Kitabı oku: «Lost Voices of the Edwardians: 1901–1910 in Their Own Words»

CHILDHOOD
Nicholas Swarbrick

I was born in Grimsargh, Lancashire. My mother died quite early of tuberculosis. In those days tuberculosis was incurable, and it was rampant. I was about four when she died, so I never really had a mother. I had one sister and a brother and my sister died of the same disease. She was in her late teens or early twenties. Of course, in those days, consumption used to establish itself, then it became infectious, but it was not infectious in the early stages. It became infectious in my mother when I was about two, and for that reason we had to be kept away from her, which was a dreadful situation. I can remember having to keep some distance away on account of her coughing. So I never had the sort of mother where you could fly into her arms. That was the very thing I was never allowed to do. I didn't know any different, though.

Alfred Anderson

My two older brothers, Dave and Jack, were born in Chicago, because my father had been one of many Dundee men who got recruited to go and help with the building of Chicago, and my mother followed him out there. They came back to Dundee before I was born in 1896. My father continued as a joiner and undertaker and my mother went to work in the jute mill – like her four sisters. I remember in those days we had gas lamps for light and coal fires at home – and we lived on a hill, so the horse-drawn carts had to struggle up and down. I used to play outdoors, and one day I saw two soldiers coming down the road – it was 1902 and they were returning from the Boer War. They were so glad to be back; they picked me up and carried me on their shoulders down the road.

Albert ‘Smiler’ Marshall

My father, James William Marshall, was a farm labourer, and he married a local girl, Ellen Skeet. When I was very small, my father put me onto a wooden cart pulled by a billy goat. When I was two and a half, he put me on the goat's back. The goat didn't like that at first and he bucked me off. My father picked me up and showed me that if I sat facing the tail and kept my arms round him, I could stay on. After that, I progressed to a pony and later to a horse. On most Sundays, my father took me to Colchester to see the soldiers' parade for church. Each regiment had its own particular marching music and I can still recall most of them. What excited me was their red coats. Many of the soldiers had just returned from the Boer War and they were wearing all their medals. At one of the parades, my father was approached by a sergeant of the Devonshire and Somerset Yeomanry who wanted me to become their mascot, but he said no.

Bessy Ruben

I remember arriving in this country. We came from a little village near Lvov, Ukraine, and our passage was booked through an agent. How on earth people arrived here intact, with their family and their few goods, I don't know. We went by train as far as Bremen. As soon as we got there, Mother got lost. She had three children with her, two boys and myself. My younger brother wasn't very strong, and she carried him over her arm. She was twenty-six or twenty-seven at this time. I remember my mother just standing there, waiting. Everybody ran to meet this agent, and Mother couldn't run with the children. My older brother, Sam, was acting like her husband. He looked after her on the journey. She said to him, ‘We're lost. I've lost the people we're supposed to meet. What am I to do?’ ‘Well,’ my brother said, ‘go into that shop.’ And I remember the girl in the shop was jerking some lemonade into a glass, and Mother could speak German, and she went in and she began to cry. This girl said, ‘Just sit there for a while, and perhaps they'll come and look for you’ – which they did! This agent was just as anxious to find us as we were to find him, and I remember that she was so overjoyed at meeting this man that she took his hands and kissed them.

We got on this cattle-boat – that's all I can describe it as. There were a lot of girls from Hungary going to America, and they took me under their wing. I remember they gave me a bit of chicken to eat. Mother asked me what I was eating and I didn't know what it was – this lady gave it to me. My mother said, ‘Throw it away. It's trefa – it's not kosher.’ Mother was seasick for the whole journey – she didn't eat anything at all, not anything. When we finally arrived in England, I didn't speak any English – only Yiddish. We lived above a shop and she sent me down with a penny farthing, to buy a pound of sugar. I went in and asked for a fing of gemulenin sicha in my best Yiddish. And everybody in there burst out laughing. I didn't know why. I was so confused. I was only five years old and I stamped my foot and started crying. ‘Wo wus yachtielare?’ I shouted, which means ‘Why are you laughing at me?’ I walked slowly home to my mother with the money. ‘Where's the sugar?’ she asked. ‘I don't know,’ I said, ‘they just laughed.’

William Roberts

My brother died when he was very young. I remember playing under a table with him. We put a cover across and played tents. We really enjoyed that. When he died, a horse and cab came and took him away. I remember him being carried into the cab through a door at the side. I wasn't supposed to see it – I was very young. They buried him on the edge of the old town.

Bob Rogers

My mother had sixteen children. She had diseased kidneys from too many births. My oldest brother died at twelve months. My second eldest died at ten months. Only me and one sister grew up. My mother had so many miscarriages. In the end, it killed her. She died at the age of forty-six.

Fred Lloyd

I was born on 23 February 1898 at Copwood in Uckfield. There were sixteen of us in our family – I had eight sisters and seven brothers. My parents really loved children. My mother died when she was forty-three – I learned from one of my sisters that she died in childbirth. My father died soon after and they said it was from a broken heart.

