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.
DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC / MUSIC BREAKS OFF IN NEEDLE-SCRATCH
But in this series, I want to discover the other side of history...
I'm already quite nervy.
...the side we don't often hear about,
how ordinary British people lived their lives...
EXPLOSION / BOING-BOING SOUND EFFECT "from the Tudors...
You'll see why it did attract my attention.
Disgusting!
...to the Victorians. Throw a stone in Victorian London,
you will hit a drunken cabman, there's that many of them.
We are not amused! EXPLOSION
From the Georgians...
Oh, my God. It's horrible just seeing you do that.
MAN SCREAMING MOTORBIKES REV
...to the people who really fought the Second World War.
James could hear the ping of bullets and the clatter of shrapnel.
One thing's for sure. These people knew the meaning of the word "tough".
WOMAN SCREAMS 'I'll be finding the truth
'about their daily lives - what they ate'...
How long would that have lasted? Up to three years.
Agh! ..'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 a pee? Go in the bucket. The bucket?!
This is British history from the bottom up.
You gotta admit, I am terrifying. MAN GUFFAWING
WHISTLING / CRASHING SOUND EFFECT BIRDSONG
This time I'm heading back to the Victorian age...
PENGUINS-CHITTERING SOUND EFFECT
...when Britain ruled the world...
They were also...lovely whiskers.
Now, while you might be thinking that 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.
SPOONS CLATTER
But life on the factory floor was cheap.
A combination of lethal machinery and long hours
meant that gruesome accidents... Agh!
...even death, were never very far away.
And right up there in the list of most-lethaljobs 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 Mile End Road,
turned 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 Ann,
and her six brothers and sisters.
One of seven kids,
Sarah was a feisty young 'un with a sharp brain.
We know that, at school, she learned how to read and write.
But this, remember, was Victorian Britain,
where, at the age of 13, working-class kids like Sarah
had to put aside such fripperies as education
and get themselves a job.
And for Sarah, that meant starting work
in the same factory as her mum and sister.
This is where Sarah worked...
the Bryant & May match factory.
Back in those clays, it would have been frenetic around here,
with over a thousand women and girls working here
six clays 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 & May match box,
and the thing about this match was that it would strike anywhere...
8S YOU can SEE.
Yeah. Very effective.
'So effective that, by 1860,
'Bryant & May were churning out 75,000 boxes of the things
'every day.'
To keep up with demand,
match girls like Sarah were expected to work 14-hour shifts,
virtually all of it on their feet.
Can you imagine?!
Luckily she was promoted,
and by 19, Sarah was working as a machinist,
the person who cut the matchsticks down to size.
Argh!
'If Sarah ever got sick, that was just tough luck.'
The factory was perfectly entitled to discard her like a...
well, like a spent match!
WOMAN SOBBING
For all that, she earned a meagre wage of five shillings a week,
which is about £16 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've all been cramped 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...
Get the good sleep. ..girls get the beds. Yeah.
'As for her one day off,
'well, after a quick breakfast of bread and dripping,
'it would be out with the broom and on with the housework.'
HE COUGHS / GRUNTS
The girls, as soon as they were old enough,
would have pulled their weight with the housework,
so they would do all the washing of the clothes,
and cleaning the house and getting the baking done ready for the week.
Only then would Sarah finally have been able to put her feet up
with a nice cup of tea
and perhaps a puff on a pipe.
MUSIC REMINISCENT OF "HAMLET CIGARS" ADVERT
The next morning...
ROOSTER CROWS SHE GASPS
And it would be up with the lark
for the start of another shift at the factory.
'But Sarah's life wasn't just exhausting.
'It was also blooming dangerous.'
MATCH STRIKING / "PSYCHO"-STYLE STABBING VIOLINS
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 "phossy jaw".
It was a terrible disease
that caused the bones around the mouth to slowly rot away
and emit a foul-smelling pus.
SQUELCHING
As the infection spread,
it would lead to horrendous disfigurement, organ failure,
and eventually death.
Luckily Sarah escaped this grisly fate,
but many of her co-workers, around one in ten of them, didn't.
Not that the factory owners seemed to care.
