The Grim Reality Of Ordinary Life Throughout British History | History Of Britain | All Out History

this channel is part of the history hit Network 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 but in this series I want to discover the other side of History I'm already quite nervous besides we don't often hear about how ordinary British people lived their lives from the tutors you'll see why it did attract my attention to the victorians from Estonia Victorian London you will hit a drunken cat man there's that many of them you take the sword 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 shrattle 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 guy in the bucket the bucket this is British history from the bottom up you gotta admit I am terrifying this time I'm going back 500 years to England in the reign of Henry VII a time of sex scandals executions and cod pieces here I see the history books are full of his Antics but what about the people who really made the country tick they may not have been well dressed or had any money but their lives are full of surprises love and courage [Music] during Henry's Reign living in towns was going out of fashion and it's not at all hard to see why the streets were paved with evil smelling mud and inside floors became layered with spittle vomit urine and bits of fish but even for the Tudors there was someone you really didn't want to live next to a no giggling please because a was a very important person in Tudor Society he was the bloke who went round collecting dead animals then taking them home skinning them chopping them up and making money out of them in whatever way he could now there aren't any specific names of actual Tudor knackers in the records we're going to call our one Thomas Grimes here's Tom skinning a carcass to make saddles his whole house would have been full of little bits of bleeding animal and it would have permeated such a stink that it would have been foul even by Tudor standards nevertheless he would have had a way of making a steady income enough for clothes and food and maybe even a long-suffering wife cause you know [Music] this is how Tom's day would go he'd leave home about 6 a.m like most Tudor men pick up his cart head off out of town towards the local farms the big money makers for Tom were dead or dying cattle and horses Hmm this one's got potential poor old thing it's even in town there could be opportunities you'd find dogs cats in the occasional horse hang on what have we got down here oh look at this a rat there's even value in a rat when it's dead back at base Tom would skin carcasses for leather boiled one to get the fat out for candles extract gelatin for glue and grind up the bones to make fertilizer and after years hacking about with all this flesh he became pretty good at it and wasn't bothered by the smell and sight of blood and these skills were about to open New Horizons for Tom all thanks to his King because Henry was making a lot of enemies and Tom was just the sort of chap he needed as an executioner [Music] whenever the paranoid Monarch Henry VIII threw all his toys out of his cot and demanded the head of some hapless Noble it could mean a very big payday involving one of these although the reality is wasn't it John that most criminals were hung rather than having their heads chopped up that's true hanging was for the Ordinary People it was only people of royal or Noble blood who were actually decapitated I mean decapitation was a whole different business John White is a historian of Crime and Punishment and he studied Tudor executions so how does Tom mynaka come into it what do you see the ax was often a messy business so in order to perfect the process you needed to have somebody who day by day was proficient in chopping flesh with an ax and wasn't bothered by a bit of blood and go I can see that that at least when Tom started to be an executioner he might feel pretty shaky about doing this job particularly if it was someone who was high nobility well on the basis that decapitation is for people who are noble and Royal you could be intimate intimidated by the shared process because there you are in front of an enormous crowd booing and jeering they like a good death yeah it could be a great Lord and somebody that's you know literally frightens you and you're now going to have to publicly kill them would you get decent money for this job will you get paid more than being a because as an executioner there are benefits the clothes The Condemned War they would become his but it was also the customer that condemned would pay almost like a tip to do me a good job what would the relationship have been like between Tom and his audience well they would cheer him if he did a good execution they would boo him if he conducted a poor execution and would he have been patted on the back in the street oh no no no no no no you see as a he'd be the lowest of the low as an executioner he'd be even lower than that everybody knows who he was he'd be jeered he was a social Pariah so almost the underclass The Untouchables Tom's tale is a really miserable one Scavenging to earn a living a rat being looked down on and then the only way of making more money is to become a figure of hate despite all this we know that many executioners were proud of the contribution that they made towards Tudor society and that by and large ordinary people believe that the death penalty was the Bedrock of their system of justice during the reign of Henry VII one bad Harvest could spell ruin even death everyone was constantly famished so imagine that you're an ordinary poor Tudor person constantly obsessed by where the next meal is coming from and suddenly you're given the opportunity of a new life where every day you're faced with a banquet I'm talking about a career in The Culinary profession Not only was it a proper paid job but you'd be fed and surrounded by a bounty of delicious food which often needed testing yes but be careful what you wish for because this tale has a bitter ending in the kitchen in the early 1500s around the time young Henry VIII was getting to know the ropes as king Richard was probably too poor to attend school so at age seven when a kitchen boy was wanted at his Lord's manor house he jumped at it before Sun up on his first day he was sent off by his mum to walk several miles across the fields to his new life it was a chance that offered Richard Career Development and who knows maybe even the opportunity to meet the Rich and Famous if he was lucky Little Richard got to stay in the big house with the other staff with a proper bed and windows with glass in but he probably only saw his mum once a week on his day off Mark meltonville is a Tudor cooking expert so he's just started here what kind of jobs would he have been doing well if he is a boy of the kitchen then it's right down the bottom to start with there's not going to be a lot of sweeping that and go and get me some wood chopping wood so he's going to do a lot of really menial stuff pot washing not really nice I'm afraid cleaning all those cauldrons how do you clean them because they didn't have squeegee soapbox no no squeegee but they have plenty of soap it's very easy to make it was made commercially and even if you want to just make some yourself in the kitchen you take a pan full of fats and bacon fat and put a little bit of Ash in it Richard would have been expected to use the soap to wash his hands before the day's work began to clean his teeth he'd have used candle soot chalk or salt what kind of hours would he have been working probably starting quite early in the morning so they're going to be down here between five and six getting everything ready because the meal of the day is going to be sent over to the house by half of 10 11 but there's only two cooked meals a day the last one's out by 3 30. so after that it's clear up set it all down and once it gets a bit older a pot of beer that's really quite Pleasant isn't it right in I'm beginning to warm to the idea of being a Tudor cook and we haven't even got to the food yet he's going to be working with so much more fresh meat than anybody outside in our farms getting it's going to be fresh meat almost every day so it's just going to wail him perhaps it was access to all that rich food but Richard drew a little curvy and must have made a name for himself because he was soon head hunted to be cooked for the bishop of Rochester this should have been a major opportunity for Richard but the country was in the middle of a major political crisis and Richard soon found himself in hot water quite literally in 1527 Henry VII asked the pope if he could divorce his Queen Catherine she was knocking on a bid hadn't given him a son and besides Henry had met someone new gorgeous Ann Berlin who was Henry noted had a nice pair of pretty duckies but some people in England failed to support Henry including yes the bishop of Rochester The Bishop's opposition to Henry's divorce was about to have a devastating impact on his cook it all started on February the 18th 1531 when the bishop held a banquet and he wasn't feeling great that evening so he didn't eat anything but his guests scoffed away and by morning 17 of them were ill and two had died immediately rumors abounded everybody thought it was poison and the finger was pointed at the cook that night who was Richard Roose they said that he had deliberately attempted to murder the bishop on the instructions of a vengeful and Berlin more likely it was just a bad case of food poisoning [Music] Henry was hopping mad that the name of his sweet Anne had been dragged through the mud so he sent Richard to the tower to be tortured until guess what he confessed to it all being his fault it sounds like things were pretty Grim for Richard but they were about to get a whole lot Grimmer Henry passed a law especially for Richard permitting a new form of execution death by boiling but it wouldn't be a simple matter of 12 minutes in the pan and you're done no it's recorded that Richard was locked in a chain and pulled up and down with a gibbet at diverse times till he was dead and that took two long hours documents from the time record how Henry VII joked to his courtiers I've cooked the cook it was a world away from what kitchen boy Richard had imagined all those years ago when all he had to worry about was the washing out so a top tip for survival in Henry's England would be don't ruffle the Kings rough [Music] which you'd think would be easy given that most people lived in the countryside in simple houses with thatched roofs and walls made of sticks and dung minding their own business [Music] this is what life was like for the vast majority of people in Tudor England a world away from the sex scandals and skull duggery and fabulous costumes that you saw in the court of King Henry VIII take for example a Yorkshire farmer Richard jenkinson and his wife whose name isn't recorded so let's call her Anne this might be the couple out in the field at Harvest Time Richard must be as worn out as his trousers like 90 of the Tudors Richard's family spent most of their time in The Great Outdoors teasing a living from the soil and it was long long hours they could start from as early as five o'clock in the morning and not finish till they lost the light which in the summer months might be 10 o'clock in contrast to their King who picked out on Banquets every day there were just two simple meals something to munch in the fields perhaps bread and cheese and at the end of the day one hot meal to look forward to this is the kind of thing that Anne would have prepared for their tea this is pottage made out of turnips and beans thickened with a few breadcrumbs and maybe just a Sprinkle of local herbs on special occasions they might even eat a chicken at night totally exhausted from the labors of the day Richard and Anne would fall asleep on their crude mattress made of straw with the kids just a few yards from them with five or six it would be a squeeze and if they had any precious animals like a prized pig that could sleep in the room too couldn't afford to let it slope off and pigs are notoriously difficult to house train so as you can imagine the room would have stunk like crazy but more important if you spent a lot of time in the proximity of farm animals you ran the risk of Contracting killer diseases it's no wonder that the average life expectancy was just 35 years there was no NHS and Tudor medicine was rubbish problem with gout apply worms pigs marrow and herbs boiled with a red-haired dog death sticker hairs gallbladder and some Fox grease in your ear with a fire in the middle of the room and no chimney the place would have been full of smoke so the children might well have had respiratory infections bad people and animals would be snug together and hopefully the thatch wouldn't catch fire [Music] if they were lucky the next day would be a Sunday and their only day off but there was no let up for Anne because she'd also have to make everybody's clothes