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

I passed out of the college in 1910. I specialised in history teaching and I had to sit a paper on the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell. I did well on that, but I also had to do the school practice. That meant being assessed as you taught a class. The subject of the class was given by the tutor. I was hoping it would be a History or Geography lesson – in fact he made me give a grammar lesson on the ablative absolute: which was really a Latin thing. I took a class of forty-nine boys in a Chelsea school, in front of the class teacher, the headmaster, the tutor and the Inspector. For thirty-five minutes I taught the ablative absolute. I struggled. At the end, the Inspector came to me and said, ‘My poor boy. You have my sympathy. Who the hell gave you that subject?’ ‘That gentleman over there,’ I said, indicating the tutor. ‘I wonder how he would have managed,’ said the Inspector. The Inspector turned to the tutor. ‘You are responsible for assessing the subjects and you gave this young man a lesson on the ablative absolute. He struggled manfully with it but he couldn't illustrate it. I'll bet a darn you couldn't have done it! What a ridiculous thing to do! And I'm going to give him an “A” mark!’

Bill Owen

I went to St Clement's School in Dove Street. We had a headmaster called Mr Campie – talk about discipline. Discipline was nothing when I went in the Marines, because this chap really was strict. Many times I didn't have a piece of bread to go to school with – there was nothing in the house – but had a polish on my shoes. I had one of those collars on, and that had to be washed and cleaned, and your hair cut. He had a cane, and he'd have your hand under the blackboard, and he'd bring it down on your fingers.

At school – talk about brainwashed – when we went out in the yard it was all ‘Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue’. I think that was the start of me joining up – having it drummed into me.

When I started school you had to pay a penny a week, and my old mother often didn't have the penny to give me for school. But while I was in the Infants, 1905-6, they came out with free education. Boots or clogs – we wore anything we could get. The old woman used to get a pair of old uppers off somebody and you used to get them ‘clogged’. If they were good uppers, you'd get them clogged.

Tom Murray

I have good recollections of my school days at Tornaveen in Aberdeenshire. I went to school in 1906 with my sister Margaret, who was a year and a half younger than me. I was kept back a year before I went to school so that the two of us could go together. We had three teachers that I recall particularly. One of them was a drunk and was always in a bad temper. He used to thrash the children with a strap, mercilessly, because he would be sitting in the room and fall asleep while he was supposed to be teaching us. We were so incensed we decided – I must only have been eight or nine years of age – we would wait till he went away at night and pinch the strap and throw it away. And we did.

James Lewis

Being a church school, there was a strong accent on religion, and the headmaster, Mr Weston, opened school with prayers in the morning, and closed school on Friday in the same way. We learned the Church of England Collects, the Apostles' Creed, and the Confession, and I enjoyed the Scripture lessons under Mr Allen. Our Geography lessons demonstrated the greatness of our empire, and our History lessons the greatness of our military and naval victories, and the prowess of our explorers. The portraits of King Edward and Queen Alexandra decorated the walls, and at the end of the hall was a large Union Jack with the caption ‘For God, King and Country’.

Our misdemeanours were dealt with by being sent to Mr Weston, to be caned across the palm of the hand, which was quite painful, but not degrading or brutalising. We were usually proud to show our weals to our classmates and I never saw anybody taking it out on another boy. Mr Burgess, of Standard 5B, was the only teacher who didn't send us to the head for punishment. He administered it himself, with a hardwood blackboard pointer, which he referred to as his ash plant, but we liked him as well as respected him. My favourite teacher was Mr Birkbeck. He was the only teacher other than the head to wear his gown. Mr Birkbeck was a master of sarcasm and was quite cutting, but his wit brought humour to the lessons. He once told me that my writing looked as if a spider had come out of the inkwell and crawled across the page. Mr Birkbeck took Standard 6B, and he developed our musical knowledge. Up to this we had sung traditional songs such as ‘The British Grenadiers’, ‘The Vicar of Bray’ and ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ – but Mr Birkbeck taught us to sing treble and alto parts, and Schubert's ‘Greeting’ and Gounod's ‘Nazareth’.

