December 2022 Group Meeting Report
Our members were treated to a ‘tour de force’ of a presentation entitled ‘Victorian London Street Life’, provided by popular speaker Delia Taylor at the December meeting of Swanley History Group. An entry in a document on Ancestry describing the end of life of one of Delia’s East End Victorian forebears as ‘buried by charity’, prompted her to question “how did they manage to live in London with nothing?” Delia also discovered that one of her grandmothers died in a workhouse, much feared though life outside offered little comfort, many slept in coffin shaped beds in hostels, along the embankments or on the grass in St. James’s Park.
With the heart-wrenching lyrics of Ralph McTell’s song ‘Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London’ playing, Delia told us how social researchers, reformers and writers reported on the plight of the poor. One of these was Charles Booth who used information gathered by school board visitors, police officers and walks taken by his associate George Herbert Duckworth to classify London streets by the social class and character of the inhabitants, colour coded from yellow (upper-middle and upper wealthy class) to black (the lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal) publishing ‘poverty maps’ – an example of which was shown. (See http://booth.lse.ac.uk).
In his book ‘In Darkest England and The Way Out’ William Booth, founder of The Salvation Army, compared the poor as “jellyfish with everything but a backbone”. Following interviews with individuals amongst London’s working classes, journalist and co-founder of Punch, Henry Mayhew, published ‘London Labour and The London Poor’. Characters from the novels of Charles Dickens reflect the lives of people he observed – his father was sent to the Marshelsea Debtors Prison when he was twelve and Charles was sent to work in a blacking factory at an early age. ‘The People of The Abyss’ written by American author Jack London, whose research included living the life of the destitute for six months, is grim reading.
Photographs, blown up to fill the projector screen, of people in desperate need and the grimy run down houses with whole families in each room with no sanitation; court; alleyways and streets full of effluent; shoeless children in rags and wizened faces told a harrowing story. The poor could not be too fussy about what they ate. Popular meals included pickled fish, pies full of ‘wobbly bits’, sheep trotters, broxy – meat from diseased animals - and muffins often speckled with rat droppings. Diseases such as cholera were rife but is was not until the Great Stink of The Thames offended noses as it flowed past The Houses of Parliament in 1858 that Joseph Bazalgette was tasked with constructing The Great Sewer.
The streets were full of people trying to earn enough to survive - buskers; costermongers; second-hand clothes and furniture sellers; rag and bone collectors; chair and umbrella repairers; manure collectors and flower sellers. Children had to work too – chopping wood, crawling under machinery and chimney sweeps used small ones to climb up inside.
The pubs and music halls were full in the evenings. The male impersonator Vesta Tilley was very popular as well as Little Tich, Lily Morris (any relation Terry?), Florie Ford and a young Charlie Chaplin – who knew the inside of the workhouse as a child.
To lift our spirits before going home Delia showed a film clip of Bing Crosby singing ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas’, our members gamely joining in, helped by a glass of wine.
Christina Tyler, Programme Organiser
With the heart-wrenching lyrics of Ralph McTell’s song ‘Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London’ playing, Delia told us how social researchers, reformers and writers reported on the plight of the poor. One of these was Charles Booth who used information gathered by school board visitors, police officers and walks taken by his associate George Herbert Duckworth to classify London streets by the social class and character of the inhabitants, colour coded from yellow (upper-middle and upper wealthy class) to black (the lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal) publishing ‘poverty maps’ – an example of which was shown. (See http://booth.lse.ac.uk).
In his book ‘In Darkest England and The Way Out’ William Booth, founder of The Salvation Army, compared the poor as “jellyfish with everything but a backbone”. Following interviews with individuals amongst London’s working classes, journalist and co-founder of Punch, Henry Mayhew, published ‘London Labour and The London Poor’. Characters from the novels of Charles Dickens reflect the lives of people he observed – his father was sent to the Marshelsea Debtors Prison when he was twelve and Charles was sent to work in a blacking factory at an early age. ‘The People of The Abyss’ written by American author Jack London, whose research included living the life of the destitute for six months, is grim reading.
Photographs, blown up to fill the projector screen, of people in desperate need and the grimy run down houses with whole families in each room with no sanitation; court; alleyways and streets full of effluent; shoeless children in rags and wizened faces told a harrowing story. The poor could not be too fussy about what they ate. Popular meals included pickled fish, pies full of ‘wobbly bits’, sheep trotters, broxy – meat from diseased animals - and muffins often speckled with rat droppings. Diseases such as cholera were rife but is was not until the Great Stink of The Thames offended noses as it flowed past The Houses of Parliament in 1858 that Joseph Bazalgette was tasked with constructing The Great Sewer.
The streets were full of people trying to earn enough to survive - buskers; costermongers; second-hand clothes and furniture sellers; rag and bone collectors; chair and umbrella repairers; manure collectors and flower sellers. Children had to work too – chopping wood, crawling under machinery and chimney sweeps used small ones to climb up inside.
The pubs and music halls were full in the evenings. The male impersonator Vesta Tilley was very popular as well as Little Tich, Lily Morris (any relation Terry?), Florie Ford and a young Charlie Chaplin – who knew the inside of the workhouse as a child.
To lift our spirits before going home Delia showed a film clip of Bing Crosby singing ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas’, our members gamely joining in, helped by a glass of wine.
Christina Tyler, Programme Organiser