BEING born in the workhouse was a tough start in life for any youngster towards the end of 19th century Southampton.

Joseph Henry Hurst came into the world on September 5, 1887 while his mother, Fanny, was living in the workhouse that once stood in St Mary Street.

By the early part of the 1900s a census shows that Joseph had by then moved to 12 Dock Street to live with his uncle, Charles Hurst, and he had joined the Gordon Boys' Brigade in Southampton.

Hampshire Heritage's feature earlier this week on the Gordon Boys reminded 25-year-old Stacey Trotman, from Hythe, of Joseph, one of her relatives she learned about while researching her family tree.

She said: "According to the information I have discovered, Joseph was the nephew of my great-great-grandfather, Charles, and that he was one of the Gordon Boys who were once based in Ogle Road.''

The brigade, an organisation formed in memory of General Gordon, the Governor General of the Sudan during the 1884 uprising, and who once lived in Southampton's Rockstone Place, provided work for local youngsters, especially as messenger boys.

Memories of the brigade figure in the Southampton City Council's book Chapel and Northam, that was compiled and edited by Sheila Jemima in 1991.

"Times were bad for boys in Southampton in those days, in the 1900s, so the brigade was started here,'' one unknown contributor to the book said.

"When I left school at 14, it was the only thing I could get with some other boys... Other kids from Chapel, Northam and Shirley. Quite a lot of big houses, or shops, might send for a Gordon Boy and the pay was sixpence (2.5p) for an hour's work, from which the brigade took two pence of it. Sometimes, if not many jobs came in, you would have stopped in the Ogle Road Brigade all day for a couple of coppers because there was quite a lot of boys there.''

Another former Gordon Boy said: "I used to take old ladies out in bath chairs, take blind ladies for a walk, deliver picture papers for all the picture houses, worked at washing, scrubbing, polishing, bill delivering.

"One job at the Dell was taking the results at half-time to the post office and at the cricket grounds doing the scorecards.

"We were treated like being in the Army with lance-corporals and sergeant-majors.''

For nearly 50 years the boys, in their distinctive uniforms and pill-box hats, were a familiar sight until their numbers dwindled and the brigade finally closed down in 1937.