Cathy Hunt historian

By late November, the Harris’s house looked just as Lucy had pictured it. It was modern, bright and homely. The coal shed was full, the lavatory next to it as neat as could be, despite doubling as a garage for George’s bicycle and a handful of gardening tools. Thomas’s pram had to stay permanently parked in the narrow hallway by the front door, where everyone was always colliding with it but there was no room for it out the back. The very thought of the precious pram being wedged in next to the WC filled Lucy with horror and besides, it was too much for her, at five months pregnant, to ease it down the passage at the end of the run of houses and around to the back gate.

As yet, there had been little time to attend to the garden but George and Lucy were full of plans. The garden was bordered on both sides by low walls and a brick path had been laid, running from the back gate up to the house.  The two feet between one of the walls and the path made a natural border for growing flowers but the rest of the garden was a blank canvas. A small area behind the WC and the coal shed and leading to the back door was bricked but apart from this, the garden was a mixture of bare earth and builders’ rubble. The couple read the ‘Gardening Notes’ column in the Coventry Herald, saving any cuttings that gave them ideas, growing tips and seasonal advice. The plan was to have a small lawn for the children to play on, flowers in the two long borders and fruit bushes and vegetables at the end of the garden furthest from the house. One sunny August afternoon in 1909, weeks before the move, the couple had walked out to the Allesley and Coundon Horticultural Society’s summer show, with Thomas in the pram, where they admired the displays of potted and cut flowers, particularly the sweet peas, stocks and dahlias. They loved the roses and George made a mental note to put up some trellising so that they could have a climbing variety or two, such as Crimson or Tea Rambler. The afternoon was a welcome respite from all the anxieties surrounding the impending move and they treated themselves to a pot of tea and a slice of cake while they listened to the Bedworth Town Band and watched a display of Morris dancing. As they came away to go home to feed Thomas, Lucy rather envied the young people staying on for an evening’s dancing, the girls in their pastel-coloured frocks resembling the shades of the sweet peas she so loved. But with a baby and in the first stage of her second pregnancy, she felt with a pang that her dancing days were over.

Lucy’s pregnancy with Thomas had been straightforward and easy.  The only time she had needed to see the midwife was at delivery and she had not seen a doctor at all. Lucy’s mum made sure that her daughter stayed in bed for two weeks after the birth so that she could rest and make sure that her milk became established. She was so well looked after that her sisters were mightily relieved when she finally made an appearance downstairs and started to pick up some of the many duties that had fallen to them at the end of their working days, including boiling nappies and washing linens. And so when Lucy realized that she was expecting again (admittedly a little sooner than she’d hoped), everyone assumed that things would go as smoothly the second time around. This time, however, Lucy was tired right from the start, she was sick for weeks, her back hurt and her feet swelled. Her mother worried that she was not gaining enough weight and asked her neighbour, Mrs Jackson, to come in and take a look at her daughter. Mary Jackson was the midwife who had delivered Thomas, and before him, Lucy and her sisters. She was widely respected within the community and trusted as a very safe pair of hands by local doctors. She had never received any formal training but when the Central Midwives’ Board was established as a result of the Midwives’ Act of 1902, Mrs Jackson’s registration as a Coventry midwife was accepted and approved as a result of her years of bona fide practice and because of her reputation for wisdom and efficiency. She was used to seeing the effects of successive pregnancies on women and when she came to visit Lucy, she saw a young wife and mother worn out by constant sickness and the anxieties of trying to be a perfect housewife in her new home. In December, much to Lucy’s initial dismay, Mrs Jackson ordered her home to her mother’s house in Spon End for the remainder of the pregnancy.

Lucy was horrified. They had only just moved to Kensington Road, she had only just started to feel confident in her new surroundings, carefully packing up George’s lunch each day and making sure his meal was waiting for him each evening when he returned home from work. Lucy had pored over the ‘Home Hints’ and household columns in the local press, seeking to improve on her knowledge of even the most basic of tasks. Her mother laughed when Lucy, having read an article on how to make a good cuppa, set off to ask her local grocer which tea was best suited to the local water. ‘He’ll see you coming,’ she warned her daughter who, undaunted, learned off by heart the Coventry Herald’s advice, even though she’d been brewing tea since she was a girl:

The water should be fresh and freshly boiled. The tea pot should be washed out with boiling water. Then the tea should be put in. if China Tea is used there will be required about one tea-spoonful to each breakfast cup. If Indian tea half that quantity will suffice. Having covered the tea with the requisite quantity of water, it should be allowed to stand for three of four minutes for fine Assams, such as Pekoe and Broke Pekoe, about five minutes for Pekoe Souchong and Souchong. The tea should be poured off the leaves immediately the proper time has elapsed. In this way the flavour of the tea is all extracted, whilst the tannin is nearly all left behind in the leaves. A good method is to use an infuser, which will permit of the steeped leaves being withdrawn directly the tea is properly made. In India a silver ball, pierced with holes to permit of the percolation of the water, is largely used to hold the tea while the boiling water is acting upon it. If these precautions are carried out the resulting beverage will be of the most delicious character, and will contain nothing to harm the most delicate nerves.

Lucy wanted to do things her way. There was more amusement for her mother – an accomplished cook – when her daughter began to seek out products that she’d seen being advertised, in the hope that their use would guarantee the perfect results. Despite, however, buying ‘Paisley Flour – the sure raising powder’ her first attempts at scones ended in tears when they failed to rise. George ate them regardless, pronouncing them to be excellent. He was happy and proud to try any of his wife’s experiments as long as they were not too costly or – worst of all – wasteful. Both of them agreed that cooking with Bisto (named for its ability to Brown, Season & Thicken In One) – introduced in 1908 and advertised from 1910 – was a tasty addition to stews, turning the cheapest cuts of meat into hearty meals:

So when Lucy realized she would have to return home until her baby was born, she fretted over how George would manage without her. In fact, there turned out to be little to worry about. She and Thomas went back to Spon End, where she rested as much as she could. There was no more shopping, no more heavy laundry and minimal cooking. George ate in the factory canteen at lunchtimes and called in each evening to see his wife and child, sitting at the kitchen table with them to have a cheese or cold meat sandwich, a mug of tea and a piece of fruit cake. On Sundays he came round for lunch and then he and Lucy’s dad walked round to the Kensington Road house to work on any jobs that needed doing so that the house was perfect for Lucy’s return in the spring, with the new baby. They dug over the garden in readiness for grass seed and the fruit and vegetable patches and George enjoyed it so much he began to think that an allotment would be a good idea, not just to keep his family in fresh produce but to give him the chance for some healthy exercise and – if he was honest – some time to be on his own, away from the stresses of family life. There were several allotment associations in Coventry and at one, the Coventry mayor told those present how great an interest the Council took in these. All men needed a hobby, he said and surely gardening was a much better option than drinking beer. George rather wondered if he might combine the two, treating himself to the odd bottle at the end of a summer’s evening gardening. He put his name down at a meeting of the local association in The Royal Oak on Earlsdon Street.