MAN CACKLING
Even Sarah's lunch hour was full of danger.
The women and girls were forced to eat their lunch on the factory floor,
where phosphorous particles could easily get into their food.
There was no other space available,
and they weren't allowed to eat outside.
Health and safety?! Agh!
So bad were conditions in the Bryant & May factory
that, on the 6th ofjuly, 1888,
Sarah and her fellow workers downed matchsticks
and went on strike.
By the end ofjuly, Bryant & 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.
Coming up, the scandal of the female miners who hauled coal.
But it wasn't the backbreaking conditions that shocked everyone.
It was, believe it or not, the nudity.
And how a Victorian navvy risked his life
to blast a tunnel through the Scottish mountains...
which was, of course, very, very dangerous.
BIRDSONG
On the back of the hard graft of ordinary Victorians,
the UK became the richest and most powerful nation on Earth.
"LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY" PLAYING MEN CHEERING
With all that money rolling in, the Victorians did
what great empires have always done.
They built things!
EXPLOSION
Huge engineering projects,
like railways, bridges and tunnels,
many of them still in use today.
HISSING
Building these monster projects was the job of the navvies,
big, strapping blokes like Angus lnnes from Glasgow.
Now, we don't exactly know what Angus looked like,
but we can take a guess,
because Scottish navvies liked 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.
This is the kind of place where Angus would've lived.
He would've 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.
MAN COUGHING
Its slums were so bad,
they were almost as disgusting as London's.
'Coming home at night from the pub,
'Angus would've constantly had to watch his step
'for fear of treading in something unmentionable.'
SQUELCH!
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 navvies like Angus who were called on to do the work.
After a typical navvy'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.
HE BLOWS WHISTLE
His job was to dig the huge trenches that held the new sewage pipes.
Using muscle-power alone,
Angus was expected to shift a hernia- inducing 20 tons of earth a day.
HE SIGHS
The more muck he moved, the more he was paid.
Oh!
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 navvies were doing here in Glasgow
in the 19th century.
But to get a more vivid picture of Angus's life,
I'm gonna travel 30 miles north of here into the Highlands.
'From census records, we know that, by the late 1850s,
'Angus had upped sticks and moved here,
'to the bonny banks of Loch Katrine,
'where he was helping to build a tunnel
'to carry clean drinking water into Glasgow.'
This is the water tunnel, which ran for 30 miles
straight into the centre 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'... THUNDER RUMBLES
...'no doubt enjoying the peaceful countryside
'along with hundreds of other navvies,
'and a bunch of angry locals.' INSECTS BUZZ
Midges!
'By now, Angus was moving up in the world,
'and had swapped his shovel for a much more important job...
...'using explosives'... EXPLOSION
...'to blast a tunnel through the mountains.'
EXPLOSION
Which was, of course, very, very dangerous.
EXPLOSION
In fact, the accident and death rate for navvies was higher
than for any other group of workers in the country,
and that included coalminers and soldiers.
No wonder Angus liked a tipple! BUZZ OF CONVERSATION
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 loch.
'Here to tell me more about life inside the camp
is local historian, Sion Barrington.
It was a well organised community. There'd be the cooking squad,
so there'd be no problem getting beef and lamb and pigs,
and oatmeal... Porridge! There'd be porridge morning, noon and night.
It's astonishing! I would've assumed that a navvy working here
would've 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 at least your belly's full.
Were the women able to work? Oh, the women would be fully employed.
There would be laundry that would need to be done.
So, lots of meat by day, booze by night,
and clean pants! And... Absolutely! SION LAUGHS
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.
I name this pipeline the Katrine Aqueduct.
Navvies 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 were the navvies,
at the very bottom of the pecking order.
And yet it was people like Angus and his like
who built modern Britain with their bare hands,
and their legacy is still with us today.
The Industrial Revolution really took off under the Victorians.
But none of their fancy steam engines,
cotton mills or water pumps
would've been any use without coal.
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 round 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've looked a bit like this young lass,
holding what seems to be a giant tambourine.
Betty and her husband lived in a small rented cottage
not far from Knowles' Pit in Bolton...
...a place much like this.
It was all very cosy. The fire was going all the time, of course.
