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Father Christmas v Santa Claus: the centuries-long battle for Britain's chimneys
The true identity of the white-bearded, red-robed figure who fills children’s stockings at Christmas has long been debated. Thomas Ruys Smith sizes up the merry contenders
Tis the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature is stirring… but someone is. While the household sleeps, a jolly visitor carefully places presents in stockings hung by the fireplace. After taking a sip of whatever tipple has been thoughtfully left out for him, he pockets a carrot and disappears up the chimney. With a tinkle of sleigh bells he disappears into the night with his faithful reindeer, a merry laugh echoing across the rooftops. It’s a familiar ritual – with one fundamental point of contention. Who do you think it was that brought you these presents? Are you a Father Christmas fundamentalist or are you a Santa Claus supporter? Each figure has his passionate partisans, and each is wrapped up with issues of national and regional identity. A recent YouGov poll of around 4,000 British residents suggested that the UK is split right down the middle on the topic – though Santa enjoyed a narrow lead by a couple of percentage points. What you may find surprising is that this isn’t a modern conundrum. In fact, the ongoing battle for seasonal supremacy has created a schism in British culture since the Victorian era. Despite what some Father Christmas traditionalists might think, Santa Claus is not some recent American arriviste. The forgotten history of the friendly rivalry between this pair of festive icons goes much further back, taking us on a transatlantic journey through popular culture to a time even before our modern celebration of Christmas was taking shape. Nick of time Let’s start at the beginning – or as close as we can get to it. The figure of Father Christmas is undoubtedly more venerable than Santa Claus – in English culture, at least. References to characters who served to personify the period of yuletide feasting and merrymaking can be traced back to at least the 15th century. But Father Christmas really emerged as a champion of the season when Christmas came under threat in Britain. He joined the fray in the midst of religious and cultural arguments during the Civil War, when Puritans tried to suppress traditional Christmas celebrations. One anti-Puritan pamphlet written in 1652 lamented that Father Christmas, who could once “knock down Hercules”, was lately suffering from “a deep consumption”, his might sadly diminished. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-526608136webready-8247d2a-e1765964190971.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a family gathered around a large Christmas tree. On the wall behind them is a banner that reads Merry Christmas" title="A c1895 photograph of a family at Christmas. The Victorians revived historic festive traditions as well as creating new ones (Image by Getty Images)" /> Christmas celebrations and Father Christmas both returned with the Restoration. But it wasn’t until the Victorian revival of historic traditions, and its creation of new ones, that Father Christmas was truly reinvigorated as the presiding spirit of the season. Certainly, Charles Dickens’ portrait of the jovial Ghost of Christmas Present in A Christmas Carol (1843) owes a lot to the established idea of Father Christmas as the personification of yuletide celebrations – crowned with winter greenery, and accompanied by bountiful piles of food and a brimming wassail bowl. This iteration had no truck with reindeer, though, and he certainly never stuffed a stocking – at least, not until his American rival started to descend British chimneys. Read more | The history of Christmas, plus 10 festive facts you might not know Enter Santa Claus. Tracing his origins takes us across the Atlantic to 18th-century New England. Puritan colonists, in common with their English counterparts, had been positively averse to Christmas celebrations, but plenty of European immigrants imported their Christmas celebrations to America, where they took root and found new forms. A wealth of winter gift-bringers set up shop in their respective immigrant communities, from the Dutch Saint Nicholas (and his secularised counterpart Sinterklaas) to wilder figures such as Knecht-Ruprecht and Belsnickel from Germany. Undoubtedly, Father Christmas made the trip across the Atlantic, too; despite the Puritans’ best efforts, he found a warmer reception in the Southern colonies. The figure of Santa Claus emerged from this characteristically diverse American melting pot. Tantalising references to a distinctive new seasonal gift-bringer started to emerge in the late 18th century. As his name suggests, Santa Claus took inspiration from Saint Nicholas, a fourth-century bishop of Myra (in what’s now Turkey), about whom tales were told of secret gift-giving. But elements of other European traditions are evident, too. In appearance, Santa was more rough and ready than might be imagined. And, rather than appearing on 5 or 6 December (the feast day of Saint Nicholas), when he came to homes in many parts of central Europe, Santa Claus visited American families on Christmas Eve. The age of Santa Though the exact origins of Santa Claus remain murky, 1821 certainly marked a key moment in his emergence onto the seasonal stage. That Christmas, an ephemeral publication for young readers called The Children’s Friend was published in New York. From its richly illustrated pages leapt the now-recognisable figure of ‘Old Santeclaus’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/J4X8XGwebready-62d3a57-e1765963962733.