starting with a bit of fleece straight off a sheep's back Marion Knights a tune a technology expert nose and secret how do we get it from that into some kind of yarn that we can make something out of well that's where this comes in ah the spindle this is the drop spindle how does it work well basically you just spin it so this twiddles around and I can feel when there's enough twist because it nips my finger up here then you can start pulling this out a bit more it is very slow labor intensive and slow how often would people have been doing this every time she'd got an empty Pair of Hands she would have got the spindle out you know waiting for the pot to boil waiting for the baby to wake up standing at the well waiting her turn this was the only way she could clothe her family have done her own weaving weaving so what sort of outfit would she have made for her husband Richard I'm meeting clothing experts Nina Michaela the thing that sticks out for me more than anything else is how robust all this is I would have thought that he would have been in rags well no I don't suppose he'd last very long in the fields in rags it is very robust he's got a warm Woolen layer on the top and in fact the whole thing is lined in another layer of wool yeah you'd be all right in the fields in this and what's all this under here well yeah it's a bit startling isn't it it's got red I wasn't expecting that there was a very strong belief in this period that red was a color that kept you healthy and it was a good color to wear near to your skin and then you've got this shirt underneath that yeah so everyone man woman and child always has a linen layer next to their skin and and that's the bit you can wash which none of these you could be washed in water big question vest on pants no pants I'm afraid most men used their shirt which was long and split at the sides so you could tuck the front this way in the back that way and that was basically your pants you'd be nice and warm yeah what about the women women absolutely no pants long skirts don't need them all the time that we've been talking there's been one item of clothing that's been catching my eye here excuse me about this you'll see why it did attract my attention I don't know what you're talking about sure realize that Ordinary People had Cod pieces Yeah by this date it was just completely standard wear on men's hose so that they were taking in the fashion of the Richer people and incorporating it into their own exactly I mean it does seem like a weird fashion but in the 15th century the Cod piece didn't exist it starts as just a simple flat flap that's used to cover the fly yeah and then human maybe male nature comes in and it becomes a bit more exaggerated and a bit more padded and embellished until it is by this date just standard almost like the one the king's wearing but King Henry's influence on Richard and Anne was about to extend even Beyond Cod pieces it was the summer of 1513 just four years into the reign of young King Henry [Music] went down to the river to fetch a bucket of water probably had a quick pee in the Hedge on the way when suddenly he was stopped by one of his landowners servants who gave him a message on more likely an order the lives of Richard and his family were about to be turned upside down by the activities of his Firebrand King Henry VII Richard was being called up for military service the reign of Henry VII an Englishman could be called up at any time to serve his King in battle and in 1513 that's exactly what happened to Richard Jenkins the young Henry VII la UT like this and he dreamed of being a great warrior king and ruling both Scotland and France so aged 22 he took his toughest troops and invaded France James IV of Scotland couldn't believe his luck Henry gone England could be his so it fell to Henry's Queen Catherine to recruit an army for him 25 000 soldiers including Richard poor Farmers like him had to provide their own weapons luckily Richard had just the thing because in Tudor times there were sheep everywhere hello they're with me here you see in order to stop them wandering all over the fields and eating the turnips these things began to appear throughout the Tudor landscape the hedgerows and to trim those you needed one of these things a bill hook which was a simple slashing sizing tool which you just made the hedges tidy with with a few modifications Richard's hedge trimmer was fashioned into a Lethal Weapon his local blacksmith simply tweaked the bill hook design with a series of nasty twists and turns now Richard was ready take on the Scots to find out how I'm visiting the Royal armories in Leeds and meeting curator Andy Dean Richard wouldn't have been able to escape from going to into the army would he no I mean it's part of that feudal system so they knew that if the call came there was no getting out of it and possibly your wives and your children would come along with you oh really why would they do that well as part of the baggage train and women had a vital role before the battle and after the battle I mean obviously picking up the bits but of course you're more likely to fight if you feel comfortable you have your loved ones around you and of course you don't sort of just go somewhere fight and come home again you might be away for 40 days and so having family around you then maybe there's a greater reason for the ordinary man to fight harder yeah to get to the battle Richard Anne and the kids had to walk about 150 miles sleeping in the fields each night they couldn't carry much food so the Army often looted from Villages along the way of course going to war would have been terrible but it would have been a bit of an adventure too remember Richard had probably only ever been about 10 miles from his home before and suddenly off he goes Andy can bring his wife and kids it would have been like some sort of weird summer holiday except he might have got killed Richard would have to summon up the courage to confront one of these guys so noisy and heavy I'd have wet myself [Music] [Applause] what am I gonna do against this guy I don't think this is going to be much use no he's almost impervious but if you came across this guy actually you and your mates have got The Perfect Weapon you can see where the gaps are where would you thrust this Spike exactly so it's gone through his eye socket into his brain now it's got a bill hook for a reason what would you do with the hook here no idea all right well I would wrap this around the back of his neck haul him to the ground Richard would need nerves of Steel but he did also have some protection this would be the most basic a jack of plates uh the plates inside the linen garment could be made out of horns well it needs to be heavy but not so heavy it limits you and it's protecting obviously your engine heart lungs so your engine is protected but your computer's not so we need something for the top end of you as well all right and again computer cover yeah and there would be an Armory and there'll be 50 100 of these and you'd be get one of these and you've had it to make it your own on it goes yeah look you got your jacket plates now with 20 other blokes all lined up who are motivated you've suddenly become a very important part of the army you've got to admit I am terrifying when they finally arrived to fight the battle of flodden the English army faced stiff odds attacking uphill against greater numbers and the Scots had bigger cannons if the Scots won and captured a chunk of England it could have been the end of Henry VII Richard watched in awe as he waited for his turn on one side you'd got the Scots with their long Pikes which were brilliant against knights in armor on Horseback but weren't nearly as good when it came to close fighting and they were up against Richard and the other Tudor farmer soldiers armed with equipment better suited to hand-to-hand combat Bill hooks which were stabbing and sithing weapons Richard and his comrades began to push the Scots back finally in one last desperate move the Scottish King charged down right into the heart of the English ranks but the Infantry held firm they pulled him off his horse and slaughtered him King James IV of Scotland killed by Common Farmers with Bill hooks [Music] Amos Victory and Richard could now return home with his adapted hedge trimmer our simple farmer had helped save Henry VII from a humiliating defeat one that could have ended his entire reign [Music] thank you [Music] with all that Blood Sweat and toil the Tudors needed to let their hair down and fun for our Tudor ancestors was pretty much the same as it is today for us first of all is this the way to Glastonbury football and most important of all a glass of Ale down the pub and if you lived in Leatherhead Surrey this could have been your local 500 years ago presiding over everything from the Brewing of the beer through to the ladling it out to the guests was a woman Eleanor rumming could have a pint please [Music] this is Eleanor still welcoming customers to the pub and the running horse is a modern Twist on the Pub's original name rumming's house [Music] Eleanor's life was tough she'd be up at dawn seven days a week fetching water from the river and cleaning up from the night before she had a kitchen over here somewhere set away from the pub and in here she would have made bread and cooked all the meals for the family and around here you would have had pigs and chickens and there would be lots of herbs growing so that she could produce the meat and the medicine for her family but the most important part of her workplace was here this would have been where she did the Brewing Ellen is ale was old school even then after the barley was malted she'd have added her own signature mix of herbs like thyme Rosemary nettle yarrow and mugwort it would have been a murky Brown brew and tasted sour and Smoky and it would go off pretty quickly because Elena didn't use hops which are important for preserving beer she produced about 10 gallons a week for her family and all the rest was put on sale because in those days everybody drank ale even children partly because it was thought to be more nutritious than water certainly didn't give you the like water did and it made you feel good [Music] we know all about Eleanor from a bloke who stopped off at the pub one night for a drink and he happened to be Henry VII's Poet Laureate a bloke by the name of John Skelton and he wrote this poem about Eleanor from our point of view it's brilliant because it describes an ordinary person in great detail you may think he wrote it because he was besotted by her beauty but in fact what he says was her face all boozy cumbly crinkled wonderfully wrinkled like a roast pig's ear bristling with hair it's Charming isn't it Skelton goes on insulting Eleanor for about 600 lines but it wasn't just her looks that he was slagging off this was full-scale character assassination according to Skelton she was a sexual deviant she was a dodgy businesswoman she cut her ale with all sorts of disgusting stuff look at this and sometimes she Blends the dung of her hens I can't imagine Skelton came back for a second pint can you so what's the truth about Eleanor jagerwise 2018 Brewer of the year has studied the ancient craft of Ale making all the way back to Tudor times [Music] why does the poem slag her off so much it's implied quite heavily that she's doing things like watering down the ale or cheating customers um I think she really did cheat the customers yeah find two pennies for um for serving false measures and she was lucky that she was fined one of the other punishments would have been a thorough ducking in the local pond like a witch yeah like a witch that's one of the things that strikes me about the poem she does come across as a bit witchy doesn't she there is said to be a relationship between witches and alewives it's true that ale wives would have used a big cauldron May well have had a cat for pest control and they did put a broom outside the pub to show the beer was ready but why would anyone want to demonize women like Eleanor what begins to happen is the Brewing industry begins to become professional and when that happens the alewives are a considerable threat so what do you do when you're under threat and you spread rumors about them you spread lies about them you want to make their product sell less than your product what about Mr rumming we don't hear much about him I imagine him as some drunken Old Sock sitting in the corner while his wife coins it all in why alewives are called ale wives and not ale women because most of them were probably married and Eleanor would have had a certain amount of Financial Freedom but it all belonged to their husbands so Eleanor did all that hard work didn't directly receive any Financial reward and risked the ducking in the local pond [Music] I wish I could have been standing here 500 years ago watching the real Elena presiding over her little boozy Kingdom but as for this poem I feel split down the middle about it because