Slumming it

Today

I've been watching, with great interest, a BBC2 historical reality series, in which a London slum was recreated and where modern families attempt to eke out a living.

It is interesting in itself, but also sheds a bit more light on family history.

In My Day

As I have before blogged, Daddy, who was born in 1893, lived out his childhood in the slums of London. His father was an habitual drunkard whom his mother eventually left, preferring to find a way of managing on her own. I'm not sure that she was very good at this. I think that they lived in Clerkenwell and Daddy told me that she used to sell newspapers outside Old Street Station. She also did some sewing and he used to tell me of the speed at which she could stitch by hand. Daddy earnt a few pennies as a "dirt boy", sweeping away horse dung at crossings so that ladies could keep their skirts clean, in the hope of earning a 6d (reminiscent of Joe in Bleak House). I have just discovered that the slums that Dickens wrote about in Oliver Twist are based on those in Clerkenwell.

Often they couldn't afford the rent and, more than once, he and his mother did a "flit" with the help of an uncle who had a handcart into which they could load their scrappy belongings and flee at dead of night. I'm sure that their "landlords" were almost as poor as they were. He had a lifelong hatred of dirt, having lived with mice, rats, bedbugs, cockroaches and so on from the start. Many books written in the 19th century describe the mud of London streets and the complete lack of sanitation in the slums. Slum clearance often simply resulted in displaced people ending up crowding into another, even worse, place, or sleeping on the streets.

One of the new laws that came into effect during the 1890's was education for all children. Daddy's mother had tried to give her boy a love of learning and they would sit down together and work out the meaning of articles in the newspaper. although she was clearly semi-literate,  but now he went to school.

This was the start of Daddy's journey upwards. He told me that one day he just decided to walk out, having watched the rats running around his mother's home one too many times, which included turning his back on her as well.

I can't really blame him; times were desperate and, if you could, you just had to use any means out of the pit.

I wonder whether the children who participated in the series will return to their well-fed, relatively lazy lives with a little more respect.