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="“Old Santeclaus” depicted in an illustration from The Children’s Friend (1821), which marked his emergence onto the seasonal stage in the US (Image by Alamy)" title="“Old Santeclaus” depicted in an illustration from The Children’s Friend (1821), which marked his emergence onto the seasonal stage in the US (Image by Alamy)" /> This character visited children on Christmas Eve, left presents in their hanging stockings, and travelled in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. Whether this reflected folk traditions that were already in evidence or newly invented them for its young readers – it was probably a bit of both – the age of Santa had arrived. Almost immediately, his public profile was boosted by the 1823 publication – initially anonymous – of a poem that is still very familiar to us today: Clement Clarke Moore’s A Visit from St Nicholas. Though that title called him by his older name, the newspaper in which it appeared introduced the verses as a “description of that unwearied patron of children… Sante Claus”. Moore’s timing was perfect: soon the poem became an emblem of a new kind of domestic Christmas centred on the family, the home and the excitement of children waiting for their stockings to be filled by a magical visitor. In the US, it did much to spread the legend of Santa Claus to eager young ears. “Just think of it!” exclaimed an American commentator in 1875. “Until we had heard or read this, we didn’t know much about him.” Read more | The child-eating Christmas Yule Cat: what are the origins of this Icelandic folklore? Over the decades that followed, American writers and artists continued to develop Santa’s backstory, locating his base in the north pole, revealing his workshop of elves, and even giving him a wife. By the middle of the 19th century, Santa Claus’s reach had expanded from his regional base in and around New York to become a ubiquitous figure in American Christmases. “Nobody ever saw him,” as one American described in 1853, “though everybody has heard of him.” Emboldened by such success, Santa looked to expand his empire further still. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1283479122webready-e55e347-e1765964523934.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A picture showing a young bearded man dressed in red and green robes and a red hat, holding a book and plate of fruit in one hand with his other hand held up in the air" title="A c1890 lithograph of Nicholas of Bari, also known as Saint Nicholas of Myra. The US version of Santa Claus can trace his roots to this fourth-century bishop (Image by Getty Images)" /> American influence Then as now, the potent slices of American popular culture that crossed the Atlantic had a profound effect on the seasonal behaviour of the young – not to mention their demands on parents – in Britain. Slowly but surely, Santa Claus gained a foothold in the Old World, his legend disseminated in popular literature. Reprints of Moore’s poem were certainly circulating in Britain by the 1850s, and probably earlier. Published in the Illustrated London News in 1855, it was accompanied by some useful advice for British children looking to emulate their American counterparts: “Before going to bed, the children hang their newest stockings near the chimney, or pin them to the curtains of the bed. Midnight finds a world of hosiery waiting for favours; and the only wonder is that a single Santa Klaus can get around among them all.” One American book, now largely forgotten, seems to have had a particular impact on the profile of Santa Claus in Britain. Sisters Susan and Anna Warner shot to fame in 1850 when the former published The Wide, Wide World, one of the bestselling books of the 19th century. Hundreds of thousands of British readers read of its heroine, Ellen Montgomery, hanging up her stocking for Santa at Christmas-time – and perhaps emulated her hopeful act. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/PC600Mwebready-f75c38f-e1765965239337.