Edith Turner

When my brother was three days old, my mother had milk fever. That's when a baby can't suck the milk from the mother and the milk goes to the brain where it causes something like meningitis. It came from worry, anxiety and unemployment. My mother was unstable. She didn't know what she was doing. She smacked my brother's bottom till it was blue, and he kept crying. The more he cried, the more she smacked him, and she couldn't feed him because we hadn't any milk. My father went to the Board of Guardians in Dalston. They sent a doctor to the house and the doctor made an order that my mother should be taken to Homerton Infirmary. So my mother was taken away with my brother strapped to her side on a stretcher. At the same time, a nurse carried my youngest sister downstairs because she was found to have double pneumonia. That left the rest of us with my father.

Jack Banfield

In my family, there were seven children as well as Mum and Dad. Two of the children died as babies. That was very common. When you got over the age of about ten, you were past the post. Until then, there was measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, scarlet fever, so many diseases.

Florence Hannah Warn

When a tiny child died, the cost of a funeral was beyond the pocket of a poor family, so an arrangement was made to bury the infant at the same time as an adult's funeral. In front of the glass hearse there was a little glass compartment running the width of the hearse, and the little coffin was placed there, and so buried in the adult's grave. We had a little brother, Gilbert, who died of pneumonia, and this was the form his burial took. None of us attended the funeral, but I remember we had black sashes to wear on our Sunday dresses.

Don Murray

When I was at school, every class had at least two or three children who were knock-kneed, bow-legged or hump-backed. There was something wrong with at least three or four in each class.

John Wainwright

I had a little sister who died when she was eight. She was out one day, watching my elder brother play football at the local ground. She got a terrible drenching and she finished up with pneumonia. She died soon afterwards.

Edith Turner

I was undernourished and I developed ringworm and eczema. All of my head was covered with sores. I was taken to Homerton Infirmary where all my hair was cut off and my head was covered with a cap and bandages to cover the sores. I was in a proper ward but I was shut away because I was contagious. The treatment was free and supported by voluntary contributions. When I was better and able to come home, my parents were unable to take me. So I was put into the Cottage Homes, which was a place similar to Doctor Barnardo's, where children that they thought were unwanted were cared for until the parents could take them again. There was a matron but I didn't learn any school there. It was more like jobs around the house.

Rosamund Massy

I shall always remember staying in a Salvation Army hostel in a shipping town in the North. Inside that house, run by a remarkable woman, there were many little girls living there for safety, having all been criminally assaulted. These poor little children were between eight and ten years of age and their little old faces were heartbreaking. One of them told us that she had never had a toy in her life.

Florrie Passman

I was involved with a day nursery, and I used to visit the mothers who had young babies, in their homes. They used to take them to the nursery at about two weeks old, until they were four or five. The little girls were dressed in pink, and the little boys in blue, and when they went home, the clothes they'd worn in the daytime were put into tubs and washed, and they went home in their own things, which had been fumigated. This was because in the rooms of the places they came from there were bugs on the walls. They were difficult to get rid of because there were so many children living together.

I can remember a Rabbi telling me, ‘Do you know, when I first came to England, I fell on my knees and I was kissing the earth. In Russia I was frightened to walk through a street in case I was going to be arrested – for doing nothing. But here you can walk about – you can laugh and talk – and no one's going to touch you here. What better place can you be in than in England?’

Mrs Landsman

I was in Petticoat Lane and I can remember seeing a child of about eight with no shoes and no stockings on, with his foot cut. A policeman picked the kid up and put him on his shoulder, and was carrying him to a hospital with blood pouring from his leg.

E. J. Dutch

I had appendicitis before the First World War. It used to be called congestion of the bowels, but then the King had it and they started calling it appendicitis.

Steve Tremeere

Mother had what they called a breakdown. She was taken queer and they took her straight over to the asylum, and she was there till she died at the age of fifty-four. Well, Father had been just an ordinary fisherman. He'd been brought up in the workhouse and he'd come out at thirteen and was apprentice to a trawlerman at Yarmouth. Well, he had to leave the sea and he went as a labourer. I was eighteen months old. There was my sister four years older than me and my brother Reggie in between. Aunt Maria, she wanted to take the girl, and Annie wanted to take Reggie, but Father said no. ‘I'll bring them up all on my own,’ he said.

Any rate, I went to school when I was three and a half. We wore petticoats then and we were left in another room, and we all played together. It wasn't supervised by a teacher. Sometimes older girls looked after you. Sometimes my sister came down there for an hour and looked after us.

I went to St Mary's School when I was six. Our teacher was an old spinster – a proper martinet, but she had a heart of gold. In her desk there was always an apple or orange or something which she cut up in little bits for us. Then we went up to the big school at eleven. You had exams then, and you had to get so many before you could go up into the next class. If you didn't get that, you stopped down there. I know some boys that stopped in number one till they left school at fourteen. We had one teacher who could take everything – every subject the whole of the year. Within a fortnight he knew every boy, and within one month he had you all weighed up. Them what could get on with their work used to go up the back of the class. All what were backward he had down in front of him. Always forty, forty-five boys in one class.

We were harum-scarums. It didn't matter about clothes – there was no school uniform then. As long as your hands and face were clean, that was it. You could go to school and you'd see some boys with a pair of trousers on and you wouldn't know what was the original cloth, it was patched so much. The only thing he looked at was your face and your neck and your hands. If he caught you, you went out to the wash-house. It was cold water – and you washed yourself, too. If you didn't wash he'd send a couple of older boys to wash you.