On one occasion the class was divided into two halves. One half was taken to visit the Cunard liner Franconia,' while my half were taken to Hightown. We walked the five miles there through the countryside, and then we made tea on a fire in our billy cans on the sand hills at Hightown, then walked back along the shore.

H. Eccles

We'd have a week's holiday at Easter time. Before the school closed for Easter, the shops in the vicinity used to throw these biscuits into the crowd of schoolchildren, and there was a scramble for them.

They used to roll eggs down the hill in Preston. They used to come up to the park and sit on the guns that were captured in the Crimea, on the gun emplacement, and you could go in to those shops – the little cottages adjoining the Park Hotel. One of those used to sell little red cakes, and the cost was only a halfpenny, and you also got a halfpenny bottle of mineral water. That was the thing done among schoolchildren.

I went half-time at twelve, when I went in a grocer's shop as an errand boy. Then I went into the mill, where I started at six in the morning. You finished at noon and had to go to school in the afternoon. After that, when I became full-time at thirteen, I went to Bank Top evening school, and there I took up continuation studies in arithmetic, book-keeping and accounts, and general correspondence. From there I went to St Barnabas Preparatory Technical College – I was about fourteen. I was there two years, and then I went to the Technical College for commercial classes. I sat for the various examinations – London Chamber of Commerce, Lancashire and Cheshire Union of Institutes – and I joined up. I got work in a solicitor's office for about twelve months, and then a mill office, John Thompson's. John Thompson was a well-bearded man. He used to come up every day in his carriage and pair, and from the office I could hear the harness rattling.

Jackie Geddes

At playtime we used to run round chasing one another, and we often used to jump over a wall in the schoolyard, and there was a good drop on the other side. And I remember I had just got over this wall, when there was an explosion. And when I came back, they were carrying this boy out, and there was a rare commotion about it. He had had a detonator, you know, what they fire the shots with in the pit. He'd been poking it to fit it onto his pencil and it had gone off and burnt his hand off. Reddick was the manager of number six pit and it was his son that had somehow got these detonators. It was quite a shock that.

Mrs Colclough

When the twins were born, a little boy was a big thing – Granny Collins' family was mostly girls. Dad used to say if you go out with the twins take them up to see your gran, and of course they made a terrible fuss of Basil. Mother kept him smart, with a little walking stick and covered coat, beautiful dressed, but they never took any notice of Barbara. One day I went up the back street and I upset the pram. Aunty Kate came and picked up the little boy and took him away, but left the little girl and never looked at her. We soothed both of them, but they didn't take the bonnet off her.

When I went to see Granny Collins I was given a slice of cake and a glass of milk, Flora wasn't, she was put in Grandad's study and that was it. I used to be upset about that too because there was no need for it, but Flora wasn't like them to look at, and I was.

Mr Jordan

The girls were in separate compartments – they never intermixed with the boys. It was all silently, secretly done if you met a lass. You dare not let your parents know. They were kept apart – in churches and chapels the girls sat one side and the boys sat the other side. But we courted. You daren't tell your parents till you were about eighteen or nineteen and then you were more open with it.

Emma Ford

When I was three years old, I ran away. Mother came out and said, ‘Has anyone seen a little girl?’ Of course there was nobody about in those days. Although it was a town it was just like living in a village, because there was no traffic, there were no cars. All you saw were coal carts and horse traps. She looked round the street and someone told her a little girl was toddling into the schoolyard. And I'd toddled up and gone to Parliament Street and of course the headmistress kept me in. Mother came in and I was sitting on the floor with my head down. I wouldn't look up because I didn't want to go.

