We
live close to the past. It's right behind us, breathing down our
necks. The older I get, the more I realise that.
My grandfather, the son of a migrant from Denmark, was born in Victorian Brixton three years after the first Sherlock Holmes story was published. I was in my thirties when he died. He's the dude on the right in the picture.
Merlin
Holland, who is about the same age as me, has just staged
a play based on a book written by his grandfather. His
grandfather was more famous than mine: Oscar Wilde. The
play is
The
Picture of Dorian Grey.
Today
I've been doing some labouring for P, a bricklayer and friend of mine
from childhood. The work we are doing is on his own house, which he
built some years ago and which he is now extending. His long and
varied career in the construction industry has included small scale
spec house building around Nottingham, especially on the eastern
side where we have always lived. P's
father also built a few houses. And his father did too. In fact I
have in my possession a copy of an application by a 19th
century family member to build a row of terraced houses in nearby St Anns Well Road (an area demolished in the 1970's and replaced with
council housing).
At
uni I studied the development of working class housing during the
epic growth of our cities in the 19th
and early 20th
centuries. The research for my special study was into the growth of
the area in which we were born. So I get a kick out of what P does,
and my involvement in it. Small scale operators like P's family played a large part in the exponential growth of British cities
at that time.
P's
house is part of a little development built in a defunct brickyard,
framed by sheer precipices which mark where the quarrying came to a
stop. It's fascinating to take an old map for a walk round our area.
You soon discover that there are many of these old brickyards, now
infilled with housing or work spaces. It's only slightly far-fetched
to say that those builders of old dug up the ground they stood on and
turned it into the houses so many of us still live in. More
exotically, the high quality facing bricks on the Midland Hotel at St
Pancras station came from here too.
My
daughter and her family live in one of a terrace of five houses built
at the beginning of the 20th
century. They are built of stone from a quarry across the road which
was working until the 1970's. When they moved in I did a little
digging into the history of the terrace and its past residents.
The story of one of the
residents of 100 years ago is worth telling at this time. He and his
wife had married in 1912, their baby was born later that year, and
they moved into the house next door but one to my daughter's. He was
30 years old and doing well: a grocery manager, possibly in the large
Co-operative Society store nearby, but I have been unable to confirm
this. He could thus afford to rent one of these houses, modest by
modern standards, but roomy and substantial by the standards of a
hundred years ago.
The rest of the story
is tragically quick in the telling. He enlisted in the motorised
division of the RASC in 1915. Then, exactly a hundred years ago as I
write, in 1916 their second daughter was born. He was killed in East
Africa in 1918. His grave is in Tanzania.
I haven't been able to
find out what happened to the young mother and her children. Could
she continue paying the rent? Could she support her two children? In
an age without state support, one hopes her family were able to chip
in and that she did not have to be separated from her children. A
young family, almost identical to mine who live there now, had had
their future wiped out.
Stories like this were
utterly commonplace a hundred years ago, and any street of old houses
will have them to tell. As someone who has been able to live his life
in peace and see his family grow up, I owe compassion and respect to
the youngsters of a hundred years ago who never got the chance.
My sources for the above:
- Dorian Grey: For more about Merlin Holland's production see:
- Census records show that the population of England went up from around 9 million in 1801 to 32 million in 1901. In 1801 more people lived in the countryside than in towns or cities. By 1901 the situation was reversed:
'In
England and Wales ... 17 per cent of the population in 1801 lived in
urban areas (defined as cities of 20,000 or more); by 1851 the figure
had risen to 35 per cent; and by 1891 it was 54 per cent. Adopting a
broader definition, the entire urban population of England and Wales
was 72 per cent in 1891, compared with 37 per cent in France, 41 per
cent in Prussia and 28 per cent in the United States. (Hall et a1
1973 : 60).' Quoted in Trends in World Urbanisation,
Christopher Watson, Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, The
University of Birmingham, UK. The whole thing is here:
- For more on the censuses see:
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/census/2011/census-history/200-years-of-the-census/1801-1901/index.html
Censuses
listed the occupants of a house on census night, so if you know an
address you can see who was staying there. They are also indexed by
name and various other search criteria. Censuses from 1841 to 1911 can
be found at
and from there you can
also find your way to other records such as Births Deaths and
Marriages etc.
- I also used the ancestry website, http://www.ancestry.co.uk/. You have to pay, but there is a free trial period which is useful if you are doing a quick check on just a few people. You can of course sign up for a subscription or, if you don't want to do that, it may be possible to buy credits as needed.
- I got information regarding the young man who died by checking the local war memorials and the local history section at the County Library. In addition to the sources already described above I went to the website of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission at http://www.cwgc.org
- A good place to start with the history of housing is with Trevor Yorke's books in the England's Living History series published by Countryside Books. The relevant book here is The Victorian House Explained, at 7.99 from a well known online bookseller.
- If you are interested in the brickmaking industry of the Mapperly area of Nottingham there is a brilliant book researched and written by Geoffrey Sheard called Clay Stealers to St Pancras. There is a Nottingham Evening Post article based on it here:
http://www.nottinghampost.com/St-Pancras-Station-built-60m-Nottingham-bricks/story-13883837-detail/story.html
- St Anns Well Road fell victim to the reckless spirit of demolition and replacement prevalent in the 1960's. Those who lived in the area before that time have a lively Facebook community where oral history, images and much more are collected together. Go to: