A New Way of Life

Edge Hill ---from 1885 to 1940

The two-up and two-down, back-to-back, terraced houses were a vast improvement on the squalid courts but despite the improvements, they could never be described as more than basic even at the time ---they were in fact an upgraded version of the courts.  Nevertheless, basic or not, they followed the precepts laid down by Dr Duncan and others in the best way that they could within the constraints of the era.  Each house consisted of a front-room, a kitchen and a yard on the ground floor and two bedrooms on the first floor---there was no bathroom whatsoever.  They all faced onto the street and were always light and airy back and front.  Most of the inhabitants took a pride in their new homes and some of them were often described as 'little palaces' especially if husband and wife pooled their skills but although it's true to say that it was a far cry from the courts, life was not exactly easy.

A ritual of keeping the step pristine begun by the more dedicated housewives gradually spread until every woman in every street assiduously cleaned the step at least once a week or risked the disdain of her neighbours.  Over a period of time, the method of cleaning evolved into a vigourous rubbing of the step with a stone supplied by a firm in Wigan.  The stones were stamped with a donkey and so the term "donkey-stoning the step" came into being.  The ritual was little enough in itself  but in a wider sense it denoted the new sense of ownership and pride in the new homes.  For many people life in the courts was still a reality as they waited their turn to enter the new terraced houses---- many of them waited a very long time and courts were still in existence right up to the war.

The toilets were all at the bottom of each yard within a brick shed.  They all had a wooden toilet seat, a rusted cast-iron cistern and newspapers cut-up for toilet-paper and they all froze solid in the winter no matter how much hessian you put round the pipes.  It really couldn't be more basic but it was sanitation, it worked and Dr. Duncan would have approved greatly.

Also to be found at the bottom of the yard, neatly fitted into a square hole in the brick wall leading onto the entry was the bin.  This thing weighed a ton when it was empty but when it was filled with a week's rubbish required Herculean efforts to just get it out of the wall.  The bin was made of steel and the men who shifted them were cast in the same mould.  Some of the bins were still smouldering with ashes from the fire when the binman hauled them out of the gap in the wall, straight onto his back, and walked the full length of an entry before tipping them onto a lorry.  The men who did this job were of truly heroic proportions and they made the coal-men look like wimps. They make T.V. shows out of this sort of task these days.

To be fair to the authorities of the time, they had attempted to address every one of the logistical problems pertaining to health as laid down by Dr. Duncan as the above description illustrates.  There was sanitation, a water supply and a rubbish removal regime and now the City Council in their zeal attempted to address the problem of overcrowding.  Large families were common in those days and a two-up and two-down was never spacious at the best of times so the Council came up with a solution to the problem which was both crude and heartless.  They employed agents called Talleymen whose role in life was to ensure that overcrowded houses were identified and steps taken to alleviate the problem.  

Their methods were straight out of the S.S. handbook and families lived in fear of their bureacratic approach which was often between the hours of midnight and 3 a.m. when a family would be awakened and if there were found to be two to a bed or too many to a room then they had the power to instruct that the family" disperse to another address". How they were expected to follow that instruction was a mystery but the real fear was that  the children of persistent "offenders" would be placed in care where apart from the trauma of being apart from their families they could be parted from their siblings within the homes.  Between the wars, children who were orphaned and taken into care would often be sent to Australia or Canada where they would be used as labourers on the farms ---many a Canadian family can trace their roots back to a Dickensian system which had little regard for the welfare of the children of the state.
There was little to be said in favour of the Talleyman system but at the very least the Council were aware of the problems that overcrowding led to and in their own tin-pot manner had attempted to find a solution.

The winters than were far more severe than those of today and it was considered normal to wake up to a thick frost making pictures on the bedroom windows.  Central heating existed and had been round since the time of the Romans but the only places it could be found at that time were municipal offices or posh houses ---well beyond the reach of the average working man.  The single source of heating was the ubiquitous coal-fire in the front room which everyone huddled round on cold evenings, fighting a running battle with the dog for the warmest spot.  The coal was kept in the back yard and was supplied by a merchant with the imaginative name of the 'coal-man' who came round in the early years with a horse and cart and carried the heavy sacks of coal on his back, right through the house and into the 'coal-'ole.  The coal-man was always as black as the anthracite he sold and his way of life changed very little for half -a-century until most of them acquired a lorry but there was no getting away from the physical toil of humping bags all day and every day.  It was well into the 1960's before the use of coal fires faded and it is only in recent years that the extent of the severe blackening to buildings has been dealt with.  All over the city of Liverpool iconic buildings have been sand-blasted revealing the beauty of the honey-coloured sandstone and restoring the architecture to its former glory.  

