How The Victorians Invented Modern Shopping | History of Britain | Absolute History

we've all seen the pictures and read the stories in the history books about the kings and queens with their power and privilege and silks and furs [Music] but in this series i want to discover the other side of history i'm already quite nervous the side we don't often hear about how ordinary british people lived their lives from the tudors you'll see why it did attract my attention to the victorians throw a stone in victoria in london you will hit a drunken cat man is that many of them we are not amused from the georgians you take the saw oh my god it's horrible just seeing you do that to the people who really fought the second world war james could hear the ping of bullets and a platter of shrapnel one thing's for sure these people knew the meaning of the word tough i'll be finding the truth about their daily lives what they ate how long would that have lasted up to three years how they made a living there's even value in a rat when it's dead and those vital necessities of life what did you do if you wanted to pee go in the bucket the bucket this is british history from the bottom up you've got to admit i am terrifying this time i'm heading back to the victorian age when britain ruled the world [Music] and mutton chops weren't just something you ate they were also lovely whiskers why thank you now while you might be thinking the victorian britain was made by a bunch of mustachioed men like him the truth was very different the unsung heroes who really put the great into great britain were just the ordinary folk who had to cope with the most dramatic changes the world has ever seen while queen victoria was busy gazing down from her throne her loyal subjects were hard at work in factories up and down the land churning out everything from steam engines to natty clothes and cutlery but life on the factory floor was cheap a combination of lethal machinery and long hours meant that gruesome accidents even death were never very far away and right up there in the list of most lethal jobs in victorian britain was the match girl like sarah chapman here still called a girl when this picture was taken when she was almost 30. in the late 1800s if you went down the marlin road turn left at the pub called the swan and down a little alleyway you'd come to sarah chapman's house she lived in a court just like this one in a house with her father samuel her mother sarah anne and her six brothers and sisters one of seven kids sarah was a feisty young and with a sharp brain we know that at school she learned how to read and write but this remember was victorian britain where at the age of 13 working class kids like sarah had to put aside such fripperies as education and get themselves a job and for sarah that meant starting work in the same factory as her mum and sister this is where sarah worked the bryant and may match factory back in those days it would have been frenetic around here with over a thousand women and girls working here six days a week every week [Music] you see there was nothing the victorians loved more than setting fire to things lamps logs more lamps and of course tobacco which meant that the humble match was an invaluable item this is an old bryant and may match box and the thing about this match was that it would strike anywhere as you can see yeah very effective so effective that by 1860 bryant and may were churning out 75 000 boxes of the things every day to keep up with demand match girls like sarah were expected to work 14-hour shifts virtually all of it on their feet can you imagine luckily she was promoted and by 19 sarah was working as a machinist the person who cut the matchsticks down to size if sarah ever got sick that was just tough luck the factory was perfectly entitled to discard her like a well like a spent match for all that she earned a meager wage of five shillings a week which is about 16 pounds a week in today's money but even that could be severely reduced by harsh fines on things like sitting down being untidy dropping a match or even just going to the toilet without permission nor was there much let up when sarah finally got home sam johnson is sarah's great-great-granddaughter and she's here to tell me a bit more about her home life there were seven children in the family which is why there's so many beds here exactly yes yes and they would have all been cramped into into a tiny room like this so maybe that's what created her feisty personality i bet she was the boss in the bedroom when she was a kid absolutely yeah check the boys on the floor and uh as for her one day off well after a quick breakfast of bread and dripping it would be out with the broom and on with the housework the girls as soon as they were old enough would have pulled their weight with the housework so they would do all the washing of the clothes and cleaning the house and getting the baking done ready for the week only then would sarah finally have been able to put her feet up with a nice cup of tea and perhaps a puff on a pipe the next morning [Music] and it would be up with the lock for the start of another shift at the factory but sarah's life wasn't just exhausting it was also blooming dangerous [Music] you see unlike today's safety