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration showing three small children in white gowns, hanging a stocking from a fireplace" title="A c1870 illustration for Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, which disseminated the idea of hanging up stockings in the US. The poem had made its way to Britain by the 1850s (Image by Alamy)" /> Even more significant was the sisters’ 1853 story Carl Krinken; or, a Christmas Stocking. The tale of a poor young American boy visited by Santa Claus one Christmas Eve, it seems to have captivated a generation of young Victorians. Looking back to her mid-century childhood, British writer Sarah Tooley recalled that the Warners’ book did more than anything “to popularise the visits of Santa Claus in our own country”; when British children read the story of Carl’s adventures, it “caught their imagination, and ‘St Nick’ is now almost as popular in London as in New York”. New British editions of the book were still being produced in the closing years of the 19th century. As early as 1856, reviewing the transformations of Christmas celebrations over the previous decade or so, one Birmingham newspaper marvelled that Christmas stockings were already an established part of the season, “for Santa-Claus has had the temerity to scale the wooden walls of old England, of late years”. Having scaled those walls, Santa became a familiar presence in British Christmases for the remaining years of the 19th century. As the London Evening Standard judged in 1861, “the children of England may be pleased with the advent of Santa Claus”. Even as late as 1896, a writer for the Manchester Courier declared: “I do think that Santa Claus is the most beautiful myth which ever comes into our lives.” So, when Victorian children hung up their stockings, it was Santa Claus that they expected to fill them. Not that Father Christmas retreated entirely in the face of Santa’s celebrity. He increasingly appeared on cards and in magazine illustrations as an embodiment of the festive season. In the late 19th century, at least, there was clearly room for both figures in the landscape of British Christmas celebrations. In 1876, for example, the Darlington & Richmond Herald found space in its account of the coming “Christmastide” for a tribute to both “Old Father Christmas” as the incarnation of the “merry season” and the American newcomer who had become a central part of domestic celebrations: “We envy not the home where the Christmas stocking… is not an established institution and Santa Claus one of the patron saints of the children’s calendar.” Read more | How to host a medieval Christmas Blurred figures It wasn’t long, though, before the outlines of these defined figures, with their distinctive roles, began to blur and merge. Even in the 1880s, Father Christmas was sometimes named as the figure who filled festive stockings. The shadow of war and a growing jingoism seems to have sped up that process, and national tensions found their way into Christmas debates. In 1912, one rather confused memoirist, looking back to his childhood in the mid-19th century, declared: “I am glad to say that in those days people knew nothing (at any rate, they knew nothing in our part of England) about such German things as ‘Christmas Trees’, or such German saints as ‘Santa Claus’. Our Christmas presents were found in stockings, and put there by Father Christmas.” He was taken to task for this assertion by a correspondent to Notes & Queries magazine, who attempted to set the record straight. “I am as John Bullish as may be but I do not remember finding any gifts in my youthful socks or stockings,” they wrote, “and have an impression that my first introduction to the contemplation of such cornucopias was in the pages of an American story-book.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-90018255webready-9d925e7-e1765964970850.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An American Christmas card printed at the turn of the 20th century depicts Santa Claus as we still know him today – sporting a red outfit with fluffy white trimming, driving a sleigh loaded with presents and drawn by flying reindeer (Image by Getty Images)" title="An American Christmas card printed at the turn of the 20th century depicts Santa Claus as we still know him today – sporting a red outfit with fluffy white trimming, driving a sleigh loaded with presents and drawn by flying reindeer (Image by Getty Images)" /> Such memories soon faded, though, and by 1933 one newspaper laid out a deceptively simple answer to the question of who exactly stuffed British stockings: “Here we call him Father Christmas, in America he is Santa Claus.” The patriotic preference for a home-grown gift-bringer was, at least temporarily, in the ascendancy. Since then, the pair have been locked in a struggle for Britain’s stockings. If Father Christmas’s status rose in the 20th century, Santa Claus has clearly made inroads into the psyche of Britain’s children in recent decades; apparently, he has even gained a narrow lead this century. However, even the most ardent Father Christmas fanatic shouldn’t panic about this apparent Americanisation of British culture. Arriving from across the Atlantic at the precise moment that our modern Christmas was taking shape in the Victorian era, Santa Claus should be considered as much a part of our traditional celebrations as Christmas trees, Christmas crackers, Christmas cards – and good old Father Christmas himself. In the spirit of the season, let’s call a truce between these jovial icons. This yuletide, if you really want to honour festive tradition, raise a glass to Father Christmas in thanks for your family’s feast and the blessings of the season – but make sure to hang out your stocking for Santa Claus. Thomas Ruys Smith is professor of American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia. His new book is Searching for Santa Claus (Boiler House Press, November 2025)
Tudor childhood: what were children's lives like in the 16th century?