Lucy relaxed in the presence of her mother and as the sickness eased, the tiredness lifted a little. Resting with her legs up each afternoon kept the puffiness down, having an afternoon nap at the same time as Thomas was better for her than her previous habit of using her son’s sleep time to race through her house, doing as much housework as she could. Her mind was eased by the fact that one of her sisters – with bad grace, it must be said – was sent up to the Kensington Road house twice a week after work to sweep the floors and dust away the incessant coal dust (while Lucy and Thomas were away, George only lit a fire for the kitchen range on the coldest of winter evenings. It was not the worst of winters; temperatures in Coventry were recorded as falling below freezing on roughly a third of days between January and March 1910. Even so, minus 1 degrees Celsius was the lowest temperature recorded that winter and for this George was grateful, allowing him to keep the coal house well stocked and save money for the coming winter, when there would be two babies to keep warm).

Florence Eliza Harris was born on March 16^th 1910. The labour, straightforward and relatively quick, was attended by the trusty Mrs Jackson. This time the doctor was called in to examine Lucy and to check the baby who was smaller than Thomas had been at birth. Both were pronounced healthy although Lucy was prescribed a few more weeks rest before she could go home to Kensington Road and resume her life as a housewife. Florence was one of 2,674 Coventry births in 1910 and although there were as yet no baby clinics in the city, the Sanitary Committee had chosen at the start of that year to appoint a second health visitor. Amongst the duties of these women were visits to mothers and babies. During the course of 1910, they made 1750 visits, giving feeding and baby care advice. As both women were also qualified Sanitary Inspectors, they made sure that whenever they visited a new mother, they assessed the condition of her housing; were the walls and ceilings clean? Were the areas in which food was stored sufficiently ventilated? Was there evidence of damp? Was the accommodation overcrowded? There was little doubt that the little Spon End house, with Lucy, Thomas and the new baby living there, was bursting at the seams but nothing that she saw gave the health visitor any cause for concern. Not only was the house scrubbed and polished but it was clear that Lucy was in very good hands, benefiting from her mum’s experience and common sensical approach to all that life threw at her. And of course, there was a new and spacious house in Kensington Road waiting to welcome back the little family.

On her first visit, the health visitor gave Lucy a leaflet about feeding her baby. In the early twentieth century health officials advocated breast feeding as the safest and healthiest start for babies. Feeds every two hours during the day and every four hours at night were recommended for the first three months and then the intervals between feeds could be lengthened. The leaflet distributed to new mothers made it clear that routine was very important and that the baby should not be put on the breast purely for comfort or to keep her quiet.  Six months of breast feeding was deemed to be best for baby but the advice was that after nine months, it should be stopped entirely. The milk was deemed to be of insufficient quality for baby by then and if continued might induce weakness in the mother, making her susceptible to illness.

Lucy understood the benefits of breast feeding. An old school friend had lost her baby to diarrhoea a few years previously, during a hot summer in which it was harder than usual to keep foodstuffs and baby milk cool and free from bacteria. Lucy wanted to feed Florence herself for as long as she could, as she had done with Thomas, but it wasn’t easy to ignore her mother, who was always telling her that breast feeding for more than just a few weeks would exhaust her and that she should aim to give the baby a bottle after the first three months. Against all the professional advice, Lucy’s mum believed – as her mum had done before her – that the natural way wasn’t necessarily the ‘nice’ way and she told her blushing daughter more than once that she was sure her husband would prefer it if she stopped feeding sooner rather than later. By the time Lucy was back home, in the early summer of 1910, Florence was being fed with cow’s milk. The suggested formula for a three-month old baby was three tablespoons of milk, three tablespoons of water, a half teaspoon of demerara sugar and one to two teaspoons of fresh cream. As the baby got older, the advice was to gradually lessen the quantity of water and increase the milk so that at six months, each feed consisted of nine tablespoons of milk. Lucy followed the hygiene advice on the feeding leaflet to the letter. As soon as the milk was bought (from the dairy and grocers on the corner of Kensington Road and Henley (now Beaudesert) Road, Lucy decanted it into a jug which she then placed in a pan of cold water, changing the water regularly throughout the day to keep the milk as cold as possible. The required amount of milk was then boiled ahead of each feed and placed in a boat shaped feeding bottle which had an opening at each end, onto which the rubber teat was placed.

After each feed, Lucy did as the health visitor advised and bathed the inside of Florence’s mouth with a small piece of clean linen rag dipped in warm water. She then washed the bottle in water to which she added a small amount of washing soda, making sure to put the rubber teat in a separate bowl of clear, clean water. It was a time-consuming regime but it gave Lucy peace of mind to know that she was doing everything that she could to keep her daughter safe. She was mightily relieved that the summer brought no prolonged periods of intense heat and she knew how fortunate she was to be able to keep food relatively cool and well covered in her kitchen cupboards.

Once Lucy was back home and settled into a routine with Thomas and the new baby, she was finally ready to take on the challenges of full time housewifery. For several months she still tended to walk to Spon End to the shops that she knew and – more importantly to her – where she was known to the shop keepers. She had heard too many tales of young wives being short-changed by shop owners who thought they could take advantage of inexperienced young wives, selling them damaged or poor quality goods, underweight measures and out of date food. By the winter, however, the prospect of yet another cold, wet walk down Hearsall Lane to Spon End, encouraged her first forays into Earlsdon to discover what it had to offer.  By the spring of 1911 she was well into her stride.

In 1911 George was earning just over 32 shillings a week. This was a decent wage, only a few shillings lower than those being earned by the men who had served apprenticeships, and considerably more than those paid to unskilled general labourers. At the Humber, George had impressed with his technical ability to manage new machinery and he was typical of the many men who, although graded as semi-skilled workers, could turn their hands to almost anything in the fast paced and ever- changing vehicle industry. His weekly wage meant that Lucy could buy non-perishable foods (tea, sugar, flour, oats, dried fruit, jam, rice and pulses) laundry products and toiletries in weekly quantities, which was much cheaper than shopping daily for them and it also meant that for the rest of the week, the pram got loaded up only with those items that were harder to store and keep fresh, such as vegetables, pies, sausages, bacon, cheese and butter. The family was luckier than many but nonetheless money was tight, with prices rising faster than wages during their first years at Kensington Road (Board of Trade figures showed that in the 15 years before 1911, wages had risen by 12 per cent and food prices by 18 per cent).

