Sources for 'Join me in the 1900s'

The material on this website comes from seven substantial and closely written volumes penned by my mother, born Florence Edith Cole. In them she recorded what she saw around her as a child in a working class family on a working class Victorian-style terraced housing estate in the early 1900s.

I believe that her recollections are unique. Although quite a lot is known about life above and below stairs in the big houses of the time, very little, as far as I know, encapsulates so comprehensively the lives of the working classes who lived on Victorian-style housing estates without paid help. The reasons are not difficult to see because anyone with such knowledge would be an unlikely author. My mother, like most children of the time from such estates, left school when she was 14 and received no formal education afterwards. Her excellent powers of observation and memory are without doubt, as is her obvious enjoyment and satisfaction in what she called 'jotting things down'. However, her punctuation and spelling were not all that they might have been, and she had the habit of taking her recollections off along sidetracks as thoughts occurred to her. So not only have I been faced with transcribing volumes of the spidery writing of her generation and social class, I have also had to identify recurring themes and edit them together into topics which I thought would be interesting as web pages. The fact that this was possible is the result of two things quite unusually working together: (1) that my mother, with her elementary schooling background, bothered to write so much even though she was fully aware of its grammatical and structural shortcomings; and (2) that I have been in a position to put her writing into a form that is available to the wider public.

In places, to add clarity, I have added information that I remember my mother talking about but which she omitted from her written recollections.

Where my mother left unanswered questions which I believed significant, my cousins, John Cole and Anne Cole (now Anne Davey) have been generous in coming to my rescue with their own recollections of old people's houses in Edmonton in the 1930s and 40s and of my mother's mother (our mutual grandmother) in her later life. I am also grateful for additional information that has come in from visitors to this website and its companion website on the Cole Potteries of my mother's paternal grandparents. All contributing individuals are acknowledged on the pages concerned.

Finally there are guest pages by my cousins, John and Anne, on their recollections of the 1940s, particularly World War Two, and I have added pages about some of my own recollections of around that time.

I have felt it important to illustrate my mother's recollections but suitable illustrations are slow to locate. There are two reasons why it is not just a matter of going round to historical displays and photographing reconstructions. One is that photography is not always allowed and the other is that my mother's work has enabled me to see the reconstructions through the eyes of the past. The result is that although the reconstructions do add an emotional feel for the times, they are all-too-often far from accurate. What I need are new photographs of still-existing 'time capsules' and old photographs - whatever their condition - taken in the final years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century.

The process of making available the full scope of my mother's recollections is still on-going, and all help with additional information and pictures will be gratefully received.

  

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