In the fourth episode of her HistoryExtra Academy series Tudor Life, social historian Ruth Goodman explains what would have been expected of children in the 16th century, and how they were viewed by their elders
On location at Plas Mawr – an Elizabethan townhouse in Conwy, North Wales, now in the care of Cadw – social historian Ruth Goodman takes us inside the experiences of childhood in the Tudor era, from learning and early schoolhouses to how much they were expected to help in the home. View Green Video on the source website Enjoyed this video? Ruth is hosting a live Q&A for HistoryExtra members on 19 November 2025 at 7pm (GMT). Find out more here Want more from Ruth? Find more episodes of Tudor life here Ruth Goodman is a historian of the social and domestic life of Britain. She has advised the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Globe Theatre and presented a number of BBC television series, including Victorian Farm
Swings and roundabouts: a history of Britain's playgrounds
We all have childhood memories of playgrounds. But what does the evolution of outdoor play in Britain tell us about the experience of being young over the past 200 years? Jon Winder serves up a history of sandpits, bombsites and battles with cars
A pub might seem a strange place to begin a history of Britain’s playgrounds. Yet in June 1858, Charles Dickens delivered a speech at the London Tavern in Bishopsgate Street that, he hoped, would transform the lives of children across the imperial capital. As the guests dined on seasonal delicacies and fine wines, Dickens gave an impassioned plea on behalf of the Playground and Recreation Society, an organisation that had been established just a few months earlier with the express aim of providing “playgrounds for poor children in populous places”. To the accompaniment of music laid on by the band of the 1st Life Guards, the celebrated author extolled the benefits that having a “playground near to their own dwellings where they knew their children would be safe” conferred on parents. “I venture to assert that there can be no physical health without play; and there can be no efficient and satisfactory work without play; that there can be no sound and wholesome thought without play,” he declared. It was a powerful argument, and one to which Dickens’ audience evidently listened – for, by the end of the following year, the Recreation Grounds Act had made its way into law. Henceforth, local authorities across the land would be allowed to create and own playgrounds for children and young people. It marked a turning point in British children’s access to play. Or did it? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-1300568438cmyk-2620726.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white photograph showing. group of children playing in a playground on a concrete housing estate" title="Children play in London’s Lisson Green estate in 1973. Since the Victorian era, playgrounds have been seen as vital to young Britons’ physical and moral development (Image by Getty Images)" /> The new legislation – and Dickens’ high-profile support – could have been a Big Bang moment for the playground movement in Britain. But, despite celebrity endorsement, political backing and widespread publicity, by 1860 the Playground Society had collapsed in a heap. It had amassed considerable debts – largely from putting on extravagant fundraising dinners. More damningly still, it had failed to create a single space in which London’s children could play. Read more | From slums to suburbs: Britain’s council house revolution The movement was hardly in full swing elsewhere, either. While dedicated play space was set aside in Salford and Manchester in the 1840s, unaccompanied children were barred from entering some city parks – notably Saltaire Park in Bradford – altogether. This sorry Dickensian tale contrasts starkly with the state of play in modern Britain. Fast-forward to 2025 and you’ll find more than 26,000 children’s playgrounds in cities, towns and villages across the UK. And while the best efforts of Britain’s great novelist failed to save the Playground Society from financial disaster, today more than £85m is spent on maintaining playgrounds each and every year. No one’s arguing that playground provision in modern Britain is perfect. Far from it. In fact, it’s a live debate as to whether playgrounds remain the best places for our children to be playing in the 21st-century city at all. However, one thing can’t be doubted. And that’s that to tell the story of the British playground is also to shine a light on what it’s meant to be a child in this country over the past 200 years. Pollution and disease Of course, child’s play didn’t begin with the Victorians. Archaeologists have discovered rag balls from ancient Egypt and sculptures of playing children from ancient Greece. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s remarkable Children’s Games (1560) depicts more than 200 children playing in 80 different ways. We know that most Victorian working-class children played outside, often in the streets close to home. Although children and their families faced many difficulties at this time – including overcrowding, pollution and disease – finding places to play and friends to play with was rarely an issue. As more children spent their day in education rather than work, there was also more time to play after school, too. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-3425260cmyk-WL-2ead018.