matches matchsticks back then were dipped in a chemical called white phosphorus it was this that made the matches catch fire but phosphorus comes with some horrible side effects and there was one that sarah dreaded above all others girls who'd worked here for some time could get a condition which they called fozzy jaw it was a terrible disease that caused the bones around the mouth to slowly rot away and emit a foul smelling pus as the infection spread it would lead to horrendous disfigurement organ failure and eventually death luckily sarah escaped this grisly fate but many of her co-workers around 1 in 10 of them didn't not that the factory owners seem to care even sarah's lunch hour was full of danger the women and girls were forced to eat their lunch on the factory floor where phosphorus particles could easily get into their food there was no other space available and they weren't allowed to eat outside health and safety so bad were conditions in the bryant and may factory that on the 6th of july 1888 sarah and her fellow workers downed matchsticks and went on strike by the end of july bryant and may had caved in the whole thing had been a complete pr disaster for them and they agreed all the women's demands you can imagine sarah and her friends racing out of here absolutely over the moon on the back of the hard graft of ordinary victorians the uk became the richest and most powerful nation on earth with all that money rolling in the victorians did what great empires have always done they built things huge engineering projects like railways bridges and tunnels many of them still in use today building these monster projects was the job of the navis big strapping blokes like angus innis from glasgow now we don't exactly know what angus looked like but we can take a guess because scottish navi's like nothing more than dressing up in their spare time just like teddy boys mods and peaky blinders to let people know who they were they sported moleskine jackets scarlet waistcoats and bright blue caps this is the kind of place where angus would have lived he would have rented a room or part of a room or even part of a bed in a boarding house it would all have been pretty grim most of angus's time though was spent building things like glasgow's new sewage system you see victorian glasgow was dirtier than a badger's bottom its slums were so bad they were almost as disgusting as london's coming home at night from the pub angus would have constantly had to watch his step for fear of treading in something unmentionable in this kind of environment disease was rife a system of tunnels was needed to get all the sewage out of the city and it was navis like angus who were called on to do the work after a typical navi's breakfast of six slices of bacon a loaf of bread one can of condensed milk and two pints of beer angus's 12-hour shift would begin the moment his foreman gave the order his job was to dig the huge trenches that held the new sewage pipes using muscle power alone angus was expected to shift a hernia inducing 20 tons of earth a day the more muck he moved the more he was paid on average that was about 25 pence a day the equivalent of about eight quid but most of that he would have spent on beer a mind-boggling gallon a day of the stuff oh cheers this massive sewage pipe is an impressive example of the kind of work that navies were doing here in glasgow in the 19th century but to get a more vivid picture of angus's life i'm going to travel 30 miles north of here into the highlands from census records we know that by the late 1850s angus had up sticks and moved here to the bonnie banks of la catrine where he was helping to build a tunnel to carry clean drinking water into glasgow is the water tunnel which ran for 30 miles straight into the center of glasgow the census also tells us that angus was now married and that his wife helen and their young family were living here too no doubt enjoying the peaceful countryside along with hundreds of other navies and a bunch of angry locals midges by now angus was moving up in the world and had swapped his shovel for a much more important job using explosives to blast a tunnel through the mountains [Music] which was of course very very dangerous [Music] in fact the accident and death rate for navis was higher than for any other group of workers in the country and that included coal miners and soldiers no wonder angus liked a tipple at the end of the day exhausted from blowing up the scottish countryside angus would have rejoined helen and the kids at the temporary camp beside the lock here to tell me more about life inside the camp is local historian sean barrington it was a well-organized community they'd be the cooking squad so it'd be no problem getting beef and lamb and pigs and oatmeal porridge they'll be porridge morning noon and night that's astonishing i i would have assumed that a navi working here would have been three quarters starved and having the most miserable time possible but actually what you're describing is something yeah it's rigorous yes but uh at least your belly's full were the women able to work oh the women would be fully fully employed there would be laundry would need to be done so lots of meat by day booze by night and clean pants and absolutely