has
no function at all save the annual election of a churchwarden, lasted
until the establishment of parish and district councils under the Local
Government Act of 1894, but by then its powers had been much eroded. The
responsibility of the Ash vestry for providing a village constable had
gone as a result of the establishment, in 1857, of the Kent County
Constabulary. Subsequently, the consequences of the Highway Act of 1862
had led to alien hands taking over the roads. Whatever |