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Two children ride bikes on a fake road" title="Children learn the highway code in a traffic playground in north London, 1947. Playgrounds loomed large in postwar town planners’ thinking – a fact that was reflected in their growing sophistication (Image by Getty Images)" /> And yet social elites and urban reformers increasingly imagined the street as a bad place to play, long before cars were common on British roads. For William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, poor city children had a “miserable subsistence” and their play was “curtailed to the running gutter”. For housing reformer Octavia Hill, children learnt “lessons of evil” while playing in streets and alleys. In response to this growing sense of disquiet, the elaborately named Metropolitan Public Garden, Boulevard and Playground Association was founded in 1882 and became the leading advocate for children’s playgrounds in the late 19th century. But could it succeed where the Playground Society had failed? The association was concerned by the “pale faces, stunted figures, debilitated forms, narrow chests, and all the outward signs of a low vital power” that it saw in urban working-class children. To address these alleged physical imperfections, it set out to create “a children’s playground divided into two portions, one for boys and one for girls, both supplied with gymnastic apparatus” within a quarter of a mile of every working-class home. Strong and healthy children would, after all, create more effective and efficient factory workers, soldiers and sailors. By the early 1890s, the association had spent more than £14m in today’s money on upwards of 50 open spaces, including 20 with children’s gymnasiums. In Southwark, Little Dorrit’s Playground – named after the eponymous star of one of Charles Dickens’ most celebrated novels – cost the equivalent of £2.4m to buy and kit out. Such spaces bore little resemblance to the playgrounds we know today. The separate areas for boys and girls reflected the inequitable gender norms of the time. And they were fitted with equipment that we would probably associate with Olympic gymnastics, including parallel bars, vaulting horses and gymnastic rings. At Spa Fields playground in Clerkenwell, a large gravel area doubled as a parade ground for local army reservists. Whatever the expectations of adults, children seem to have enjoyed using such spaces. On a visit to a playground in 1896, the campaigner Isabella Holmes described a boy “whose clothes were literally dropping to pieces… and he twisted himself about on the handle swings, putting his toes through the handles, and performing all sorts of gyrations which many a well-fed boy, clad in the best of flannels, would have given his all to be able to accomplish”. While children had been busy playing, by the early 20th century adult attitudes to playground design were beginning to change. For the author Annesley Kenealy, writing in 1907, the “pitilessly meagre surroundings” of most children’s gymnasiums did little to protect children from the “unwholesome sights and sounds of a sordid, huckstering, fetid slum street”. Better playgrounds were needed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/12079707-cmyk-WL-dfaf616.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="6 children play in the wreckage of a building. The boy in the front is looking directly into the camera, smiling" title="Children in the rubble of demolished houses in Hulme, Manchester, 1965. One study found that many youngsters preferred to play beyond the playground – even if there was one available to them (Image by Mary Evans)" /> Not fit to fight? Such calls coincided with concern during the First World War about unfit conscripts and juvenile delinquency on the home front. Wartime investigations into the health and wellbeing of mothers and children concluded that a playground close to home was essential for a child’s proper physical and moral development. Voluntary organisations, philanthropists, municipal parks departments and commercial manufacturers all responded enthusiastically in the interwar period. The National Playing Fields Association became an important advocate and funder of children’s playgrounds across the country. With King George V as its patron, and regular funding appeals on BBC Radio, the NPFA had considerable success in promoting the playground cause. This cause was given greater urgency by the growing number of children being killed by cars. In fact, such was the death toll that street play was increasingly regarded as unacceptable. One coroner investigating the death of three toddlers observed that it was “not fair to drivers that parents should allow their children to play in the street”. The NPFA even campaigned against the temporary closure of streets to enable safer play, preferring instead to encourage children into playgrounds. By the 1930s, there were nearly 50 playgrounds managed by the London County Council in the capital, with 26 in Manchester and many more elsewhere. The burgeoning demand for equipment saw manufacturing companies adapt their production lines. The entrepreneur and inventor who had the greatest impact on this development was Charles Wicksteed. Read more | “Leisure was built into the whole shopping experience” | Annie Gray on the history of the high street On the back of earlier commercial success, Wicksteed created a public park in his home town of Kettering in Northamptonshire. Disappointed that so few children visited, he decided to make it