The strange thing was that although the street lamps were lit by gas and the houses were also lit by gas mantles, nobody gave a thought to using gas-fired heating.  There were consolations though and those who have never experienced a coal-fire will never know the exquisite taste of a 3 inch chunk of bread hacked off the loaf,  toasted over an open fire with a 3-pronged fork and topped with an inch of butter.
Another common sight was the 'rag and bone man' who also travelled around on a horse and cart collecting old clothes, bottles, metal and so on ----- an early form of recycling.  His horse's hooves could be heard on the cobbles long before he could be seen and even into the 60's the odd horse and cart plied their trade.

There was, it was true, a water supply to each home which was again a vast difference from a communal water supply but there was a single tap to the back-kitchen sink and the water was cold.  The back-kitchen sink was what an estate agent would today describe as multi-functional ----the same sink was used for the dishes, the washing, shaving, daily ablutions and anything else that came to mind.  The early sinks were made of stone and are highly prized today for making into garden troughs and the chimney-pots are valued for the reason.  The tin-bath hung on a nail in the yard and taken down once per week for the family bath night using the same water for all the family so it was just tough if you came from a large family ---but again there are consolations and the last to get in the bath stayed up later than all the others.  Hot water came from one source only and that was from the kettle heated on the fire, so that while a pot of tea was a mere inconvenience, bath-night was a logistical nightmare. 



A Woman's Place
 
There were very few women who worked in those days.  There was a defined division of labour in which the man went out to work and the woman looked after the home.  It was an old-fashioned attitude derived from a previous generation but there was also the factor that women who did work were grossly underpaid and in some cases the man regarded it as shameful if he could not maintain his family.  There was also the fact that in a world of hard manual labour and long hours most men were too tired to help anyway.  All these things have now changed and in most family groups both parents go out to work ---ignoring the fact that the responsibility for the small children is thrown onto the grandparents and ignoring the fact that the woman who works, generally does most of the housework as well even if there are labour-saving devices.  Not all things change for the better---some are just different.
Anyway, be that as it may, most of all the household chores were the responsibility of the woman of the house and every one of them was far more arduous than their equivalents today.  One of the major chores was the household weekly wash and the bigger the family the harder the task.  Most women trudged down to the wash-house pushing a pram-load of washing{ the distance could be anything up to 2 or 3 miles depending where the place was situated } then stood for hours in a Turkish Bath { no doubt praising St Kitty Wilkinson of The Washing} and then trudged all the way back home ----- and the clothes still had to be ironed.  Ironing was carried out with a solid lump of cast-iron which a weight-lifter would have balked at, heated on an open fire and stood on an asbestos stand, very often flaking.  The alternative to the wash-house was to fill a bath with hot-water and rub the clothes vigorously along a serrated board { later to be used as a musical instrument in Skiffle groups } then put them through a converted medieval instrument of torture called a mangle. 

Minus a hoover, cleaning the house was a long, tedious process with a brush and shovel but nowhere near as time-consuming as shopping which was always a major expedition.  Supermarkets were not even a concept never mind a reality in those days and even had they existed there was no transport to reach them so there was literally a shop on every corner and each shop specialised in a particular item.  This meant that a housewife of necessity had to travel from shop to shop like a bee collecting pollen from different flowers, in order to put together the ingredients for a meal.  
Worse still, in the absence of a fridge, it had to be done on a daily basis and since pre-packaging was unknown, in the case of a visit to the butcher for instance he would -----slice the 3oz of spam, weigh the sausages, reset the slicer to cut the bacon, so that each customer took an age to be served and queues were inevitable.  The same tedious process applied in the greengrocers with the limited items available making the task even more tiresome----- peppers, limes, okra, ginger, star-fruit were all unheard of and even bananas and grapefruit were difficult to come by.  And so it went on.  The sagacious housewife treated the daily shop as a social event and in that way turned her work into a far more pleasant task --------it was a pretty tedious job for those who didn't.