on one hand it's funny it's body it brings to life A working woman in The Tudor period but on the other hand it takes the mick out of her it slags her off and that kind of writing about working women at that time helped dry the nail in the coffin of their lives and it meant that they were cut off from their work and all the opportunities that go with it for centuries to come [Music] yeah the course of his Reign Henry VII managed to annoy the Pope the French the Scots and it seems most people in Europe how did it happen they'd had quite enough of Henry just another on me and now the threat of invasion hung in the air [Music] the new situation demanded that England have a ready and well-equipped navy which meant that suddenly a lot of ordinary people had exciting new job possibilities and the chance of long-haul travel 7 000 new semen were taken on as Henry expanded did the Royal Navy from 5 to 40 warships so what kind of life could a novice sailor expect in the swashbuckling early days of the Navy well for once we can answer that question in incredible detail thanks to a remarkable Tutor Time Capsule that emerged from the drink nearly 40 years ago there is the wreck of the Mary Rose it has come to the surface in 1982 It's a Wonderful structure and a wonderful site salvages recovered Henry's Flagship Mary Rose which had sunk back in 1545. the Mary Rose is safe and Well on board were 19 000 artifacts and the jumbled bones of 179 sailors and in one corner of a lower deck archaeologists found one complete skeleton an ordinary seaman will call John a man who went down with his ship so this is our man this is John this is John Alex hildred is a curator at the Mary Rose trust and first dived the wreck back in 1979. it doesn't seem hugely tall he isn't actually he's about our height more or less about five foot four ish maybe five foot five it's one five four and a half yeah perfect almost identical what about age uh age you can see that the sutures have all closed so he's probably between 20 and 30 a perfect age for somebody who's a hard-working individual John who would have looked something like this was one of a crew of over 400. [Music] I've never seen this before no really truly come on have a look oh wow [Music] I've so always wanted to see this this is like the tomb of Tutankhamun [Music] half the ship rotted away but the remaining halves in good Nick it's as though the Mary Rose was cut down the middle lengthways to give us a sneaky look inside John's home where was he actually found he was found just over there so this is the hold of the ship and there were four people in there and five Big Barrel well barrels about this high with tar or pitch in them so it looks as though he was working it looks as though he was working [Music] Jossy his mission was to constantly check that the Timbers were watertight and to repair them with tar and Pitch before the ship sank every day he would have worked a Relentless shift pattern of four hours on four hours off signaled by the tolling of the ship's Bell John may have been a local lad who learned his craft from about 14 years of age as an apprentice at Portsmouth dockyard then around 18 he'd have had his big chance of a life of adventure at Sea imagine his first name he must have been completely all strong we got any idea where John might have slept likely he would have just slept anywhere that he could have done maybe on the storage deck above or on the main deck by the guns that's the sort of thing we hear are people just crunching themselves up beside the guns and falling asleep as much as they can I bet everybody would assume that he would have slept in a hammock hammocks weren't around yet so no no hammocks and for an ordinary seaman like John there were certainly no cabins or Banks either all right we've got him up in the morning what about his ablution well the only evidence we have for that are two channels if you like both up on the upper deck in the stern which basically they were like urinals and they went out through the side of the ship with little protruding basically beams which had a hole in the center so everything would go out the side [Music] if we got any evidence of the kinds of things that he might have done in order to make his spare time bearable actually really close to where he was found just on the deck above we have evidence of two gaming boards musical instruments in fact that we had a fiddle that was found just by the main Mast so we've got fiddle and a table drum and pipes I love the idea that you've got a ship's band you look at something like this and all you see in your mind's eye is the serious nature of running a ship but they were grooving away as well also near John skeleton they found one of these I know what that is that reminds me of primary school yeah those are one of our most common objects both the anti-nit Combs part which are very very fine and then the one for normal grooming he would have had Nets wouldn't he probably and you do hear of people throwing themselves in the sea to get rid of the nits but John might have got comfort from a special friend a small skeleton was found in the doorway where John would have picked up his tools interestingly in the opening of it because it was a sliding door so almost jammed in the crack was a was a small dog [Music] I know we called him hatch because he was wasn't too far away from from the hatches but but he was so far away that he couldn't get out he couldn't get out no I know and he actually is our most complete skeleton I don't want to get too weepy about this but John would have seen him every day he would have and he was only 18 months old the dog just a just a baby really let's move on before I show myself up [Music] this may be one of the great archaeological Treasures of the world but it's also the place where young John lived and worked every day along with 500 of his mates in very dark cramped conditions imagine though how proud he must have felt about being a crew member of the Mary Rose [Music] but in July 1545 the French attacked the English Fleet at Portsmouth [Music] Henry watched as the Mary Rose went out to engage the enemy all the Cannons to starboard fired a volley together turned had gun ports fatally dipped beneath the water line and water rushed in John's whole world would literally have been turned upside down there would have been things flying across the room up down backwards forwards smacking him in the face then a final gush of freezing cold water and then that was it no Escape the Mary Rose sank Like a Stone only 30 of over 400 crew members escaped John perished where he worked I like to think that John would be pleased to know that the English Navy finally managed to repulse the French and also that he might be a bit tickled if you knew that 500 years after he died his life would become immortalized [Music] Henry's pride and joy for 34 years its end foreshadowed his own he died two years later and thanks to his Reign the lives of ordinary people would never be the same again [Music] nowadays it's seen as a period of great sophistication and elegance darling where did you get that dress may I have the next dance but for ordinary people it was far from that for them the Georgian period was particularly cruel and nasty in everything from laws to living standards there was a huge Chasm between the poor and the wealthy [Applause] but some of those who came from the wrong side of the track weren't prepared to accept their dreary lot Jack ran who was born in 1750 was one of them here's Jack right now like many ordinary families at the time Jax was dirt poor they would most likely have lived altogether in just one room with no running water and just a bucket for a loo we think his dad was a peddler a street seller earning maybe six or seven Shillings a week just 35 quid in today's money which meant that most of the family's money was spent on bread certainly not on fun and yet just to rub it all in Jack lived in a city that was oozing with luxury and pleasure bath the go-to tourist destination for Britain's rich and privileged they came here to party sample the spa Waters and generally Ponce around oh the heartache but at least the toffs provided a business opportunity for a certain canny young someone yep no school for him instead he'd be following in the footsteps of his dad twelve-year-old Jack regularly used to pitch his Peddler's cart in the city center in the Square selling George and Delicacies like pastries and oranges his customers were the high society men and women strutting around like peacocks with their hair piled high on their head like a glossy magazine Center spread there right in front of him and the more he saw of it the more he wanted a piece of the action and quite frankly he wanted to look cool enough to get some of the girls saw his charms in the George and last for high-speed travel for Jack the growing numbers of wealthy Travelers whizzing around the country in fancy carriages men the charms have Jack going places too [Music] when he was just 18 He got The Plum job in this new world of high-speed travel he became a Coachman and was soon running all the transport for a large household Chris Thompson is an expert on the sort of Life Jack would have had that coat that you're wearing that to me is traditional Coachman's clobber am I right yeah great court has many capes for keeping up the weather and is very heavy and warm so in inclement weather it would be something of a savior in warm weather it wasn't too good and Jack would have worn them like this yeah what hours would he have worked long hours long into the night if his employer requested to travel overnight then Jack had to get the ready on a daily basis he would probably work from Donald dusk and Jack was Jack wasn't a couple of grand today although he did get meals and accommodation thrown in [Music] stage coaches were uncomfortable and packed tight with smelly passengers but Jax was in a different class it's beautifully padded it's like your sofa at home and you're just sitting there watching the telly when Jack reached one of the new coaching Inns to overnight his passengers went inside to relax with a hot meal and a freshly made up bed but Jack's long day wasn't over until he'd washed brushed and fed the horses often his own bed was right beside them along with any fleas and ticks that might happen to be crawling around one thing was for certain being a Coachman was not giving Jack the glamor that he craved what he wanted was the fat cat Lifestyle of his wealthy passengers he'd seen them hand over wads of cash every time they stopped to pay for the fancy wine and the gorgeous meals well he had to bed down in the stable it was time for a career move Jack was about to become a Highwayman [Music] even back then Highwaymen were romantic figures more daring and glamorous than bog standard robbers the mid Georgian period was the Heyday of The Highwaymen there were loads and loads of Travelers around was no organized police force to catch them and like most Highwaymen and indeed Highway women Jack would ride up to the coach with The Travelers in it he would shout your money or your life and he would wave his pistol but it was extremely dangerous passengers could carry guns too so Jack knew the risks but he was determined that even if his career was going to be really short at least it would be fun and exciting and just great so he dressed like a Dandy he had these silk britches and each one was tied with eight silver strings at the knee so he got the nickname 16 string Jack which is a pretty good nickname isn't it and there was one victim who remarked Jack behaved exceeding civil and rather begged for the money than used any violent means he was [Music] his pile of cash and his Charisma rapidly grew but the authorities were on to him he was caught and tried not once but an incredible 17 times and on each occasion silver tongues Jack outwitted the judge and Charmed the jury but finally in 1774 Jack was accused of stealing from the king's daughter's chaplain what's wonderful is that you can hear Jack's brass cheek and his accent in the court transcript he says oh he knows no more of it than a child does unborn they have said false things to you but Jack had made a Fateful Error the court didn't take kindly to the princess's Pastor being called a liar he was found guilty and this being the Georgian era he was sentenced to death [Music] Saucy last supper with the governor of Newgate Prison and seven delightful young ladies the next day a showman to the end he danced a high jig on the scaffold before the Noose tightened around his neck [Music] times Britain began to rule the waves and ordinary men went off to see exploring trading and generally enjoying themselves far too much in ports across the globe ask me where he's gone hello Big Boy another drink anyone one such man was a 24 year old Irish sailor called John Mara he was minding his own business one day in 1770 just hanging out in a lively port on the Asian island of java having a drink