Well, fuel was everywhere, wasn't it?
And here's a clue. Tiny little seat,
tiny little potty.
They had two children, and when they were at work,
Betty's cousin looked after them.
In order to keep Betty's household going,
her cousin did all the housework.
She cleaned the house. She went shopping every day,
cos 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.
RHYTHMIC SPLASHING I don't envy her!
But if running a Victorian household wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs...
BABY CRYING
...working down the mine was just horrendous.
"HOVIS ADVERT" MUSIC / MUSIC BREAKS OFF IN NEEDLE-SCRATCH
Six clays a week, dressed in trousers and jacket,
our Betty would leave the house at dawn
and head down t'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.
CRASHING SOUND EFFECTS
To learn more about Betty's life underground,
I've come to Caphouse Colliery near Wakefield.
If you'd like to follow me, please, through these doors... Yep.
'I've been joined by Denise Bates,
'whose great-great- great-great grandmother
'was a Victorian mining lass like Betty.'
Can you imagine just shlepping up and down here every single clay?
I think we sometimes don't realise we're born.
No, we don't, do we?
'Just like Betty, we're going to have to crawl on our hands and knees
'to get to the coal face.' Whoa!
Oh! it...really hurts your hands!
Like most of the women and children who worked in the mines,
Betty's job was to drag the big, heavy carts
used to carry the coal.
So, this is the conditions that Betty would've been working in, right?
Oh, definitely. She reported that she was working in a very nasty pit.
Oh! I can't imagine what it must've been like
if these were your...working conditions for...
how many hours a day, do you reckon?
14 hours, depending on demand. Blimey!
Would you get up to the surface at lunchtime?
Not a chance. Oh! HE CHUCKLES
'More likely to have been a hunk of bread and cheese on the go.'
Is this the coal face here? Yeah. Looks like it, doesn't it?
Yeah. Yeah. HE GRUNTS
I don't think I should've touched that!
HE CHUCKLES / SIGHS
So, tell me about Betty.
She was working for her husband,
which was the practice of females who mined in Lancashire.
What do you think their relationship would've been like?
Betty mentions that there's an awful lot of domestic violence going on,
that there were very many women who were being beaten by the man
that they worked for, for no other reason than their inability
to move those trucks as fast as the men wanted.
CREAKING What with the heat,
the dust and the regular beatings,
life for Betty was about as tough as it gets.
When Betty got home from work,
usually around 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening,
she would've been absolutely exhausted.
She'd have been filthy, sweating...
but she would've 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.'
CRUNCHING SOUND EFFECTS
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.
SNORING
But Betty's life was about to change.
'In 1838, a flood at a Yorkshire colliery
'drowned 26 children,
'prompting a report after a lengthy public enquiry.'
So, the report was published, and, as you can imagine,
the press were all over it.
Here's some of the daily newspapers
that came out in May 1842.
Some great pictures here. Look.
You've got "Propelling the loaded wagons",
"Digging out the coal"...
Imagine seeing these for the first time,
if you didn't know that that kind of thing went on in your country.
But the revelations didn't end there.
In fact it wasn't the long hours,
the dust, the...awful conditions,
the industrial accidents, that shocked people.
It was, believe it or not, the nudity.
"The girls, they are naked down to the waist."
"Young females, dressed like boys in trousers,
crawling on all fours."
"Any sight more disgustingly indecent or revolting
can scarcely be imagined than these girls at work."
"No brothel can beat it."
Disgusting!
In actual fact, if it happened at all,
such topless working was extremely rare.
But still, the report had a dramatic effect.
HOOTER BLARES
And in 1842, the Mines and Collieries Act
put a stop to women, including our Betty,
working underground.
'Coming up, how a Victorian shop girl got people to part with their cash.'
Ooh, look!
Esther's job was to try to persuade her customers
to do something entirely new.
HE CLICKS Come on!
'And why you might think twice about taking a cab in Victorian London.'
Cab drivers were notorious for spending hour after hour in the pub.
BIRDSONG
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.
Keb, sir? Keb?
Men like John Cockram.
John was born in 1833,
and lived in Holborn, an old-fashioned part of London
full of narrow alleyways and densely packed housing.
