Lost Voices of the Edwardians: 1901–1910 in Their Own Words

Each season used to have its game. There'd be marbles, and in springtime when the days were getting longer, we used to come down to the village with hoops. The boys used to have iron ones, but the girls had wooden ones, and we used to have the middle size, I think it used to cost fourpence with a stick. We'd come down the road before school – there was very little traffic then and it was just horse traffic – and then go up the road and come back again. And then there'd be ball games in the wintertime. Also in the winter my mother would dress up with my Aunt Lilly. She used to dress up as a man. She was slender, but Lilly was plumper, so she used to wear a black cap. It was just making fun amongst your own people.

Mrs Skinner

At Christmas, there was an advert in the paper for a nice big doll, and my mother said to me, ‘Would you like it?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ When I got up on Christmas morning, it was a big cloth doll filled with sawdust, but it was beautifully dressed – my mother had dressed it. We also had a Wooden Betty which my uncle had made out of wood. The eyes, nose, mouth and teeth were burnt in with a poker then painted. It went through five of us, and then it went in the oven to heat the Sunday dinner.

Fred Lightburn

We used to make firecrackers for the fifth of November with gunpowder from the store. The powder was in pellets and we used to roll it out into a fine powder with a rolling pin, then there was a certain way of filling it into folded paper. One or two of the old hands was well up to the job, and you used to get some hefty crackers, I can tell you.

Mary Maughan

For our one holiday a year we went to South Shields. There were shuggy boats and marquees, you could get a meal for sixpence and the village brass band would sit in a ring, and it was tuppence to have a dance to the band. It was with Sunday school, you got a bag of mixed buns, and mother would send teacakes and home-made pies.

Alwyn Lewis

There was a rugby field just outside our house and the girls used to play rugby with us. They used to wear clogs. There was one girl lived on this dirty old street called Becca Lewis. Becca Lewis was a great big rough girl – we used to think she was a woman, but she must have only been in her teens. She used to play rugby in her clogs and we were afraid to go near her.

Mr Patten

When you got home you maybe got a meal or you had to wait until the father came in from his job. If you didn't get a meal when you got in, you took off your school clothes, as you couldn't afford to soil those, and you went and played outside again. Well, there were apple trees, pear trees and plum trees in your district somewhere, and you would have to get them some way or another. Everything like that was fair game, and it was always fair game to tease the keepers and those people who had apple trees and things. Even if we couldn't eat them, it was a question of being clever enough to steal them from the owners. Your status was improved if you were the one to steal the most.

Mr Harrison

I used to see fights at school and there was a fight in the streets every night as well. We used to play in the pit pond and it was full of dead ducks. You had to shove them to one side while you were swimming.

Polly Lee

We used to call in at the greengrocers and get straw ropes off orange boxes. We couldn't afford proper skippy ropes. If you saw anybody with skippy ropes with handles on you thought they had plenty of money. The straw skips didn't last very long though, they'd soon break. You sometimes used to sneak a bit off your mother's line, but when you were skipping double you needed a long rope.

Florence Hannah Warn

We did not have any pocket money, but sometimes we ran an errand for someone and received a halfpenny, so we would buy some sweets, and for a farthing there were lots of things one could buy. There was a strip of toffee called Everlasting, which it was not; a braid of liquorice which broke into strips and were called Shoe Strings; a slab of black toffee called Wiggle Waggle, which blackened the tongue and lips. Bull's eyes were marbles of sweet which could be eaten, but when rubbed on a rough wall, revealed a flat surface with rings of varying colour, hence bull's eyes. Sweet shrimps, white or pink fondant mice – we girls were a trifle squeamish about eating these – for a farthing you could get six pretty little boiled sweets called Rosebuds.

D. G. I. Lodge

My brother had diphtheria when he was two and my mother was expecting another baby, so I went to stay with my aunt and uncle, who was a doctor. They had no children but longed for a child. I stayed and I stayed, and then one day I said, ‘I think one father and one mother and one little girl is best,’ and from then on I stayed with them.

One night my uncle woke me up and put me in a dressing gown and carried me to the front door in his arms. It was a dark night. The clouds were low and misty. We couldn't see anything. Then we heard the migratory birds going over. It was the most wonderful sound I've ever heard. They were flying so low and seemed to go on for ever. It was amazing. Curlews and sandpipers, redshank, all piping and calling to one another. I know nothing to compare with that.

WORK (#ua3445ea5-152d-551c-9048-0469b6d08cbf)

Ray Head

I went to work for the Post Office in the City of London. Hounslow was an agricultural town in those days, a little rural place. Most people living there worked on the land. Most people working in London still came from the area close to the City – I was an exception. Most of these people walked to work. There were thousands of houses in Lambeth, Southwark, Whitechapel and Dalston, and all the inhabitants used to walk to work in offices which were really clerical factories. Everything was so labour-intensive. Typewriters were only just beginning and the telephone was a luxury for the very, very few, so everything was written by hand. In the banks, all the ledgers were done by hand and there was a great deal of clerical work to do.

