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One distinct type had been the “factory girl,” whose token moment of emancipation arrived in the summer of 1888 when 1,500 “girls,” working in the Bryant amp; May match factory in Bow, walked out of their jobs in a demand for higher wages; they were to a certain extent organised by the Fabian militant, Annie Besant, and their success had significant consequences. In that year also women were allowed to vote in local London elections, and of course the movement of the suffragettes found its source and purpose in London. For the first time in the city’s history, women were able to engage its egalitarian spirit in pursuit of their own interests.
In 1913 Sylvia Pankhurst founded the East London Federation of the Women’s Social and Political Union (the WSPU itself was established by her mother ten years earlier); the federation’s birthplace was a baker’s shop along the Bow Road, not far from the Bryant amp; May factory. Sylvia wrote later that “I regarded the rousing of the East End as of utmost importance … The creation of a woman’s movement in that great abyss of poverty would be a call and a rallying cry to the rise of similar movements in all parts of the country.” So through the efforts of women London reacquired its destiny as the home of radical dissent; it was a suitable response, kindling a spirit in all those women who had been written off as “soaks” or worse.
The history of the suffragettes connected with Sylvia Pankhurst was associated very closely with that of the East End, and became a genuine expression of the area’s concerns. Meetings were held in Poplar, Bromley and Bow; processions began, or ended, in Victoria Park; the printer of suffragette literature was in premises along Roman Road, while the Women’s Hall opened on the Old Ford Road. The significance of the topography of the women’s movement has never adequately been analysed, but it has become clear that the eastern areas of London lent power and authority to it. During the First World War, a Distress Bureau was opened on the Old Ford Road for women who, with their husbands’ income gone, had been threatened with eviction. A co-operative factory, organised by Sylvia Pankhurst, was established in Norman Road with a day nursery within it. A free clinic and nursery was opened on the corner of Old Ford Road and St. Stephen’s Road; it had once been a public house, known as the Gunmaker’s Arms but was renamed the Mother’s Arms. It was this double movement, of caring feminism and the female adoption of male working roles, which steadily advanced the moral and social position of women in the city.
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There are still women wrestlers in Shoreditch; the inmates of Holloway Prison have been characteristically convicted of cruelty to children, prostitution, or drug trafficking. There are still many poor women whom the city has beaten into submission. From the latter half of the twentieth century there are records of hostels and refuges for “sick women and battered women.” There is a truth about London here; the pattern of relative misery remains recognisable and unaltered, while surging above it are broad general movements of change. So, for example, the latest statistics suggest that female labour in London has increased by over 6 per cent in the ten years from 1986, while that of men has declined. It is now estimated that 44 per cent of the women in London are in paid employment. So the city has become friendlier to women, and they permeate all of its structures and institutions; there are female taxi-drivers and female executives. Just as the early twenty-first-century city is becoming lighter and more open, so after two thousand years it is discovering its feminine principle.
CHAPTER 68. Boys and Girls Come Out to Play
The history of children in London affords much material for contemplation. Whether in their mortality, in their savagery, or in their instinct for game, the great forces of the city are revealed. The first evidences are brief and elusive: fragments of small leather shoes and slippers, as well as bronze toys and bone whistles. The delight in game, or play, is profound and eternal. The tombstones of children from the Roman era still also survive; one is inscribed to Onesimus, the “helpful” child and “well-deserving” son, and another to “good Dexius, son of Diotimus.” The death of children is a constant thread in the history of London. In more than one sense, youth is a stuff which will not endure within the confines of the city.
Deep beneath the level of Poultry has been found the golden statuette of a baby and that small image represents all those ideas of holiness or sacredness which surround the child. There are accounts of children as prophets and visionaries; one young Londoner “was imbued, to the glory of God, with a knowledge which the master had not taught him.” We read of another who “had the job, along with two boys from the cathedral school,” of guarding the abbey at Westminster. There are accounts of children carrying baskets of sand and gravel to Smithfield in the early twelfth century in order to help Rahere in the building of St. Bartholomew’s great church there.
This connection of children with the protection, and even erection, of London’s sacred sites is a highly significant one; the city is acquiring the energy and innocence of its children, in an activity not far removed from that of child-sacrifice in the foundations of temples or of bridges. Certainly children were at the centre of civic and ecclesiastical ceremonies. It has been noted that “upon St. Nicholas, St. Katherine, St. Clement and Holy Innocents Day, children were wont to be arrayed in chimers, rockets, surplices, to counterfeit bishops and priests and to be led with songs and dances from house to house, blessing the people.” As late as the sixteenth century, just before the Reformation, “a boy habbited like a bishop in pontificabilis went abroad in most parts of London, singing after the old fashion.” In the Lord Mayor’s Show of 1516 the great procession was accompanied by “16 naked boys,” and children were an integral feature of all the city and guild pageants that were carried along Cornhill and Cheapside. We may also note here the curious and yet consistent pattern of superstition which surrounded children. During the Commonwealth “the prophesies of children were listened to intently,” and astrologers employed children as “scryers” or visionaries. “When a spirit is raised,” one book of magic suggests, “none hath power to see it but children of eleven or twelve years of age or such as are true maids.” Here the idea of innocence, in a corrupt and corrupting city, is powerfully effective.
