No Place Like Home

I live in a very small terrace house, 'two up, two down'. It was built over 140 years ago, and as an enthusiast for 19th century history I have done it out in period style. The furniture in my front room is a mix of styles from throughout Victoria's reign, but I have tried to create overall a look reminiscent of the 1840's, sometimes known as 'Regency Victorian'. This I find pleasant to live with - unlike the dark, heavy and cluttered High Victorian style popular when the house was built. 



But as one who studies the past, I don't fool myself that I'm recreating anything here. It's an agreeable pastiche, not an historical re-creation. 

The house is one of of a pair built for a framework knitter in the mid-1870's who went on to live in the slightly larger one next door (belongs to an electronics engineer now). He rented mine out to a young railway guard and his family, incomers from London.

The house is very neat and cosy; it's low maintenance and cheap and easy to keep warm. Ideal for a guy on his own with a busy life to be getting on with. That's not how it was in Mr Framework Knitter's time though. An ideal home for a busy single professional now, it was much less than ideal for the families who lived in it in the past. At the beginning of the 20th century there was a family of 7 living in it: Mr and Mrs Hollyoak and their 3 daughters and 2 sons. 

I could now try to give a picture of what it was like for them. But I can go one better, by calling on a professor at the University of Florida, who had the experience at first hand.

  William Woodruff, academic, author and long-time professor at the the University of Florida, died in 2008 at the age of 92. He was born far away from there though, in the industrial North of England, in a house similar to mine. He tells us in his autobiography, The Road to Nab End,

'My brother Dan and I shared a bedroom with our parents. There were two metal beds with straw mattresses resting on thin metal slats. Sometimes the slats sagged, leaving a pocket into which we sank our hips. Dan and I slept in the same bed. We slept so close to our parents we could touch them. The nearness of our bodies made us feel safe. No one noticed the lack of privacy. I accepted my parents' love-making long before I understood it. It was as natural as someone using the pisspot (I didn't know the word chamber-pot until I had left school). It didn't disturb me, or confuse me, or revolt me. Like father's deep snoring, I ignored it.

My sisters Jenny and Brenda slept in the other bedroom, behind a paper-thin wall.'

The Hollyoaks' experience would have been similar, except with three girls sharing, not two. 

Also, the house they and I have lived in is built to a better spec than Woodruff's despite being the same size and layout. My house was built at the time of the passing of the 1875 Public Health Act which brought in the era of the 'bye-law houses', so called because local authorities could enforce quality and design standards through local legislation - bye-laws. So at least the girls would not be sleeping 'behind a paper thin wall', and the floors and external walls are much better quality than in the older, flimsier, jerry built housing Woodruff was born into.

In Woodruff's kitchen,

'Under the window there was a stone sink and a slop stone, or draining board. Above the sink was the only tap in the house.'  

We can assume things were similar for the Hollyoaks. In fact, they were the same in the house in which I was born thirty-odd years later. These houses didn't have bathrooms or indoor toilets of course. Woodruff says they bathed in a tin tub which hung on the wall outside in the yard. 

A typical tub - oval, centre - seen recently
 on a wall in rural Derbyshire. This is identical to
the one I was bathed in as a child.

As you will know from my previous posts, I don't usually go around saying the past was better than the present. But for once I will. Bathing has never got better than that: our mam pouring hot water over our heads with a saucepan, and towels and fresh pyjamas warming on a clothes horse in front of the fire. But then we weren't the ones who had to drag the tub in from the yard, and ferry water from the kitchen fireplace to the tub using that saucepan. And we weren't the ones who had to  to bail the used water out of the tub and down the sink before dragging it back out into the yard.

All this was tough, and I wouldn't want to go back to a life like that. But one dealt with the very basic facilities by being organised and capable. I remember in the 90's there was a reality TV show which put modern people into historic lifestyles to see how they coped. I found the one about the 1900 house rather irritating. The family seem to have been chosen for their inability to handle novel situations; more entertaining TV I suppose. I remember one episode dealt with the lady of the house attempting to wash her long hair. Of course she got into a chaotic mess, not having running hot water, shower head, dryer or shampoo. 

It didn't have to be like that, with a little thinking beforehand. As a child I helped my mum wash her long black hair. Pans of water were brought to the right temperature on the gas stove, she held her head over the sink while I poured enough of it over her hair to thoroughly wet it, then she lathered it. After that it was my job to pour more warm water over her hair to rinse it clean. Drying involved towels and time: no hair dryer of course. So: inconvenient and time-consuming, but doable and capable of getting an acceptable result.