a more exciting place to play. And so he designed a raft of products inspired by Edwardian amusement park rides in Great Yarmouth and Blackpool. These included the joy wheel (an early roundabout), the jazz swing (commonly known as a plank swing today), the ocean wave (witch’s hat) and large wooden slides. A progressive liberal, Wicksteed hoped to create healthy, happy and free childhoods. Girls and boys, children and adults were all welcome to play together in the Wicksteed Park playground. Writing in 1929, he suggested that “the poor little gutter-children with all their hardships, playing with mud in freedom, are far happier than many well-to-do children under the perfect control and sad dullness and weariness of a too-much-ordered life”. His playground equipment was designed to be so robust that children could play with it however they liked. And we’re not just talking British children. Soon, municipalities from across the globe were placing orders with the Northamptonshire entrepreneur. In fact, by the late 1930s, Wicksteed’s company had equipped more than 4,000 playgrounds – from South Africa to Hong Kong and Venezuela to the tiny South Atlantic island of St Helena. Wicksteed’s advocacy and wider shifts in social values meant that few playgrounds were segregated by gender by the late 1930s. But playgrounds now looked the same, no matter where they were in the world. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-1414384444cmyk-aa9a638.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Children play on a large wooden climbing frame in a park. In the foreground, two children play in a sandpit" title="Children at play in St John’s Wood, 1962. While many playgrounds now sought to promote creativity and self-expression, sandpits (like the one in the foreground) remained a perennial favourite (Image by Getty Images)" /> Natural evolution Back in Britain, swings, slides and roundabouts became an essential feature of efforts to redevelop British towns and cities in the mid-20th century. Slum clearance schemes, including those in Caryl Gardens in Liverpool and Quarry Hill in Leeds, positioned the playground at the centre of new blocks of flats. Sites requisitioned or damaged during the Second World War were also put back into playful use. Paddington Recreation Ground had been repurposed as a municipal piggery during the war, producing more than 300 tonnes of meat. It was reopened in 1948 by Field Marshal Montgomery with manufactured play equipment, a paddling pool and a sandpit. Town planners working on Plymouth’s reconstruction designed a network of more than 100 playgrounds in public parks and on bomb-damaged sites across the city. The playground explosion may have been a big hit with children but, to many adults, it was a little dull. In fact, in the eyes of some commentators, Britain’s new wave of standardised playgrounds – with their uniform climbing frames and stark tarmac surfaces – were “as bleak as barrack squares and just as boring”. A postwar movement of progressive educationalists, landscape architects and artists, headed by Lady Allen of Hurtwood, envisaged a more fulfilling future for Britain’s outdoor play spaces – and it was one that promoted creativity, self-expression and contact with the natural world. As an experiment, bombsites were converted into adventure playgrounds so that children could build with scrap materials, dig in the mud, nurse fires and tend small gardens. Sculptures, decommissioned steam rollers and immobilised trucks were meant to inspire make believe. Commando playgrounds incorporated tree trunks, suspended tyres and concrete pipes to provide “not only a free and varied outlet for energy but a spur to imagination and invention”. Landscape playgrounds had undulations, banks, trees and bushes as a more naturalistic setting for creative play. In a handful of cities, traffic playgrounds provided playful amusement and taught children about road safety. Children’s responses to these play spaces were seldom recorded. Instead, we must look to the work of sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s to get a sense of how playgrounds were used. One study of nearly 6,000 children found that swings and roundabouts primarily acted as a meeting point for friends and play mates, who then went on to play beyond the playground. Another study showed that more children preferred sandpits and paddling pools over manufactured equipment. Overtaken by the car These doubts about the value of the playground were reinforced by events in the later 20th century. Funding cuts meant that local authorities increasingly found it difficult to maintain play spaces. In 1973, Colin James, the bishop of Stepney, felt that many councils had got their priorities badly wrong, suggesting that “it is not through malice or evil intent I am sure, but they have been overtaken by the motorcar and other matters so that play provision has been left behind”. In the 1980s and 1990s, as social housing and state-run industries were privatised, the children’s playground remained a publicly owned and communally funded place for play – although not without its share of problems. Tabloid and broadsheet newspapers reported on the risk of parasitic infection from the snapping pincers of toxocara canis (dog roundworm) and the threat posed by paedophiles. Further funding cuts meant that many playgrounds became derelict, with the journal Play Times even running a monthly award for the worst playground in the country. Read more | What were the games and