after four years of mux sweat and beer angus's time at loch katrine finally came to an end and in 1859 the new water channel he'd helped to build was opened by none other than queen victoria i name this pipeline the catrine aqueduct navis like angus were a special breed they were itinerant rootless soft and very isolated it was like you had the working class there and somewhere down here were the navies at the very bottom of the pecking order and yet it was people like angus and his like who built modern britain with their bare hands and their legacy is still with us today the industrial revolution really took off under the victorians but none of their fancy steam engines cotton mills or water pumps would have been any use without coal [Music] coal powered the victorian age and the mining industry was huge in 1841 nearly 220 000 people worked in the mines most of them were men but around about 5 000 of them were either women or children as young as five among these women was one betty harris we don't have any actual photos of her but she might have looked a bit like this young lass holding what seems to be a giant tambourine betty and her husband lived in a small rented cottage not far from knolls pit in bolton a place much like this it was all very cosy fire was going all the time of course well fuel was everywhere wasn't it and here's a clue tiny little seat tiny little potty they had two children and when they were at work betty's cousin looked after them [Music] in order to keep betty's household going her cousin did all the housework she cleaned the house she went shopping every day because fridges hadn't been invented yet she cleaned the courtyard she did all the washing imagine how difficult it would have been keeping things clean with all that smoke and dust about not only huh but if running a victorian household wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs working down the mine was just horrendous [Music] six days a week dressed in trousers and jacket al betty would leave the house at dawn and head down pit where she could spend the next 14 hours on her hands and knees like a beast of burden hauling coal it's hard to imagine anything more grim [Applause] to learn more about betty's life underground i've come to cap house colliery near wakefield if you'd like to follow me please throw these doors yeah i've been joined by denise bates whose great great great great grandmother was a victorian mining lass like betty can you imagine just schlepping up down here every single day i think we sometimes don't realize we're bored no we don't do it just like betty we're going to have to crawl on our hands and knees to get to the coal face oh it really hurts your hands like most of the women and children who worked in the mines betty's job was to drag the big heavy carts used to carry the coal so this is the conditions that betty would have been working in right oh definitely she reported that she was working in a very nasty pitch oh i can't imagine what it must have been like if these were your working conditions for how many hours a day do you reckon 14 hours depending on demand and would you get up to the surface at lunchtime not a chance more likely to have been a hunk of bread and cheese on the go is this the cold face here yeah it looks like it doesn't it yeah oh god i should have touched that so tell me about betty she was working for her husband which was the practice of females who mined in lancashire what do you think their relationship would have been like betty mentions that there's an awful lot of domestic violence going on that there were very many women who were being beaten by the man that they worked for for no other reason than the inability to move those trucks as fast as the men wanted what with the heat the dust and the regular beatings life for betty was about as tough as it gets when betty got home from work usually around 6 30 or 7 in the evening she would have been absolutely exhausted she'd have been filthy sweating but she would have been far too tired to have a wash before she went to bed one thing she'd definitely have done though is have a decent meal she'd have needed the calories apart from rent virtually all her money went on food victorian delicacies such as tripe trotters or budget land cuts from sheep that have dropped down dead from disease come sunday her one and only day off betty was then expected to catch up on chores like darning socks and knitting stockings while hubby put his feet up and contemplated the serious issues of the world but betty's life was about to change in 1838 a flood at a yorkshire colliery drowned 26 children prompting a report after a lengthy public inquiry so the report was published as you can imagine the press were all over it here's some of the daily newspapers that came out in may 1842 some great pictures here look you've got propelling the loaded wagons digging out the coal imagine seeing these for the first time if you didn't know that that kind of thing went on in your country but the revelations didn't end there in fact it wasn't the long hours the dust the awful conditions the industrial accidents that shocked people it was believe it or not the nudity the girls they are naked down to the waist young females dressed like boys in trousers