Their budget looked broadly like this;

Wage:  32 shillings

Outgoings:

9 shillings to Mr Bird for house payment

8 pence a week to the Workers’ Union, George’s trade union subscription (this would, if needed, give strike pay, sickness and out of work benefits and a contribution towards funeral costs)

1 shilling to the Hospital Provident Fund to help with the costs of seeing a doctor and any medicines required (when Thomas had a series of chest infections later that year, the couple was very relieved to have this insurance)

3 shillings (where possible) into the Coventry Building Society to replenish the rainy day fund

2 shillings kept by George for the odd pint of beer, plus plants and seeds for the garden

This left around 19 shillings a week for food, fuel and clothing. Lucy’s mum thought it strange that Lucy knew exactly how much George earned each week, as her husband had always kept an undisclosed amount of his wage packet for himself and handed over the rest for housekeeping. George was only too happy to trust Lucy to feed and clothe the family and all he expected was that she would manage efficiently and learn to be a careful manager. She was determined to do precisely that.

By the time the Harris’s were well and truly settled, there were several shops in Kensington Road. The only ones that Lucy went to regularly were the dairy run by Mr Cleaver at number 102, (milk contamination was regularly reported in the local press and so Lucy would only buy milk from the trusted Mr Cleaver) the newsagent and tobacconist at the bottom of the road (13b, where, just once a week, George picked up a packet of ten Lambert & Butler Waverley cigarettes for 3d, the Coventry Herald every Friday for 1d and the Midland Daily Telegraph on his way home from work each evening for a halfpenny ), the Post Office (55) and Bales the Chemist at the junction with Albany Road. Mr Bale grew used to the sight of Lucy in his shop, visiting not just to buy soap and liquorice (which she swore by to keep the children ‘regular’) but to ask for advice about the children’s many minor ailments. His advice, as opposed to the doctor’s, was free, even if it did sometimes result in Lucy spending precious pennies on some rather questionable concoctions, such as Bales’ Blood Mixture, advertised as a ‘spring medicine’.  

On very rare occasions, Lucy bought sausages or a pie from the London Central Meat Company at 104 Kensington Road, a butcher’s with several shops in the city, but on the whole she favoured Coventry Market for meat. One of her favourite times of the week was going to the Market Hall on a Saturday evening when it stayed open until 11pm. Saturday was pay day for most people and a chance to go shopping with a full purse. Once the children were in bed, Lucy left George in charge and met her mum at the bottom of Albany Road where they walked to the market together. Both women kept a close eye on the prices of products in the local paper, noting what was in short supply (and therefore more expensive), what was plentiful and where the bargains might be. Lucy’s main purchases on her Saturday night excursions were butter (in 1912 this sold for around 1 shilling and 2 pence although Lucy, always with an eye for the new, was later converted to Lipton’s Margarine, ‘made with nuts and cream, equal to butter and half the price’), new-laid eggs at a shilling for nine, and – most important of all – the Sunday joint. At the butcher’s stall, she still stuck close to her mum, who knew exactly what she was looking for – the right amount of fat, the right colour, smell and general appearance of the meat. The later the visit to the stall, the better was the chance of a knock down price, although this was risky if all the best cuts had been sold. But it was worth paying a little more to trust the butcher and to know that the joint would be the basis for meals on Sunday (roast), Monday (cold cuts with potatoes), Tuesday (minced, using economical recipes found in magazines and newspapers), and the bones used for stock or soup. When prices were too high (such as in September 1911 when an outbreak of foot and mouth disease closed live markets and led to meat shortages), Lucy would choose chicken, which ranged in price from 2/6 to 4 shillings, depending on the size, but these were never big enough to last for as many meals as beef or lamb. Rabbit was another option but for this Lucy tended to visit Mr Fletcher’s butcher’s in Earlsdon Street as he very often had a fresh supply of rabbit hanging on hooks from the shop ceiling. The preparation of rabbit, bought unskinned for around a shilling, made Lucy feel queasy when she first started cooking, but after a while, her only thoughts were on the pie that she was making and which was a firm family favourite.

Lucy made her own bread and cakes but occasionally, she treated Thomas and Florence to a Chelsea bun (shared on the walk home)  from Wright’s Model Bakery on Albany Road. If her parents were coming for Sunday tea, she would buy a slab of Wright’s Rich Sultana Cake (sold in slabs at sixpence a pound). Sometimes, on his cycle ride home from work, George would stop off at Atkinsons to pick up a pork pie; this was a treat for him and Lucy, when the children were asleep, eaten with pickles and raw onion. Fruit and vegetables came from various shops, including Crumps and also Moore’s, both on Earlsdon Street. As time went on and George cultivated much of the garden and then his allotment (which he got in 1912), there was a steady supply of seasonal produce, including leeks, parsnips and potatoes, peas and beans, raspberries and gooseberries. It was not long before Lucy added jam making to her ever growing list of skills. She collected recipes and added to them over the years. One of her earliest came from a women’s trade union newspaper she had once brought home from work, before she was married. Her father had been cross that she had brought what he regarded as subversive material into the house and so Lucy had showed him the pages of home hints, which calmed him down a little (though she never brought it home again and instead read it in the rest room at work).

‘Savoury Shape‘

Half-pound cold meat finely chopped, 3 ozs. Breadcrumbs, 2 ozs. Suet finely minced, little grated nutmeg, ¼  teaspoonful curry powder, ¼ teaspoonful herbs, a teaspoonfls browned breadcrumbs, 1 or 2 eggs, milk or stock, pepper and salt. Grease a basin with butter, cover surface with browned crumbs. Mix all other ingredients in order given above and cover with greased paper. Steam an hour. Serve with brown sauce.

Another favourite was ‘Savoury Pie‘, useful for the middle of the week when the joint had run out. Lucy always added a little bacon to it, fearing that George would complain if presented with a meal without some form of meat. A pound of tomatoes could be bought for between 6 and 8 pence a pound and Spanish onions for around 1 ½ d a pound. Lucy liked making this dish but was aware that these were expensive ingredients and she mostly made it in late summer when the tomatoes had ripened at the allotment.

Put 1 ½ ozs. Or dripping in saucepan and 1lb Spanish onions; let cook gently near fore but not near enough to burn, for 20 minutes. Then chop 1lb of tomatoes and lay on top and the 1lb of potatoes on top of the tomatoes. Put id on and let cook gently till the potatoes are cooked through.

The only commodity that the Harris’s had delivered was coal. The kitchen range ate a great amount of coal and the Harris’s tried to keep their coal shed stocked up, because it was much cheaper when bought in the largest quantities possible (Lucy saved a little every week for coal so that they could bulk buy).  Deliveries were made by T and J Dewis, Coal Merchants on the Butts and Thomas looked forward to the delivery days when the cart arrived and the coal was shovelled into a wheelbarrow and trundled down the alley and in through the back gate. Lucy was never more thankful for the back gate and coal shed on coal delivery days, pitying those whose coal entered the house through a coal shute from which clouds of thick black coal dust would invariably rise and spread. It was bad enough keeping the range clean, with black lead polish, the worst job of the week (apart from laundry day).