(A later series, The 1940's House, was better and more realistic I thought, because that family were resourceful and capable of working together to find solutions, and ended up living quite well.)


I was born into a Victorian housing stock. The epic expansion of the previous 150 years had left us great areas of densely packed houses of variable quality, from the infill jerry building of the early 19th century through the increasing quality raising interventions of government to the beginnings of social (council) housing. I have friends now who grew up in houses far worse than the one I was born into. One friend, as a child, shared a bedroom with six brothers and sisters, sleeping on mattresses laid out on the floor of one of the two bedrooms. Another shared his childhood with the hordes of cockroaches living behind the wainscoting in their decaying terrace house.  

These guys now live in smart modern houses, a measure of how far we have come. But the struggle to keep everyone housed decently goes on, as prices escalate, young people experience difficulty getting on the 'housing ladder' or struggle to afford high rents, and as developers planners and the public don't always see eye to eye about what housing should be provided.

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Notes

The Original Residents:

I went as usual to the census returns for the relevant years for details of the people who lived in my house in the past. Censuses from 1841 to 1911 can be found at

http://www.ukcensusonline.com/index.php

Framework knitting, which is to say the manufacture of hosiery on hand and foot-operated machines, usually in the home of the operator, had been a boom industry in the early part of the century. After that it declined, causing much hardship. However, it was still possible to do well at the high end of the market if you were skilled enough. Our two houses, though, were never adapted for frame knitting (large windows are needed to provide good light levels). So he must have worked elsewhere. Well, there's an old 3 storey factory building nearby- unpowered, big windows, typical of operations where hand machines were grouped together under one roof by one owner. So it's just possible he worked there. Neglected for a long time, it's now been sensitively restored and rented out as apartments.

For more see:

http://www.frameworkknittersmuseum.org.uk/about-framework-knitters/

Nearby, there are two railway stations and what was, until fifty years ago, one of Europe's largest marshalling yards. So it's not too difficult to figure out how a London railwayman happened upon a nice little house to rent in the nearby countryside, as it was then.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colwick_marshalling_yard

There's a nice Wikipedia article about Sneinton, the area in which I was born and spent much of the first half of my life:

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneinton

Also, the nearby area, now known as St Ann's, where the two friends mentioned at the end of my post were born, has a good website:

http://stannswellroad.weebly.com/virtual-walk.html

What's Your Poison? Again

In What's Your Poison? I told of my grandmother's experience of being poisoned by a 'medication' given to her in the 1890's and of the poisoned beer catastrophe of 1900.

A little earlier in the century, journalists Charles Manby Smith and James Greenwood wrote on similar themes. They were writing at a time when dreadful epidemics were raging in Britain's teeming cities. Cholera, with victims vomiting and shitting themselves to a nasty dehydrated death, was especially feared.

It was a time when there was no systematic, scientific, way of approaching this kind of phenomenon. A lot of heavy duty thinking and investigating around the subject was going on but unfortunately for cholera victims the approach of the professionals was going into a blind alley, involving smells, or miasma, as they called them. This had been adopted as the official view. So it was that the findings of Dr John Snow's investigation, which had correctly identified water pollution as the source of infection, were long ignored. 

 This could be characterised in tabloid terms as baddy establishment overrides humble local doctor/campaigner. But we must remember that they were groping their way step by step into the unknown, piecing stuff together which, over the following century, would build into the knowledge which is our salvation now. In that scenario, why not believe that foetid, poo-smelling atmospheres are the carriers of disease? Having said that, Edwin Chadwick, the guy who set up the miasma legislation, was an odd and very pushy man, not given to tolerating the ideas of others.

 Even the concept of having government departments and inspectors to deal with health was only just getting established – against the usual tide of opposition. 

This cartoon, published in McLean’s monthly sheet of caricatures; March 1, 1832, sends up the new Board of Health inspectors.

 James Greenwood tells us that, struggling to come up with measures to control the disease, some authorities recommended the moderate drinking of alcohol as a preventive. The pub trade, he says, was eager to help:

A West-End Cholera Stronghold*

(*This paper was written during the last visitation of this terrible epidemic.)

