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

I remember there used to be a nurse who'd come and examine our hair. Those who were lousy dreaded her coming, but those who were clean she'd pass over, and we'd be very proud to know we were clean. We didn't have any nits. Well, quite a lot of children who were very nice children, really and truly had nits, and one of my friends was so self-conscious about it.

Edith Turner

I was put in the London County Council School. At that time, I had no shoes on my feet. There was a School Board man who used to visit if you didn't go to school and they used to threaten the parents that they would prosecute them if children didn't go to school. So I had to go to school. I went climbing up the stairs at school, with no shoes and socks. My headmistress, Miss McCrae, she was a proper bitch. No matter what illness the children had, she demanded that they went to school.

Joe Garroway

When I first started school it was just a room at the primitive chapel. I must have been a bad boy because I was put down into the cellar, and when dinnertime came they forgot I was there. Well it so happened my little sister, two years old, was buried that day. When I didn't turn up my uncle came to seek me. He came and shouted down to the cellar where I was crying. He said, ‘I'll get you out, lad!’ and he went and saw the caretaker. As I came up the steps to my uncle the teachers came back into the school, and he said, ‘Who's put him down there?’ My teacher was Miss Clark, and she said, ‘I have.’ He said, ‘Take that’ and whacked her and he walked out again.

Bessy Ruben

There was a lot of poverty. We had a girl in my class called Nelly – she was a Christian girl and I liked her very much. She used to come to school without shoes on her feet. I couldn't understand it – no shoes and stockings, and it was the middle of winter and raining. She used to sit next to me, and I said, ‘ Aren't you cold?’ Her feet were so cold. I used to go home to her house for tea very often, and I could smell a very nice, welcoming smell – it was bacon. Although her mother offered it to me, I had an idea I mustn't eat it. I told my mother what had happened, and asked her, ‘Why mustn't I eat it?’ I couldn't have been more than nine at the time. And mother said, ‘Because it's not very healthy.’ And I said, ‘But Nelly Conlan walks about with bare feet, and she's never had a cold in her life!’

Don Murray

We used to go round by the girls' school and watch them come out and make fun of them. But the girls had a way of joining together and instead of going home separately, they used to go home in groups, singing a song that's quite popular now, ‘Strawberry Fair’:

As I was going to Strawberry Fair,

Singing, singing, buttercups and daisies …

And they used to do a little dance and then they each branched off as they got to their homes.

Emma Ford

We all wore pinafores at school. They practically covered our dresses. And the boys wore what they called ‘ganseys’, which are jerseys. They were mostly handouts, and some of them would be too big and some of them too small.

Bessy Ruben

After the Russian pogroms, there was an influx of Jews to our area – the East End of London. There were a lot of children who had to go to school. Some were big girls, twelve or thirteen, and you couldn't put them in the infants' school, so a lot of them came to our school. The older girls like myself were given a class, just to teach them to speak English. I remember one girl – when I told her to say ‘and’ she couldn't. She said ‘aernd’ and she said ‘royce’ for ‘rose’. This used to annoy me, and I did bully the poor girl a bit. One day, in the playground, she was standing in a corner, crying. I went over to her, and I said in Yiddish, ‘Why are you crying?’ and she said, in Yiddish, ‘Everyone's laughing at me. You laugh at me. I can't say like you say the word in English. I can't say “rose” – I say “royce”.’ I said, ‘But you've just said “rose”!’ After that I became very friendly with her.

Florrie Passman

My sister and I went to the Aldersgate Ward School. It wasn't a Jewish school, and my sister and I were the only Jewish girls in our class. My mother, although she was very orthodox, was very broad-minded. Not like some people who said to their children, ‘If they're going to have prayers, you must come out!’ But luckily, my mother said, ‘You must go to prayers and do everything, because when you get older, how will you know which is right and which is wrong? How will you go anywhere? What will you do if you don't know what they're talking about?’ And do you know, I got the prize for the New Testament!

Bessy Ruben

I remember Miss Green. She had snaggle teeth. I was very fond of her. Then we had Miss Poole, who was a dear, and we had Mrs Cameron, who was a fiery Scot. And we had a Miss Jackson – she was so patriotic that she wore a Union Jack apron. After the Kishenev pogrom, there was an influx of Jews from Kishenev. A lot of the children came to our school and I remember distinctly this Miss Jackson saying, ‘Now, all you foreigners who come from Russia, you should all go back to your own country.’ And a girl sitting in the front – her name was Yetta Solomons – she was so incensed about it that she took out her inkwell and flung it at Miss Jackson, and smashed her glasses. Of course she was chastised for treating one of the staff in that fashion, but our headmistress was a very nice and a very clever woman. I met her many years later and I asked if she remembered the incident. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘We had that teacher dismissed, because she was in a Jewish area and she just didn't like foreigners.’