down by the harbor checking out the girls suddenly John was surrounded by British Marines are you employed they were looking for crew men who are you working and had the right to force any semen between 18 and 55 to join their ship whether he wanted to or not right get over there John had no choice he'd been press ganged about a quarter of the neighbors Sailors were recruited like this so who exactly was behind John's dastardly kidnap none other than the famous explorer Captain James Cook John was now a sailor in Cooks crew on board HMS endeavor [Music] John marra soon calmed down he admitted that one ship was pretty much as good as any other and that only a fool would want to stay in this disease-ridden port so he was welcomed on board [Music] in Georgian times there was no such thing as cabins for ordinary seaman so when John first got on board he would have been given a hammock could have gone below and found somewhere to put it and that would have been his living quarters for the rest of the voyage but at least he traveled light so storage of all his worldly Goods wouldn't be a problem these were called ditty bags this was where each sailor kept his spare change of clothes his mementos his knife his Bible that was the love and John wouldn't even have had a uniform to worry about because he wasn't an officer so this is where the men lived and down here was the officer's quarters and if any of the sailors just went beyond that line they could be shot by a marine if you just looked an officer in the eye then you could be punished for dumb insolence but look at the difference this was how the officers lived [Music] John became a Gunner's mate his job was to keep the Cannons secure how they're dry he also made sure all the ship's ropes pulleys and sails were in good order he'd work four hours on eight off with extra time off when they reached port John would be faced with just endless skies and endless Seas [Music] been covered in goats sheep and chicken even cows and some of the men in the club together and brought a pig on board and all those animals would have created a right old man one that John and the other Seaman would have to clean up everyone knows that Sailors used to scrub the decks and I'd always assume that that meant with a scrubbing brush but it didn't this is what they used this is It's like a square of sandstone and you stuck a peg in it like that and you went back and forward and back and forward day after day essentially it was a disciplined thing it just kept the lads from arguing and thumping each other but it had a secondary effect which they weren't at all aware of is that it kept the germs down so essentially ships were a pretty healthy place to live though after a few months at Sea there'd be less mess to clean up because all the animals would have been eaten [Music] Sophie forgan an expert on Georgia Naval Cuisine knows what kind of food John would have been left with that's a bit of really manky salt pork now that is as solid as a rock how long would that have lasted well they did last up to three years but pretty awful by that time it must have been incredibly salty very very salty but one way you got rid of the salt was to put the joints in a small net and two them behind the ship to wash some of the excess salt off is it right that occasionally John would be treated to something weird like Albatross it is right everything they shot was eaten the only one they turned their backs on was wolverus the Sailor said no way but there was one fate even worse than walrus for breakfast scurvy on Long voyages it was the biggest threat to Jon's life the disease was caused by a lack of vitamin C and on some ships it killed half the crew men like John were terrified of scurvy and you can't blame them it was absolutely horrible your skin started to go pale your eyes sunk in your gums weren't all swollen and bloody your teeth fell out you got covered in bruises then your arms and legs started to go Black Death when it came was a blessed relief John never got scurvy and traveling at a modest speed of just under 10 miles an hour made it as far away as it's possible to be from Britain the South Pacific [Music] must have thought he was in Paradise in Tahiti he got friendly with the local Chief who apparently offered him his own house his own land and the prettiest girl in the village to be his wife chosen from among a dozen maidens John was over the moon what an offer let's get out of here and being a strong swimmer he knew when to make his move he waited till the sales were being lifted and the anchor was being weighed and sprinted to the side dived overboard began swimming through the crystal clear waters towards Paradise unfortunately he was spotted he was dragged back and brought dripping into the ship to be punished by the captain this is what he would have got the cat and nine tails Wham but he wouldn't have been standing up he would have to lie down like this and this was known as kissing the Gunner's daughter and get whacked on the back and on the bottom dozen lashes that was the standard dose although quite honestly for a bloke like Mara I don't think it would have made any difference [Music] after five years sailing around the world with cook John finally returned to Britain he'd made a bit of money and he could have called it quits settled down in Ireland in a Cottage By the Sea but he didn't Grog got the better of him and he drank it all away [Music] and the last time we ever hear of him is in a port on the coast of Australia looking for another birth another ship and another adventure foreign one thing you definitely didn't want to be in Georgian times was Ill you might find yourself being bled for acne oh cool we'll get tobacco smoke blown up your bottom I'll cure a headache and as for surgery even if you could afford it run a mile if you're able to if you were poor naturally you'd be stuffed either way unless you happen to be in the right place at the right time which surprisingly could be somewhere Round Here it's just another day in London's most notorious District Jacobs Island near London Bridge also known as the capital of Cholera or the Venice of slums houses rotted by dampness Windows covered in paper and Rags the whole place overcrowded with people and dirty face kids swarming everywhere one of the residents 60 year old Elizabeth Regan is woken up really early by the racket of people clattering past when she's emptied the contents of her chamber pot out of the window she pops out and joins the queue for the pump to get some water for her stew [Music] in Georgian times 60 was considered pretty ancient so Elizabeth was probably shacked up with her grown-up children helping out with the cooking and the shopping nearby Borough Market was the perfect place for her to bag a bargain Neighbors this particular morning she was rushing down Borough High Street avoiding all the crowds of people and all the horse-drawn carts and as she's crossing the road trips over carp runs over her leg multiple compound fractures and remember in those days there were no ambulances no NHS but she's very lucky because the accident has happened just outside one of the most important hospitals in London that's been here since medieval times St Thomas's there must have been a friendly bystander who helped a limp to the door then Elizabeth would have been carried up these stairs 52 ancient cranky wooden steps you really do feel like you're walking back into history next bleeding in pain and on the edge of Consciousness Elizabeth wouldn't have been certain that the hospital would even admit her Julie Mathias knows all about the history of Saint Thomas's if I came here I've had a road accident my legs are all smashed up my mates carry me here dumped me on the floor what will be your response well you would actually be quite fortunate in that case because the hospital provided one walled um to access cases of an emergency such as yours casualty so I've absolutely priority patients yeah you were yes indeed so things are sort of looking up despite being from the worst postcode in London Elizabeth had a world leading surgeon on her case I'm gonna put myself in her place to get an idea of what Elizabeth went through in Europe's oldest operating theater Karen Howell is my surgeon Gary Karen presumably you're going to operate on me because you've got the pinafore on that's right I'm the operator for today the surgeons for you so I'm hoping to amputate your league Elizabeth must have been a tough cookie but this experience would have terrified her and I'll submit I'm already quite nervous just below me here yeah yeah look at this this sawdust presumably is for collecting my blood and bits and pieces you got that right that's actually for to stop the blood going through the floorboards the the church is below us there was a church under there I don't want to drip on the congregation that's right yeah but fear not Elizabeth you're getting high-tech treatment the operating table was the latest design featuring a pop-out platform for Elizabeth's good leg even a headrest and the table was a handy height for holding her down thoughtful touch Sonic is on to limit the damage we're managing your blood so that when we cut I don't lose much blood [Music] but that wasn't all Elizabeth had to cope with she suffered this indignity in front of crowds of people who are making an incredible amount of noise yelling at the assistants to keep their heads out of the way there would be a few medical students naturally but in some hospitals they actually issued tickets there was no anesthetic just a piece of leather to chew on and maybe a prayer before the chop came in the 18th century Georgian method is circular action on one knee are you ready yeah we have permission to amputate and you're bracing yourself is an old technique they call the Tour de Matra Masters round goes around like this and you can see what's going to happen so we're ready and sort of saying wow so that's just splitting me right open all the way around and the idea was then you take the saw oh my God we know really it's about six to eight cuts through that one bone very fast saw as they are it's horrible just seeing you do that then that is the bone through so my leg's gone now yeah there's no load there now yeah Elizabeth began to faint but got a hefty slap to keep her conscious with blood everywhere she must hang on in there the arteries are now severed we need to act quickly to close up the wound basically we put a thread through there like this big thick thread and tie it like a drawstring bag [Music] the operation was a success well at least Elizabeth didn't die on the operating table but then came the tricky bit recovery thanks to the unsanitary conditions in the hospital Elizabeth's chance of survival was just one in three [Music] despite her ordeal in the operating theater Elizabeth didn't make it she never left the ward within a week she died of infection and yet within 50 years the medical profession had started to become aware of bacteria and began cleaning their surgical instruments and their operating theaters although sadly for one Brave Georgian that came too late [Applause] one of the biggest problems for the poor in Georgian times was that they were powerless to change their lot Ordinary People couldn't vote so the laws were made by the rich and for the rich and to keep the working class under control the powerful voted in a long list of crimes you could be hanged for over 200 of them in fact [Applause] thing from oh destroying a toll gate estimating a Chelsea pensioner how dare you but even more serious was pinching the toff's game local rumor down here in Hampshire at the time suggested that Charles Smith was a practitioner of the Dark Art of poaching although no one had ever actually seen him do it this looks like Charles in 1821 age 28 with his son standing a six foot tall when the average was just five foot five he was thought a rather romantic figure even married above his station Charles lived with his wife who was the daughter of a wealthy farmer and his kids and his little Terrier in a cottage very much like this one [Music] so you've got a roof over his head probably thatched like this one this is actually quite gorgeous isn't it but to feed his family Charles needed money some of it came from his day job as a casual laborer he could get the occasional day digging ditches lugging clay around at the brick Kilns scraping the Skins at the tanners and back in the old days that might have been enough to buy things like butter cheese and the occasional bit of meat for dinner but getting food on the table was getting harder and harder terrible Harvest [Music] Harvest changed everything now to avoid starvation families like Charles's had to spend all their money just to buy the basics this is how the food would have been cooked although it would have been pretty rudimentary something like tatters and Shake which was potatoes with salt on it or a flat bread like something that you get in the Kebab shop