The status of the child as a legal and commercial entity was also quickly established. Of William the Conqueror’s charter to Londoners in 1066, the second of the three precepts was “I will that every child be heir after his father’s death,” thus confirming a tradition of primogeniture. A complex system of wardship was also in place, so that there was no possibility that the children of the deceased might be fraudulently deprived of their inheritance. The commercial importance of the child in London is emphasised by the words of an ancient ballad, in which a married couple send their boy “away to fair London, an Apprentice for to find,” while the first extant record of a young London apprentice can be dated to 1265. Another commercial activity undertaken by children was that of begging, while children themselves were robbed, kidnapped and murdered for profit. One Alice de Salesbury was condemned to stand in the pillory because “she had taken one Margaret daughter of John Oxwyke, Grocer … and had carried her away and stripped her of her clothes that she might not be recognised by her family, that she might go begging with the said Alice, and a gain might be made thereby.” This activity of child-stealing continued upon the streets of London well into the nineteenth century, when it was called a “kinching lay”; the children of the affluent were a particular prey since they could be decoyed, and their clothes and jewellery sold. Many of them were killed upon the spot, to prevent their crying out or afterwards identifying their assailants. London could be a perilous place for the young.
William Fitz-Stephen preferred to emphasise the energy and vivacity of the youthful citizens, how they delighted in cockfighting and in “the well-known game of foot-ball” with an inflated pig’s bladder used as a ball. On the holy days of summer, the children engaged in leap-frogging, wrestling and “slinging javelins beyond a mark”; in winter, the
y indulged in snowballing and ice-skating, using the long shin bones of animals rather like the skateboards of the late twentieth century. Fitz-Stephen is at pains to emphasise the elements of competition and aggression in these games, to complement his description of the valiant spirit which marked out London from other cities. The “lay sons of the citizens rush out of the gate in crowds … and there they get up sham fights, and exercise themselves in military combat.” Young children were often given bows and arrows with which to practise their skills, since one day they might be required to defend their city. They were already “Londoners,” with a strong sense of civic identity and pride. In similar fashion schoolboys were taught how to engage in dispute and rhetorical combat one with another, while “the boys of the different schools wrangle with each other in verse, and contend about the principles of grammar or the rules of the perfect and future tenses.” In well-known public areas, such as the churchyard of St. Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, the children would mount upon makeshift stages and compete in “rhetorical harangues” or recitations. Here lies one of the origins of London drama but aptly, in Fitz-Stephen’s account, the elements of combat and aggression are compounded with spectacle and theatricality. In this respect the children of London are faithful images of the city itself.
One fourteenth-century bishop reproved “impudent youths” who scribbled in the margins of books, while Robert Braybroke in his “Letter of Excommunication” on 9 November 1385 complained of boys “good for nothing in their insolence and idleness, instigated by evil minds and busying themselves rather in doing harm than good.” They “throw and shoot stones, arrows and different kinds of missiles at the rooks, pigeons, and other birds nesting in the walls and porches of the church. Also they play ball inside and outside the church and engage in other destructive games there, breaking and greatly damaging the glass windows and the stone images of the church.”
A baker’s boy was carrying a basket of loaves up the Strand; he passed the bishop of Salisbury’s palace, and one of the bishop’s servants stole a loaf. The boy raised a “hue and cry” and a crowd of children, apprentices and other citizens engaged in what almost became a full-scale riot. Children were, in other words, part of the turbulent life of the turbulent city. The administrative reports of the fourteenth century record “a boy climbing up to a gutter to retrieve his lost ball; of others playing on a heap of timber when one fell and broke his leg; and of another, a schoolboy returning over London Bridge after dinner, who must needs climb out and hang by his hands from a plank on the side of the bridge, and fell in and was drowned.” They played “hoodman blind,” now known as blind man’s buff, and “cobnutte,” which is the present game of “conkers.”
There were rule-books for schoolboys which by indirection preserve the essence of a London childhood in the medieval city, with injunctions concerning “no running, jumping, chattering, or playing, no carrying of sticks, stones or bows, no tricks upon passers by; no laughing or giggling if anyone were to read or sing minus bene, rather less than well.” In turn there survive doggerel poems by schoolboys about their masters:
I would my master were an hare …
For if he were dead I would not care.
In a city where everyone was competing for notice, the children also clamoured. But they also seemed drawn to the forbidden places of London, as if in defiance against its threat. It is the spirit of impudence, or mockery, which has always been noticeable among London children. In the 1950s and 1960s they played a game called “Last Across” in which they would run across the road in imminent danger of being knocked down by cars. It is a question of meeting, and beating, the city on its own terms.