Elsie Beckwith

I remember holding my parents' hands as we walked into the hall, and we got seats downstairs. There was a sort of platform, and this boy was there. I thought his father was there – there was someone with him anyhow – but I was just a kid and I wasn't interested much. This boy said he was going to speak about salvation, and he took as his text ‘How can we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?’ I was only a kid, I was just listening, but I remember the text because my father wrote it down, he was an awful fellow for writing things down, he used to read them over and over again. I used to get it off, and mother said, ‘Oh yes, that was the boy preacher. Hebrews 2.’

It was just a boy preaching, but everybody was talking about it at the time. It was at Howard Hall, a picture hall, I think, they had taken it over just for that Sunday evening. It was unusual, that's why people were so interested. They came from different chapels, Presbyterians, all kinds of things.

It was unusual to see a black person. If they came in on the boat they kept to where the boat was, the lower parts of North Shields, where the quay is. That's where they went into lodgings. As a child you weren't allowed to go there. Clive Street was terrible, the people living there would frighten you.

Steve Tremeere

Hard to believe, but poor or not, beggars an' all, we all went to Sunday school. It was a sprat to catch a mackerel. You had a stamped card. If you went to school on Sunday, the teacher would stamp it with a star. You had to have so many stars before you qualified to go to the school treat in the summer. Father used to give us whatever he could muster then – generally sixpence. We'd all go down there in Chitty and Mannering's carts, what they used to cart the flour about in. They used to fill them up with us kids and take us all the way up the town to where the mill is, along the river bank there. At the back was all fields, and that'd be where we had the treat – muffins and bits of bread and lumps of seed cake and one thing and another. Then there would be little sports as your ages went up. You got a little memento, and there were little stalls where you could spend your tanner. Farthing worth of dosh – toffee. It used to be wrapped up in newspaper. You could never get it off the paper once she'd wrapped it.

Anne Taylor

If you wanted a doctor you had to go round to one of these church people and get this form to fill in and take that down to the doctor's. Then he pleased himself whether he came or not. No welfare state then. If you hadn't got a ticket and you hadn't got half a crown, he wouldn't come in the house and look at you. The most dangerous things were diphtheria and scarlet fever when we were kids. Everybody had a dose of senna pods or brimstone and treacle every week. Kept you healthy – regular. For colds we used to have to go down to the chemist for two penn'orth of Friar's Balsam, penn'orth of aniseed and a penn'orth of sweet nitre. Father would get a spoonful of sugar and put three drops on it. Two drops for us kids, three for him. Your cold was cured. In the winter he'd get Russian tallow and he used to rub it on our chests, and since our clothes weren't thick, he'd wrap sheets of brown paper round us.

There were children, some was starved. You could see the poor little buggers – they come out with rickets – irons on their legs. Or you might be playing with this girl, same age, and when she got about twelve, you could see it coming, consumption. That was very rife amongst them. Any rate, most kids weren't so big as now, because they never had free milk or anything like that. Half of them never had dinners – but we always got one good one at the weekend.

Billy Brown

On a Saturday night that bedroom window was our look-out. The parents would think we were asleep, but we'd get up there and watch all the old women down there, all chin-wagging. If there was a fight we could watch it in the grand circle without anybody interfering with us. We often got up there in the middle of the night and had a look. There was a big lodging house out the back of us – Irish navvies in it, all sorts while they was building the breakwater. Irish navvies and their women. You should have heard the language of them! No wonder we learnt it when we was little. Drink – fight among theirselves. Then you'd see the old women popping down there every half-hour – sometimes less than that – penn'orth of porter. In the pub at the bottom or else the one over the other side of the road – The Cause Is Altered. They drunk more beer indoors than what the old man drunk outside. Then they used to shout at him because he'd been drinking!

Don Murray

My dad used to do everything wrong. He went with the choir one weekend to a cricket match. He only went as a spectator, but they were a man short so they decided he should keep wicket. He had no flannels and he decided not to take his bowler hat off. Well, the ball came to him and instead of using his hands, he stuck the hat out and the ball shot straight through it. When he came home that night, he stood in the doorway as drunk as he ever could be, with this little lid on top of his broken hat and a lot of sausages hanging out of his coat pocket down one side. He'd bought them for Mum as a gift offering to keep her sweet. She took one look at him and called him a damned fool. He looked at her. ‘What have I done wrong now, my dear?’ he asked. He was a very funny man. He was a very good singer, too. He used to sing in the pubs on the Saturday night. Mum would go down there to listen and when they came home they'd quarrel. I used to lay in my bed shivering, dreading them coming home and quarrelling.

Reece Elliott

In those days we were lucky if we had one pair of boots – no shoes, dear me. Many a time we walked with two odd uns. People who were well off would hoy them out over the wall, we used to get them and pick all the good uns out, you'd be maybe running about with a six and a seven, or maybe a seven and a nine.

My father cut my hair, and you know what he used to cut my hair with? Horse clippers. He was in with the horsekeeper at the pit, who used to give him big combs, when they were too bad for the horses. They had that many teeth broken, they used to give them to my father. You can imagine what that was like, sitting on the bloody cracket, getting your hair cut, all off, little bit top left, aye, the yakkers cut! Just a bit left on top. With the teeth being broken, he must have gone o'er the bugger umpteen times, like a bad cut in a cornfield! I used to be laughing when he was doing us. Sitting there squawking and scringing. My mother, not showing sympathy, would say, ‘Be canny, you bugger, sit still!’ Especially our Lance, he had a cowlick, Father says, ‘I cannot do nowt with this bugger, it'll all have to come off!’