 There never were such roaring times for a poor neighbourhood publican. He is never the poorer for a cholera visitation, for although his trade in beer at such periods is lamentably injured, it has always been the fashion to recommend brandy as an anti-choleriac, and under the management of the knowing proprietor of the Pig and Whistle a quartern of brandy may be made to yield as much profit as four retailed pots of beer, and so the matter was as nearly as possible equalised. But with this season's visitation of the scourge a new fashion in drinks has been introduced. “The safest and simplest drink during the prevalence of the epidemic is a mild compound of good rum and pure water, taken in moderation”, is the formula promulgated by certain well-meaning M.D.s, furnishing a hint not likely to be thrown away, either by the landlord of the Pig and Whistle or his dram-drinking customers, who, so long as they are permitted to guzzle until they are drunk, are quite indifferent as to the means employed. So I found matters in a dirty tavern in Hare Street, [where] a puncheon of “fine old vatted rum” was under-labelled in great chalk letters “Cholera Mixture” 

Let's now go behind the bar with the other journalist, Charles Manby Smith:

 The Drink Doctor

Mr Quintin Quassia, D.D., as the gin-spinners and beer-druggers who require his services gravely address him ... is a member of no learned profession, and is in possession of no degree, save a very considerable degree of quiet impudence and self-possession ... Under his miraculous management three hogsheads of proof gin from the distillers shall be in the course of a single night become transformed into seven substantial hogsheads of "Cream of the Valley". He has the assistance of a redoubtable necromancer in the person of Father Thames, whom he secretly invokes from his oozy bed at his beck at the dead of night.

'Father Thames', in a contemporary cartoon. 

Bear in mind that we now know, and Dr Snow at the time suspected, that 'Father Thames's' water was responsible for the cholera; that it had so much reeking stinking ordure bobbing about in it that Parliament had to move out of Westminster because of the unbearable smell - the Great Stink of 1858.

Watered gin would of course be insipid (unless there were a turd floating in it) and easily detected. Other additions were therefore used to put some taste back. Large amounts of sugar were added; an additional 'benefit' of sugar was the excitement of thirst so that, having finished one drink, the drinker was inclined to buy another.

But strong spirits require a 'kick', so something else was required:

'He has also ... another liquid spirit at his beck – a spirit whose touch is torture, and whose function frequently is to burn what fire will not consume – the fiend of sulphuric acid, whose vulgar retail name is vitriol ... he carries poisons of terrible efficacy, and thirst exciting drugs to consummate his work.'

So: alcohol for the feel-good + water to increase profit + sulphuric acid to provide a kick when you swallow + sugar to make you want more + help to ward off cholera! Perfect, let's have another!

I suspect that, if asked, the drinkers of this stuff would say they preferred it to straight unadulterated gin, the taste having become associated with the euphoria provided by the alcohol. This thinking was certainly apparent among the drinkers of low quality beer at the beginning of the 20th Century, as reported by James C. Whorton in his book, The Arsenic Century. This stuff had never seen malt, its alcohol being derived from any available vegetable source, with added colouring and flavours. After the arsenic poisoning disaster of 1900 , when some brewers produced beer guaranteed to be made of authentic ingredients, many drinkers expressed disappointment at the taste compared with the fake stuff they had been drinking. 

It was the same with my uncle John (my gran's eldest son) in the 1970's. A dedicated six to eight pints a night man, he knew his stuff about beer. He could tell you all about the good breweries and the not-so-good, and all about those landlords who kept a good pint and those who didn't. Then, in the 1970's the British brewing industry panicked about its future in the modern world, industrialised its production methods, changed its recipes and reduced the product to a low quality generic fizzy drink. And Uncle John went right on drinking it and talking the same talk. Worse: in those years there was a bit of a craze for brewing your own, using kits bought from supermarkets or chemist shops. He went in for that, big time. The product was execrable. But at 5% abv who cares? He certainly didn't as he threw copious amounts of it down his neck. Many men were the same. I think it was a case of that well known rule of thumb: after the third pint it all tastes good.

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Notes:

There's a succinct article here about cholera in London, and the róles of John Snow and Edwin Chadwick:

http://www.choleraandthethames.co.uk/cholera-in-london/cholera-in-westminster/

Charles Manby Smith wrote for the popular magazines of the day. In 1853 he republished a collection of his articles in a book entitled Curiosities of London Life, and this has been republished in the Victorian London Ebooks series with an introduction by Lee Jackson. It's a great read, an immersion in the lives of real people in mid-Victorian times. The passages quoted in this post come from this edition. 

My James Greenwood extracts come from his book, The Wilds of London, published in 1874, also republished in the Victorian Ebooks series and also with an introduction by Lee Jackson.

I got the Board of Trade Inspectors cartoon here:

https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101393365-img