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

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!