But he was looking to move up in the world.
The year is 1851,
and 18-year-old John Cockram 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.
Hallo, Daniel. You are looking so beautiful, aren't you?
WHINNYING
But sadly his dad isn't around anymore to show him the ropes,
because, when John was 11, his old man had passed away...
BIRDS CAW ..leaving behind a wife,
four kids and huge pile of debt.
CASH-REGISTER SOUND EFFECT To make ends meet,
the young John had been forced to become the main breadwinner.
'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.'
HE GRUNTS 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! HE MAKES CLICKING SOUND
Come on! HORSE WHINNIES
"BLACK BEAUTY" THEME MUSIC 'Back in the 1850s,
'London streets would have been filled with horse-drawn cabs
'just like this, leaving great piles of steaming dung in their wake.'
But while the middle-class passengers were able to put their feet up
and enjoy the view... WHIPLASH SOUND EFFECT
...for working-class lads like young john,
the job was relentless, six clays a week.
On an average day, he'd start touting for work about 9:00 AM,
and finish at midnight.
He didn't have a little yellow "for hire" sign on the top of the cab.
If he wanted to show people that he was available,
he held up his whip like this.
WHIPLASH SOUND EFFECT Where to, love?
THUNDER RUMBLES
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.
Chuckin all that Victorian soot and smog,
and the lifestyle of cabbies like John
was about as healthy as smoking 40 a day.
MAN COUGHING
The money wasn't much better, either.
To make a profit, he had to work really hard.
You only got sixpence a mile for a cab like this,
and out of that, you had to pay yard money
for the stabling and feeding of the horse. It was a tough old job.
'And it was about to get a whole lot tougher.'
You see, horses can be very temperamental...
...as poor old John discovered one afternoon
shortly after buying his very own cab,
when his horse suddenly bolted,
causing his new set of wheels to flip over...
ALL SHOUT AND SCREAM
...leaving John with a hefty repair bill.
MAN SIGHING
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've been sitting on the box of the cab,
no matter what the weather. Yeah? In truth, they hid inside a pub.
Presumably there must've been examples
of cab drivers coming out of the pub hammered and having accidents.
Oh, they're numerous. SEAN CHUCKLES
Throw a stone in Victorian London, you'll hit a drunken cabman.
TONY LAUGHS There's that many of them.
But not John Cockram,
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,
salted herring.
'And before long, he'd signed up to an extraordinary new idea...
'a scheme to stop cabbies from drinking and driving.
'I know! Mad!'
I'm not really allowed in here, am I? I'm not a cabbie.
You're not, but I might give you my badge.
In 1875, John attended the opening of London's very first cab shelter,
a place where cabbies could wait for customers
without drinking their bodyweight in beer.
SNORING
It's great in here, isn't it? Lovely. Nice and compact and bijou.
Yeah. It's a funny shape, though, isn't it? It's really long and thin.
They're designed to be the same width and length
as the original horse and ca-...coach,
so they didn't take up no more extra space in the road.
Oh, so just go, cab, cab, cab, little hut, cab, cab?
Exactly.
Do you think it would've been very similar in Victorian times?
Absolutely. You've got electric lighting there.
Would've been gas lighting in them days.
But they got a gas stove. They would provide hot meals for you,
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... Cheers, love.
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 cabbie, eh?
Cheers, mate. Cheers.
MUSIC: Dance Of The Hours by Amilcare Ponchielli
Victorian Britain was brimming with inventions
and people experimenting with new ideas.
But forget your lsambard Kingdom Brunels of this world
and all those boats and bridges of his,
and consider instead another great Victorian advance.
It's the invention of modern shopping.
You see, with all that new industry, wages were on the up,
and for the first time, working people had a bit of money to spend.
Go! WOMEN SCREAM
The canny Victorian shopkeeper was only too pleased to help.
CASH REGISTER GRINDS / RINGS
was really hotting up. A hundred years previously,
a window display like this one
would've been completely unimaginable.
The shops had been small, specialist,
and staffed by very fierce shopkeepers.
But change was on its way,
and it was pioneered by women like Esther Brown.
Here she is.