crawling on all fours any sight more disgustingly indecent or revolting can scarcely be imagined than these girls at work no brothel can beat it disgusting in actual fact if it happened at all such topless working was extremely rare but still the report had a dramatic effect [Music] and in 1842 the mines and collieries act put a stop to women including albetti working underground in victorian britain the place to be was in the city london might have been filthy and plagued by crime but by the 1850s it was the world's largest city and in just 40 years its population doubled in size just like queen victoria's waistline we are not amused and all those new people meant lots of work for london's cabbies capture cab men like john cochran john was born in 1833 and lived in hoban an old-fashioned part of london full of narrow alleyways and densely packed housing but he was looking to move up in the world the year is 1851 and 18 year old john cockrum wants to set up in business he wants to do exactly what his dad did before him and be the driver of a horse and cab hello daniel you are looking so beautiful aren't you [Music] but sadly his dad isn't around anymore to show him the ropes because when john was 11 his old man had passed away leaving behind a wife four kids and a huge pile of debt to make ends meet the young john had been forced to become the main breadwinner and by 18 he scrimped and saved enough money to buy himself a horse hire a cab and follow in his dearly departed dad's footsteps but the problem for john was that he looked really young and on one of his first journeys he was accused of being a buck which was the slang word for an unlicensed driver but he wasn't he was perfectly legal he was over 16 and he knew the highways and byways of london which were the two stipulations right let's go come on back in the 1850s london streets would have been filled with horse-drawn cabs just like this leaving great piles of steaming dung in their wake but while the middle-class passengers were able to put their feet up and enjoy the view for working-class lads like young john the job was relentless six days a week on an average day he'd start touting for work about nine am and finish at midnight he didn't have a little yellow for hire sire on the top of the cab if he wanted to show people that he was available he held up his whip like this we're to love sitting on top of his cab with only a hat and a couple of old coats for protection john was exposed to the very worst of london's weather chucking all that victorian soot and smog and the lifestyle of cabbies like john was about as healthy as smoking 40 a day the money wasn't much better either to make a profit he had to work really hard you only got sixpence a mile for a cab like this and out of that you had to pay yard money for the stabling and feeding of the horse it's a tough old job and it was about to get a whole lot tougher you see horses can be very temperamental as poor old john discovered one afternoon shortly after buying his very own cab when his horse suddenly bolted causing his new set of wheels to flip over leaving john with a hefty repair bill in fact accidents like this were pretty common and more often than not they were caused by the same thing [Music] cab drivers were notorious for spending hour after hour in the pub but did they really i'll ask a cabbie taxi driver sean farrell writes a blog on the history of london's cabbies so by law they should have been sitting on the box of the cab no matter what the weather yeah in truth they hid inside a pub presumably there must have been examples of cab drivers coming out of the pub hammers and having accidents oh they're numerous throw a stone in victoria in london you will hit the drunken cat man there's that many of them but not john cockrum because john one of the few cabbies who refused to work on a sunday didn't approve of the demon drink so while his fellow cabbies were off getting plastered john could be found sitting on the taxi rank reading a book and munching on a popular victorian dish sorted herring and before long he'd signed up to an extraordinary new idea a scheme to stop cabbies from drinking and driving i know mad i'm not really allowed in here am i'm not cabbie you're not but i'll i might give you my badge in 1875 john attended the opening of london's very first cab shelter a place where cabbies could wait for customers without drinking their body weight in beer [Music] it's great in here isn't it lovely nice and compact and bijou it's a funny shape though isn't it it's really long and thin they're designed to be the same width and length as the original horse and coach so they didn't take up no more extra space in the road also cab cab cab little hut cab cab exactly do you think it would have been very similar in victorian times absolutely you've got electric lights in there would have been gaslighting in them days but they got a gas stove they would provide hot meals for your hot tea coffee you could even bring a steak and they would cook it for you and charge you accordingly and while he was getting his protein hit john could also browse through a selection of complementary books and newspapers keeping his brain fit and alert to deal with london's roads and grow his business by the