Agricultural hiring fairs – now largely forgotten –performed multiple social functions and were an intriguing aspect of rural life, writes Stephen Caunce.

Over the last three decades, long-established British newspapers have endured a steady dwindling of staff, depth of reporting and public respect. Paradoxically, however, the digitalising of old content has increasingly encouraged historical researchers, especially genealogists, to search out contemporary information. This account shows that utilising a sample of eight decades of items from the Hull Daily Mail, a respected regional title, allows scrutiny of a generally forgotten, but fascinating and potentially controversial, aspect of Victorian and Edwardian country childhood and adolescence which official archives almost entirely overlook...