That’s all from the Harris family for now. Maybe I will revisit them as their family grows, when Thomas and Florence starts school and to see how they deal with the tragedy of war.

A note from me

Firstly, thank you so much for reading. Researching and writing this short series on Kensington Road has been useful therapy for me following the death of my mum earlier this year. Mum was a big fan of my blog (that’s mums for you) and it always got us talking. One area of discussion would lead to even more unanswered questions and so the need for more research. And that curiosity – the need to find out more – is precisely why I write. For years I was so cautious about committing anything that I wrote to print, that much of it stayed on my computer until I deleted it out of frustration and annoyance at my lack of bravery. I am still learning that it doesn’t matter if I don’t know all the answers or if I get something wrong. The advantage of writing a blog is that it can be widely read and people can comment, make suggestions and fill in some of the blanks. Thank you to those who have got in touch already – I am extremely grateful for your input.

Thanks also to

British Newspaper Archive, largely Coventry Herald, Midland Daily Telegraph

David Fry and Albert Smith for photographs and also for their invaluable Earlsdon and Chapelfields Explored (see Part One of this blog)

The Woman Worker for recipes

Coventry Archives for Annual Reports of Medical Officer of Health; Trade Directories; Coventry Municipal Handbooks

Recommended reading for more on domestic life and motherhood in early 20^th century Britain

Margaret Llewelyn Davies Maternity: Letters from Working Women (1915, Virago edition 1978)

Cathy Hunt, Women’s Lives in Coventry, 1850-1950, 2018, Pen & Sword

Maud Pember Reeves Round About A Pound A Week (1913, Virago edition 1999))

Robert Roberts The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (1971, Penguin)

In the second part of my small study, I am going to introduce a fictional family to tell the continued story of one Coventry street and its residents. The family may not have existed but the details of their lives are based on historical research and it’s a way of taking as close a look at Kensington Road’s earliest years as possible. As with the first post, I welcome comments from readers so that the most accurate portrait of family life can be painted.

George and Lucy Harris moved into Kensington Road in the autumn of 1909 when George was 27 and Lucy was 25. With them was their eight-month old son, Thomas, and a new arrival was expected in the spring. The couple was relieved to finally move out of Lucy’s parents’ house in Spon End where Lucy had grown up with her five siblings. Although this meant that she was used to the noise and chaos that filled each of its four rooms, starting her married life within those crowded walls had proved a strain on everyone. After the wedding in the summer of 1907, the couple lived there so that they could start saving in earnest for a home of their own. It was a tight squeeze. In order to free up a room for the newly-weds, Lucy’s parents slept downstairs in the living room and her three younger sisters shared the other bedroom. Her elder brother had already left home, for a room in a house near to the newly opened Ordnance Works in Red Lane where worked.

George was not a Coventry kid. He was born in Northampton, left school at 14 and started work on the railways. He was always vaguely restless and listened with interest to his fellow workers’ animated talk about the Coventry cycle factories that were beginning to diversify into motor car production. One Saturday morning, he asked a friend to cover for him for the last hour of work on the tracks near the station, boarded a train to Coventry and made his way to the Humber Works on Lower Ford Street. Dressed in his Sunday suit, George made a good impression on the work’s foreman who understood only too well his keenness to join the men who were part of this transport revolution. Looking beyond a lack of engineering experience, the foreman recognised a willingness to adapt and to learn and hired eighteen year old George on a trial basis.

It was a good decision for the Humber. George was hard working and although his job was initially in cycle production, he was quickly hooked on the excitement felt by the young workers as the company strengthened its development and output of motor vehicles. He found lodgings on the Holyhead Road and it was while cycling back from work, that he first saw Lucy Evans, leaving Williamson’s watch making factory where she worked.  A courtship was followed by an engagement, which George insisted should continue until they had saved enough to set up home together. As they walked out together on Sunday afternoons, they noted the progress made to the new streets and houses being developed near Hearsall Common. As they strolled, they speculated about what their future might be like in one of these modest but elegant red brick houses. It took many walks but eventually Lucy persuaded George to set a date for the wedding, by telling him that if they could start their married life with her parents, the money George paid out in lodgings could be put aside. They would, Lucy was quite sure, only have to give a little extra to her mum to cover their contribution to food and fuel. The wedding was at St Thomas’s Anglican Church on The Butts, where Lucy had been baptized in 1884.  From girlhood, Lucy had dreamt of a wedding dress of satin crepe -de-chine, trimmed with pearls, finished off with a satin train and tulle veil, with a tiara of orange blossom. She kept her dreams to herself, however, and opted for a simple cream dress with a grey serge coat. A future and a home were more important and the only frivolity Lucy allowed herself was a sheaf of white lilies which everyone agreed set off her outfit perfectly. There was a wedding breakfast of roasted ham, beef and wedding cake at her mum’s and just enough wine and beer to toast the young couple. For a year, the newly-weds saved every penny they could and, when, in the late summer of 1908, they realised that they were going to have a baby, it was clear that they would need to redouble their saving efforts ahead of Lucy leaving her job at Williamsons.  Despite her many friends there, Lucy couldn’t wait to turn her back on the factory; she had expected, as did her employers, that she would leave as soon as she was married – as she had seen so many other women doing – but she had stayed in pursuit of achieving her dream of a good, solid home for her family.  

And then, there it was. In the early summer of 1909, a sign appeared in the window of a house still under construction at the top end of Kensington Road. The notice directed those interested in this or the houses to its immediate left and right to contact Mr Bird, the builder and developer.  Lucy immediately loved everything that she could see from the road, from the downstairs bay window, to the tiny tiled porch and the intricate pattern of the line of decorative brickwork below the eaves. When they got back to the house in Spon End, she stood impatiently beside George as he wrote to express their interest in the house. The reply came two days later. Mr Bird asked them to meet his agent at the house that Saturday afternoon and so, leaving baby Thomas with Lucy’s mum, they knocked on the door at 3 o clock. It was love at first sight for Lucy; the house was nearing completion, the walls were plastered and the floorboards were laid. The Minton tiles in the hall were in the process of being laid and added a rich redness to the interior of the house. Compared to the little Spon End house where Lucy had grown up, it seemed palatial. There were two downstairs reception rooms and a kitchen with a generous sized pantry. The builders, said Mr Bird’s agent, were about to install a coal-fired range for cooking and a copper for boiling water. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, the smallest one still big enough, explained the agent, to partition and add a bathroom if they wished. If they wished! Neither Lucy nor George had even considered such luxury and nor did they now. Not only would this add to the weekly rent, it was far beyond their expectations and they dismissed the idea. To have their own outdoor WC and not to be sharing with five other people seemed luxurious enough for them.