Richard Common

We had this one teacher, old Ramsay, and he was a tyrant. He used to have a stick. It wasn't a cane, it was like a very thin rolling pin, and if you did anything wrong he used to rap you with it. You held your hands out, palms upwards, but if you pulled your hands back, instead of bringing it down on you, he brought it up and hit you on the knuckles. One day old Ramsay went out, and one of the lads hid his stick behind the central heating pipes. He came back and he couldn't find it and he told us that when he did find it, we were all going to get it. He marked our names down on the blackboard with the number of smacks we were going to get. And my goodness, when he found it, we got it. He stood us all in line and he looked on the blackboard and walked up, saying, ‘Ten for you! Six for you!’ right up the line. The girls got the same. He hammered us all.

Nicholas Swarbrick

The Jesuits ran Stoneyhurst College in Preston and the Catholic College for Boys in Winkley Square was staffed by the same Jesuits as the College. These Jesuits were very much inclined to use the leather strap they called a ferula like the devil.

In my first two or three forms at the college I did very well academically. Each week we had a card which we took to our parents, which had four designations on it – the first was excellent, the next good, the next fair, and poor. In the first three forms I always had excellent – excellent on conduct and application. And I always got sixpence from my father for that. When I moved into the senior college there was one particular Jesuit priest, Father Ellison, and he was a devil with the ferula. On one particular occasion I had a lot of homework, I was given a lot of irregular verbs to parse – horrible things. I did my best, but Father Ellison hit me so hard and hurt me so badly that I refused to go back to school. My father more or less acquiesced, and my education was ruined. Although I was instinctively a studious person, that ruined my education. Nowadays, Father Ellison would have been jailed for what he did to us. If I'd had my way, I would have gone to the local Church of England grammar school where there was no ferula, but religious intolerance was fairly rampant, and I wouldn't have been allowed. After that incident I stayed at home and no one came in to teach me. I was fourteen when I left school.

Thomas Eustace Russell

When I was at Hatfield Road School in St Albans, we had a master named Cowley who was a brute of a man. A sadist. He broke a boy's wrist with the stick on one occasion. There was a great how-de-do about it.

John William Dorgan

In Choppington, there were two schools. One was the Church School with a grant from the County Council and the other was the Colliery School. My mother couldn't fit me out with decent clothes, so I couldn't go to the Church School. I went to the Colliery School. On Monday morning, every child in the school had to pay fourpence. That was an enormous amount of money in those days. Usually, I didn't have it, so I had to walk to the front of the class and put my hand out. I received four good straps on the hand. Girls who couldn't afford the fourpence got the same. About half the class used to get the strap every Monday morning because they couldn't pay.

Bessy Ruben

A lot of the children at our school didn't have birth certificates, so when they reached the age of fourteen, their parents would have to go and swear an affidavit at the solicitor's to say the child was fourteen, and the child would have to swear too. At school one day, one of the girls said, ‘I haven't got a birth certificate, and I've got to go and swear that I'm fourteen.’ So Dinah, this friend of mine, said, ‘Oh, you don't have to worry – all you have to do is, if you're a Christian, you stand up and say, “I swear by the Lord Jesus Christ”, and if you're Jewish, you have to swear another way.’ That's all she said, and she never meant anything derogatory against Jesus Christ. The teacher was out of the room when this happened, but there were two Christian girls there. When we went out to play in the playground, I could see these two girls walking up and down talking, and pointing at Dinah and our little crowd. When we came back, the teacher of the class called Dinah out to the front of the class. ‘How dare you stand up and make fun of Our Lord? We don't make fun of your Rabbis or your Gods!’ and so on. And Dinah was weeping. ‘I didn't mean anything,’ she kept saying, and she didn't, but the teacher wouldn't even let her speak. She was sent out to the headmistress, and then she was sent to apologise to all the English staff of the whole school. She was sent to Coventry. The only one who used to speak to her was myself, and I used to meet her outside school. Sent to Coventry with a year's marks taken away from her.