Bessy Ruben

My friend Dinah's mother had a cheese stall down Petticoat Lane every day except Saturdays. I used to go with Dinah to collect this cheese. One day, we dawdled along, taking our time, and we changed dresses, like children do. I put her dress on and she put mine on. Her mother was waiting for us to come back, and when we finally arrived, she mistook me for Dinah and clouted me. I said, ‘I'm not Dinah!’ and she said, ‘Never mind, you're just as bad!’

Tom Kirk

In 1908, my father died. I went to the reception after his funeral, where I was reprimanded by Uncle Harold for kicking a football about the lawn. ‘Tom, please, NOT at a time like this!’ Sadly, I realise that I had seen so little of Father in the preceding year that his death meant little.

Jim Crow

When Mother died, Father got married again, and it was disastrous. She drank like a fish. I remember my father visiting my grandfather at his house in Lincolnshire and bringing the second wife with him. We were in the sitting room, having lunch, when my grandfather turned to my father and said, ‘Jack, I don't think much of your choice.’

Jack Banfield

On the way home from school, one of the routines was to pick up what bits of wood you found along the wharves on the Thames, so that when you got indoors, Mum'd be able to light the fire. When I got in, Mum'd say ‘Your dad's not been in, he must be working. Go round to the wharf and see.’ So we went to where he was working and he'd say, ‘Yes. We're working till seven o'clock. Fetch me a jug of tea.’ So I'd take him a jug of tea and wait outside the back gate. When he'd finished the tea, he'd give me the jug back and there'd be some ripe bananas in it, off one of the ships, for us to have for our tea.

Freda Ruben

I didn't have any new clothes and I used to cry about it. My friends Fanny and Florrie used to go to Petticoat Lane to buy lovely dresses, and I wanted one. My mother said she'd got no money. I cried and cried – but I never got anything. If I wanted a farthing, I used to cry for it and not get it. I remember crying myself sick because I wanted one of those peppermints shaped like a walking stick. My mother wasn't impressed. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘cut my throat.’ ‘I want a walking stick,’ I wailed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you can't have it.’

Ethel Barlow

Dad was an engine driver. He drove a steam train between Plaistow Station and Aldgate East. My brothers used to wait for him and he'd take one at a time on his engine for a little ride. When he came past our house on the goods train, he used to toot us up and my mother would come out to the garden and he'd thrown her a side of bacon and a huge lump of coal for our fire. That happened very often. There was a lot of pilfering like that. One day he came home and he had about ten pairs of new boots in his bag. We all had a pair. Another day, he came home with six bottles of whisky and gin. He hid them in the coal cupboard underneath the boards. He used to come home with all sorts of things: thirty bars of Fry's Chocolate Cream, a bag full of crabs and shrimps, all sorts. It helped us a lot – his wages was only £2.10 shillings. Every day of his life he went to work on bread and cheese and a can of tea. The railway police came to us once but they didn't find anything. My cousin Frank was also an engine driver and he lived round the back of us. The railway police went in his house and his wife tried to hide all the bottles but the police heard them clinking and they locked him up. He lost his job.

My mother was nearly always drunk, so I used to take my three brothers out of the house when I got home from school. One day, when my dad got home from work, he couldn't find my mother anywhere. We went out into the garden to see if she was there and we found her in the chicken shed on the ground, blind drunk, all the chickens running over her. So he picked her up, fetched her indoors, washed her and put her to bed nice and clean. He never said a word to her about it, not an angry word ever. He had the patience of a saint.

Arthur Harding

Every night, there were children in the pub all night long until the Liberal Party stopped it, and that was as late as 1911.

Mary Keen

On the Sabbath, I used to wake up with an awful feeling that something terrible had happened. There was just a feeling in the air. You daren't laugh and all your toys and books had to be put away. My father used to sit with a newspaper while we washed, tidied up the house and got ready for church. I had one special frock for Sunday and a top petticoat. In those days, I was bundled up from the top down to my boots. This petticoat had a starched top which used to cut into my neck. It was so painful that when it got to tea time, I would look at the clock, thinking, ‘God, only another two hours before I go to bed.’ I was so glad to take that thing off. At church, we sat in a pew and I would pass the plate, and if we were flush, one of us would put a ha'penny in, otherwise we put nothing in. I told a vicar once how I hated Sundays. I think I shocked him. After church, we had to go to Sunday school. In the evening, we were allowed out, but we were never allowed to ‘hang about’ as Father called it. We had to go for a walk and I used to like going to Kensal Green cemetery. I used to watch the people weeping and putting flowers on the graves and I used to think it must be lovely to be dead.

Ernest Hugh Haire

I can remember our Sundays. My parents were great churchgoers. Father wore a frock coat and a tall hat and Mother wore leg-o'-mutton sleeves. We went to morning service and evening service and I went to Sunday school in between. People used to come to our house after church in the evening to have refreshments. We had cold meats, jellies and blancmange. Our friends brought music with them and we sang round the piano.