time the cab shelters were built in the 1870s john's business was thriving he ended up chiseler with nearly 30 people working for him and 126 horses in fact when he was 68 he sold up and retired on the profits not bad for a cabrio cheers me cheers victorian britain was brimming with inventions and people experimenting with new ideas but forget your ismart kingdom brunels of this world and all those boats and bridges of his and consider instead another great victorian advance it's the invention of modern shopping you see with all that new industry wages were on the up and for the first time working people had a bit of money to spend [Music] [Applause] the canny victorian shopkeeper was only too pleased to help by the late 19th century the competition for customers was really hotting up 100 years previously a window display like this one would have been completely unimaginable the shops had been small specialist and staffed by very fierce shopkeepers but change was on its way and it was pioneered by women like esther brown here she is esther was born in 1878 in manchester where she grew up in a small terraced house her dad joseph worked on the trams while her mum margaret stayed at home looking after esther and her brother and sister the victorians though didn't really do childhood and by the age of 14 esther had left school and was working on a market stall selling household bits and bobs [Music] but down the market things were a bit well down market and when esther was offered a job in a fancy new shop she jumped at the chance [Music] esther came up this very road on the first day of her first proper job the year was 1894 and she was 16. this is cheatham hill it's not the most salubrious part of manchester is it there would have been trams clanging backwards and forwards lots of new immigrant communities it would have been noisy vibrant energetic and it was esther's big day [Music] her new job was as a shop girl at michael marx's penny bazaar which was the very first marx and spencer's store this is the cheatham hill m s now well it was absolutely nothing like that this was virtually a victorian pound shop he kept the stock under tarpaulin in the backyard and over the front door there was a big scarlet sign that said don't ask the price it's a penny [Music] marx's penny bazaar wasn't just a bargain hunter's paradise though oh that is so lovely you see for years if a customer so much has stepped into a shop they were expected to buy something but all that was about to change with a little help from esther esther's job was to try to persuade her customers to do something entirely new in fact it was so new they had to invent a word for it and that word was browsing looking at the goods without feeling that you had a compunction to buy them nowadays we're all brilliant at browsing aren't we but back then it was a novelty oh look a rolling pin i can handle it a basket i can touch it of course the downside was that from now on shoplifting became a big problem i'm sorry it must have just fallen in my bag once the customer had chosen what they wanted wooden spoon maybe a chopping board four candles that's actually what these are then esther would wrap them all up but she wasn't allowed to tot up the money that had to be done by a man leanne can you demonstrate how this procedure works certainly five pennies thank you very much so then put this in here there's half a ball this will be closed tight now i would put this in a slot send it up through the system to the cash office that would go to the cash office the gentleman would record in the ledger what you'd spend and he would send your change back the exact same way a nice sensible man who would know how to add up of course not like the course giddy girls who wouldn't be trusted with that while adding up wasn't high on her list of duties esther was expected to be smart polite and have the constitution of a exactly anyone who's ever worked in retail knows what it's like standing on your feet all day but esther's day started at six in the morning finished 10 or 11 at night so a 90-hour week in big clumpy shoes heavy skirt stiff back smiling nicely all the time must have been so exhausting and of course her customers paid her wages so they were always always right at lunchtime esther didn't get much of a break but michael marks was better than most employers at least he installed gas rings like these in the back office so the girls could get some hot food such as that shop girls favorite a nice bowl of green pea soup lovely for her efforts esther was paid a modest 25 pounds a year around half of what a male shop assistant earned but just enough for the odd trip to the music hall on her one day off [Music] working in this shop is so commonplace nowadays that it's easy to underestimate quite how different it would have been for someone like esther in those days a lot of people thought that shop girls were a bit tainted like prostitutes you know just standing out there in public selling stuff to customers happily though for esther things were beginning to look up because as shopping got more and more popular shops began to move into fancy arcades like this and as for the women who were working in them they started to have a career path they could end up as shop managers and