the difference being that there was no meat in it in fact they had virtually no protein at all [Music] I want some protein and in 1816 the government made it illegal for ordinary people to hunt and kill any sort of game even wild rabbits oh courgette and butter so while the rich had more Fine Food than they could fill their faces with Charles and his family were starving Charles's local landowner was an aristocrat called Henry Temple by count Lord Palmerston which is a bit of a mouthful and he was the future Prime Minister he loved having fancy parties for his hunting friends and his Estates were jam-packed full of deer and pheasant and Partridge and all sorts of yummy treats [Music] and kids were hungry what else was he supposed to do Charles turned to poaching Seb littlewood is an expert on poaching in Georgian times what kind of snares or traps to charge you there were small traps like these small animal traps so what is that it looks like a trap for fairies yeah it's about this about the right size so this is this is how this operates so it's sprung by pushing this down you open the teeth and then we clip that up like that okay so it's all set for the rabbit Along Comes Mr rabbit yeah that's so horrible isn't it it's not nice and presumably the thing about leaving a few of these around is that it means the gamekeeper will know that they're approach is about if the gamekeeper comes across them he knows people out and about poetic comes back to check his traps gotcha gotcha yeah so a rabbit trap could become a trap for the poacher who set it so if Charles wanted something much bigger and much more effective what might you do well there is this option I suppose something like this hey would you actually be able to bring down something like a rabbit with that you would although it's a musket it works much the same way as a modern shotgun I say you put pellets in it pellets in it this was scatter shot meant that hopefully anything sort of 10 15 yards away you're going to hit it but but isn't there a big drawback to using a gun the bang the bang the size absolutely generally the whole idea about poaching is you relying on stealth uh on a level of secrecy something like this you're going to hear it from half a mile away November 1820 there was a big and noisy local Festival oh Rebel Rebel Rebel I do love a rebel of the revelers Charles figured would hear his mask his mustard Woods hooray when it was dark Charles went over to his hiding place produced kiss musket and he would have had a big tunic on with a pocket in it down here somewhere and he would put the butt in it to support it and then he would sneak out hoping that before morning he would have been able to find something warm and furry with which he could feed his family the next day the weather was perfect just enough moon to light the way and just enough wind in the trees to mask the sound of footfall taking his Terrier Charles made his way to collect his brother-in-law John pointer then the two of them pressed on to the plantation of palmerston's estate with all its Rich pickings cautiously they crept to the spot where they'd seen pheasants roosting earlier child raised his gun but unfortunately Deputy gamekeeper Robert Snellgrove was a party pooper who'd rather be lying in wait for poachers than reveling as soon as he heard Smith's gun he was after them Snellgrove caught up with them and as he did so there was a bang and An Almighty cloud of smoke cleared to reveal Snellgrove bleeding badly from his thigh poachers were nowhere to be seen Charles Smith went on the run but Snellgrove had seen his face clearly enough to identify him it took them over a year to catch up with Charles but eventually he was tried in Winchester and on March the 23 1822 he was hanged as one of the last men hung for poaching under the Georgians [Music] he was unlucky just a year later the law was changed and poaching was no longer punishable by Death in Georgian times the countryside was beginning to get crowded so a lot of ordinary country folk started heading off to the cities and nowhere was a more seductive destination than the booming capital in the 1730s the whole of London was squashed into a fraction of its size today London started here around about Tower Bridge that's there and stretched about a mile in this direction over towards Westminster and that was London and it was Ram packed full about 700 000 people and dogs and horses and other animals and amongst this Hurley Burley was a woman called Elizabeth Bowman she's in there somewhere that's her Elizabeth was one of the many young single women who saw an opportunity to make money from George and London's expanding population six days a week she'd get up at sunrise and leave her small rented room to come shopping here at Covent Garden Market it was the best place in London to buy juniper berries herbs and spices because Elizabeth was a maker and seller at the capital's most popular recreational product gin in Georgian times in London they were knocking back an incredible seven million gallons of gin every year that's stupid two pints of gin every week for every adult oh thank you two pints is what we drink on average per year I mean all right I'm slightly more than the average but you know what I mean anyway it Elizabeth certainly had a lot of eager customers for her product but what was her life like Anastasia Miller is an expert on drinking in the 18th century why do you reckon a woman like Elizabeth would have got involved in the Gin making trade because if you were a good girl you would want to do something where it it's honorable enough that you could sell something you could make something you could make enough of a profit so you're implying that she could avoid the sex trade she could avoid the sex trade an incredible 20 of George and London's young women were involved in the sex trade whereas selling and making gin was considered far more respectable for Elizabeth it meant she could afford a new Bonnet when she needed or visit one of the new theaters that were springing up around Colvin Garden and she might even treat herself to a ball of scented soap for her daily ablutions making gin was a bit of a dodgy business first Elizabeth probably blagged a jug or two of rough neat Spirit from the local Distillery no questions asked okay so Elizabeth's got some of this dodgy stuff she takes it home yes what does she do well she's going to make it into gin easiest way is you take your spirit and she probably used you know just regular Crockery jugs things like that now here's the important part she had to have Juniper is that the thing that really marks you know that is what gin is but juniper berries were pricey and might sometimes have been beyond Elizabeth's budget other way to do it to get that Piney smell was to use this is that paint stripper well that's boiler Terps Terps yeah they used to tip turbs into the Gin well they also used to take well a vitriol to give it a little bit of peppery bite which is what sulfuric acid oh that's ridiculous oh I know and if she was feeling creative Elizabeth may have added her own herbs and spices as well seal this up let it sit overnight and you're done you've made gin once Elizabeth had made her gin the next challenge was to flog her dodgy home brew one of the most horrible things confronting Elizabeth daily would have been the sheer filthiness of London that had been rubbish strewn all over the place pigs snorting everywhere and in the days before main sewers that had been put in human effluent was just chucked into the street or else whoosh went straight into the River Thames Elizabeth would have had to walk many miles a day through this without Wellies or a face mask just to get to her customers where and when was Gin sold they sold it everywhere there you go and up and down the streets too but the best place to sell Jen was if you showed up the places where people gathered and you're looking at hangings at the tavern tree if you're going to go see a proper set of hangings today you're going to need Refreshments you're going to need gin after spending the day at The Gallows Elizabeth might have found some more thirsty customers at the local Fight Night women used to do bare knuckle fighting because there's another way to make money and they'd be selling gin as a refreshment but they also gave it away as a prize really ladies love chin but unfortunately ladies loved it too much as did men and quite a few children by the 1730s Gin was no longer just a recreational drug londoners had become hopelessly addicted to the Tipple Elizabeth was selling so the government banned Hawking gin on the streets and that meant Elizabeth's livelihood was seriously under threat desperate for an income she moved her gin operation underground and found a clever way to advertise her bootleg a puss and Mew what you do you fancy a gin right and you start this is absolutely true you would stand outside it going inside Elizabeth would hear it and she would reply so the bloke knew that it was time to put his penny in or his Taps if he wanted a double and then she would pour the Gin out and it would come down that spout and he would get out his Pewter Mug and drink it it was a bit like ordering a burger from a drive-in [Music] but in Spring 1738 Elizabeth's luck finally ran out she was snitched on for selling gin and sentenced to two-month imprisonment at the Tot Hill House of Correction Georgian houses of Correction were pretty brutal places inmates like Elizabeth were forced into hard labor they used to have to spend the whole day hammering away at tough hemp plants to extract the fibers for rope making they lived in squalid cramped conditions the food was meager the whippings were frequent all for committing the crime basically of being a poor person trying to get a living in a rich man's world after prison Elizabeth disappears from the historical records maybe she stopped selling gin or maybe this candy operator became even better at hiding her trade Ordinary People [Music] inhalers or poachers life was a hell of a struggle but I'm just in awe of this Spirit of survival 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 I think now while you might be thinking the Victorian Britain was made by a bunch of mustachioed men like him the truth was very different because 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 legal machinery and long hours meant the 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 a 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 youngin 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 Sarah that meant starting work in the same Factory as her mum and sister this is where Sarah worked 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 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 [Music] luckily she was promoted and by 19 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 Flacco well spent match for all that she earned a mega 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 Chuck the boys on the floor and uh 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 they're 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 [Music] the next morning foreign [Music] 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 fuzzy 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 grizzly 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 Railways Bridges and tunnels many of them are still in use today [Music] projects was the job of the Navy's 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 nav is 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 moleskin jackets scarlet waistcoats and bright blue caps [Music] 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 slums was 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 Navy's like Angus that were called on to do the work after a typical Navy'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 which is that held the new sewage pipes I think muscle power alone Angus was expected to shift a hernia-inducing 20 tons of Earth a day the more Mucky 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 navis 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 [Music] this 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 which was of course very very dangerous 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 like to 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 there'd be the cooking Squad so it'll be no problem getting beef and lamb and pigs and oatmeal porridge there'd be porridge morning noon and night it'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 is full were the women able to work oh the women would be fully fully employed there would be laundry it would need to be done so lots of meat by day booze by night and clean pants and absolutely after four years of muck 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 [Music] navis like Angus were a special breed they were itinerant rootless often very isolated it was like you had the working class there and somewhere down here with a navis 