I used to wear a stiff collar, tie, trousers, heavy boots, a bowler hat and an umbrella. You needed heavy boots because they soon wore out with all the walking. The people higher up wore top hats. The atmosphere in the office was pretty formal. Contact between men and women was very limited. We were kept apart and we dined in separate dining rooms. There was no palliness with the bosses. We were very humble. In spite of all this, we were happy. It almost felt like a club.

Ronald Chamberlain

We lived in Canonbury in Islington. It was a very nice, lower middle-class area, populated by clerks, post office people, bankers and people who worked in shops. My own father was a clerk in the Post Office. He earned a modest income, about seven or eight pounds a week, and he brought up three children on that. He was always very particular to be well groomed and well dressed. He wore a bowler hat and never wore shabby clothes. He never worked in his shirtsleeves and there were no Christian names used at work. They were very dignified in the office. He was a very modest man but he had a very high sense of propriety and conduct. All Post Office people had that attitude to their work. I remember being out with my father one evening and we saw a postman who had finished his work and he was slouching and rolling – he had obviously been drinking. My father was enraged by this. He went up to the postman and said, ‘Pull yourself together, my man! You are a civil servant and so am I, and in the Post Office, you can't behave like this!’ That shows the attitudes of the day. My father originally worked six days a week, but in 1906 or 1907 they gave him the Saturday afternoon concession and he was able to come home in the middle of the day.

Mildred Ransom

After a period of hovering, I decided to learn shorthand and typewriting. I went to a commercial school in the City and in intervals of hard work I sometimes contrasted the cold, gas-lit, smelly classrooms with the scents and beauty of the Tropics. I don't know that I regretted them. I felt rather that I was satiated with sun and beauty and I wanted to stretch my brains and learn endlessly and make a path for myself through the clamour and hideousness all round me in this perfectly revolting school.

From this seat of learning I went to a copying office in Bedford Row and I am deeply grateful to it. It was the worst of offices and the clerks were habitually kept till 11 p.m. Payment was made by results, which meant that you were paid half the value of the work you did; naturally the two partners kept all the fat and gave out only the badly paid stuff to the clerks, and then generously handed out a meagre half of what the latter had earned to them each Saturday. I earned five shillings my first week. Later I rose to the amazing salary of fifteen shillings, and one day I meekly approached the junior partner and asked if she thought I should ever rise to £1 a week. She looked at me with utter contempt and said, ‘Never,’ and then turned to more practical matters.

Sometimes my fellow clerks and I sat in idleness when the partners were busy, working hard because there was not enough work for everyone, and the partners had to be overworked before they would hand out anything to the clerks. At such times I used to urge insurrection and try to get them to demand better conditions, but it was very little use. A more popular effort was the recitation of Aesop's Fables Revised. The favourite moral was ‘You cannot pretty much most always tell how things are going to turn out sometimes’. But I was grateful to the office because I learnt from the point of view of the downtrodden junior what was bad and how not to treat a staff, and I learnt by experience how unspeakably bad long hours were for the health and that reasonable comfort had a money value in producing work.

Ernest Hugh Haire

Liverpool impressed us because it was so commercial. A boy coming out of Liverpool Institute, going into a job as an office boy or a junior clerk, would go to a shipping office, an insurance office, a bank or a cotton brokers. Shipping was a big business in Liverpool with Cunard and White Star. The cotton brokers were a tremendous part of Liverpool commerce. They bought the cotton and sold it to the spinners in Lancashire. Myself, when I left Liverpool Institute, I started work for a small private marine insurance company. My father chose it. He had a friend in the church who was a sailing ship owner who recommended me. At first, I was a junior clerk, relaying messages, but then I was sent to the Open Policy Department. There was a great trade between Liverpool and Chile. The ships went out round Cape Horn, taking out manufactured goods, then they brought back guano, bird shit, which was used as a fertiliser. I checked out the policies as each ship came in and I learnt a great deal of geography. But I only earned seven shillings a week.

Cecil Withers

I left school at thirteen and went to work for W. H. Smith and Sons, where I was a bookkeeper. I worked in the office of the General Manager, Mr William Smart, in Arundel House in the Strand, opposite the Law Courts. I had to wear a collar with studs and a tie. Every morning, I used to take the number 74 tram from Brockley, which only took twenty-five minutes to get to the office. Sometimes the tram would stop because a horse had gone down ahead. Sometimes a ‘bloody horse’ would slip on the cobbles and cause a stoppage. When that happened, sacks were laid all around so the horse could gain a footing on the road surface.

