Tag Archives: The way we were

Ever spent time looking at the online comments to a Daily Express or Daily Mail story?  Really, life’s too short.

But is this a new phenomenon?  The sheer volume of lunacy allowed by the Internet is a change, but beyond that it seems little has altered in the last century.

Here are some readers’ comments about suffragettes, from the Daily Express in 1913.

“These neurotic women clamour for the vote.  What they need is a fire hose.”

“Hard labour and salts and senna would soon quench the ardour of these notoriety-beating females.”

“The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, but women who smash

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Poor men wasting all their money on drink?  Drunken teenagers – boys and girls – lying about in the streets? Drunk bridegrooms?  Yes, Edwardian Britain had them all.

Here’s a contempory account of the problem:

“Beer drinking is no less than a religion to the average East Ender.”

In these words, the Rev Richard Free of St Cuthberts, Millwall epitomises a terrible indictment of the condition of the East End of London.

the working man will go to public houses and lay his golden sovereigns on the counter, with instructions that he is to have drink as long as the money lasts.

When he

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If you should ever, in your spare moments, happen to invent a time machine and travel back to Victorian England, you might want to think twice about eating the bread.

This report to the Government from 1862 recommended bringing bakehouses under a regulatory regime, as slaughterhouses already were at the time.

…in many cases almost total covering of cobwebs, weighed down with the flour dust that had accumulated upon them, and hanging in strips just above your head.

A heavy tread or a blow upon the floor above, brought down large fragments of them, as I witnessed on more than

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In the present day, many people look back to the 1950s as the golden age: low crime, low divorce rates and a simpler life.

In the 1950s, people tended to see Victorian times as the golden age, and it’s easy to see why. After two world wars and faced with austerity Britain, the tail end rationing and an Empire in terminal decline, it must have been tempting to cast warm glances back to a time when Britain was top dog and the Empire was at its peak.

So when did people in Victorian times see as the Golden Age?

According to a …

You know how kids these days are all out of control, and in the good old days there was rarely any bad behaviour at all?

Here’s a first person account from a 1949 Manchester police officer, having been summoned a school where trouble was afoot. Did the police deal with it in the best way? You decide.

There were boys everywhere. As our lady informant had quite rightly said, there were hundreds of the little sods. Some were balancing on the railings, some were ripping slates off the shelter roof, windows were being broken and stones flying about.

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Contrary to popular belief, the Victorians tended to be pretty open and frank about sex. The old myth about covering the legs of pianos or tables was a joke told by the Victorians about others.

This text is taken from “An exposition of the true Cause and only Cure of the Three Primary Evils: Poverty, Prostitution and Celibacy”, by Dr George Drysdale and published in 1852.

Excepting medical advances and terminology, it could almost have been written today.

The only means by which virtue and the progress of mankind are rendered possible is ‘Preventative Sexual Intercourse’. By this is meant sexual

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Today’s literary delicacy, served up for your pleasure, is an account by Edward Stourton of the (now banned) French dish of ortolans.

These tiny songbirds are pretty little things, with greenish heads, yellow throats and brown and black striped backs. They must be captured alive and then left for a month to gorge themselves on grapes and figs in a dark box (some connoisseurs prefer to blind them altogether); once they have swollen themselves to a grotesque size they are drowned in Armagnac, roasted and eaten whole, bones, feathers and all. Tradition dictates that the diners should cover their

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Whilst crime in London fell between 1870 and 1910, the story north of the border wasn’t quite as rosy.

As the Daily Express reported at the turn of the century:

“The most notable fact of the statistics for 1899 is the immense increase of the criminal work of the country”. Thus opened the report on Scotland’s prisons and court for the past year, which was an unenviable record.

No fewer than 176,524 persons were apprehended or cited, a figure which has never before been reached by 10,000. Drunks and disorderlies alone totalled 112,033.

South Queensferry holds the proud position for 1899 of

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Several hundred people in the UK have died from swine flu since May 2009. As a historical note, this text from 1942 puts our modern health problems in some perspective.

In the England of 1840 the average age of death was twenty-nine, today it is fifty-eight. …the babies of 1840 suffered an appalling mortality. To-day one child in seventeen dies before it is a year old, but in 1840 the figure was about one in six, and about a third of the children born died before the age of five….Infants died of convulsions, diarroea, and atrophy, the latter

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Football Hooliganism Old School as reported by the Daily Express on 29th January 1909, 101 years ago.

The Preston North End team, which played a drawn game with Sheffield Wednesday at Owlerton on Saturday were violently treated at the conclusion of the match by a crowd of spectators who were dissatisfied with the result.

Councillor Houghton, who was in charge of the Preston team gave an Express representative the following account of what took place:

“We delayed our departure from Owlerton on account of the hostile attitude of the crowd which gathered around the dressing-tents.

“Immediately we left in a char-a-abanc we were

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We’re used to self-styled futurologists getting their predictions hopelessly wrong, so it’s impressive to come across this, from architect Sir Aston Webb. Made in 1914, Sir Aston imagined taking a journey a century into the future, to 2014.

I asked why everything looked so bright and clean, and my companion said that was because they had done away with the smoke and only used smokeless fuel materials now.

In a bird’s-eye view I obtained of London, I noticed that, besides the railway tracks out of London, there were great arterial roads stretching out in all ways. They were 120 feet

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