pastimes enjoyed by Tudor children? National government has rarely been interested in play provision. But in 2008, £235m was allocated to local authorities across England to improve playground provision. Accompanying guidance, called Design for Play, encouraged councils and designers to think more creatively about play provision. However, the implementation of policies of austerity from 2010 saw funding and guidance withdrawn. Despite periods of neglect, the playground remains an everyday feature of British urban life. This is hardly a surprise given our almost universal – and often nostalgic – experience of using them. Children still enjoy digging in sandpits, the rhythm of the swings, and the trepidation of scaling tall climbing structures. But we must not let this nostalgia mask problems with the playground concept. As the campaign group Make Space for Girls has shown, there is still much to do to ensure public spaces are welcoming to all children and young people. The obsession with playgrounds, often tucked away in the corner of a park, might even be seen as a distraction from wider efforts to create child-friendly towns and cities in which children rather than cars dominate our streets. The long history of the playground helps us to understand how we arrived in the present. But it should not stand in the way of efforts to create inclusive and humane urban environments for the future. Ropes, pulls and a joy wheel Five fixtures of the British playground. But which was your favourite? 1. Swings Children and adults have long swung from ropes tied to the branch of a tree, while ingenious Victorian children fashioned rope swings from lamp posts. More formal swings were often a feature of travelling fairs and circuses. In the 1890s, bylaws for Victoria Park in London limited the cost to 1d a go. 2. Roundabouts Roundabouts evolved from an Edwardian amusement park ride called the joy wheel, and were found in both Great Yarmouth and Blackpool from around 1913. The ride was a polished mechanical disc that used high speed and centrifugal force to dislodge its adult riders. Charles Wicksteed marketed a joy wheel from the 1920s. Costing £40 and made from metal tubes, it was self-propelled, smaller and included plenty of places to hold on. 3. Sandpits German educator Fredrich Froebel promoted the use of indoor sandpits in the classroom from the 1820s. Sand first appeared in Victoria Park, London in 1893 when the park superintendent reported “a novel mode of enjoyment has been provided for the little children of the East End in the form of a sea-sand pit which is apparently much appreciated”. 4. Climbing frames Victorian gymnasiums for children and adults included wooden frames that supported ladders, ropes and poles for climbing. Climbing frames really took off from the 1960s as manufacturers experimented with new materials, including Playstyle’s ‘playcubes’ which comprised a series of interconnected plastic polyhedrons. 5. Slides Slides became a common playground feature in the early 20th century. Initially made from wood, they were soon constructed from metal with safety railings at the top. In the 1920s, a grand ‘joy slide’ was installed in St James’s Churchyard, Bermondsey, paid for by Arthur Carr, owner of the nearby Peek Freans biscuit factory. Dr Jon Winder is a historian of modern Britain at the University of Liverpool This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
"I felt very alone in a world gone horribly mad": the experiences of evacuees in WW2
It was a moment of possibilities, dislocation and dread. Dan Todman tells the story of the 1.5 million urban Britons evacuated to the countryside at the start of the Second World War
It’s October 1939, and an aristocratic couple are discussing how to manage the horde of ill-spoken, slovenly evacuees from the city who have been billeted in their house. Not to worry, the husband tells his wife: bringing the children into a more refined environment will soon civilise the youngsters. Instead, as the sketch plays out on the BBC Home Service, the couple’s lordly airs and graces disappear. It’s the evacuees – sent away from home at the behest of the authorities – who change their hosts, rather than the other way around. It’s a skit that fits with how the story of Second World War evacuation has often been constructed, both at the time and in the years since. Here is a narrative that emphasises a clash of cultures: the rural rich suddenly confronted by the urban poor – a moment replete with topsy-turvy possibilities. But the circumstances around the recording of the sketch itself reveal how evacuation was a much larger and more complex event than this straightforward narrative suggests. Read more | Persuading the people: British propaganda in the Second World War It was performed by a cast of variety performers who had also been evacuated, from London to Bristol. That move was part of the BBC’s own preparations to maintain a schedule of light entertainment to intersperse with the news bulletins and government announcements expected to dominate the airwaves over the first weeks of the war. Seen in this light, the first wave of evacuations was specifically a product of conditions in the autumn of 1939 – but it was also an event that came to have a deep significance in the British folk memory, emblematic of the longer and wider disruptions, separations and anxieties experienced by so many civilians. It was, too, part of a global phenomenon, as states and communities sought to move people out of harm’s