Esther was born in 1878 in Manchester,
where she grew up in a small terraced house.
Her dad, Joseph, worked on the trams,
while her mum, Margaret, stayed at home
looking after Esther and her brother and sister.
SOUND EFFECT OF CHILD GURGLING
The Victorians, though, didn't really DO childhood,
and by the age of 14, Esther had left school
and was working on a market stall
selling household bits and bobs.
CROWD LAUGHS
But down the market, things were a bit...well, downmarket.
And when Esther was offered a job in a fancy new shop,
she jumped at the chance.
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 Cheetham Hill.
It's not the most salubrious part of Manchester, is it?
There would've been trams clanging backwards and forwards,
lots of new immigrant communities.
It would've been noisy, vibrant, energetic...
and it was Esther's big day.
Her new job was as a shop girl
at Michael Marks's Penny Bazaar,
which was the very first Marks & Spencer store.
This is the Cheetham Hill M&♪ now.
Well, it was absolutely nothing like that.
This was virtually a Victorian pound shop.
They kept the stock under tarpaulin in the back yard,
and over the front door there was a big scarlet sign
that said, "Don't ask the price, it's a penny."
Marks's Penny Bazaar wasn't just a bargain-hunter's paradise, though.
TONY, AS SHOPPER: "Oh, that is so lovely."
You see, for years, if a customer so much as 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.
Ooh, look! A rolling pin! I can handle it.
A basket! I can touch it!
Shoplifting became a big problem.
TONY, IN FALSETTO: "I'm sorry! It must've just fallen in my bag."
Once the customer had chosen what they wanted...
wooden spoon, maybe, a chopping board,
four candles... That's actually what these are!
Then Esther would wrap them all up.
But she wasn't allowed to tot up the money.
That had to be done by a man.
Leanne, can you demonstrate how this procedure worked? Certainly.
Five pennies. Mm-hm. Thank you very much.
So, I then put this in here, this half a ball.
This would be closed tight. Now I would put this into the slots,
send it up through the system.
And he would send your change back the exact same way.
A nice, sensible man who would know how to add up. Of course.
Of course. Not like the giddy girls who wouldn't be trusted with that.
While adding up wasn't high on her list of duties,
Esther was expected to be smart, polite,
and have the constitution of a...
HORSE WHINNIES / SNORTS 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 ten or 11 at night, so a 90-hour week,
in big, clumpy shoes, heavy skirt...
stiff back, smiling nicely all the time...
Must've been so exhausting.
And, of course, her customers paid her wages,
so they were always, always right.
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 favourite,
a nice bowl of green-pea soup. Lovely.
For her efforts, Esther was paid a modest £25 a year,
around half of what a male shop assistant earned,
but just enough for the odd trip to the music hall...
on her one day off. CROWD LAUGHING
Working in a shop is so commonplace nowadays
that it's easy to underestimate how different it would've been
for someone like Esther. In those clays,
a lot of people thought that shop girls were a bit tainted,
like prostitutes, you know, just standing out there in public,
selling stuff to customers.
Happily, though, for Esther,
things were beginning to look up...
...because, as shopping got more and more popular,
shops began to move into fancy arcades like this.
And as for the women who were working in them,
they started to have a career path.
They could end up as shop managers,
and who was one of the first women to do just that?
Esther Brown.
WHISTLE BLOWS Coming up,
the train-loving office worker
who recorded every tiny detail of his life.
Everything seems hunky-dory.
But the diary tells a very different story.
BIRDSONG
CROWD CHEERING Before the Victorian age,
travel was a bit of a bore.
"LONE RANGER" THEME MUSIC (WILLIAM TELL OVERTURE)
The fastest thing around had four legs and ate straw.
DYNAMIC "LONE RANGER" MUSIC CONTINUES
So no wonder the invention of the steam train...
HORN BLARES ..got everyone,
including Queen Victoria, rather excited.
TONY, AS QUEEN VICTORIA: Albert, 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 Waugh.
He was a secretary, writing letters in his office in Manchester
in the late 1840s. He'd just turned 30.
He lived in Hulme 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.'
Oh! Look over there! Mwah!
