by Abrams, Fran
Fun, ancient and modern
‘My brother Leslie was continually falling into ponds,’ Olive Everson recalled. ‘In winter he would slide on too-thin ice, and in Summer, wading in streams in order to catch “tiddlers”, he would suddenly find himself in deep water and arrive home soaked and miserable. My mother never knew what to expect at the end of the day, when he was due to arrive home . . . he loved to go off on his own for a day’s fishing, with a bent pin, a worm and some string.’12
Baden-Powell tapped into some powerful forces when he founded the Scout movement. There was the age-old tendency for boys – who always had more freedom – to go off exploring their environment, and also this renewed sense that there was something fundamentally character-building and life-affirming about allowing children to roam the countryside, to breathe its healthy air and even occasionally to come into contact with cold water or mud.
The first weekly comic strip, which had appeared in 1884, had featured a raffish character called Ally Slope, who was always getting into scrapes. But it was during the Edwardian period that children’s comics began to come into their own, with Alfred Harmsworth’s Amalgamated Press launching the Daily Mail on the profits from its Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips.13 But the big excitement of the age, for the working-class child at least, was the cinema. The first films were shown in the late nineteenth century at travelling fairground shows, and graduated to small shops known as ‘Penny Gaffs’. By 1909, larger cinemas were being built, licensed by local authorities.14 Yet these picture-houses were a working-class domain, not considered entirely safe or respectable for the more affluent child. Elsie Oman, born around 1904 into a very poor family in Salford, remembered her local picture-house as a chaotic place:15 ‘Sometimes Auntie would give my cousin and I a penny each to go to the pictures matinée – “the bug house”, we called it. Sometimes we got a free orange or a comic as we entered. It was like a madhouse inside. Some children got their entrance fee by taking empty jam jars or bottles back to the shops – they got a penny for three. The place reeked of oranges and every now and then lumps of peel would come whizzing round our earholes . . . it was a good job they were silent pictures, as with the noise of the children it would have been difficult to hear.’
The premises in which films were shown to children were often unsanitary and even unsafe. But it was the content of the films, and their possible effect on the morals of the children of the urban poor, which now began to cause serious concern. The first known case of a film being blamed for encouraging juvenile delinquency occurred in 1913:16 a magistrate named Mr Wallace, dealing at the London Sessions with a boy who pleaded guilty to burglary, blamed the pictures for the offence, according to the following day’s newspaper: ‘Many of the lads who came before him owed their position to having been influenced by pictures of burglaries and thefts at such shows . . . these shows, as far as young boys were concerned, were a grave danger to the community.’
Similarly, the following year a group of boys who came before the Sutton Coldfield magistrates accused of theft were bound over not to enter a picture-house for twelve months: ‘The chairman said the town had been made notorious as a den of young thieves, and shopkeepers had been terrorised. A petition, signed by clergy and ministers of religion and by the local branch of the Women’s Temperance Association, was presented, suggesting the closer supervision of picture theatres. They urged that no picture should be allowed to be shown which represented violence and wrongdoing, and objected to certain posters.’
Yet the cinema was here to stay. In 1914, research by Manchester’s Director of Education, Spurley Hey, revealed that half the city’s pupils were attending at least once a week. Indeed, Mr Hey told a commission of inquiry, many of them were prepared to beg or steal to do so. One enterprising group had formed a begging circle for the purpose, which had met its demise when one member had stolen the group’s hidden boots and stockings – removed to increase the impression of poverty – and had pawned them for cinema tickets. But The Times weighed in on the child’s part. Criticism of the cinema as immoral was ‘an expression of the type of mind which regards all pleasure as evil’, the paper said in a leader column in January 1914. But the biggest question was: What would children do instead if the picture-houses were closed to them? ‘Are their homes better ventilated than the palaces, or the street corners less draughty? Will they go to bed any earlier, or sleep any sounder for being left at home?’