Ronald Chamberlain

I was brought up in a very strict environment. On one occasion, I went round to the home of a schoolfellow and he played some rather doubtful comic records on his gramophone. I went home and relayed these to my parents with great glee and was immediately told that I must never go to that place again. There was great strictness about table manners. No elbows on the table. Don't put food in your mouth when it's already full. Don't speak while you're eating. We always said grace before and had to ask permission to leave the table. Similarly, there were very strict rules in regard to the treatment of ladies. We had to open doors for them, let them go before us and walk on the roadside when they were out with us. The way we were dressed as children was very restrictive. At the age of five or six I had a velvet suit with an elaborate lace collar, and I can remember how uncomfortable it was.

Albert ‘Smiler’ Marshall

Manners were very important in those days. If the boys didn't raise their caps and the girls curtsy to the gentry, then we were given a lesson in manners.

Mrs G. Edwards

There was a lot of crime going on in those days. I was always warned never to speak to anybody and never to take money or sweets from anybody I didn't know. I remember walking in Thornton Heath and a man came the other way, carrying a big bag of coal. As he passed me, he knocked my head and I started to cry. He offered me a penny but I wouldn't take it. That frightened me far more than the bump on the head.

Ella Grace Hunt

My mother used to keep a cane on the table, and if we didn't behave ourselves she said we would get ‘Tickle Toby’. That's what she called the cane – ‘Tickle Toby’. Well, for the most part we were very well behaved.

Thomas Henry Edmed

We lived in a millhouse on an estate owned by the chairman of the National Provincial Bank. Father was a labourer on the estate. He had been a colour sergeant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He was paid eighteen bob a week, from which he had to pay four bob rent. That left mum with fourteen shillings, for seven children. She had a hell of a time making this money go round. We used to get wood from the estate. We had a big brick oven and mother used to get flour in by the sack and she baked all her own bread. For clothes and shoes, we were always on our uppers. Father had a pension from the Fusiliers. He got seven pound every three months, which would have helped, but the trouble was he used to spend most of it at the tavern.

Edith Turner

While my mother was in hospital with my brother and sister, my father had the opportunity of selling papers to earn himself a few coppers. When he was out doing this, I was locked in a room at home so that I couldn't come in contact with the landlord. The landlord would knock on the door, and when he got no answer he tried to open the door to get in. I used to lie on the floor and watch him to see when he went away.

Mrs G. Edwards

When we were little, my mother would fill the bath in the kitchen and bathe us in there. One day, she brought in a saucepan of boiling water and poured it into the bath, and when she went off to get some cold water, my younger sister fell backwards into the bath. My mother took her to the doctor straight away but he wouldn't have anything to do with it and told mother to take her to St Thomas's Hospital. We didn't think she was going to live. My father came home and when he heard, he was in an awful way and went straight to the hospital. After he left her, he was walking away when he heard her crying. He rushed back again and he found her in the ward with nobody with her and he made an awful fuss about it. He said he wouldn't leave her there. They told him that if he took her away, he'd be responsible for her death. So he left her in the end, but he told my older sister Nellie, who was about fourteen at the time, to go to the hospital to talk to the nurses to try and get them to take an interest in my little sister. She lived, but her back's been all scarred ever since.

Tom Kirk

In 1905 I remember a great adventure – a visit to London! I still remember the smell of leather seats and the swishing of the horses' tails as we went along Station Road. I remember Father's remarks on the train as we neared Peterborough. ‘Look out on the right and you may see a red Midland and Great Northern train racing us!’ The following day, we went to Brixton to pick up a tram into the City, but the electrical supply had somehow failed, and when the tram finally appeared it was pulled by a horse.

Dorothy Scorey

Mother said we all had to have a trade, because she was left a widow when she was in her forties and she said that if we were ever left like her, you have to have something you can put your hand to. She was so blooming strict with us. ‘Any of my girls bring trouble home to me, the workhouse you'll go.’ That's what she used to say. She wouldn't let us out after ten o'clock, and if we were talking to a boy, she'd come up and say, ‘I don't thank you boys for keeping my girls out at night time!’ I always used to say, ‘We'll never get married, any of us!’

Ernest Hugh Haire

We had a servant who lived in. Her name was Bridget and we used to call her Biddy. She was a delightful Irish person who kept us in order as children. Her husband was a sailor with the Cunard Line. He lived with us too when he was home from sea, and did odd jobs for Father. He made all sorts of toys for us. They were marvellous people. We had another woman there for a time who was paid £8 a year.

Mary Keen

My father was a very hateful kind of man. None of us liked him. He ruled us with a rod of iron. We were afraid to speak or laugh. He thought we were a lot of dummies. He always rowed with my mother for no reason at all. We'd be sitting at the table, having our meal, and he'd glare at her, then he'd start swearing and cursing and he'd fling up the window and shout out, ‘I'm going to let everyone know what you are! You're a so-and-so and a so-and-so!’ His language was filthy. Then he'd go out for a walk and he'd come back and he'd be as right as rain. I think he was a bit mad. One morning we woke up and found that he was gone. We were rejoicing, but he'd only gone hop picking in Kent.

Jack Brahms

I was twelve when my mother died and after that I had to fathom for myself. Father couldn't do much for me. He used to make me go to the synagogue every morning and evening but apart from that he wasn't interested. He might have made a meal at the weekend but most of my meals were a ha'p'orth of chips from Phillips, the fish and chip shop in Brick Lane. I'd sit on my doorstep and eat it. Or else, I'd go to the soup kitchen to get a can of soup and a loaf of bread. I used to go to McCarthy's lodging house because they had a fire burning there and I'd have a warm-up. I had to bring myself up.