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 thank you 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 [Music] Betty and her husband lived in a small rented Cottage not far from Noel's pit in Bolton a place much like this it was all very cozy fire was going all the time of course wolf fuel was everywhere wasn't it and here's a clue tiny little seed tiny little potty they had two children and when they were at work but his cousin looked after them oh [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 I've had Envy 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 jackets our 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 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 through all these doors yep I've been joined by Denise Bates whose great great great great grandmother was a Victorian mining last like Betty could you imagine just schlepping up down here every single day I think we sometimes don't realize we're born no we couldn't do it just like Betty we're going to have to crawl on our hands and knees to get the coal face it's 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 pooch 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 climbing 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 cult face here yeah it looks like it doesn't hurt yeah the touch so tell me about Betty she was working for her husband which was the practice of females who mind in Lancashire what do you think their relationship would have been like I bet she 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 would 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 lamb cuts from sheep that had 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 oh [Music] 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 law s the Duffy 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 in actual fact if it hadn't at all such topless working was extremely rare but still the report had a dramatic effect and in 1842 the mines and colliery's act put a stop to women including our Betty 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 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 thank you the year is 1851 an 18 year old John Cochran 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 [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 [Music] 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 bread winner and by 18 he's 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 views the working-class lands like young John the job was relentless six days a week on an average day he'd start touting for work about 9am and finish at midnight he didn't have a little yellow for higher sire on the top of the cab if he wanted to show people that he was available he held up his whip like this where 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 Chuck in all that Victorian soot and Smog and the lifestyle of cabbies like John is about as healthy as smoking 40 a day money was much better either to make a profit he had to work really hard you only got six months 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 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 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 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 cab man is that many of them but not John Cochran 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 I scheme to stop cabbies from drinking and driving I know mad I'm not really allowed in here am I I'm not a cabbie you're not but I might give you my badge happening of London's very first cab shelter a place where cabbage could wait for customers without drinking their body weight in beer [Music] it's great in here isn't it isn't it it's a funny shape though isn't it it's really long and thin they're designed to be the same width and lymph as the original horse and car coach so they didn't take up no more extra space in the road cab little Hut cab exactly do you think it would have been very similar in Victorian times oh absolutely you've got electric light 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 complimentary 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 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 excuse me cheers Victorian Britain was brimming with inventions and people experimenting with new ideas but forget yourism Bard Kingdom brunelles 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 any Victorian shopkeeper was only too pleased to help by the late 19th century the competition for customers was really hotting up a hundred years previously a window display like this one would have been completely unimaginable the shops had been small specialist and staffed by a 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 [Music] Ians though didn't really do childhood and by the age of 14 Esther had left school and was working on a market store selling household bits and bobs 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] a new job girl at Marx's Penny Bazaar which was the very first marks 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 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 couldn't touch it of course the downside was that from now on shoplifting became a big problem I'm sorry in my stery had chosen what they wanted wooden spoon Maybe a chopping board full 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 I would then put this in here it's half a ball this will be cool cool taste slot send it up through the system so the cash office that we've got the cash offers the gentleman would record in The Ledger what you'd spent and he would send a change back the exact same way a nice sensible man who would know how to add up of course not likely of course Gizzy 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 exhausted 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 girl's 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 mail shop assistant earned but just enough for the odd Trip To The Music Hall on her one day off [Music] working in the 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 shot 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 thank you because her 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 foreign age travel was a bit of a bore 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 loves young dream went to Rochdale in the evening in company with my wife oh full of unhappy Reflections oh 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 Begley 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 hate me between us and we knew not where the next meal was to come from 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 Salas 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 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 [Music] 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 2 000 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 Banger and in Edwin's case Blackpool Susan it's very exciting to tell me more about Edwin's big day out his Railway historian Susan major why was he so excited about this excursion well he had a particular thing about the thrill of being in 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 in Edwin's diary he does say that there were two thousand people I thought that was a misprint no 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 so they were being treated as animals they stopped being dehumanized they would bleach and moo and Bar [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 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 appear 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 Falcons 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 thank you the Nazis were the most terrifying enemies in one of the nastiest Wars in history on wasn't just down to men like him Britain fought the second world war with a bunch of ordinary office workers Grocers Bakers and Housewives [Music] we know the result but what was it really like for ordinary britons caught up in it all most of the people who still remember the second world war were only children at the time but even though they were just kids a lot of them still have vivid memories of having to seek shelter because their country was under brutal attack [Music] in 1940 eight-year-old Babs Clark and her family found themselves in the thick of it all in London's East End so what did babs's mum do she grabbed the kids and headed for the countryside thousands of parents had the same idea nearly a million school children were packed off to the country Babs and her mom and sister Jean ended up in Torquay it was amazing they had a small cottage on a farm and went to a local school best of all they could play on the beach every day safe from the bombs also they thought Babs now in her 80s still remembers one particular incident like it was yesterday there was claims coming in from the same and I was saying to my sister I wonder what they are Jane and it was so nauseous mix and I machine gun the beach we were on [Music] because we came home full of it telling my mum and I won't say the actual words my mum said but in other words it was so and so that for gamer soldiers we're going back to London I'd rather the bombs coming down and the Bloody Germans machine coming our kids Babs and her mum and sister hot footed it back to the family home in bethnal green I wish was yours this one so when you got back to London what was your house like it was all right apart from the fact we had to have the tarpaulin over the roof because the roof had got blown off during the Blitz and you still live there oh yeah of course you did the family's unscheduled break in Torquay May well have saved their lives and after Hitler had had his way with the East end it was even more fun than the beach if well a little dangerous [Music] a problem for Growing Kids was food the government was Keen to make sure nothing got wasted to make sure Britain didn't run out the amount of food everybody could eat was rationed and every time you wanted to buy something you got a stamp in this your Russian book for bab's mum it was a right old drag staff this for a game of soldiers and provided for only a limited menu this is what Babs would have been allowed in her rations a couple of pints of milk some sugar a little bit of cheese some Jam some Marge some lard one egg and some egg powder this much meat and a few sweets it would make a lovely meal wouldn't it but it had to last Babs a whole week the government was full of useful advice on how to make everything go further but there was one thing that wasn't in short supply for Babs and her family greens we had a allotment and we grew a lot of age and our allotment was in there my dad used to be quite proud of that a lot but since he grew yeah what did your mum make here Joe used to have a lot of stews after tea as night fell Babs and her mum and sister would head down to the newly built bethnal Green Tube Station EastEnders depended on the Underground as the best place to hide from Hitler's bombs yeah it was a three-tier Bank bottom middle on top there was loads of space because the rails hadn't yet been laid in the new station and it's surprising the bunks didn't collapse they'd been assembled by Boy Scouts from a flat pack I'll fall down that's how old did you used to sleep I would like to say how many yards but it was a good 10-15 minute walk it was quite a way down and you didn't feel claustrophobic no no I mean you're at the banks are the side and the walkway in the middle and I think it's because we knew so many people my mum had stopped and talked to him and you've got your bunk in the end what did you do if you wanted to pee go in the bucket the bucket yeah they're buckets they're so far along yeah with the curtain round it very smelly thank you apart from the smell it all sounds rather Jolly it was like an underground town with a library doctor's surgery they are and a hall for weddings or parties every time a soldier came home they had a jolly shindig did you feel safe here yeah But there again you said I'd my mum and my sister so I felt safe because I was with them I wonder if you left anything down there let's chewing gum I've stuck it on one of the walls could still be there and it still is there yeah but the fun was about to come to a juddering halt as once again the realities of War hit home on the 3rd of March 1943 an incident took place at bethnal Green which in moments became a major tragedy it was a Rainy Night the air raid siren went off at 8 17 people started coming down into the tube as they always did but at that moment anti-aircraft guns began to start firing in Victoria Park just over the road there foreign people came down and it was very dark they only got one light because of the blackout and there weren't handrails here then like there are now and all the steps were really slippy and a woman tripped over with her son and some old chap fell on top of them and more and more people kept pressing down until they were right up to the ceiling crushing each other although Babs survived many didn't a memorial next to