A Classic Slum and other books by Robert Roberts ........... on the place he was born

I first came across Robert Roberts and the Classic Slum in 1973.

Waterloo Street, 1893

I can’t remember if it was recommended to me or I just found it on the bookshop shelf.

Either way the phrase “poverty busied itself” leapt off the page and I was hooked.  Here is a vivid description of Salford life at the beginning of the 20th century.*

It is an account not tarnished by romanticism or bedevilled by lofty and detached criticism but a vivid description of what it was like to live a working class area.

It could so easily also have been Manchester or a clutch of other northern cities and towns and for that many any one of the equally grimy bits of south east London where I grew up.

Robert Roberts was born in 1905 and lived at 1 Waterloo Street at the junction with West Wellington Street.  The house had four rooms and one of those was the shop.

Here he lived with his parents and his four siblings.  His father was a brass finisher and his mother ran the shop.

At which point many will groan and mutter “not another story about dirty old Salford, from a southerner who only plays at being a northerner.  Why can’t he offer up something on the Salford of today?”

It’s a criticism with a tiny bit of validity.  I am from south east London, having been born in Lambeth, spent my early years in Peckham and then Eltham which is the place near Woolwich.  That said I have lived here from 1969, had a dad who was born in Newcastle upon Tyne and a mother who grew up in Derby.

But what makes the Classic Slum and its companion A Ragged Schooling more than just a set of memories is that they are supported with a heap of scholarship drawn from newspapers and official documents all mixed with descriptions of ordinary people Mr Bickam a veteran from the Boer War who on August 5 1914 tried to enlist the day after war broke out.

The bigger Salford picture in 1893

“He stopped my mother as she hung washing across the street. ‘Turned down!” he said disgustingly – ‘Bad teeth!.  They must want blokes to bite the damned Germans!’  She laughed.  Mr Bickham went on his way.  ‘They’ll be pulling me in though,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘before this lot’s done!”

An amusing comment on the outburst of patriotism at the start of the war but which doesn’t prepare you for what happened because “By August 5 1915 he had been lying dead three months in France.”

Many will know the book but for those that don’t or like me are coming back to it after a long break it is well worth a read.

All of which leaves me to say I chose not to offer up a picture of Flatiron Market or a grimy street, instead just a detail from the 1893 OS map of South Lancashire showing Waterloo Street.

Although it is worth mentioning that in the 1911 street directory only Mr Roberts and another shopkeeper are listed the rest of the street were not.

Picture; Waterloo Street, 1893 from the OS for South Lancashire, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*The Classic Slum, Robert Roberts, 1973 page 39

The Classic Slum, Salford stories from 1900

When you get to my age whole swathes of your childhood landscape have gone.

Many of the homes of friends have vanished under slum clearance plans along with the corner shops, small factories and builder’s yards.

Some have been replaced with social housing, but many more by prime state of the art flats for young couples with plenty of disposable incomes.

I guess it’s what comes of growing up in what had become shabby run down parts of our towns and cities which more recently have been rediscovered and gentrified.

Or they have become car parks which was the fate of the houses and streets where my mother’s family lived in Derby from the 1840s through to the 1970s.

Not that this is a nostalgic ramble of warm memories and cosy stories of a world that was better than today.  I have always been suspicious of that repackaged brand of history.  True people did share, and doors were left unlocked but that had more to do with the pitiful amounts of possessions that people possessed.

Open air markets like Flatiron on Chapel Street in Salford may look quaint to us today but were places where “poverty busied itself”* and almost any item of second hand clothing was available for a price.

And it is that remembered phrase that has drawn me back to Robert Robert’s powerful description of growing up in Salford in the first quarter of the 20th century.

You won’t find any romantic tosh of lives of happy poverty.  People constantly battled against the grime, the vermin and the damp which threatened to invade their homes, in mean and often dark streets and courts where fresh air and sunlight rarely penetrated, and with the ever present threat that bad luck, ill health or unemployment might pitch the family into the workhouse.

Not that people gave up.

“On Sundays the artisan in his best suit looked like the artisan in his best suit; no one could ever mistake him for a member of the middle classes.  But any day at all the poor looked poor.  With us they wore, irrespective of fit, whatever would hide indecency; clogs or blutchers [Derby shoe] on their feet and about the neck a muffler – white, if possible, for the Lord’s Day.

Those in greatest need found even the old brokers’ shop too expensive ; they bought everything from the local Flatiron Market”

Now in recent years there has been a real attempt to turn the pawnbrokers shop into something respectable, something without the taint of poverty, and in the words of one friend “into a place for today, where bargains can be found and deals done to avoid using the credit card.”

But for me they will always be places where desperate families pawned possessions including treasured wedding rings to eke out the weeks income and just because it was part of the regular routine as much as seeing the dawn rise and the night fall it was no less demeaning.

In my own childhood in that “you have never had it so good" decade it was the tally man who brought the consumer goods and the essential clothing at ten shillings down and four shillings a week, and like all credit deals meant that you were often still paying for items which had worn away.

Not that you can compare life for most us in the 1950s with the existence described by Robert Roberts, where “Cheap Sunday boots for children were the bane of young lives.  Hard and ill-fitting, they rubbed the skin off the heels and toes without getting one’s sympathy much sympathy from adults who often were plagued themselves with corns, callouses, ‘segs’ and bunions.  In any crowd of workers on the move a sizeable number would have been seen walking badly”**

And it was also in the faces of those pre NHS generations.  Seldom do you see working class women smiling in photographs because to do so would reveal the extent to which a poor diet and lack of professional dental care had wrought havoc on their teeth.

Still in the 1930s it was possible to have a bad tooth pulled for a small fee in the open on Ashton market and in rural areas by the blacksmith.  And the surprise expressed by some at the huge numbers of spectacles and prescriptions issued in the first year of the National Health Service was less about the exploitation a free service but was an indication of the very real need for medical care which decades of poverty had meant were out of the reach of vast numbers of people.

So the Classic Slum is essential reading covering everything from possessions, to food and drink, manners and morals and high days and takes the story of the poorest parts of the city on from the writings of Dr Kay and Frederick Engels in the 1830s and 40s, and acts as measure for how far things have improved in the first quarter of our own new century.

*Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum, Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century, 1971, Pelican edition 1973

** ibid Robert Roberts

Pictures; Union Street Derby, 1950, from the collection of Cynthia Wigley, and Flatiron market Salford, Samuel Coulhurst, 1894, m59571 & m59569, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, and Bradford Power Station and Stuart Street, circa 1970s from the collection Eileen Blake