Games children played in the streets in 1900s working class London

In the early 1900s we children were expected to entertain themselves. There was no money for expensive toys, and the adults were too busy to set anything up for us. We expected nothing else and we enjoyed ourselves. Fortunately there was little or no traffic, so the street was our playground: the roads, the pavements, and the tiny front gardens. It never occurred to us to ask permission to use front gardens, and probably no-one would have expected it.

The boys played marbles, and if there was a manhole cover, they would use the two dips in them that were there for the workmen as gulleys. I dread to think what their nails were like but hygiene was not so important then as now. The boys would flip their marble with their first finger against their thumb and score if they got a marble into the gully. Some of the marbles were very pretty. They were made of glass with a twisted colour markings inside. Boys were proud of their marble collections and would swop among themselves to get a range of sizes and colours.

We also played with hoops. There were wooden ones in various sizes for girls with sticks to beat them along the pavement. The boys had iron hoops. They would start the hoops with their hands then run with them, using a sort of large hook to keep the hoops going.

I liked leapfrog. One or more of us would bend over and clutch our knees while the others would run and put their hands on our backs and jump over. Sometimes we would get a clout on the head if they missed.

Skipping was one of my favourite games, either by myself holding one end of a rope in each hand or in a group where the ends of a longer rope were held by two different people. Any number of children could come in and skip together and sometimes we tried to see how many we could get in before someone stumbled over the rope and stopped it. Sometimes we would play at "calling in" a particular child by name and we would vary the speed of the rope so that the child doing the jumping had to jump faster or in some sort of fancy manner.

When we played cricket, the lamp post was the wicket. Lamp posts were short and rather elegant, and not automatically controlled. The lighting came from gas mantles which were the same as those used in our houses. The lamp posts were also used as winning posts in other games.

Then there were our tops, peg tops for boys, smaller tops for girls, and whipping tops for everyone, all beautifully made of boxwood. The peg tops were made of ordinary wood about 2 inches long and about 1 ½ inches in diameter, and the sides were grooved. A boy would have a length of string two or 3 ft long which he wound round the grooves. Then, keeping hold of the string, he would throw the top onto the pavement with a brisk jerk. This sent the top spinning on its metal peg at the bottom. Boys competed with their friends for how long a top would spin for. The whipping tops were small and squat with only a small peg at the bottom, and they were made in two colours, usually red and blue. With a small whip we would wind the string around the top, then would stoop on the ground and with one hand on the top, pull the whip briskly and at the same time let go of the top. This set it spinning. Then we would whip it to keep it going. My brother Jim got into trouble one day with his top. For some reason the string clung to the bottom of the peg when he threw it. He swung around holding the string and then unfortunately he was only 1 ft away from somebody’s house, and the top went straight into the person’s front window, breaking the glass. The lady was most indignant. So my father put a sheet of glass in right away and little was said to my brother.

For hopscotch the concrete paving slabs of the pavements could easily be marked out with chalk. There were many variations of this game, with different rules about what to do at each slab. The chalk quickly rubbed off or was washed off by the rain. Hopscotch always seemed to be a game for girls where I lived.

Then there was "Please we've come to learn the trade". This is what one of the children had to say. Then the others would say “What trade?”. The answer could be any trade. The the children would say, “Set to work and to do it”, and the trade would be mimed. The child who guessed correctly would then have the next turn.

Hide and seek had to be behind people’s privet hedges because the street provided little else to hide behind. It got us pretty dirty and I, for one, got into a lot of trouble as a result - but I still did it.

Knocking Down Ginger was the name of the game in which we knocked on somebody's front door and ran away. Why the game amused us, I cannot now imagine, although it did. Neither do I know how it got such a strange name.

Conkers was an Autumn game. As the conkers fell off the horse chestnut trees, boys would select the firm ones and bore a hold into them. Then they would thread their conkers onto pieces of string about a foot long. Conkers was played in pairs, and the idea was to swing your conker to hit the opponent’s one. The game ended when one conker got broken. Then the unbroken conker was declared the winner. Interestingly, the boy who owned the conker was never regarded as the winner, just his conker. My brothers sometimes asked me to play but I never did because I was afraid that a conker would hit me in the face.

One boy in our road had hand-me-down bicycle. One day he asked me if I would like to have a go on it, and I jumped at the chance. Then, lo and behold my mother who had been out shopping, came down the road. The look on her face was enough. I could not get off that bike quickly enough, but I couldn’t raise my leg over the boy's high crossbar without help. So I let the bike fall and me with it. I was called indoors and ticked off. My mother said, "Don’t you let me see you do that again, you brazen hussy". I had no idea what a brazen hussy was. Years later I looked it up and found that brazen means, 'Unrestrained by convention or propriety' and a hussy is 'A pejorative term for a person who is deemed sexually promiscuous'. No such thoughts had entered my mind when I accepted the ride. I can only think that my knickers were showing because my skirt was pulled up by the crossbar.

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