Mr Patten

We always set off in a gang. Farms in those days had more people and so more children on them, and there were no school buses, children walked. You were either in a happy gang or you were in a fighting gang – you know what children are, one day so-and-so was pals with them, the next day, not. It was a common sight in the nineteen hundreds to see the schoolchildren coming to school in gangs, some from Kimmerston, some from Hay Farm. And there would always be the odd one or two who didn't gang up.

You carried your bait – your bait was bread and dripping, bread and butter and a tin bottle full of tea. You gathered in the playground and had great fun until nine o'clock, when the schoolmaster blew a whistle and you ran into your classes. You cheated when it came to some öf the difficult sums, if you could. You peered over the shoulders of the ones in front of you or something like that. You knew the good scholars and tried to get the answers from them. If it was a wet day, you went to school and you sat there damp the whole day. At noon, you broke up for dinner and you took your tin bottle. There were always stoves at the school and you popped your tin bottle on top of the stove to warm the tea up again. If you didn't slacken the cork, when it reached a certain temperature it blew the cork up into the air, which the teachers didn't like very much because tea was splashed over the stove and created fumes.

Mrs Wain

My maternal grandmother, Georgina Roberta Murray, born in 1850, was the thirteenth child, and was named after two older sons who had died in childhood. She often visited my parents, and urged us children to get up in the morning with ‘Rise Cornelius, and put on thy pompeycrackers, and go and see a rye cockalorum go along the road with a high cockalorum on his tail’. We never knew what she was talking about, but any child would get up to dress in ‘pompeycrackers’.

Albert Rowells

You had to go – if you had a brother in the school he had to come and make you go. If you didn't you'd be put in the Mickey book. You couldn't get off – old Corker was a stickler for discipline and attendance was his specialty. He held the best record in County Durham for attendance – if you were sick he would send for you to come and sit in front of the fire to keep you warm.

Tom Kirk

On my first birthday, I was presented by my uncles with a real steam engine of German make, with lots of lines. My earliest memory is of crawling after the engine, which was emitting a delicious smell of methylated spirit oil and steam. On succeeding birthdays Uncles Tom, Peter and Harold always presented me with additional lines, signals and points.

Henry Allingham

I lived with my grandparents until I was seven, and they rather spoiled me. My father's father was a jewel-case maker. He was merry fellow – he always wore a red Turkish fez with a black tassel. He used to tease me and play games. He'd pretend to pull my nose off and say, ‘Eh, look, you've got your nose in my cup.’

Tom Kirk

When we were children, the Pierrots were terribly important to us. They used to come every year and put up a small stage with a piano amongst the sand dunes at Seaton Carew where we lived. At the end of each performance they would collect a few coppers from the children, in a bucket. They all called themselves ‘uncle’ and I remember their songs:

If I were Uncle Percy,

I would, I would, I would appear

On the end of the pier.

We all went to the shop to shelter from the rain,

We all had a lick of the raspberry stick,

And we all came out again.

Ethel Barlow

Every Easter there was a lovely big procession in the East End. I think they were collecting for the hospital. It was a mile and a half long. There was a cart with a barrel organ, and a cart with a big dancing bear, but the winner was always a yellow cart with yellow flowers from Colman's Mustard.

Sonia Keppel

Sometimes, King Edward, who I called Kingy, came to tea with Mamma, and was there when I appeared at six o'clock. On such occasions he and I devised a fascinating game. With a fine disregard for the good condition of his trouser, he would lend me his leg, on which I used to start two bits of bread and butter, butter-side down, side by side. Then, bets of a penny each were made, my bet provided by Mamma, and the winning piece of bread and butter depended, of course, on which was the more buttery. The excitement was intense while the contest was on. Sometimes he won, sometimes I did. Although the owner of a Derby winner, Kingy's enthusiasm seemed delightfully unaffected by the quality of his bets.

Edith Turner

As a child I used to play with my sister. We didn't have anything to play with so our enjoyment was plaiting our hair, rubbing our noses together, sitting on the table and trying to plait our fingers together. That kind of thing.

Thomas Henry Edmed