Sonia Keppel, growing up in a wealthy household in London, would have had no such japes. However, her mother would occasionally take her to a matinée at the theatre, which in itself was a far from sedate experience.17 ‘Clearly I remember that it was a matinée about Nero, fiddling madly before the burning of Rome. A deafening thunderstorm went on in the background, through which Agrippina shrieked valedictions to her insensitive son. Alternately, the stage glowed red from the flames consuming Rome, or was blacked out altogether while the thunder lasted, or flared white with the lightning. Through all these extremes of heat and shade and light I clung to Mamma, protesting loudly that I was not frightened.’
Nor was the experience entirely free from violence: the Keppels had taken along a friend, Sir Hedworth Williamson, ‘who appeared to treat the appalling scene in front of him with comforting levity’. Halfway through the performance, a lady arrived late and groped her way to a seat in the row behind. ‘Then she took the long pins out of her hat and pinned it to the back of the seat in front of her. On the stage the lightning flared, and by its light I beheld the terrifying spectacle of Sir Hedworth Williamson impaled, like a gigantic butterfly, on the back of his seat. And a doctor had to be sent for to dress the wound and to treat him for shock.’
The Keppels evidently gained endless amusement from retelling the story later. Yet these excursions with her mother were rare, Sonia said, and mostly she ‘accepted the current theory that a child must not be too much with its parents’. Yet, despite her admission that she longed to spend more time with her parents, she described the times she did spend with them – shopping trips, even a holiday in St Moritz – as times filled with fun and affection. The Edwardian age, Sonia said, was a time when the heavy mantle of Victoria’s solemnity was lifted, and when both children and adults indulged – at least sometimes – in childish behaviour.
The world intrudes
Yet this was a turbulent age, with Britain preparing for war and with tension mounting over women’s suffrage, Irish home rule and the reform of the House of Lords. And children were not immune to their odd outbreak of social unrest. In 1911, a wave of school strikes swept the country, during which pupils refused to work in protest at perceived injustices in their schools. It all began in Llanelli, in south Wales, when pupils had marched out of their classrooms in protest at the hitting of a child by an assistant teacher.18 Similar strikes followed across the country, highlighting grievances over hours, leaving ages, holidays and discipline. By the end of a week, pupils had walked out of lessons in Liverpool, Sheffield, Birmingham, London and Glasgow, as well as in other cities. In the East End, school strikers armed themselves with iron bars, sticks and belts, though eventually their protest ended peacefully. The Times, while condemning the action, took a notably relaxed stance. Describing the outbreaks of unrest as ‘a popular method of escape from the dullness of discipline and scholastic routine’, the paper’s leader-writer pointed out that none of this was new: ‘The incident may serve to remind us, and especially those who are disposed to regard ill-disciplined boyhood as the peculiar product of twentieth-century legislation, that schoolboy strikes are probably as old as organized education itself,’ the paper said. A school striker had lost his life at the Edinburgh High School in 1595, and those of a classical bent would recall that a similar incident had taken place in one of the Mimes of Herondas.
Parents could occasionally be part of the problem when school-children failed to behave, the paper added – ‘Difficulties have arisen from time to time from the fact that parents of elementary sc
hool children, while anxious for good discipline, object to the use of ordinary instruments for maintaining it’ – and maybe the strikes would lead them to discipline their own children better in future: ‘These school strikes may serve a useful purpose if they induce parents to realize the limits of peaceful persuasion as an educative force.’
The class divide, which remained stark, loomed large in the lives of many children. Olive Everson, in Suffolk, was very aware of her social position.19 ‘Grannie was a person of refinement,’ she explained, because she had taught in a small village school, while Olive’s father was a worker on a country estate. Yet the Eversons were very aware of the social gulf that divided them not just from the family in the ‘Big House’ but also from those who owned their own land: ‘I had a school friend whose parents lived at a farm. I often went there for tea, and on one occasion to their Christmas party,’ Olive wrote. ‘Relatives of the family were there in full force, and one elderly friend of the family was a lady who lived at the Manor Farm. Sitting at the far end of the table she directed her glance at me, the little girl whose father was merely a farm worker, and in a loud tone heard by everyone she remarked: “You don’t get anything like this at home, do you dear?” I could only have been nine or ten years old, but I felt most embarrassed and resentful.’