When the young Thomas More walked in the 1480s from his house in Milk Street to St. Anthony’s School in Threadneedle Street, the city pressed upon him in ways which he never forgot. He passed the Standard in Cheapside, for example, where public and bloody executions took place; children were not spared the spectacle of violent death. He passed churches, painted images of the saints, and the “pissing conduit” as well as the stalls of the fishmongers and butchers; he would have seen the beggars, some of his own age, as well as the prostitutes and the thieves or loiterers set up in the stocks. Like an adult he went dressed in doublet and hose because children were not considered “different” from their elders but simply younger versions of the same thing. At school he learned music and grammar, as well as useful proverbial phrases. “O good turne asket another … Many handes maken lite werke … The more haste, the werse spede.” He was also educated in rhetoric, and was one of those children who competitively exercised their talents in St. Bartholomew’s Churchyard. But the important point is, simply, that he was being trained for a career in the legal administration of London. It was undoubtedly and principally a civic education; he was taught to celebrate order and harmony, and much of his public career was devoted to introducing that order and harmony within the streets which he had known since childhood. Yet those same streets hardened him, as they hardened all their children. His own writing is filled with their slang and demotic; the hardness and theatricality of his own nature, as well as his wit and aggression, sprang from a characteristic London childhood.
London children, therefore, confronted harsh realities. If they were poor they were put out to hard service, working hours as long as their adult companions, but if they were the offspring of affluent families they were enlisted within the households of richer or more eminent citizens; the young Thomas More, for example, entered the household of the archbishop of Canterbury. It was necessary to work, or be punished. The records of Bridewell show that nearly half of its inmates were boys accused of nothing but vagrancy; they were “packte up and punnyshed alyke in Brydewell with rogues, beggers, strompets and pylfering theves.” This harshness is reflected in the commentaries of two Londoners, the late fifteenth-century William Caxton, and the early sixteenth-century Roger Ascham. Caxton complained that “I see that they that ben borne within [the city of London] encrease and prouffyte not lyke theys faders and olders,” while Ascham maintained that “Innocence is gone: Bashfulnesse is banished; moch presumption in yougthe.” These sentiments might be considered as the perpetual rage of age against youth, in the context of the changing generations, but it is interesting to note that they were made at a time when the city was expanding. Between 1510 and 1580 the population rose from 50,000 to 120,000, and it suffered from an excess of turbulence, unrest and energy; it seems likely that the children embodied that spirit in the most obvious and, to the older citizens, alarming way.
The image of the unruly young apprentice was a potent one within the city, for example, and as a result the civic authorities drew up tightly regulated and organised statutes of labour and discipline. Nothing could be allowed to disrupt commercial harmony. The apprentice was bound “and must obey. Since I have undertook to serve my Maister truly for seven years My duty shall both answer that desire And my Old Maister’s profite every way. I prayse that City which made Princes tradesmen.” By the latter comment the speaker meant that even those of noble birth could be enrolled as apprentices of a trade. The commercial instinct was very strong. Apprentices were forbidden to muster in the streets, drink in the taverns, or wear striking apparel; they were, in addition, allowed only “closely cropped hair.” In a similar spirit it was still the custom for children to kneel before their father to acquire his blessing before proceeding with the day’s events. They often dined at a separate, smaller table, and were served after the adults; then they might be questioned about their activities, or their learning at school, or asked to recite a verse or a proverb. Recalcitrant children were often whipped with “the juice of the birch” which is “excellent for such a cure if you apply it but twise or thrice.”
The songs, as well as the calls and cries, of children are part of the general sound of the city. “Home againe home againe market is done” must rival for antiquity “On Christmas night I turn the spit” or “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the
bed that I lie on.” In 1687 John Aubrey wrote that “Little children have a custome when it rains to sing, or charme away the raine; thus they all join in a chorus and sing thus, ‘Raine, raine, go away, come againe a Saterday.’” There are a great many songs and rhymes set specifically in London; this is perhaps not surprising, since the city had the largest congregation of children in the nation and, eventually, in the world. It has been stated by those authorities on childhood matters, Iona and Peter Opie, that most of these rhymes can be dated after 1600; certainly they emanated from London printer-publishers of the period, one of whom was jocularly known as “Bouncing B, Shoe Lane.”
But there are more significant urban features of these songs. They emanate from the street cries and ballads of London; their context is that of an oral culture. Some rhymes relate indirectly to wars or to political matters, while others refer to urban events such as an “Ice Fair” upon the Thames, or the burning “of a bridge of London town” in February 1633. Other songs came from the London theatres, such as “There was a jolly miller” and “When I was a little boy, I washed my mammy’s dishes.” “The house that Jack built” was originally the title of a London pantomime. In fact there were so many pantomimes and harlequinades-Old Mother Hubbard and her Dog, Harlequin and Little Tom Tucker, and a host of others-that it could be presumed that Londoners themselves had become like little children.
The printers of Shoe Lane, Paternoster Row and elsewhere issued a stream of story-books and song-books, catching the young with their usual commercial spirit, and again the presence of London filled their pages. “O was an oyster girl, and we went about town,” from an eighteenth-century spelling book, is only the plainest of a number of verses or songs which celebrated London trades and tradespeople. There are children’s songs on the milkmaids of Islington and the sweeps of Cheapside, as well as the tailors, the bakers and the candlestick-makers. Some of them begin “As I was going o’er London Bridge” as a great metaphor for the highway of life, but of course the most ancient and familiar is the mysterious song
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