SOCIAL HISTORY
CLASS OF 37
Claire and Hester Barron Langhamer (Metro £16.99 272 pp)
One day in May 1937, Miss Kemp, a young teacher who believed in idealistic teaching, asked a class made up of 12- to 13-year old girls what they would do when they grew older.
Like Miss Kemp’s own father, most of those girls were destined to end up working in one of Bolton’s lung-clogging cotton mills when they left school at 14. Many dreamed of better things, perhaps for the very first time in generations.
‘I should like to keep a shop,’ wrote one girl, in a neat, curling script, ‘as I like serving the little boys and girls with sweets. The women would buy loaves which I could tie up in a parcel.’ Others aspired to jobs as nurses or teachers, although some of their mothers complained about the homework which distracted the girls from their many household chores: mopping, sewing, cooking and running errands.
Claire Langhamer, Claire Barron, and Hester Barron have used essays from teenage girls to create a fascinating novel about life in a mill-town. Pictured: Schoolgirls in 1937 dreamed of a better life
Miss Kemp asked Pike Lane School girls to write essays for the Mass Observation project.
This had been set up by a group of Left-leaning intellectuals at the start of that year, aiming to create ‘an anthropology of ourselves’.
Claire Langhamer and Hester Barron, historians, had spent many years studying the MO archives before they found the essays. They were enchanted by the intimate glimpse into the lives and times of these working-class children.
‘We knew immediately the preciousness of what we were looking at,’ they say. And they’ve used the vivid detail of those essays (on everything from ‘How I spent my holidays’ and ‘The Royal Family’ to ‘What I learn at home that I don’t learn at school’) to write a fascinating book about life in a mill town, two years before war would change everything for its inhabitants.
The characters of Constance and Joyce, Ada, Joyce, Nelly, Ada, Ada and Irene shine brightly on every page, often contradicting the somewhat snooty character sketches by the Mass Observers.
Madge is described thus: ‘Father; lorry driver. Swears a lot . . . Mother admits can’t manage her . . . It’s very funny. . . Untidy clothes.’
But from her essays we learn that Madge spent her spare time writing ‘good, sensible poems’ and dreamed of becoming an author when she grew up, although she also fancied a job on a farm. ‘Just think how nice the fresh cream would be!’ she wrote. ‘Anyone who reads this, I hope it does not make your mouth water as it has mine.’
We learn about the difficult conditions at home at a time where 19% of working men were not employed and children often went without food. Little Ada wrote proudly about being let out of school early at lunchtime to ‘make a proper meal which costs only a few pence’ for her large family.
‘Sometimes people who have too much, like millionaires . . . go mad or get very miserly and will not give a copper to the poor,’ wrote Mavis. ‘The poor people who have no money are sometimes tempted to steal, then money is evil when that happens.’
Miss Kemp asked a class from Pike Lane School of 12-13-year old girls to write essays on their dreams in 1937. Pictured: Pikes Lane Girls School pupils c.1934
Bolton Housing Survey Committee declared certain parts of the town unsanitary in the 1930s.
Many houses had poor light, ventilation, and decent sanitation and were crawling with insects. Many families still shared an outdoor toilet, while others had no hot water, bath, or indoor WC.
The poor housing, malnutrition and dangers of mill work meant that many of the girls had experience of the town’s run-down, understaffed infirmary, which one Mass Observer described frankly as ‘a hell hole’. Mavis’s elder sister, Florence, died there of tuberculosis aged just 19. Mavis wasn’t consoled by religion. In an essay on Heaven and Hell, she wrote that Jesus was ‘sometimes a little too religious’ and that Heaven was made up ‘so people can die happy’.
The grimness of daily life put the treats in sharp relief. It’s delightful reading of the girls’ trips to the cinema. In the UK, 946 million cinema tickets were sold in 1937, compared to 176 million in 2019, and sales reached a peak of 1.64 billion in 1946.
CLASS OF ‘ 37 by Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer (Metro £16.99 272 pp)
The girls write of ‘thrilling’ to the sound of the Odeon organ music and crunching Maltesers (first sold in 1937) as they lapped up adventures on the screen, from which they learned ‘how easy it is to open a safe’ and ‘what a very good time a girl can have’.
There is no premonition in the girls’ writing of the looming conflict, even as preparations were being made for the evacuation of children from cities in the event of aerial bombing.
But World War II would change their lives. All romance was intensified by the fear and loss, as their first kisses were snatched in the dark.
Nellie later marries a man who served with the RAF. He will never be able, after seeing so much destruction on the Normandy sands.
Irene’s husband (a PoW in the Far East for 18 months) will battle nightmares for the rest of his life.
Mary will be expecting her third child when her husband dies.
Madge, the young poet, went to work as a bookbinder, and she died in her 50s from a heart attack. But her daughter told Barron and Langhamer that she would have loved to know her words would one day be published in a book: ‘She would be so proud.’