The agent, who could see that the couple wanted this house very much, asked them if they had considered owning rather than renting it. George and Lucy’s initial reactions were the same – that such an arrangement could never be for the likes of them. They knew very little of banks and mortgages – this was not the world from which they had come – and so, as Mr Bird’s agent went into sales pitch overdrive, the Harris’s listened with incredulity and learned that with a £30 deposit, they could buy directly from the developer and then pay him nine shillings a week until the full balance of £235 was paid off. Minds reeling, they went back to Spon End to consider their options. They did have £30 in savings but not much more than this and, with the new baby on the way, they were acutely aware of the new expenses to come. Neither liked the idea of removing the only safety net that they had. But how wonderful it would be to own their home and not to be at the mercy of a landlord who might put up the rent without warning or even evict them in favour of a preferred tenant. George was earning a decent wage at the Humber. Work was generally steady; there had been a few periods of short time working and one or two layoffs when sales stalled or declined, depending on the season and the economy, but George had a good reputation with the firm which was expanding and had recently opened new works in Stoke. He was confident as he could be of his continued employment in Coventry. The couple took a deep breath and decided to enter into the agreement with Mr Bird.

The house was ready by early September and the keys were theirs. In the weeks before they moved in, George, Lucy’s father, and a friend from George’s days in lodgings, spent virtually every evening and Saturday afternoon papering the walls and painting the woodwork. Lucy arrived home one day with a pattern book she had picked up from a shop in Bishop Street. Her eye was drawn to a rich blue paper with a design of embossed daisies and tiny strawberries. How good this would look on the downstairs walls. For the nursery she liked a yellow paper covered with leaves and woodland creatures. She knew, however, that neither was in their price range and instead, she happily accepted the need to go instead to the Coventry Decorators’ Supply shop in Queen Victoria Road and pick out some of the cheaper rolls that were end of range. Although this meant that much of the house was decorated in rather plainer colours than she hoped, George surprised her by splashing out on a slightly more expensive cream paper with a textured rose pattern for the front room. For years afterwards, this room was used only when relatives came to visit and on Christmas Day.

Once the house was decorated, Lucy turned her full attention to the furniture and furnishings she wanted. She longed for elegant, brand new things but she knew that there wasn’t enough money to get everything at once. The couple had already acquired a few bits and pieces; wedding gifts, including a willow patterned tea service, had been carefully stored away until they had their own home. Lucy had been left tablecloths and a bedspread by her grandmother as well as an assortment of pots and pans and cutlery.  Her father had made the baby’s crib and highchair and there was a bed from her parents’ house for Thomas, once the new baby came along. George’s grandparents in Northampton had left him an elegant dining table with six chairs which was being stored in a friend’s workshop. It was a start. Some more furniture came from an auction – an oak bedstead, a divan suite covered with brown velvet, a tiled washstand and two hearth rugs. Lucy was tempted by the ‘easy terms’ offered by the Coventry Furnishing Company in Fleet Street.

For four shillings a month she might be able to get the pair of walnut dressing tables she had seen in town, priced £4 and four shillings but she knew better than to ask George about it, knowing that he would never consent to buying goods on terms. His biggest worry was becoming ill or having an accident and not being able to work. He was in a trade union but its sickness benefit wouldn’t last long and, despite the advent of state sickness benefit some years later, George remained anxious about buying the house until the final payment was made years later. And nothing was ever bought on tick. Besides, matching bedroom furniture could wait; Lucy was particularly anxious to dress her windows as perfectly as possible, to let the neighbours know that she took pride in appearances, thereby demonstrating her family’s respectability. With material from the market, a friend of her mother’s made ‘lace’ curtains using white filet net with an elaborate border which gave Lucy the elaborate finish she was seeking.  Even so, she aimed to replace these with Nottingham lace as soon as funds would allow.

Roller blinds were fitted to all of the bedroom windows and Venetian blinds prevented the prized living room wallpaper from becoming faded. The modern advice to housewives was to let as much natural daylight into the house as possible and Lucy, anxious for the health of her family as well as wanting to have a fashionable home, welcomed the move away from the heavy drapes that has been popular just a few years before. 

The house was fitted with gas lighting brackets on each side of the chimney breasts in the main rooms. The only cost for the Harris’s was to choose globes to cover the mantles. There were so many styles but Lucy opted for a combination of plain and frosted glass. Gas was paid for by a penny-in-the-slot meter under the stairs and to keep costs low, the gas was only usually lit in the back downstairs room and the kitchen, with candles and night lights upstairs for years to come.

The next instalment of my study will look at life in Kensington Road for the young couple, with particular focus on Lucy as she grew as a mother and housewife, shopping, cooking and caring for her growing family. There was endless domestic advice given to women on the ‘home hints’ pages of newspapers and magazines. Times were changing but Victorian notions of the Angel of the Hearth were still very apparent, as this article in the Coventry Herald of 1909 makes clear;

Woman makes the atmosphere of a home, and it is for her to decide what the atmosphere shall be. Shame on the woman who does not make it an atmosphere of sunshine and love. Though she may be possessed of the wisdom of Minerva or the beauty of Venus, she is not a good no a worthy woman if she allows her moods and temper to ruin the home life of those dependent upon her for happiness. Woman are apt to excuse themselves, regarding their moods and their tempers by saying that they inherit these peculiarities or that they are the result of sickness or trouble. That is folly. There is no inheritance we cannot overcome if we set ourselves about it and some of the people who have suffered the greatest losses and the greatest trials in life have developed the sweetest characters. It is pure selfishness which permits a woman to indulge in these weaknesses.

Lucy certainly felt the pressure….

Kensington Road Part One

Here is Part One of a portrait of a Coventry street in the earliest years of its existence. Kensington Road, running between Albany Road and Earlsdon Avenue North, is a thoroughfare I thought I knew well, for it was in one of its 138 houses that I became, for the first time, an owner occupier, in a terraced property that was home to my family for almost ten years. I loved that house from the moment we moved in (our youngest son made his appearance into the world on moving day itself), which was just as well as we had no money to change or replace anything. Lucky for us then that the original window frames hung on long enough to serve us, even though the sash cords were largely useless and the single glazed glass panes defenceless against passionate garden football matches. It was years before we dared peep under the carpet in the narrow hall in case the Minton tiles we hoped would be there proved too badly damaged to expose. But there they were and although we were never able to have them professionally cleaned and restored, we were pleased they were back on show anyway (just visible under a sea of trainers), a proud feature of the original house. We never did risk removing the wood chip wallpaper that adorned the whole house, for fear it was all that was holding the plaster on the walls, yet even through its thick and uneven texture, we could just make out the pipes that served the gas lamps that once lit the front room.

