AAR               More Stories of Yore as told me by my mother    Added to on 21 April 2007

 Annie Campbell, my mother, was born July 5 1901.   Annie just missed being a Victorian by a month or so.  Her elder sister, Lena, actually made it into the world during Queen Vic's reign.  Annie's own story is given in AAQ, this essay here is an extension of my mother's stories as she often talked of her younger days, and the privations that the working classes suffered at the beginning if the twentieth century.  Society moved very slowly in those days so I imagined my grandmother's story would have been similar to that of her daughter (my mother).

To the young people of today, the things I am going to say will probably be treated as gross exaggerations.  Please believe me, they are not.  The lot of the poor in 1900 was dire. 

The workhouse was an ever-present possibility.  I don't know how severe the conditions were in the workhouse, but just the name brought fear to most poor people.  They would do their damnedest to stay outside.

Money conversions -- for what it is worth!
Twenty shillings to the pound
Twelve pence to a shilling
A Crown (rarely seen) was worth five shillings
Half-a-crown was a common coin.
A Florin was a special sort of two shilling piece and, again, was common coin
There were three bronze coins, a farthing, a halfpenny, and a penny
A threepenny "Joey" was a silver coin, as was a "tanner" ( sixpenny piece)
A "bob" was a shilling and was a twentieth of a pound

There were various heavy slang terms that a polite person never used:
A "clod" was a penny, A "Sprazi" was a tanner or a sixpenny piece.
There were various terms used in betting, but few responsible working men had enough money to go racing.  Of course. there were always the irresponsible few who kept their family short while they blued their wages either in a pub or with a bookie.

I don't know what year compulsory education came in.  My mother told me of taking threepence to school to pay for her classes, but she also told of "the schoolboard man" who chased absent children.  My best bet is that compulsion education came in in about 1910.

Prior to the first world war life was hard.  Food was cheap by today standards, but money was always a problem.  A penny (one two-hundred and fortieth of a pound) would buy a meal for a family.  They didn't eat well, but they ate.  A building labourer got about fifteen shillings a week if he wasn't rained off.  You could rent a house for seven and sixpence a week, and you always took in a lodger for half-a-crown (two and sixpence a week to help pay the rent)

"Uncles" (a pawn shop) was a regular support.  Father's best suit went in on Monday and was redeemed when Dad got his wages.  There was one tram in Teddington to the High Street that was nicknamed "the pawnshop special" by the tram crew.  Jobs that were regular never lacked staff.  If you could get a job as a postman, a tram conductor or driver, you were lower middle class.  A policeman was one of the plum jobs but was very difficult to obtain.  Your father had to be a copper, or something similar.  And if you got a criminal record, you were doomed to be a labourer all your life.

Law and Order was on an entirely different scales to today.  If a yob was involved with a gang and someone got killed, the whole gang would hang.  Older members of a gang would frisk the youngsters to see that they weren't carrying a shooter, because if the young fool used it, and someone got killed, everyone would swing.  If a copper gut hurt in a scuffle, the culprit would ALWAYS fall down the police station steps to the cells and might well appear in Court the next day in bandages.  The beaks were fully aware of what happened, but never questioned the police when the prisoner complained that he had been tripped.  It was a crude method of keeping control, but it worked.  A petty thief who got convicted on a number of occasions got Preventative Detention (PD).  And the prisons weren't very pleasant places either.  A youth who argued with his teacher got "six of the best" so that he could not sit down comfortably for a week  And if a lout beat up, say, an old lady; the birch was administered by a hefty prison officer.  And he couldn't even lay in bed comfortably for over a week.  The weals never went septic because salt is a very good antiseptic.  None of the crime-prevention policies I have outlined were widely published.  The public just knew that it was not a good idea to indulge in thuggery.  How different is is today.  The reasons that prisons are bursting at the seams is that they are no longer a deterrent.

My mother told me a story of a woman who lived in Shacklegate Lane in Teddington in about 1910.     The son nicked a chicken out of a neighbour's hen house.  The woman reported the theft and a bobby searched the dustbins of local houses.  He found chicken bones in the house of this particular woman.  Chicken for lunch was very rare in working class circles.  To save her son getting a police record, the woman admitted to the theft.  She got three months penal servitude.

