A Pitiful Figure

Camp had a beer house from the late 18th century; the Crown Hotel opened its doors around 1900; Oaklands obtained a license in 1947 and Marshalswick in 1962.  Fleetville might have received its license a good deal earlier that 1927 had it not been for well-orchestrated campaigns by groups and the owners of factories in the area.

From a 1924 edition of War Cry

Although the Salvation Army HQ is in London, the print works which spewed out huge quantities of its official weekly newspaper,  War Cry, each Friday, was in Campfield Road, St Albans.  In a 1924 edition the Army presented a disturbing article about young children spending long periods of time on the steps of public houses while their parents were downing drinks inside.

"Certainly it was a terrible thing for children to be taken into bar parlours, there to be contaminated by all the coarseness and devilry that alcohol engenders.  In winter it is a still more terrible thing that children should be left on the pavement outside, perhaps for hours at a stretch, helpless and uncomplaining against a fate which leaves them faint, tired, hungry, and very likely cold, wet, and piteously unhappy."

The writer was explaining the unintended effect of the government's then-recent amendment of the law relating to public houses, and the imposition of a minimum age for entering a pub.

Reputed to be young women
involved in Bryant & May's
match strike of 1888.

No sooner had the social conscience been pricked on children collecting in pub doorways than some parents began to leave their children at home.  Incidents, often involving grate fires or candles, claimed the lives of children left in their homes on their own – which would later mean a further revision of the law preventing children from being left in the house without an appropriate adult.

The War Cry article is detailed and emotionally written, but it is not the words which have the greatest impact, but the photograph which accompanies it.

I wonder whether there are any other period photographs in our shoe boxes, which also have a story to tell, especially of the social conditions confronted by ordinary people at the time.  Often they appeared in magazines or newspapers, but were also often sold as postcards.  If you have such a photograph which might have an impact in its own right, or as part of the story to which it relates, then do let me know.