Other parts of the house’s history revealed themselves to us bit by bit. A builder friend showed us how the force of bomb blast had shifted the top half of the house before it settled back into place but now ever so slightly out of kilter with the lower half of the building. Troublesome drains eventually led to an understanding of the extent of fractured sewage and water pipes running under the whole neighbourhood, a consequence of the pounding that Coventry took on the night of 14 November 1940, one of the most intense bombing raid on a British city outside London during the Second World War. Digging at the bottom of the garden one day, my husband’s spade went through the earth and kept on going down, revealing a shaft to ensure fresh air could reach the (long gone) air raid shelter that offered a safer space than the house did to its wartime occupants. I have always loved the story recounted by Ernie Newbold in Portrait of Coventry (1972) of King George Vl’s morale boosting visit to Coventry hours after the 1940 Blitz. Alderman Moseley, at that time Mayor of Coventry, lived at number 39 Kensington Road and, in the course of the King’s tour of the city, brought him to his home. The Mayoress, Moseley’s wife, was evidently taken by surprise, for she was at the back of the house dealing with fallen plaster and broken glass when there was a knock at the front door. She yelled out an instruction to come round the back because the door was off its hinges and then she saw who it was, ‘a tall spare figure in a military greatcoat’. I love the story not so much because of the thought of Mayoress Moseley yelling ‘ come round the back, it’s open’ to the King but because of what it says to me about women’s endless capacity for resourcefulness.

When we finally accepted that we had grown so much that we had run out of space and needed to move (albeit not far away), I cried when our Kensington Road front door closed behind us for the last time. Nearly two decades later, the Covid lockdowns of 2020/1 provided me with an unexpected opportunity to stay and work locally and to go for walks which took me on occasion back to this road which I held so much affection for. On some days, the traffic was so light that I could walk down the middle of what is normally a busy road and take photographs quite safely. It brought to mind a story I was told by Charles Evans, who came to live in Kensington Road not long after it was developed. As a boy, he and his siblings used to attach a very long rope to a garden gate on each side of the road. The rope, used for mammoth skipping games, needed untying only a few times in any one day, if a car or delivery vehicle needed to get past. A far cry then, from modern car ownership; when we lived there it was considered something of a triumph to be able even to park in the street.

One of the results of those local walks this past year is this blog, produced with the help of what I already had to hand – census material, newspaper archives and a good collection of books on Coventry’s history. There is – I know – much more still to discover in building plans, regulations and rates books, all to be explored when life is back to normal with archives offices and libraries open once again. I have thought long and hard about whether to post this, as it is so clearly unfinished but after years, I am finally beginning to understand that if I don’t put things out there, they will remain on the hard drive of my computer and running around my head but of no use to anyone. So this is a brave effort on my part to share and it comes with a plea; if you have any information, plans, deeds or stories about the street and its residents, please do get in touch with me so that the story can be expanded and enriched. I make no claim that Kensington Road was a typical Coventry street; the characteristics of the city have always been too diverse for it to be that. It is just a story of everyday life in early twentieth century Coventry.

Development

The houses in Kensington Road were built between 1907 and 1910 on land sold by the Sir Thomas White Charity to the Newcombe Estates Company. This development company was responsible for the streets of terraced housing now variously referred to as Hearsall or North Earlsdon and situated between the mid 19^th century districts of Earlsdon and Chapelfields. The best – and also the most visual  – description and analysis of the development, which began in 1904 with the development of Newcombe Road, can be found in David Fry and Albert Smith’s Earlsdon and Chapelfields Explored (Simanda Press 2011). They explain how the land was sold in stages to the Company and how, from there, it was sold on again to individual builders who in turn bought plots large enough to build several houses. In April 1907, in a column called ‘Expanding Coventry’, the Coventry Herald announced plans for new buildings including 11 houses in Kensington Road for Mr W Higgins, 20 for Mr C.J. Smith, 13 for Mr C.F. Woodhall and 10 for Mr T.F. Bird.  A first glance down the road seems to suggest uniformity but a slow walk along it shows precisely how it was shaped by the piecemeal development; here’s a run of houses with flat roofed bay windows, there’s another with small, pitched roofs over the bays and extending over the front door. Some houses are entirely flat fronted and a few more have bay windows on both levels.

With the exception of one or two larger houses built on corner plots, the houses were built with two reception rooms, kitchen and/or scullery and (on the whole) three bedrooms. Some had entrance halls, others opened straight into the living room. The original specification for the majority of the houses was an outside WC next to the coal shed and all the houses had back access, via a series of alleyways, with gates to each property. This ensured that coal could be delivered without the need for it to be tramped through or stored in the house. I know I would have been particularly pleased with that, given the dirt and the dust involved in bringing in the coal.

Using the 1911 Census of England and Wales, we can see which houses had six as opposed to five rooms. It’s important to note that in the room count for each entry, bathrooms and sculleries are excluded. This does make it more difficult to know which of the houses were originally fitted with bathrooms or added them subsequently. There is some useful evidence in the local press, such as the notice of a sale by auction of number 26 Kensington Road in 1912, after the death of the owner occupier. This house was described as having a forecourt, a good piece of garden ground at the rear with back approach, 3 bedrooms, a fitted bathroom and WC, front and back sitting rooms, kitchen, scullery, pantry, coalhouse and WC. The deceased owner was a 71 year old widow who lived alone in the property with a servant. Neither servants nor sole occupants living ‘on their own means’ were the norm on this working class street of workers, families and lodgers so perhaps the bathroom at number 26 was added as something of a luxury feature. When selling newly built houses, builders often made it clear that finishings could be added at the purchaser’s request, to suit their budget and tastes, rising from a basic price in the region of £270 in 1909. By the time we moved into our house in the early 1990s, a bathroom had been added to the back of the kitchen, where once the outside WC and coal shed had stood. Upstairs, the third (back) bedroom showed signs that it  – or much more likely a divided section of it – had once been a bathroom, but without access to any documentation, I cannot be certain that the bathroom was an original feature (although I suspect that it was).

I recall another conversation with Charles – the young skipper – who moved into the road in 1912. According to the census of the previous year, his family’s house had five rooms; Charles told me that it had a scullery and I regret not having asked him what made him describe it as a scullery as opposed to a kitchen. On the whole, sculleries were for food preparation, washing dishes and doing laundry and were not big enough to count as living or even cooking space, thus distinguishing them from kitchens with a range and even a table around which family members gathered for meals and domestic jobs.  I have not yet been able to go and see any plans of the houses but I have turned to Fry and Smith for some help. They include a floorplan for a substantial terraced house in Albany Road which had both kitchen and scullery marked out. There is also a plan for a small (and much older) cottage in Warwick Street, showing the architect’s plans for its extension in 1911. This adds space for a scullery and pantry but with no mention of kitchen. My Kensington Road kitchen originally had a fireplace along the back wall of the house and small though the room was, the six rooms recorded on the census suggests that this had always been regarded as the property’s kitchen, with a walk in pantry under the stairs.