Twice a year, ‘her ladyship’ would visit the village and leave parcels of her children’s outgrown clothes. And at Christmas the wives would be sure to show their gratitude as they queued in the courtyard of the House to receive their annual joint of beef. Due respect was shown – on Sundays, when Olive sang in the church choir, she was exhorted by her parents not to try to crane her head to see ‘the family’ in their special box pew.
Sonia Keppel, meanwhile, remembered being regularly incarcerated inside just such a box pew during her family’s regular visits to aristocratic friends in the country, and being completely unable to see out. Her mother, Alice Keppel, had a social conscience, though, and rather enjoyed embarrassing her wealthy friends by showing it. Often, Lord Alington, who owned large amounts of property in the East End, would call to invite Alice out for a drive: ‘One rather dull day, he called for her and as usual asked her where he should drive her. “Hoxton, please,” she said.’ It transpired that Lord Alington had never actually been to Hoxton, despite owning large parts of it, and had no desire to go. But to Hoxton he now went, unable to refuse a lady’s request: ‘From her subsequent description the drive was funereal. Along dreary streets the horses clopped slowly, the smart equipage jeered at or sullenly watched by dull-eyed men and women and miserably-clad children. Through an occasionally open doorway the inmates of the carriage got a glimpse of disheartening squalor. Many of the window-frames had lost their glass, and the holes had been stuffed up with old rags or newspaper, or just left empty. At the end of it Lord Alington was speechless and miserable. As he dropped her at home, Mamma thanked him enthusiastically. “I do think it was charming of you to let me see Hoxton as it is now,” she said. “Next time I go there, I shan’t recognise it.”’
On another occasion, during a Christmas shopping trip to Oxford Street, Sonia was entranced by a baby doll in a toyshop window. But so, too, was a ragged and dirty little girl of about her own age who was also staring at the doll from the pavement: ‘Leaving me on the pavement and with bewildering speed, Mamma went into the shop, bought the doll and came out with it, still as it was, without its wrappings. Instinctively the child lifted up her thin little arms for it and Mamma laid the doll in them . . . Mischievously, Mamma looked down at me, purple and furious. “I thought she needed it more than you did.”’20
Sonia Keppel was ten when King Edward VII died of bronchitis and a series of heart attacks. The little girl had not been told the truth about her mother’s relationship with the monarch: ‘I was aware of some secret which even Violet shared, but which I was considered too young to understand.’21 The King’s death precipitated a family crisis for the Keppels. Alice and her husband George fled their home in the night; Sonia was taken the next day to join them at the house of some friends. Shortly afterwards, Alice set off on a tour of the Far East, and continued travelling for some time. Sonia would spend months in Germany with her nanny and governess, and would not see her parents for the best part of a year.
Despite the fact that the open secret of her mother’s affair was spoken of only in whispered asides in her presence, Sonia’s descriptions of daily life gave a sense that she was aware of much more than she could say. Her description of her nanny’s daily ablutions make eye-opening reading: ‘Surprisingly, under her martial exterior, Nannie had a snail’s soft body. In the early morning light, under her voluminous nightgown, I could descry the pink folds of it. At one moment I could see the outline of a huge shoulder above the bath, then its eclipse behind a bath towel, then its emergence again for a tantalising minute, as she put on her bodice and stertorously pulled up her stays. There followed the camouflage of her petticoat, concealing the pulling on of knickers, more whalebone, more starch, clamping down a vast bosom, the fastening of sharp buckles and a brooch, like the riveting of armour.’
To a growing child, these glimpses of an unseen world seemed entirely natural. Olive Everson, growing up in Suffolk, recalled hearing a story about an elderly couple living in a nearby cottage: ‘How we knew that the wife was one of those who accepted money for services rendered, I have no idea, but I expect brother Leslie had heard it from his mates at school. Her fee was said to be 1/-.’ The children of the village gossiped in this way about several local women, the price of each being general knowledge – two shillings and sixpence for the youngest and most attractive: ‘On Saturday and bank holiday evenings, when often local fishermen were home from a trip at sea, with pockets full of cash, these ladies would make for the Huntingfield Arms. At closing time they would take their clients for a walk up a secluded lane nearby,’ Olive recalled.