Daniel Davis

I had an aunt in Rothschild Buildings – Aunt Bessy, and she was very orthodox. Her eldest son was a cripple and he used to sit on a settee all day. He used to sleep there and eat there and everything. It was terrible to go into that place because he used to do his business in the room. You used to think twice about going up there.

William George Holbrook

On Saturdays I worked for my grandfather. He was a mean man. He was a greengrocer with a ginger beard and he used to pay me a shilling for the day. I had to walk to his house about four miles away through the fields. In those days there were no houses beyond Romford. So I spent Saturday making deliveries in his greengrocer's van to the people he knew in Romford. And when I went back to his house at night, he gave me a shilling. He used to keep his money in a bag that he kept in the scales. So I would say, ‘Grandfather! A lady would like to see you!’ and while he was gone, I used to pinch his money. He didn't know. When I got home, I shared it with my older brother and sister. Once, I bought fifteen shillings' worth of fireworks with it. When I left the job to start work on a farm, my younger brother took it on. When he came home the first Saturday, I said, ‘Tom, he keeps his money in a bag in the scales.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know.’ Tom worked it out on the first day. I took a year to find out. The funny thing was, just before he died, I went to his shop in Romford and on his deathbed he gave me a gold watch. And I was the one who stole from him.

Bill Smartson

Every Saturday, before I started at the quarry, I used to go over to Ravensworth golf course caddying for the golfers. I got on caddying for a chap, Mr Nixon, he got me to wait every Saturday, and I carried his golf clubs, and I used to clean them after the match with emery paper. He would come out the golf house and say there's four shillings, take that home to your mother and there's sixpence for yourself. Well, out of that sixpence I could go to the pictures for tuppence, buy a bottle of pop for a penny, and get a three-ha'penny paper of fish and chips. I used to give my mother the four shillings on the Saturday. Many a time she was waiting on me coming back, and as soon as she got the money, she was away off to the butcher to get a bit of meat for the Sunday. There was about nine of a family, I was the eldest of nine. Hard days.

Harry Matthews

Pretty nigh every morning when we got to school, first thing the master used to say was, ‘Come out the boys that have been on the breeze lumps’ – picking over rubble for small pieces of coal to burn. There'd be about four or five from Oare and some from this way, and we used to go out and stand in front of him, and he used to send us home to have a wash and clean up, because we smelt so where you'd been on the breeze. Whether you'd been on it or not, when he said that, you went up, because that meant we never used to go back to the breeze till after dinner. Pretty nigh every morning, out we used to troop. I always used to be there.

I've been out here before it was daylight and I can remember raking the snow off once to get some breeze to have indoors for a fire. I've been out there and got that before breakfast of a morning, the firing what comes out of the breeze what they used to burn the bricks with. A policeman caught two of us getting this coke and we had to go up over the market in the court house – but we got off with it.

Kitty Marion

Strange how one learns the bad parts of a language most easily. I came home one day, having taken the baby for an airing, and cheerfully hailed my aunt with, ‘You bloody bugger!’ She was shocked and horrified. Where had I heard such dreadful language! I didn't know it was bad. I had passed two men in the street and one slapped the other on the shoulder laughing, using that expression. I thought it was something nice and friendly.

Ethel Barlow

I remember the Penny Bazaar. We called it the bazaar. There was nothing over a penny. You could get a lovely silver bracelet, a silver ring, earrings. When I bought a pair of the earrings, my dad used to say, ‘Take them out your damned earholes and put one through your nose. You see! She ain't ours! She's come from the gypsies! They've changed her!’ He always swore blind I came from the gypsies. I had long curly hair when I was small, but then I had concussion of the brain and they cut off all my hair.

Once my mum and dad were invited to a ball, because my dad worked on the railway. My dad had to buy a rubber collar and a V-front that looked as if he was wearing a white shirt. My mother bought a straw boater that cost sixpence. She bought a black veil and a pair of gloves. Her blouse was years old with a collar of lovely lace. She had a lovely long feather boa round her shoulders. I don't think she had any pants on because she hadn't got any. None of us had. She curled her hair and she looked beautiful. All us kids were left behind that night with no food, so we raided the cupboard to look for all the dry crusts of bread. We found some sugar and we dipped the crusts in hot water and then dipped them in the sugar and we had a feed.

Helen Bowen Pease

On my eighteenth birthday, Mother walked out on us. It was pretty shattering. She was an odd person. She stuck to Father as long as she stuck to anyone. Father was only just forty and it was all excessively upsetting. I had six younger brothers and sisters and it was extremely difficult to explain to Father's friends that the last thing we wanted was to be handed over to our mother. Father was our principal protection. Mother was as hard as nails – or diamonds – because she had a certain brilliance. We had to fight it out in the law courts because she tried to take us children. I gave evidence, and it must have been quite a shock to the judge because Mother's father was a very famous judge.