bethnal Green Tube Station erected surprisingly recently in 2017 marks the worst British civilian disaster in World War II 173 people were crushed to death what do you remember about that night I know I got pushed and I fell over something and somebody fell on May there were so many people down the stairs they were all falling on top of them and I just heard my sister saying oh don't pull me out yet I've got my little sister here and with that whoever it was pulled the pair of the set didn't know what had happened to my mum and my sister was going around asking if people had seen anything of our mum which they hadn't and then an air raid Walden said to her go in that room she might be in there Gene went in there and um it was all dead bodies she had to look at to see if her mum was there [Music] luckily bab's mum had survived and the next day life went on as usual she still got us up the next morning for me to go to school and the head milestones in assembly and he said there's been a bad accident at Bessemer Green Tube station and he said any of you children that were in it you can go home for the day well after school covered with this they all washed out did you ever use that shelter again or was it closed down oh no we used it as following night labs and her family just just kept calm carried on the German bombing campaign deliberately set out to undermine our morale but talking to Babs I get a real sense of the conviction and determination that was shared by almost everyone and I reckon it was that as much as anything that got us through many though faced a different kind of danger hundreds of thousands of ordinary young men were learning how to fight and to kill [Music] James Palmer was one of them James Palmer lived in Hume Manchester with his Dad he was very lucky very jokey as a lad oh boy do you think they're impressed I said flip him well hope so very good what's next by 1939 he was working as an office boy in the garage he spent a lot of time with his girlfriend Muriel and he was just about to turn 21. all right James's birthday was on July the 1st but it was a slightly glum affair war was on the horizon and young men between the ages of 20 and 22 were being recruited by the government to boost Army numbers James must have opened his birthday cards with mixed feelings especially as one of the cards wasn't a card at all it was his call-out notice within two weeks James was being seen off at the station by his girlfriend and his dad James is parting from his father was emotional for both men his dad had served in the first war and had seen the horrors of the battlefield first hand and when his wife had died he devoted himself to looking after his son and now he was going to have to let him go he must have been worried sick he knew all about war James wrote in his diary on the day he left Muriel was in tears clinging to my arm dad turned away as she kissed me a lump in my throat prevented me from saying much I was on my way to God knows where or what where James was actually headed was Warminster to join the 13th tank regiment thank you on his first day James was presented with loads of stuff I'm meeting Alex Jones a war veteran and army historian to find out more so he would suddenly have been responsible for all this absolutely as soon as they arrived had been given a kit bag in the qm stores and of course if the Army gives someone kitten equipment you know there's going to be inspections coming up you'd have had to have built his boots he would have had suppressed his kits he would have had to have blancoed the webbing as well so giving it this kind of nice green protective layer which all the soldiers thought was utterly pointless don't say a word absolute silence so this is what his setup would have been like he's not real by the way just in case you were wondering he'd have had a cupboard like this with all his stuff in it and his uniforms laid out and he'd have had a regulation blanket everything Ship Shape all out there for the world to see but amidst all this boys agility James met the Corporal in charge jock a regular Soldier on the First Night the Lights Go Out Darkness you're supposed to go to sleep but some of the recruits keep on talking and jot tells them to shut up but they don't in fact they're talking even louder and Jack goes when I tell you to do something you do it and it goes completely silent and then one of the recruits says get stuffed and then all hell breaks loose jock grabs him and punches him straight in the face and knocks him out cold oh welcome to the war James but it wasn't only this mouthy private who got a rude shock from army life James and the new soldiers like him were complete fishes out of water weren't they they really were because they didn't have any Prime military training maybe the only experience they had were the stories made from their fathers we know James's father was a veteran of the Somme for example yeah what would his training have been well James when he first turned up would have undertaken eight weeks of basic military training [Music] it also would have consisted of anti-gas training the Army was very concerned about the gas threats behind you there is a pretty fearsome looking instrument presumably he would have been trained on that yes this is the Vickers machine gun which would have been the standard Armament in a lot of British light tanks at the start of the war James recounts when he first gets his chance to to shoot on a live range he's so excited he just fires off all the rounds at once he's going blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah forever and ever well no because all he has given the cuts to training allowances is 20 rounds to practice with which is about 500 rounds a minute meant that James would be out of ammo in about two seconds oh perhaps because of his enthusiasm James was assigned to be a gunner on a tank May 1940 the call finally came James was going to fight in France he was given 48 Hours leave and then he was off he spent his last day in Britain with his girlfriend Muriel and his father before heading across the channel self under attack as we topped the rise anti-tank guns hit us from the right flunk four of our tanks were Ablaze before we've gone 10 yards we were sitting ducks it was sheer murder I saw some men running amongst the trees with their clothes burning like torches men were dragging their Pals through the mod away from the burning tanks and the smell of burning flesh was catching my throat James crouched and he could hear the Ping of toilets and they platter of shrapnel but his tank driver pressed on and on through the hail storm of fire and eventually he reached the other side of the valley their first action had been a disaster though only four of the 25 Lads in James's troop were still alive soon his regiment was desperately retracing the path back to the coast as the Army retreated via Dunkirk they were off back to blighty almost as soon as they'd left [Music] returned to Manchester and proposed to Muriel she said yes but now James had a war to win he'd be in some of its most crucial battles before life would return to anything like normal and he and his new fiancee could finally tie the knot [Music] for many ordinary Brits taking on Hitler's fearsome War Machine demanded a Brazen response and women especially suddenly found themselves doing all sorts of things they'd never imagined doing and then like Eileen Herron in 1939 Eileen was 23 but she still lived at home because she worked for her family's grocery business in folkestone where she served behind the counter and drove the delivery van Eileen was a bit of a Pioneer when she was only 20 she'd been among the first women to take the newly introduced driving test little did she know though what use her driving skills would be once the war started just three months into it 43 000 women volunteered for the auxiliary territorial service or ATS the women's Infantry decided to do [Applause] the Army welcomed her with an armful of Jabs just a scratch from a needle already blunted by the other recruits she shared a freezing Nissan Hut with around 20 other women but at least they could help each other take their medicine before settling down in a lumpy mattress oh not not I wonder if Eileen regretted her decision as she sat in her freezing cold Barracks there was three feet of snow on the ground and okay the recruits were given a bucket of coal a day but one bucket was hardly going to make any impact at all in a tin building at the end of the first week she trudged all the way to the nearest town for a hot bath at the swimming pool and a nice cup of cocoa but getting used to unsumptuous living conditions was the easy bit Eileen was in the Army now and there was a whole new world of pain to embrace for the new recruits training was intense and Relentless from the shrill sound of the bugle at 6am [Music] the whole day was a long list of drills physical exercises and skills training and all from measly 11 Shillings a week two-thirds of what a man of the same rate would have got but Eileen was special she was a high value recruit because she had something the Army needed she could drive a truck [Music] so-called Tilly trucks were used as anything from ambulances to carriers of vital military equipment and I'm having a go on one the clutch and the accelerator on the braking is great but the steering disease a lot to be desired compared with today's cars every time I go around the corner I feel it in my biceps but these were brilliant Vehicles they were so adaptable real dogs bodies vehicles but the downside was that they were very bumpy and uncomfortable I'm having a great time but I'm only doing it for one morning Eileen had to do it month after month poor old Island she must have been knackered in fact she called it her wretched Tilly that was a really good drive it was nice and simple you know there's only sort of four or five little things to push and pull on it but the viz is not very good at all it must be very difficult at night absolutely and especially because of the blackouts headlights would have been just a glimmer of light coming from that and obviously the threat of invasion was at its height so all of the signposts have been taken down and so they'd have to rely on Matt Reading knowing where they were going Julian Pattinson is a historian of the ATS she knows all about everyday life for women like Eileen well they're in Barracks so they're going to be having Mass catering hearty nutritious meals that could be feeding hundreds of people [Applause] they actually got better rations than the ordinary civilian um but so I think she would have been well fed and the rest of the time when she wasn't working she worked long hours but she would always have time off and they would go to the cinema they would always be dances on a Saturday women were very much in demand at local Army Barracks so I think they played hard and worked hard lots of nice accounts where women talk about wearing a bit of lipstick wearing non-regulation underwear because nobody's going to notice that they're not wearing their khaki pants so there are opportunities for these women to individualize the muddy green gray dull uniform there was a slogan that beauty is a duty too so you have these manufacturers whether it's of toothpaste or breakfast cereal or shampoo and it would be very much you know the woman in the ATS like Eileen who would be applying particular kind of face cream for example there was this expectation that women would pay attention to their appearance because actually it would have a knock-on effect on male morale I bet if I said to you beauty is a duty too now you just smack me in the nose I'm not going to answer that question Marlene might not have enjoyed driving her Tilly very much but she was obviously pretty good at it because soon she was made a driving instructor and was promoted to the rank of Lance corporal this meant she now had 25 trainees under her and a lot more responsibility under Eileen hundreds of women learn to drive and maintain motorbikes ambulances and trucks helping the war effort to smash the Nazis she was about to experience something even more exciting one day Eileen was ordered to go to her common dance office and he told her a secret apparently a new subleton which was the equivalent of a second Lieutenant was going to be working alongside her and her friends but this was no ordinary suppleton her name was Princess Elizabeth that's Elizabeth was soon mending the Tilly trucks together by day sableton Elizabeth mucked in with the other girls [Music] Eileen wrote at the time that the princess was quite striking pretty with lovely eyes and a charming smile but more celebrities were about to appear one day King George VI and his wife turn up to have a look at exactly what it is their daughter princess Elizabeth is doing and it's a it's all Pomp and Circumstance until suddenly King George leans under the Bonnet starts fiddling away with the engine Lord knows what he's doing one