Emma
As I stood here near to the cottage where my paternal Great Grandmother was born, I couldn’t help but wonder why she chose to leave this lovely countryside and travel to the comparative slums of South London. But in so doing I am conjuring up an image of idyll rural life that was most likely fantasy. In the early 1800s rural housing was a mixture of poor quality decaying older properties, poorly built new houses and a minority of decent stone or brick-built cottages for the more prosperous. The nature of work was, in some part, a determinant of the nature of rural housing. Living space was more important for the domestic weaver or knitter who spent much time indoors, than for my ancestral farm labourers who toiled for 12 hours a day in the field.
In that period living conditions could be as unhealthy and harsh as in many towns: a combination of poor housing, lack of employment and poor social prospects frequently impelled townward migration rather than any specific urban attractions.
The image of the rural idyll had by the 1890s become firmly implanted as a middle-class vision of the countryside that was increasingly imprinted on rural areas through residence, landownership and conservation movements. The National Trust was founded in 1895. However, the reality of rural life in the early years of the twentieth century was, for many, harsh and often unpleasant. Despite increasing mechanisation agricultural work was still hard and poorly regulated, while rural labourers worked longer hours for less pay than most other workers. The National Union of Agricultural Workers was established in 1872 but its membership was low and much of the welfare legislation passed between 1900 and 1914 did not apply to or was ignored by the agricultural sector.
And so it was that in the late 1800s Emma Wall, my Great Grandmother, migrated to Lambeth in South London and took a job as a charwoman. Most of her extended family stayed East Kent, but in London Emma fell in love and had a son, my grandfather, ‘out of wedlock’ and gave him her surname Wall. And so, in due course, I was born a ‘Camberwell Cockney’.
Emma
As I stood here near to the cottage where my paternal Great Grandmother was born, I couldn’t help but wonder why she chose to leave this lovely countryside and travel to the comparative slums of South London. But in so doing I am conjuring up an image of idyll rural life that was most likely fantasy. In the early 1800s rural housing was a mixture of poor quality decaying older properties, poorly built new houses and a minority of decent stone or brick-built cottages for the more prosperous. The nature of work was, in some part, a determinant of the nature of rural housing. Living space was more important for the domestic weaver or knitter who spent much time indoors, than for my ancestral farm labourers who toiled for 12 hours a day in the field.
In that period living conditions could be as unhealthy and harsh as in many towns: a combination of poor housing, lack of employment and poor social prospects frequently impelled townward migration rather than any specific urban attractions.
The image of the rural idyll had by the 1890s become firmly implanted as a middle-class vision of the countryside that was increasingly imprinted on rural areas through residence, landownership and conservation movements. The National Trust was founded in 1895. However, the reality of rural life in the early years of the twentieth century was, for many, harsh and often unpleasant. Despite increasing mechanisation agricultural work was still hard and poorly regulated, while rural labourers worked longer hours for less pay than most other workers. The National Union of Agricultural Workers was established in 1872 but its membership was low and much of the welfare legislation passed between 1900 and 1914 did not apply to or was ignored by the agricultural sector.
And so it was that in the late 1800s Emma Wall, my Great Grandmother, migrated to Lambeth in South London and took a job as a charwoman. Most of her extended family stayed East Kent, but in London Emma fell in love and had a son, my grandfather, ‘out of wedlock’ and gave him her surname Wall. And so, in due course, I was born a ‘Camberwell Cockney’.