who was one of the first women to do just that esther brown before the victorian age travel was a bit of a bore [Music] the fastest thing around had four legs and eight straw so no wonder the invention of the steam train got everyone including queen victoria rather excited hell but i want one but trains weren't just for the rich and famous they were used by almost everyone like this ordinary shoemaker's son from manchester who describes one memorable train journey in his diary it is very strange reading the diary of someone who was born over 200 years ago and is so candid about their life his name was edwin war he was a secretary writing letters in his office in manchester in the late 1840s he just turned 30 he lived in hume with his wife who looked after the house when he was away working which is what a victorian wife would have done in those days everything seems hunky-dory but the diary tells a very different story because edwin was utterly miserable [Music] he and his wife marianne weren't exactly love's young dream went to rochdale in the evening in company with my wife oh full of unhappy reflections and then there was work edwin loathed his job and he hated being two-faced trying to squeeze money out of people who were in debt to his company he wrote in his diary i don't have the beggarly eloquence which can humbug them into a false generosity for his efforts edwin earned about a pound a week around 130 quid in today's money but often he wasn't paid at all prompting him to complain my wife and me had just one happening between us and we knew not where the next meal was to come from for the long suffering mrs war it all got too much after a particularly heated row with his wife marianne edwin describes her packing her bags and heading off for her aunt sally's in rochdale she even takes the rocking chair with her so she's clearly not intending to come home edwin's response is to turn to drink but marianne must have had second thoughts because she eventually returned home presumably with the rocking chair too [Music] to celebrate their reunion edwin splashed out on a pair of railway tickets to that home of holiday fun blackpool marianne was going to be so pleased on the morning of the blackpool excursion edwin gets up early tries to wake his wife but she won't budge he's not going to let her spoil his day though so he gets washed gets all ready and leaves the house oh marianne when he got to the station edwin was gobsmacked by what he saw i found an astounding gathering of people upwards of 2000 persons you see to the average victorian city dweller the lure of the sea was like human catnip and beginning in the 1840s special railway excursions began ferrying hordes of over-excited day-trippers to such far-flung locations as brighton bangor and in edwin's case blackpool susan how you doing good to see you we're going off on a holiday it's very exciting to tell me more about edwin's big day out is railway historian susan major why was he so excited about this excursion well he had a particular thing about the thrill of being a crowd now to us being in a crowd is a nuisance yeah yeah but somebody like him he felt it made it feel as if it was one world it was a new thing it was a modern thing oh definitely [Music] in edwin's diary he does say that there were 2 000 people i thought that was a misprint these were monster trains with monster excursions quite often you'd find more than one engine pulling up to 100 carriages there could be three four engines it would have been like being on the london tube in the rush hour in june wouldn't it people must have felt that they were being treated as animals they felt as if they were being dehumanized so they would bleat [Music] finally edwin's train pulled into blackpool where he and his fellow passengers disembarked and like a crowd of starving penguins headed straight for the sea [Music] so edwin comes down the high street from the station and remember because the crowd know that they've only got a limited amount of time here they immediately set to work having a good time the blackpool of 1849 didn't yet have its famous tower or even a pier for that matter nonetheless edwin was totally smitten the thing he likes more than anything else though is the donkeys there's little kids who get on them and they won't move he says everybody is having a good time except presumably the donkeys and then towards the end of his stay he buys four chops raw chops off some bloke and then he goes back into town where someone in a shop fries them up for him for fourpence what a way to spend the day as for his problems well they now seemed a million miles away [Music] but things weren't just looking up for edwin in a momentous time marked by new railways new sewage systems and even modern shopping the victorian period was a crucial part of british history driven by ordinary women and men across the land

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 953,340

Rating: 4.8803968 out of 5

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, tony robinson, time team, history of britain, victorian era, hidden killers, victorian life, victorian jobs, worst jobs in history, absolute history

Id: KWPgwo0CHbM

Length: 43min 17sec (2597 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021