Selling the Houses

 Once the houses were nearing completion, builders used various methods to try to sell them. In the autumn of 1908, Mr Taylor of 65, Butts, put five houses on the market at a combined price of £1,100 (although they were also available singly), presumably hoping to sell to a landlord who would then let to tenants. T.F. Bird, a young builder and contractor (born in Dudley but by 1911 living with his wife in Earlsdon Street), who built extensively in Earlsdon and Hearsall, placed the following ad in the local paper in 1909:

“An Englishman’s Home” should be his own. Hundreds of our fellow townsmen realise this and instead of paying rent they buy their own houses and save the rent. Why not do likewise?

TF Bird seeks to make this possible for all. Call and see his houses in Kensington Road. They are designed for you. You can either buy them outright or by the payment of a deposit of £30 and the balance at eight shillings and four pence per week.

It’s interesting to see an advertisement from over 100 years ago playing on the British obsession with buying as opposed to renting, which is today as strong as ever. I presume that those who bought from the builder in 1909 remained leaseholders until they had paid off their debt, whereas those who had a more conventional mortgage were immediate freeholders. David Fry and Albert Smith note that owner occupiers lived in half of the road’s houses, a much higher percentage than some of the streets that surrounded it. I need to do more work to find out the average cost of weekly renting but I did see that a landlord with a house in nearby Newcombe Road was hoping to get seven shillings and six pence per week from tenants.

And now for those who lived in the street.

The People and the Census

There was an urgent need for housing in Coventry by the early 20^th century; the city’s population had risen from 46,563 in 1881 to 106,349 in 1911. The craft industries that had dominated Coventry’s economy in the nineteenth century – ribbon weaving and watch making – were both in decline. But new industries were changing the face of the city, providing employment for Coventry born folk and for those attracted in to the city by openings in bicycle and – increasingly –  motor car manufacture. Both were predominately male occupations and by 1911, along with the associated industry of machine tool making, made up the largest category of employment for men in Coventry. Across the city some 13,000 men were employed in these industries out of a total of 37,222 working men.

The 1911 census reveals that in Kensington Road, the motor, cycle and machine tool industries accounted for around 40% of male heads of household, lodgers, sons and other male family members and this was the single largest category of male employment in the street. By contrast, only one young woman in the road – the daughter in a household – is expressly recorded as working in the cycle industry (across the city over 1000 women were employed in the cycle and motor industries). Of the Kensington Road men working in these new industries, over 60% had not been born in Coventry; some came expressly to take jobs in workshops and factories where wages were relatively high. In 1913 a strike and campaign initially at the Humber, Daimler and Ordnance factories, resulted in a minimum wage of 26 shillings and 6 pence for a 53-hour week. This was as much as five shillings higher than the average paid at that time to a general labourer. These were undoubtedly good wages for Coventry’s factory workers, generally classified as semiskilled, and the agreement set a basic rate that was higher than anywhere else in the country, and on a par with London rates. The skilled engineers (the craftsmen – those who had served apprenticeships) may well have been somewhat irked by the fact that overtime pay for these semiskilled workers was paid at the same rate as their own.

That these industries were attractive to relatively young men is evident in Kensington Road, where the average age of men thus employed was around 30. The majority of these were householders, many married with children, some of whom – the vast majority boys – also went into this work. This certainly fits with the findings of a study that found that in 1911 over 75% of those in the cycle and motor industries were under the age of 35, and over 5000 were under 25.

Although employment in the city’s engineering factories dominated, there was still quite a range of employment in Kensington Road. Among men the next largest category of work (although at around 12% it was considerably less than engineering) was that carried out by craft and tradesmen – builders, decorators, carpenters and gas fitters were, with all the house building going on in the city, generally in high demand. In addition, there were railway workers, shop workers, a few white collar workers – clerks and insurance agents – and a few professional workers, including an accountant and a very few teachers.

The crafts of old Coventry – watch making and ribbon weaving – were both represented but in small numbers. The once thriving watch industry, so prevalent in Earlsdon and Chapelfields, was clinging on but the average age of the men thus employed (for on this street no women were recorded as working in watch making) was, at about 42, more than a decade older than the average in engineering. There was just one apprentice to the industry and whereas one might expect this to be because of local connections to watch making, he was in fact a young man whose father worked as a nightwatchman in a machine tool factory, the family having moved to Coventry from the south west of England. The husband and father who lived in ‘our’ house was a watch dial painter, and at 35, he was a relatively young worker in the trade although, unlike the apprentice, he was a Coventry born man who came from a watchmaking family.

Ribbon weaving, once such a proud feature of the city, had suffered a devastating and irreparable blow in the 1860s and although it remained, it had, by 1911, come to be regarded more as women’s work than employment dominated by skilled male craftsmen. What did this mean? That the women employed in the industry (of which, across the city, there were far more than men) received low wages, a consequence of it now being a woman dominated industry which in turn acted as a deterrent to men because of the low wages. There is just one man on the street  – a silk dyer – working  in the silk trade and a 77 year old ribbon weaver (despite the fact that by 1911 the State had introduced old age pensions, this man is described as ‘unable to work’ rather than retired. The fear of destitution lingered long in people’s minds). We need to be wary of assuming that the work had become de-skilled; true, the days of master weavers working in their homes with the help of their families was long gone, but among the few young women in Kensington Road described on the 1911 census as working in the silk industry, there is evidence of specialist work, including silk blocking and pearling.

Of the houses in Kensington Road that are listed as having male heads, around 70 show that no  occupation was recorded for their wives. There has sometimes been a temptation amongst commentators to conclude from such statistics that married women did not need to work because they were the wives of relatively well-paid male workers. This may have been the case for some families, particularly because of decent wages in the Coventry engineering industries. But if we look again, the census also reveals that of the households where women were not working outside the home, nearly half had lodgers, or accommodated one or more extended family member. Men of various occupations – including engineering – lived in houses with lodgers and there is little doubt that the work of ‘doing’ for the lodger would have fallen almost entirely on the women of the household. Having a lodger was certainly no easy way to make money. During these early years of the 20^th century, the local press is full of columns advertising rooms, such as this from 1909:

Board-residence Vacancy for Gentleman Boarder 43 Kensington Road. Healthy situation. 16 minutes Broadgate. Penny tram and motor bus stage. Every comfort. No children. Moderate terms.

Another at number 8 Kensington Road offered sole occupancy of a bedroom, a shared sitting room and a bath. Prices were not generally advertised, as the terms of residence were for private negotiation; some lodgers requested an evening meal whereas others would eat at the works canteen and opt for a more self-contained arrangement (the provision of meals and services was what usually distinguished a boarder from a lodger), perhaps needing only to share the family kitchen to make tea or light suppers. Boarders and lodgers alike added considerably to the laundry load and to housework tasks and of course there was the loss of family privacy – a stranger at the table for Sunday dinner, perhaps. There was the inconvenience of another person using the WC and washing facilities, the need for more hot water and heat. Kensington Road boarders and lodgers were overwhelmingly male and in Kensington Road the very few women lodging included a dressmaker, a nurse, a piano teacher and an elementary school teacher (living in a household where the daughter was also a teacher). Suitable lodgings for women workers were difficult to find during these years and there were public meetings organised by concerned campaigners to establish all-female lodgings where women could feel safe and secure. This was put forward as a moral as well as a practical issue (it being declared a ‘disgrace’ that Coventry had nowhere where women could seek lodgings other than newspaper columns and shop noticeboards), for the need to preserve women’s modesty and privacy in mixed sex boarding houses or households troubled many who sought to improve the lives of young and single women workers. When young women could no longer live with their families or had left their home towns in search of work, what they needed was to see advertisements like this one, for ‘superior apartments for one or two young ladies: board optional. No other boarders kept’. They still of course had to take the meaning of ‘superior’ on trust.

