School holidays in working class London in the early 1900s

When I was a child in the early 1900s no family in our road on the Huxley Estate went away in the school holidays as far as I know. Our family certainly didn't because there wasn't the money for it. However we children had a very free childhood and we could more or less do as we pleased outside the house. So we spent a lot of time out of doors. We were entirely happy to go off for the whole day and our parents never seemed to be concerned about danger. We would wander where we pleased, taking our sandwiches with us. There was never anything particularly exciting in them, either paste or jam, and we also had an apple or any other fruit that happened to be around. Some days we might be given a halfpenny or a penny to spend.

One of our favourite places was Hadley Woods a few miles away from where we lived in Edmonton (now Enfield). We thought nothing of walking there. If there was a stream around we would paddle in it. We never had a towel with us and just sat on the grass until our feet were dry. Some days we would take nets and jam jars with us and go fishing to catch tiddlers or frogsporn. If we brought these home, we were not allowed to keep them in the house but could in the back garden.

Another place we would go was to the relatively new Barrowell Green open air swimming baths in Southgate. Southgate was a very select area compared with where I lived in Edmonton. One experience really brought this home to me. I wanted to go swimming with my friends but had no swimming costume. So my mother, who could see how upset I was, took one of her old vests, cut and sewed the lover part into two legs and dyed it with the bluebag. That turned it mauve. I was quite happy and off I went. Not being in a proper suit didn't matter to me. Then, though, inside the baths one of the girls from the better-off Southgate cried out, "That girl’s got a vest on". It really upset me and I have never forgotten it. Nevertheless my friends and I would stay there for hours. As soon as we arrived, we would go in the water. Then after a while, we would come out, dress and lay out our swimming things to dry on the grass bank beside the bath. Then we would have our sandwiches and change to go back into the water again. In fact our swimming things were not really dry and it was pretty uncomfortable getting into wet things, but we had to put up with that. We would stay there until sunset. A few minutes before closing time, the staff would turn on spray which came from the handrails around that bath. I’m not sure if this was to clean the area at the end of the day or to alert us to it being closing time. It was probably both.

My brother Ted and I would always have a spit and polish before we went home after our outings so that our mother wouldn't be cross. We would go down to the stream by the weir at Weir Hall, wipe the mud off our shoes with dock leaves and tidy up generally. Then we would check each other over to make sure we looked all right. We would also use dock leaves when we had been stung by stinging nettles. I don't know if they really had any healing properties, It could just have been the coolness of the leaves that gave relief.

In Winter and wet days we played indoors, the girls with their dolls and the boys with their soldiers and forts. The soldiers were very well made and colourful and some had arms which were made to move. Just after the first world war there was a move against letting boys play with them as it was thought bad to encourage boys to think about war. Trains were played with by boys and their fathers. The rails were wooden and interlocked, and some families had so many that they would cover the whole floor. The trains ran by clockwork, so had to be wound up and the carriages hooked on to one another. They really were fascinating to watch.

This website Join me in the 1900s is also known as Join me in the 1900's and is © Pat Cryer.