wonders what this bit does Elizabeth's panicking everyone else is laughing then Elizabeth gets her hands out and goes look dad they're all oily everyone seems to have seen the funny side Eileen later wrote that the queen was very interested to see who these gals were consorting with her elder daughter and the King was absolutely Charming the visit was filmed at length and became a very effective piece of wartime propaganda [Music] it's ordinary people at that time the king and queen had become powerful symbols of the kind of country that they were fighting for so when their daughter princess Elizabeth was seen amongst them mucking in getting her hands dirty it must have sent a really powerful message [Music] when the Nazis finally threw in the towel victory in Europe was celebrated with a party to end all parties Dean and the other women of the ATS let rip outside Buckingham Palace and even princess Elizabeth snuck out Incognito to Gate Crash the party [Applause] [Music] four years before those joyful celebrations it had only been that bit of Muddy Water we call the English Channel that held the Nazi foe at Bay but some rather unlucky Brits didn't even have that it's easy to forget that over sixty thousand British people lived under Nazi control here in the Channel Islands from June 1940 all the way through to 1945. the German Invaders were excited to have claimed a little piece of Britain I suppose that for them compared to fighting say on the Russian front hello sunshine hello Sky it was almost a holiday but not so for the locals keep walking there may not have been any fighting but the very feeling of being British and any connection with Britain was under attack can you imagine what life would have been like here during the German occupation would have been a lot of happy smiling faces I can tell you that one ordinary Britain Hubert Lanyon was the only Baker on the small island of Sark just off Guernsey he lived there with his wife and four kids including five-year-old Maisie but I just remembered um being told all the Germans are coming the Germans are coming and then when they arrived they marched and they used to sing beautiful songs and it it just echoed all around the island it was it was really lovely to hear them singing and of course we were a bit apprehensive but once we got to know them and the ordinary Soldier was quite friendly but for Hubert the new regime changed everything overnight he even had to share his Baker's oven with the Germans they had half the week and he had half the week and as all went on the provisions came from France the flower was a terrible quality it was full of bits of wood stones and rat droppings to make things worse the departing British Army had taken a lot of the Channel Islands Food Supplies with it and there wasn't much left we could manage to grow vegetables which was you know a Saving Grace we didn't have meat we didn't have much meat just rabbit but whatever animal was killed had to be shared with the Germans the Germans had their proportion and there was so much left for the Islanders so the local people started to think outside the box and go in search of new culinary experiences yummy the beach was Awash with seaweed which they harvested and boiled up to make jelly it wasn't too bad if it was flavored with blackberries or frankly anything they could lay their hands on time went by the food shortages got worse and worse the fishermen were only allowed to go about a mile out to sea because the Germans were frightened that they would run away basic Commodities like soap began to disappear off the shelves what little there was was reserved for newborn babies Moss replaced cotton wool in the hospitals some people said they couldn't recognize their friends and colleagues in the street because they'd grown so thin even the Germans were hungry when it came towards the end of the war they shot cats they had cats the Germans yes we saw them go up the lane with our cats strong on their belt you're kidding our cat was on his belt they'd shot it it was been awful for a little girl to see that terrible maize's father Hubert decided to make a stand in June 1942 the Germans had confiscated the radios on the island and now people couldn't even get the news so Huber joined a secret organization defiantly named guns a Guernsey underground news service because it was also secret no one knew very much about it but this building is now hey Brian it's here that I reckon I'm going to find the evidence I need about what maize's dad was doing in the war historian Julie Carr has found some of the news sheets that the resistance group published oh look that's V for victory guns and V for victory these are original copies yeah and as you can see they're they're typed out on tomato packing paper which is really thin and if you were caught with one of these you would have been arrested oh absolutely absolutely yes so what was it that maize's Dad actually did on this newspaper he was the distributor of guns in Sag who had a little library at the back of the bakery and so he would take a newsletter and put it inside a book in the library so people would come along and where I was in the library and you know but apparently there were even German soldiers who knew about it but stayed silent because they also wanted to have the real news but not everyone could be trusted to keep a secret some Islanders were prepared to trade information for food even at the risk of having their houses dorbed with the swastika one day acting on a tip-off the Germans came to the lanyon's house searching for Hubert and his newsletters they had fixed bayonets and they went through the toy basket under the bed with a toy basket and went right through my panda bear stomach that's outrageous but it wasn't long before they found her dad they beat him up and knocked teeth out and and he was he was unconscious for a while and then they'd hauled him off hands behind his back and holding his hair and pull it and he went past our door with all the family standing on the doorstep and he just looked at us and I thought I suppose he thought when will I ever see them again can you remember what you were thinking well I just thought they were being cruel to my daddy was your mum able to explain to you what was going on she didn't know where he was for a month we were we thought he'd been taken to concentration camp and perhaps shot then the family discovered Hubert was alive and imprisoned on the island maisie's mum pleaded for his release saying that the Islanders were desperate for him to bake bread after four months in prison he was released but five others involved in the free paper were deported to Germany where two of them died in prison I consider my father was lucky to come home to us sure and I do still feel very sorry for the people whose lives were lost of course there's no doubt that Hubert was a very brave man but it does make me wonder what I would have done in a similar situation would I have resisted knowing that it could put my family and my neighbors in Jeopardy or would I just have gone about my business and kept my head down till the end of the war I really don't know in the Second World War on an event that happened far away on the other side of the world on the peaceful Pacific Islands of Hawaii in December 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and forced the United States into the war [Music] the Cavalry had arrived and very quickly our little island was swarming with Americans one and a half million of them were either stationed here or stopped off here on their way to Germany [Music] had a decisive impact on the course of the war and meant a heck of a lot to the Brits who worked with them fought with them or as was often the case fell in love with the American GIS [Music] would be one of them but back in 1941 before the gis arrived she was just 16 and a love affair was the last thing on her mind [Applause] Joy soon became her family's only wage earner and had to support her mother and two younger brothers she catched the train before half seven each day when it was cheaper but instead of leaves or snow on the line there was the threat of blown up Bridges or unexploded shells [Music] she had a boring job at the Inland Revenue in the city typing letters to people who hadn't paid their tax Joy lived for her daily break [Music] best time of day was a lunch hour and I could walk in The Gardens of the Tower of London at the end of each day she'd catch the train home before night fell and the bombing started once again supper could be an omelet made from powdered egg or if there was nothing else available there was the Sinister threat of whale meat in the evenings they'd listen to Jazz or popular songs on the record player [Music] or tune into Winston Churchill for a bit of Courage we will meet out to the Germans more than the measure they have meeting at weekends joy and her friends glammed up and hit the dance hall the embassy Ballroom in Bexley newly reopened after the worst of the blitz it's really a nice place it was a big dancehall and had a nice bands and was jumping it was also a popular haunt for American GIS and course that Drew a lot of girls that wanted to come there and dance with the soldiers [Music] but these American boys were supposed to be on their best behavior just look at this [Music] this is the little book they all had to read instructions for American servicemen in Britain 1942 issued by the U.S war department the purpose of this guide is to start getting you acquainted with the British their country and their ways it goes on to give lots of Handy advice the British are often more reserved in conduct than we so if britons sit in trains or buses without striking up conversation with you it doesn't mean they're being haughty and unfriendly probably they're paying more attention to you than you think but they don't speak to you because they don't want to appear intrusive or rude and there's another one here I really like this creep out of the arguments you can rub a britisher the wrong way by telling him we came over and won the last one I don't think they'd like that and most importantly don't be a show-off the British Tommy is apt to be specially touchy about the difference between his wages and yours keep this in mind actually the British Tommy was most likely to be worried about the thought of the GI running off with his wife or the girl next door and to be quite honest he was probably right to me as one British comedian famously put it the Yanks were oversexed overpaid and over here Giada Joy met in September 1944 wasn't like that at all how did you first meet Carl he was brought to the Embassy Ballroom by the other guys in the unit they said you you should come and meet this girl his name was Carl Bibi he was not so laughing and joking and all that kind of thing like the others were you know he didn't tell me that the streets of New York were paved with gold Carl was stationed here at the stately home Hall place two miles from Joy's house he worked for U.S Army intelligence intercepting encoded messages from Nazi High command soon Carl asked joy out and they hit it off they'd go for walks in the park near where she lived he was always bringing me flowers or something for Easter he picked a whole bunch of daffodils there's a place where flowers grow after three months of courting Carl proposed but arranging a wedding in Wartime required let's say special skills [Music] how did you get a dress this nice in the middle of the war you'd have to ask my brother oh he got it through some friends of his or people he knows I don't know so you're saying it was off the black market really aren't you I believe that it was the black market yes foreign did you get married in a church yes I did a very much damaged Church the roof was out and the rain and the snow was coming through and they'd had little pots on the floor to catch the water and you could hear the water dinging into the spots [Music] the second world war had brought joy and Carl together and they eventually made the journey to America together with their young son the war created huge Rifts between countries which took decades to heal so it's nice to hear some stories of romance coming out of all that chaos for Joy at least and for others like her the war did have a silver lining for you [Music] [Applause] one of our country's Finest Hours

Channel: All Out History - Premium History Documentaries

Views: 815,549

Keywords: suzannah lipscomb, hidden killers, hidden killers of the victorian home, hidden killers of the tudor home, Victorian, Tudor, Georgian, Disease, Sugar, Tudor documentary, bbc documentary, History, inventions that shook the world, inventions at home, inventions that changed the world, All Out History, AlloutHistory, Allouthistory, allouthistory, AllOutHistory, tony robinson documentary, tony robinson history of britain, tony robinson, world war 2

Id: R5N6qsAnOlY

Length: 168min 4sec (10084 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 16 2023