Albert ‘Smiler’ Marshall

My headmaster was a wonderful man who took a great interest in me and all the pupils. He taught everything, including football and cricket, gardening – and he was also the scout master. The staff were a bit ‘fishy’ – a Miss Herring, a Miss Salmon, and the headmaster was Mr Whiting. They were all much loved by the pupils. Twice a week the rector visited for the first hour. We started with a hymn and were told about all the historical events which had taken place on that day. Any trouble, and you got the stick. None of the boys mentioned this to his parents, as he might well have been belted at home had he done so. Most boys had an orange-box on wheels, and when we were released from school, there was a rush down the hill to collect horse manure for the gardens.

Andrew Ruddick

My first school was run by a middle-aged woman called Minnie Turnbull. We used to pay thruppence a week, and the big school at Hallbankgate cost tuppence. Minnie Turnbull had ten pupils, five girls and five boys, so that was half a crown a week, and that was all she had to live on and she had a daughter and a father to support. When free education came into operation, after the summer term Minnie Turnbull had to close down, and we went to the big school.

Bessy Ruben

Commercial Street School was a lovely place. What attracted us very much at the time was the unseen heating. In the winter we had the warm air blown in and in the summer it was cool air blown in. We were told how lucky we were that this was our new school, and we were breathing clean, fresh air every day. The school had about 304 children, out of which about 300 were Jews and four were Christians. In consequence, we had all the holidays, both Jewish and Christian.

Harry Patch

I went to a Church of England school where the headmaster was a disciplinarian – so much so that he lost two teachers in three months. They couldn't stick him. But he was a good man. He gave up two nights a week, Tuesday and Thursday, for evening classes. His one condition was if you started, you had to stick at it. First hour on the Tuesday was English as it is spoken. The second hour was Latin. Anyway, we stuck it, and on Thursday the first hour was geometry, and the second hour was algebra. He asked us the shortest distance between two points, A and B, and of course the answer was a straight line. He told us to write down the definition of a curve. Well I couldn't think so I wrote ‘straight line with a bend in it’ and he gave me a rap across the knuckles.

Henry Allingham

When we moved to Clapham, South London, my mother wanted to get me into a high-grade grammar school in South Lambeth Road. She went to see the head, who said, ‘Send the boy up to me and if he can pass the school entrance, I may be able to find a place for him.’ So I went to do the exam. He was a lovely man. He put me in the main school hall. He said, ‘Now, make haste slowly!’ and I did my best and answered all the questions on the paper. And I passed. It was a fantastic school, and they taught us French, science, woodwork, metalwork and art. The art master took us to the Tate Gallery. I used to spend Sunday afternoons at the Tate. I loved that school. I went there until I was almost sixteen.

Albert ‘Smiler’ Marshall

I was a bit of a fighter at school. A boy who had been expelled from another school started causing problems in our class. The master took me aside and told me to deal with him, so I met him outside where he was bullying some of the smaller ones and I gave him a good beating. He was as right as rain after that and he wanted to be my friend, but I wasn't having any of that.

Richard Common

The classroom had wooden ceilings, and when the teacher went out, we used to play darts with our pens. We threw the pens so that the nibs would stick in the ceiling. Then we would throw anything – hats or whatever we had – up to the ceiling to try and knock them down. One day, the teacher came in and we all had our pens except Billy Hurd, a Scotch lad who lived in Stanley Street. ‘Where's your pen?’ asked the teacher. There was one pen stuck in the ceiling. The teacher made Billy sit underneath it. ‘You'll soon know when it comes down,’ said the teacher, ‘you just sit there.’ And he made Billy sit underneath it all day.

Joseph Henry Yarwood

I went to the council school in Battersea, South London. I was poorly dressed and that made me a figure of ridicule. For a long time, I was known as ‘mop’ because I had long hair and we couldn't afford a haircut. Without being snobbish, I was an intellectual cut above these other kids and I could answer the teachers' questions. We had a sarcastic swine of a Scottish teacher who said, ‘I wonder, Yarwood, how you can answer all these questions?’ It was quite simple. I was always reading. My old grandmother used to say, ‘He'll come to a bad end, that boy. He's always got a book stuck in his fist.’

Ruben Landsman

From school I put in for a thrift form. I was given a corduroy suit and a pair of boots, and I came home so proud of that suit. But when my father came home in the evening and saw it, he asked, ‘Where d'you get that from?’ ‘From school,’ I said. ‘I signed the thrift form.’ ‘You can take it back.’ Charity he wouldn't have. We had literally nothing to eat, but charity he wouldn't have.

Daniel Davis