If the cult of childhood in the Edwardian era was partly precipitated by a reaction to the stresses of urbanization, it was equally a reaction to a sense of a civilization in a different kind of decline: that of sexual degeneracy. There was a peculiar kind of double-think attached to sex during the period – everyone knew it went on, and yet a kind of collective innocence was feigned – sometimes to a startling degree. When J. M. Barrie published The Little White Bird – precursor to Peter Pan – in 1902, The Times Literary Supplement gave it a glowing review.22 It was ‘an exquisite piece of work’, the paper said, and ‘one of the most charming books ever written’: ‘If a book exists which contains more knowledge and more love of children, we do not know it.’
Yet the book contained passages which would never be published in today’s more knowing world. At one point the author describes spending a night alone with a child: ‘David and I had a tremendous adventure. It was this – he passed the night with me . . . I took [his boots] off with all the coolness of an old hand, and then I placed him on my knee and removed his blouse. This was a delightful experience, but I think I remained wonderfully calm until I came somewhat too suddenly to his little braces, which agitated me profoundly . . . I cannot proceed in public with the disrobing of David.’
Sonia’s experiences in the years before the outbreak of war provided a striking counterpoint to this apparent state of denial. Entering her teens, she became increasingly aware of an exotic tinge to the artistic life of the capital, and to the performers who could now be seen there: ‘In London, nothing like Nijinsky’s lithe and sensuous dancing had been seen before, and Karsavina’s interpretation of “Scheherazade” was voted to be equally seductive and disturbing. Many of those who saw their performance were powerfully affected by it, and some of the most unlikely people suddenly saw themselves as pagan gods and enchantresses,’ she wrote. These influences were even percolating through the ceilings of the Keppels’ home, through the activities of Sonia’s older sister, Violet. By 1913, Violet had ‘come out’, into society, had put up heavy gold lamé curtains in her bedroom and was mixing with a
racy crowd: ‘She had Persian jackets for her friends to put on when they entered, and a huge feathered turban, along with incense.’ It was this kind of avant-garde artiness to which Max Nordau had taken grave exception a couple of decades earlier in his influential book, Degeneration23. But now, as the young contemplated the prospect of war, it seemed to take on a new kind of intensity. At the home of a family with whom the Keppels spent Christmas, the teenage son had taken over a housemaid’s cupboard as a ‘studio’, within which strange events were staged: ‘Over the fireplace, Pan supplanted the sphinx,’ Sonia remembered. ‘And panthers and Nubian slaves seemed to be inextricably mixed up on the walls. Through the doorway, alluring strains of Rimsky-Korsakov’s ballet music used to filter, toned down on the gramophone. Then more prosaically a strong smell of oranges. And then incense. Then someone would begin to read, slowly and sonorously. It did not sound much fun.’ Years later she asked a shy boy who had been admitted to the broom cupboard to tell her what had occurred within. ‘He had a slight stammer, and indignantly he spluttered out: “It was damned dull! They t-took off m-most of my clothes. And made me eat fruit!”’24
Yet when the long-anticipated war finally came, sweeping rich and poor together into the trenches, both were equally ill-prepared. Sonia and her family were on holiday in Holland when war was declared, and were forced to pack and leave in a hurry as the Germans invaded Belgium: ‘The usual routine had been upset. Ordinarily, our packing was conducted almost invisibly . . . but . . . it had spilt everywhere and Papa and Mamma had packed as urgently as anyone . . . the meals had been equally disjointed, served by Mr Hillsden and one footman in incomplete livery, looking rather harassed and without their gloves.’ The family found itself on the last boat back to England, which was besieged by crowds of people trying to board. Fortunately, the purser recognized them, and allocated them two cabins. ‘Through the porthole of Mamma’s and my cabin, I looked down on to less fortunate passengers jostling each other on the deck. One harassed mother was trying to cope with two crying children. Inanely, I asked Mamma: “Where will those children sleep?” And inevitably, purposefully, Mamma replied: “There’s plenty of room for them to lie down on the lower bunk in here.”’ Back in London, they found the house shuttered and cold, and repaired to the Ritz for breakfast.25