Mildred Ransom

Typewriters were by no means common in offices early in the Nineties, and copying work was still given out to stationers and printers who farmed it out to an army of out-of-elbow writers. When the many advantages of typing over writing dawned on businessmen, their documents were sent as an experiment to a copying office and copying by writing became a thing of the past. Finally, even lawyers gave way and said they had always been in favour of so excellent an invention. So women took premises and fitted them up with typewriters and were kept busy with every variety of work sent in from the aristocratic centres who, though obliged to drop the old-fashioned method of copying by hand, would not install machines of their own.

The old machines were very unlike those of today. The No. 2 Remington had a serrated bar running along its front, and many is the time I tore the back of my fingers on it while running back the carriage to begin a new line. Torn and bleeding fingers with dirt and oil liberally rubbed into the wounds were an ordinary accompaniment of the day's work till one became expert enough to avoid the snare, and no one ever dreamt of an iodine bottle and no harm ever came of it.

As years passed, firms everywhere began to fit up their offices with typewriters and to employ girl typists. Systems of filing were introduced, and instead of sending all copying work to be done out of the office, the work was organised so that it could be done inside by the normal staff. With this change, and particularly noting the rapidity with which it grew, it was plain that the period of prosperity in copying offices was passing, as work was only sent to them when the staff had too much to do and had no time to grapple with extra work. To those who could read the signs of the times it was plain that development was necessary. This was the origin of the secretarial schools and colleges. Girls had to be taught secretarial work, and even if every writer, MP and doctor had his own machine, he did not want to be always hammering at it. It paid him better to get a secretary and leave the hammering to her.

Schools were already in existence to teach shorthand, typing and bookkeeping, and sometimes modern languages, but their students aimed chiefly at clerical commercial work. The parents of girls from better-class schools disliked the milieu of the commercial schools and wished for a more suitable training. Gradually a demand grew and increased for a training which would be wider and better than a mere knowledge of shorthand and typewriting, and secretarial schools offered an educational scheme in which subjects were co-related, and where girls were taught to use in their new work the first-class education that most of them had received.

I took an engagement under the old London School Board, who appointed me to give a lecture at three evening schools every week. Two were most genteel and respectable and of unvarying dullness. Happy is the nation with no history, and more satisfactory still is the evening school which works hard and has no exciting incident of any kind. The third school made up for both the others in excitement. It had been closed down for a considerable time because of the perfectly awful incidents that occurred. I never could find out what these incidents were, and my inquiries were received with silence and large, circular eyes.

The school was reopened as an experiment and the entire staff was chosen primarily for their capacity to keep order and for their reputation as disciplinarians. I was deeply flattered when the head of the staff mentioned this, as I had no idea I possessed such a capacity, and it was not long before several of us wished we hadn't … The school was for girls only, which gave us a chance, and the staff was composed both of women and men. The responsible teacher was a woman. A more solidly loyal lot would be impossible to find.

My first opportunity to exercise discipline was on my first evening, when some of my class turned up unwashed, with hair unbrushed and wearing aprons spattered and soaked with blood. They had come straight from work in local slaughterhouses. None of the class had taken any trouble with their appearance, and the first thing to do was to teach them self-respect under the pretence of learning.

Success meant that somehow a teacher could hold the wild and wandering attention of his or her class and ultimately make them rule themselves. At first no dodge was omitted; girls pretended to be stone-deaf, to be unable to write – they left in a body if bored and invaded other classes. But they continued to attend.

One evening my class was tired of me and twenty-three out of twenty-five pupils had walked off to the arithmetic class. They informed the responsible teacher that their mothers absolutely insisted on this, so the unfortunate arithmetic master had a class of nearly fifty irresponsible rowdies instead of his normal trouble. I reported the exodus to the responsible teacher, who put the two Abdiels into the singing class. Thereupon, the singing master reported that he had no pianist and asked if I would play for him. Never have I forgotten that experience. My class promptly defied their mothers and deserted the arithmetic class and arrived, not out of loyalty to me, but to combine with the singing class in making the most appalling remarks that can be imagined. The mildest was that it was a put-up job between myself and the master to hang over the piano together.

We got over these little things; an extra teacher always patrolled the classes ‘just to make sure’ a teacher wasn't being devoured. Aprons came off, hair was brushed and faces and hands were washed. An immense improvement was noticeable and an inspector came round who was most complimentary. The school began to respect themselves and to modify their language. It was an uphill job, but after six months, when the school closed for the summer, it was a blazing success. Favourite teachers were escorted politely to their bus because ‘the boys round 'ere are a rough lot.’ Pretty manners were no longer greeted with derisive yells – we had progressed.