Men's Work

If life was difficult for women it could be downright dangerous for a man.  There was often work to be found  but unless you were a white-collar worker then most of the jobs were poorly paid, long hours and heavy, manual work.  There was no legislation as to Health and Safety and most workers carried out their allotted tasks with no questions asked as there was always someone else to take their place.  The bosses had the upper hand and in many cases took full advantage of their position sowing the seeds of discontent which in later years culminated in militant Unions throughout the land----- the paradox was that the unions became powerful when their conditions had improved a hundred-fold.
But the vast majority still turned into work, woken by the "knocker-upper" who was paid a penny per week, per house, to knock on the bedroom with a long bamboo pole and on dark winter mornings it was followed by a clattering of boots and clogs hastening to work with the first fag of the day.

The 30's were of course exceptional with work at a premium and life hard for the working classes especially.  The docks had always been a stable place of work in Liverpool but with the 30's there were far more men for too few jobs. As a result, each day would see hundreds at the dock gates with the requisite number hand-picked by the foreman and the rest turned away.  The system was ripe for exploitation and the employers took full advantage, ignoring the daily humiliation of the working man.  It is no coincidence that in later years the docker's union was the most militant of all.
George Orwell's "The Road to Wigan Pier" is a searing indictment of working life in the north during the 30's and paints a depressing picture of Dickensian custom and practice in every trade.  He describes vividly the lives of the Lancashire miners which have always been hard but it is difficult to find exploitation to rival the following anecdote:----Orwell worked alongside the men for a while and was astonished to discover that their day's work did not begin until they were actually at the coal-face which meant that they had to travel to the mine, descend into the ground and then crawl on hands and knees often for up to a mile before they began to earn their wages.  Like the dockers, the miner's came to be considered militant in later years but the employers who were to face their wrath had their predecessors to thank for resentment which went back many years.


"The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists"

written by Dublin born author, Robert Tressell, is a tale of oppressive bosses and exploited workers which struck a chord with working men everywhere.  Although it is a novel, it tells of working conditions in England at the turn of the century and the book has acquired cult status, reprinting year after year. The book was required reading for Socialists in the 1930's which illustrates clearly that firstly the book had lost none of its impact and secondly that it was still relevant because conditions in the workplace had never changed since the book's publication in 1914. The book is still widely read today and has been reprinted in many languages but its heart belongs in 1930's England when working conditions were truly deplorable ---what they were like prior to that doesn't bear thinking about.   Even as late as 1977, there was a celebration of his works and ideals in Liverpool and on February 3rd, 2008, a Blue Plaque was placed on the facade of the old Royal Hospital building recording the fact that Tressell had died there on 3rd February, 1911. The Plaque records that Tressell's true name was Noonan ---- the author had written the book under a pseudonym for fear of reprisals, which is indicative of the very repression Tressell was writing about.

The 1920's were also a time of great unrest and for men who had returned from the war it was unacceptable to have no work on one hand and poor conditions of employment on the other.  It spoke volumes about working conditions when the police went on strike in 1919 and the 20's and 30's were a wake-up call to employers throughout the country and the beginning of a long odyssey into the promised land of decent wages and conditions.


Disease was an ever-present throughou t the years before the Second World War and in pre-penicillin days many diseases were potential killers.  Penicillin was discovered in 1929 by Sir Alexander Fleming but it wasn't until the 1940's that it came into common usage.

Tuberculosis was an ever present threat given the damp conditions and polio was dreaded.  The flu virus of 1918 killed off more people than the war itself ---one of the saddest cases was of a nummber of Canadian soldiers awaiting transport to return home being stricken down before they could leave these shores.  
Their graves can be found in the churchyard of The Marble Church in St. Asaph. 

Scarlet Fever was not uncommon even into the late 50's and sufferers were quarantined with survival being a matter of luck.

The National Health Service was not to begin until 1948, but an enterprising initiative preempted the mass vaccinations of the 1950's when diptheria was all but eradicated via a mass inoculation of children in 1935. 



So, it can be seen that while life was a vast improvement upon the fetid courts it was still far from being a bed of roses.  But, that sense of helplessness had gone and there was a glimmer of a suspicion that with exceptional application your destiny ultimately could lie in your own hands.