 Taking in lodgers or being recorded on the census as ‘helping’ with the family business (I will talk more in the next blog about this) are all signs that extra income was needed to help make ends meet, to pay the rent or mortgage and to feed growing families. There was always a need to be as resourceful as possible, where work outside the home was not possible, practical, desired or permitted (by husbands). 

Amongst women who were heads of households, over half were widows, some of whom living with children who were working, one who was running a shop ( I will talk more about shop work in the next blog), another who had turned being a landlady into more of a formal arrangement and was letting out apartments. Of the single women heads of household, one acted as her sister’s housekeeper (the sister worked for a tailoring company) and two others were dressmakers, working at home. A couple of married women were recorded as housekeepers or carrying out domestic duties; I like to think that they insisted on these descriptions to show that their unpaid labour was of immense value but in reality it probably depended on who filled in the form or on how the given information was interpreted by the enumerator once it had been collected.

Most of the women listed as being in work were the daughters and female relations of heads of household. It is – because of the small numbers – much more difficult to try to analyse women’s occupations in Kensington Road in relation to the broad trends of Coventry employment in 1911 than it is for its men. It is just possible to see, however, that the majority of Kensington Road women did very broadly reflect the city wide trends, which identify domestic work of all kinds and work in the textile industry as the main categories for employed women. There was a handful of women working as servants or housekeepers in Kensington Road but with the exception of two (as far as I can see), they worked at home for their families. In addition, some women in the street were employed on different types of factory work, including cardboard box making and there were a few clerks and teachers.

If you’ve survived my riff on statistics and are still interested, do watch out for the next part of this blog when I’ll take a look at life on the street and offer some information on setting up home, buying and acquiring furniture and all the other things that make a house a home. I locate the street’s shops and think about food prices, meal preparation and lots more besides.

Huge thanks to David Fry and Albert Smith for allowing me to use their images of Kensington Road

Thanks also to the British Newspaper Archive

The study that I referred to when discussing the ages of Coventry’s new workers is by Brad Beaven and John Griffiths and is called Citizenship in the Industrial Boomtown: Narratives of work and leisure in Britain 1880-1914

Ernie Newbold’s Portrait of Coventry was published in 1972 by Robert Hale

I’m currently preparing a series of blogs about life in a working class Coventry street just over 100 years ago. I hope that the first of these articles will make its appearance in the next week or so. In the meantime, I am absorbed in – and far too distracted by – local press advertisements and references to the running of house and home. Today, feeling more than a little lockdown glum in the gloom of a wet mid February, I came across some delightful advice included on ‘The Women’s Page’ of the Coventry Herald 110 years ago. Entitled ‘How to Be Happy’, it grabbed my attention on a page full of subjects such as how tuberculosis is infectious (and how to render sputum harmless) and why you shouldn’t overheat your house (the heated air is detrimental to the mucous membrane of the nose). There are some cures for insomnia which range from taking a hot bath, using a hot-water bottle, reading a particularly dull book to the rather more specific suggestion of covering the eyes and ears with wadding. In a similar vein there is free medical advice provided to those writing in to the column. ‘Anxious M’ is told to ‘springe out the nostrils’ with a mixture of hot water and carbolic acid every morning, and sounding even more alarming than that is the advice given to ‘Concerned’ who is told that, ‘There is no connection between the discharge and the operation. Use a warm douche containing a little Condy’s fluid twice daily’. I think it’s best we don’t know what had been asked. I feel pretty sorry for the (presumed) infant of another Anxious who faced a cotton reel being strapped to his back using tapes passing round his waist to prevent him from lying on his back.

Also on the page are recipes for Crecy soup (a thoroughly boiled and sieved concoction of carrots, turnips, celery, onion, ham slices and beef broth), boiled mince roll (sewn into a cloth), mutton and macaroni (also boiled), Scotch eggs ( using up scraps of cold or sausage meat) and apple snow, served with redcurrant jelly and thin (boiled) custard. There is a pattern for a Spring skirt and a sketch for a an Easter bride’s dress.

The adverts are well chosen for the page and include mangle rollers, chimney sweeping, ladies blouses and Allinson’s Wholemeal Bread, available from the city Health Food Stores. There is a children’s column offering mathematical surprises and stories from around the world about the moon (women readers of newspapers and journals were used to sharing ‘their’ section with children, making sure that the loftier matters of politics and sport were kept far apart from household cleaning, fashion, food – oh and the raising of children. At least ‘Concerned’ could be reasonably assured that her ailment wasn’t likely to be read out at breakfast time).

The humour in the jokes section is cheesy enough for groans; “Now Patsy, would it be proper to say, ‘You can’t learn me nothing’? ” Patsy, “Yes, ‘m “. Teacher, “Why?” Patsy, “Cause you can’t”.

And on that note, here are the words of wisdom given to the women of Coventry in 1911 not just on how to be happy but how to stay that way, in ten steps:

‘Keep cheerful. Hunting trouble ruins more nerves than trouble when it arrives

Keep alert. Mental ruts make more hypochondriacs than does overwrought imagination

Keep physically active. The alert woman who hates to move is usually the greatest growler about her health

Keep clean. The close connection between the pores of the skin and general health is not considered carefully enough

Keep interested. There is nothing like a fad or an object in life to put aches and pains into the background

Keep your feet warm. more cold is taken through the ankles than in any other way, so do not run in low shoes all winter

Keep away from drugs. Walk more and take medicine less

Keep a curb on your appetite. Over-eating is the menace of the age

Keep out of debt. There is nothing like money troubles to worry one to death. Care will kill the nine-lived cat and what gives more care than a budget of debts with no money to settle?

Keep smiling’.

Lucky those, then, who could settle their debts. In my forthcoming series, I will be looking at the people who lived in the street I have chosen for the study, examining their occupations, their wages and how they got by. In the early twentieth century Coventry’s population was growing, new industries were providing employment not just for the local workforce but for those from other towns and cities, attracted by the prospect of a decent wage and a secure future. I want to look inside the census statistics, curious to get as close as possible to the realities of daily life. That’s if, of course, I stop getting distracted by discoveries along the way….

The page is from the Coventry Herald, March 31 1911