"Went to Rochdale in the evening in company with my wife."
"Oh, full of unhappy reflections."
TONY SIGHS
'And then there was work.'
and he hated being two-faced,
trying to squeeze money out of people who were in debt to his company.
He wrote in his diary, "I don't have the beggarly eloquence
which can humbug them into a false generosity."
For his efforts, Edwin earned about a pound a week...
around 130 quid in today's money. But often he wasn't paid at all,
prompting him to complain,
"My wife and me had just one ha'penny between us,
and we knew not where the next meal was to come from."
For the longsuffering Mrs Waugh,
it all got too much.
After a particularly heated row with his wife, Mary Ann,
Edwin describes her packing her bags
and heading off for her aunt Sally's in Rochdale.
She even takes the rocking chair with her,
so she's clearly not intending to come home.
Edwin's response is to turn to drink.
But Mary Ann must've had second thoughts,
because she eventually returned home,
presumably with the rocking chair, too.
RHYTHMIC CREAKING
To celebrate their reunion,
Edwin splashed out on a pair of railway tickets
to that home of holiday fun, Blackpool.
Mary Ann was gonna be SO pleased. ALARM CLOCK RINGS
On the morning of the Blackpool excursion,
Edwin gets up early, tries to wake his wife...
but she won't budge.
He's not gonna let her spoil his day, though.
So he gets washed, gets all ready...
...and leaves...the house.
Oh, Mary Ann!
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 overexcited day-trippers
to such far-flung locations as Brighton, Bangor,
and, in Edwin's case, Blackpool.
Susan'? SHE LAUGHS
How you doing? Fine, thank you very much.
We're going off on a holiday! Yes. It's very exciting.
To tell me more about Edwin's big day out
is railway historian Susan Major.
Why was he so excited about this excursion?
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 2,000 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 a hundred carriages.
Er, there could be three, four engines.
It would've been like being on the London Tube in the rush hour in June,
wouldn't it? ENGINE CHUGGING SOUND EFFECT
People must've felt as though they were being treated as animals.
They felt as if they were being dehumanised,
so would bleat and moo and baa.
ORGAN RENDITION OF "I DO LIKE TO BE BESIDE THE SEASIDE"
where he and his fellow passengers disembarked...
and, like a crowd of starving penguins,
PENGUINS CHATTER AND SQUAWK
So, Edwin comes down the high street from the station, and, remember,
because the crowd know they've only got a limited amount of time here,
they immediately set to work having a good time.
SEAGULLS CRY
The Blackpool of 1849 didn't yet have its famous tower,
or even a pier, for that matter.
Nonetheless, Edwin was totally smitten.
The thing he likes more than anything else, though,
is the donkeys. DONKEY BRAYING
There's little kids who get on them, and they won't move.
He says, "Everybody is having a good time,"
except, presumably, the donkeys.
And then, towards the end of his stay,
he buys four chops, raw chops, off some bloke,
and then he goes back into town,
where someone in a shop fries them up for him for fourpence.
What a way to spend the day!
As for his problems, well, they now seemed a million miles away.
But things weren't just looking up for Edwin.
In a momentous time marked by new railways...
HORN BLARES ..new sewage systems,
and even modern shopping...
Go!
...the Victorian period was a crucial part of British history,
driven by ordinary women and men across the land.
'In the next episode, we're in Georgian times,
'an era of great luxury - unless, of course, you were poor.'
One of the most horrible things confronting Elizabeth
would've been the sheer filthiness of London.
Your life was at the mercy of the rich.
MAN: John had no choice.
He'd been press-ganged.
'If you wanted to grab a piece of the action'...
MAN: Stand and deliver! ..'you risked everything.'
jack was sentenced to death.
BONE-CRUNCHING SOUND EFFECT
JAUNTY ORCHESTRAL INTRO / MALE VOCALIST SINGS MUSIC-HALL STYLE
# Boiled beef and carrots
# Makes you fat and it keeps you well
# Don't live like vegetarians
# On food they give to parrots
# From morn till night blow out your kite
# On boiled beef and carrots #
DRUMBEAT / WHIMSICAL VIOLIN OUTRO
Subtitles by Red Bee Media