Lillah Bonetti

My mother became a widow at twenty-three, leaving her with me. Then she married again. When I was fifteen, I decided that Southampton wasn't the town for me. I'd read about white slavery. I thought how lovely it would be, to be adopted or taken away or kidnapped. My mother was horrified when I said I wanted to go as a nursemaid to a family living in France. She tried to put me off, but being the rebel that I was – and red-headed – I decided I knew best. So I went over to France, resplendent in my nursemaid's uniform, thinking I was the cat's whiskers. I was there for two years. I learned French, which has never done me much good. I was a rebel.

John Wilkinson

After my brother was born, my mother died, so my father was landed with two little boys. We had no other women in the family but our two aunts, so they offered a very happy solution, that we should go and live with them in South Shore, Blackpool. So I went in 1898, and we went to Raggett's kindergarten and then to Arnold School.

I remember a day's fishing trip in January 08. We'd been on our bikes to Garston, fishing in the river there, and I got the biggest fish I'd ever seen in my life. We wrapped it in some newspaper and I put it across my handlebars. Frank Raynor worked in the newsagent shop, so I asked him to weigh the fish for me. And it was five pounds! I was thrilled. Just as I was leaving, Frank said, ‘Jack, have you seen this? It's a new book we've just got in.’ It was called Scouting For Boys by Baden-Powell, and I thought, ‘This is something new.’

I could hardly put it down and I read it through three times that night, and before the end of the evening I decided that I was going to get some lads together and join the Boy Scouts. There was no Army about it – never military – it was quite the reverse. It was the outdoor life, camping and cooking, birds and animals, and singing. I wrote out the first chapter that night, and put down a list of chaps I was going to ask to join. And when I'd finished with them, they were as enthusiastic as I was. I'd copied the chapter out and we made more copies from that over the weekend. We had a meeting every day that week, I got these chaps red-hot on scouting. It was out of this world. We formed our little patrol in the next six days. I had seven or eight people and I made myself the patrol leader. We picked on the name of Lions, as I thought it was a good sturdy animal, and in any case I couldn't make many animals' noises – but I could roar.

We sent fourpence for a dozen membership cards to the head office. Our first outing was the first weekend – we didn't waste any time – we were getting down to it. We were never short of things to do. We could walk up to the cliffs and all round was fields. Then sometimes if we were at my end of Blackpool, we could go down in the sandhills with the wildlife. We used to camp in the hills, not far from home, and we'd all got bicycles. We did all the usual things, and in the summer we went fishing and scouting and signalling and we collected cigarette cards and football cards.

We did all right for uniforms – we were in short trousers anyway, and we could always get short khaki or blue trousers, and a green shirt. My aunts made the shirts. When I went to Cheshire I made my own uniform – I got my tailor's badge for that.

Ernest Taylor

We used to watch the shrimpers bringing their long poles in, and one lot of them had a little shop where they would boil their shrimps and sell them. To get to their shop you'd go round in front of the fort and up the ladder. Sometimes you'd find a body washed up – and that used to put me off shrimps a bit. Of course the only thing to do was feel in his pockets to see if there was any money. You'd put your hand in his pocket and all these little things would run over you – they were shrimps, and you were eating these shrimps, and they were eating him. If you found a two-bob piece or a couple of coppers in his pockets, then you were well in. We would go back up the shore and tell the bobby on the dock gates there was a body down there. Then there would be a bit of a commotion, while we would walk around the docks and see what we could pinch. We only found two or three bodies, but they reckon there was one every day of the week.

Edward Slattery

I was born in Bacup, Lancashire, on 21 December 1891. It was a traditional valley mill town and cotton was still king. It was a world of cloth-capped men and women in shawls who wore wooden clogs with irons on the heels that clattered and sparked on the cobbled streets.

I was the first of thirteen children. Only six of us survived childhood. My mother, Maggie, was a short, stout woman – five feet tall and eighteen stone – of Scots and Irish descent. She had many friends among the neighbours, the doors of our house were always open and anyone in need always found solace from Maggie, either in money to lend, goods to pawn, or hunger and thirst to quench. It was there for the asking without any question.

At eight years of age I would look after my brothers and sisters whenever my parents went out. When they became ill, I often rocked them to sleep in the cradle through the long winter nights. They might have measles, scarlet fever or whooping cough. My mum and dad would stoke up the fire with coal and slack and make me comfortable in a large rocking chair, giving me instructions to wake them should my brothers or sisters get worse during the night. They then locked the doors and went to bed. As soon as they left I would tremble with fear – what frightened me was the expectation of a ghost coming from the dark passage near the stairway to the bedroom. Our house was built on the hillside underneath another building and the stairway, which was wet and dark, ran up behind the dining-room wall like a railway tunnel.

I shall never forget the sight of my twin brother and sister, James and Sarah, suffering with the croup. My mother got some stiff brown paper and covered it with goose grease, then heated it before the fire and placed it on their chests and necks, but they screamed more and more, and looked as if they were choking. When morning came, she sent me for the priest – she had more faith in his treatment than the doctor. Anyway, prayers or medicine, it made no difference, my brother and sister died just the same.

Six of my siblings died before they could walk – somebody seemed to come or die at our house every year when I was a boy. I was eleven when I first learned where babies came from. My mother was preparing to bake our weekly 20 lb of dough, when she started to scream for me to run and ‘fetch Mary O'Donnell and tell her I am sick’. Mary lived a few doors away. She was not a certified midwife, but all the children around knew that she brought babies from somewhere. They loved her and thought she was an angel.