On her return home she confided to a neighbour that she had not had such a good rest for years.  In those days life was hard for working-class women.  All day Monday  in the scullery doing the washing.  And doing the ironing most of Tuesday.  All meals were cooked in the oven that was part of the kitchener.  To make a pot of tea first thing in the morning, you had to get the fire going before you could boil a kettle.  Life was VERY DIFFERENT to today.

My mother told me of a very sad story of a younger sister.  The child, (Chris) was several years younger than my mother.  Chris was rather adventurous youngster and one day a neighbour banged on the front door of the Victor Road Teddington house with some devastating news.  It turned out that Chris had wandered up the road and had been run over by a tramcar in Stanley Road.  The tram driver broke regulations and reversed the vehicle.  Chris lost both legs below the knee,

A local householder  got a push-cart and took the little girl to Teddington Hospital in Elfin Grove.  That was the original hospital in Teddington before the Memorial Hospital was built in Hampton Road at the junction of Queens Road.  In those days ambulances as we know them today were non-existent.  The bottom of the legs of the girl were just raw bleeding flesh.

During the time Chris was in the hospital she became delirious and was reported to be calling out "Du, Du".  The matron told my granny of the delirium, and she worked out that she must mean "Dook", my mother's nickname in the family.  My mother was duly despatched to sit with Chris in the evening until she went to sleep for the night.  Initially the senior nurse wouldn't let my mother see Chris's legs for fear of her fainting.  But my mother eventually persuaded the nurse to allow her to see Chris's legs being dressed.  My mother was congratulated for her stoicism and comforted he young sister until she was discharged

The doctor who attended Chris in hospital must have been a saint.  He set up a trust fund of fifty pounds (a lot of money in those days) to get the little girl indentured as a milliner when she left school.  But it wasn't to be.

A week or so later, Chris and a friend from a few door away were having a tea party at my grandmother's house.  The friend told my granny that Chris just snored herself to sleep.  Chris had died at the tea table.  My deduction was that Chris had a blood clot reach the heart or brain, and she just died at the table making a snorting sort of noise.  In those days, medicine as we know it today just didn't exist.

NORMANSFIELD
Before I talk about Normansfield, I must tell the reader that this place has its own website
http://www.twickenham-museum.org.uk/contact.asp.  This site is worth a visit to let he reader know about the institution.

My mother trained as a tailoress and managed to put food on the table for my brother and I.  My father walked out on the family in 1930 just after my younger brother was born, and left my mother to fend for herself and we two kids.  Some time in the mid 1930s my mother was out of work and took a job as a cleaner at Normansfield.  She later told  me of a few memories she had of her time at Normansfield.  One of the houses had well-to-do residents who were quite barmy, but harmless.  The houses were just that -- buildings erected as private dwellings and constructed in that manner.  One of the inmates used to lurk at the bottom of a flight of stairs and look up the skirts of the cleaners as they descended the stairs.  This chap was also partial to stroking the legs of the cleaners as they came down, by reaching through the side of the banisters.  One of the other women told my mother to do what they all did.
She said "He loses interest in us if we 'accidentally' tread on his fingers!":

Also at Normansfield my mother got quite friendly with one of the male nurses and went out on the river a number of times with him. But my mother was still married to my father, and maintained the protocol of those times.

My mother also told me of comic events relating to Normansfield when she was a child.  I used the word "inmate" above because they weren't considered to be patients, as they are today.  Some of the inmates used to be taken into Bushey Park by a male nurse.  These were time when political correctness was still in the future.  The little gang of walkers used to be followed by local kids.  The favourite cry was "Spot the keeper".  I imagine that it was an adult who put the kids up to it.

Some of the most disturbed patients were kept in padded cells.  My mother told me that these inmates were so nutty that some of them would eat their own faeces.  I suppose these days the worst that the  poor wretches would endure would be to be permanently drugged (up to the eyeballs.)

If one does not make light of these horrific stories, the world would be a sad place.