When she heard my message, she ran to my mother, and I followed. My mother lay on some papers spread out on the floor, which seemed to be covered with messy blood, and Mary was pulling a baby from her belly. She told me to go out and play for a while. I was reluctant – I thought my mother might die. However, I returned soon after and Mary had cleaned my mother up and put her in bed with the baby. She told me to put more coal on the fire and make the house warmer. She said, ‘Your mother is asleep, and she has brought you another little sister.’

Harrison Robinson

I was born in 1892 in Burnley. I had four sisters and a brother, but my brother died of appendicitis when he was ten. My dad worked at the gasworks – he was a labouring type of chap from a farming family in Yorkshire. My mother never went out to work. My mother went into service at Kettlewell when she was eight years old. After that she never went back home on her holidays. She left service to get married.

I went to Alder Street School until I was twelve. Then I went in the mill half-time, mornings one week and afternoons the week after, with school the rest of the time. The doctor had to pass you as fit when you went, but it was a bit of a farce. He came to the mill – and everybody passed.

We weren't tired at school when we were working half-time and we had no homework. But we had tests we had to pass. I was very good at sums and arithmetic. I used to go to the corner of the class and teach the dunces how to do their sums. I left school when I was thirteen.

Bill Owen

In those days you only had to see a policeman and you'd run. You hadn't done nothing – but you still ran. You were terrified of the police, and there used to be some tough customers. In the coal yards by us there used to be some battles on Saturday nights. There were houses off Maynard Street and there were steps and railings – I've seen the police getting knocked over those railings.

Polly Oldham

My father was a labourer with Blackburn Corporation and my mother stayed at home. There were eight of us children – Harry, Jim, Jo, May, me, Frances, who died of diphtheria, Ethel, who died of TB, and Albert. There were two years between us all.

We lived in a two-up, two-down, in Hannah Street, Blackburn. We all lived there, but some got married and moved out. We were all very happy, although we weren't well off – Dad was a labourer, boiling the pitch all round Blackburn.

We had a wash boiler and Dad used to make broth in it. It tasted good. He used to put sheep's heads in, big lumps of beef, and vegetables and barley and dumplings. Then we'd go round the street giving out broth and sometimes patty cakes to the old girls.

Every child they had made it that much harder for my mother, because there was just the one wage coming in. Some of the children were at school when I was born, and within a fortnight she was back washing and so on. The older lads and my dad looked after the family for those weeks.

I started work when I was twelve – half a day at the mill, half a day at school, then I went full-time when I was thirteen. I had a bad arm, and I had to go to the infirmary every twelve months and have it scraped. They wanted to take my arm off, and my mother said, ‘What chance has she if you don't?’ ‘Well, just as much chance as she has now.’ So she said, ‘Leave it on, then. We'll risk it.’

We used to play games with old buttons, and we used to have wooden hoops which you put round your neck or waist, and then swing them. Then we played tips – rounders. You'd hit the ball with your hand and run, and they'd try to hit you before you got to the next stop. We played in the street, and the organ-grinder used to come round once a week, and we'd go and dance on the flags to the music. The boys used to dance as well. Then a rag-and-bone man used to come round with a peep show. You'd give him rags, then he'd let you look through a little hole, while he was pulling a string to make these dolls dance.

We had a good wash before we went to bed. We had no bath, so we used a big bread mug. Mother used to bath us and Father used to wipe us – girls one night, lads another. We washed our hair every week in the sink, and then she'd put Rankin's ointment on – ooh it did stink! Our lads used to say, ‘Is it sassafrass night? We're going out.’ It smelled like sarsaparilla but very strong, it was to stop you getting nits. She wouldn't let us go to school with Rankin's ointment on, but she used to put it on Friday nights, then she'd wash our hair on Sunday before we went to school on Monday. She was a very clean woman – spotlessly clean. We had sand on the floor, but you could have eaten your dinner off it when she swept that sand up, and the bedroom boards were white – she used to struggle with bleach and water.

At Christmas we used to hang our stockings up, and we'd get a toffee pig, an apple and an orange, a bar of chocolate and a little toy – and you could buy a little doll then for tuppence, with a black head, and she'd give us girls bits of rags to make clothes for them. The boys would get a whistle or a flashlight – something like that, and a new penny. She'd make a rabbit pie with some beef in – I used to like the head. I used to like picking it over.

I had rheumatic fever when I was eleven and I was ill for a long time then. I went to Blackburn Infirmary and I got St Vitus Dance – they had to strap me down. You never hear of it any more.

When I was fourteen we moved to Providence Street next to the Co-Op – to a house with a bath! We wanted more room and it had three bedrooms. The toilet was outside, and downstairs we had the front room, a hallway and a kitchen.

Father was a great fellow – marvellous. He used to like a pint, but he'd do anything for his kids. When the fair came to Blackburn, the marketplace was full of horses that went up and down on a carousel. Then there was the cakewalk – all of it run by steam engines. There were huge swinging boats with each side holding fifty people. They were on big pulleys, and there were also swinging boats for two, where you had to pull yourself up, and on the ground there was hoop-la stalls. You could buy peanuts, hot chestnuts, popcorn and black peas. They used to sell lotus in the shop – you could chew it. It was like a big piece of root – like liquorice to chew on, but you'd spit it out – not swallow it.