way. Thinking about evacuation therefore helps us understand not only Britain’s war, but also a wider human experience – national and local differences notwithstanding – of the impact of mechanised conflict. Pre-emptive action In Britain, three types of evacuation were undertaken: official, organisational and private. Official schemes evacuated children, mothers with infants, pregnant women and disabled adults from cities to locations in the surrounding countryside – so-called ‘reception areas’. These were set in motion on 1 September, once war was imminent but before it had been declared. More of these evacuees came from London than any other single city but, with the exception of Northern Ireland (where evacuation didn’t start until 1940), this was a nationwide phenomenon. In total, more children were evacuated from other conurbations including Greater Manchester, Tyneside and Merseyside, than from the capital. Read more | Guernsey’s child evacuees Schemes were set up to relocate important parts of the state machinery that would run the war, too. The Air Ministry was later sent to Harrogate, the Admiralty to Bath and a new Ministry of Food was based in Colwyn Bay. At the same time, the BBC wasn’t the only organisation that evacuated its staff. Others, including banks, galleries and universities, moved part of or all their operations away from big cities. Meanwhile, many private citizens with the means to do so took it upon themselves to head to the homes of rural relatives or seaside resort hotels. In those first days of September 1939, as many as 3.5 million Britons may have been in transit by train, boat, coach or car. Being evacuated, as well as seeing evacuees depart, travel or arrive, were shared common experiences that lodged in the memories of those involved. As evacuee Donald Wharf recalled: “I will never forget standing, dazed and bemused, on the forecourt of Paddington Station… I also felt very alone in a world gone horribly mad. That was, of course, in spite of the fact that the station was virtually full, mostly with East End evacuees with labels and gas masks like me. But that was the way I felt at the time – maybe some others did too – while lots, who were similar in age to me, just put down their boxes and cried.” Anticipating attacks The rationale for these relocations was simple. There was a widespread expectation that any new conflict might start with a devastating air attack by enemy bombers. Such a raid would inflict all the horrors of the front-line trenches of the First World War – not just high explosives and slicing shards of metal but also choking and blinding gas – on civilian populations. The best way to protect vulnerable people and essential services was to move them out of danger. Such fears substantially overestimated the power of combatant air forces at the outset of the war, but it was the perception of risk that mattered. Had anything close to the worst-case predictions come to pass in Britain, the impact would have been so awful that it might have broken the country’s will to carry on. Local authorities were responsible for planning official schemes for evacuating children, some mothers and vulnerable adults. Teachers and members of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS), the civilian organisation set up under the auspices of the Home Office in 1938 to support civil defence and war work, then implemented these schemes. Local arrangements varied by area – how parents signed up their children to be evacuated, how much form-filling was involved, and how active local government officials were in communicating with families. As part of Britain’s official war history, Richard Titmuss was commissioned to study the effects of evacuation and bombing. In the resulting book, Problems of Social Policy (1950), he suggested that the varying quality of these local arrangements, and the confidence (or lack thereof) they inspired, influenced whether parents registered their children to participate in the scheme. Meanwhile, in the reception areas, WVS billeting officers arranged accommodation for evacuees. Householders with empty bedrooms could be compelled to take in evacuees, but in practice the overwhelming majority volunteered. In return, they were paid an allowance by the government. Most were not owners of stately homes or manor houses. Instead, it was typically lower-middle-class and working-class families who most often offered help. Their willingness to take in evacuees at short notice, creating considerable inconvenience, spoke to a moral acceptance of the obligation to help the needy in a time of national crisis. Unlike the wealthy, however, those of more modest means often lacked the space to separate themselves from evacuees whose manners, lifestyle and expectations were frequently very different from their own. Mass movement In some ways, the official scheme was an extraordinary success. In just a few days it moved around 1.5 million people from urban to reception areas without a single fatality. Had the expected aerial apocalypse arrived, this would have looked like an even greater achievement. Yet those journeys, and the travellers’ experiences on arrival at their destinations, did not feel so orderly to those involved. Most evacuees did not travel far, at least by modern standards. The majority went to rural areas relatively close to their home cities, though some were despatched much further afield. More than 250,000 were billeted in the Home Counties, 73,000 in East Anglia, and almost 57,000 in Wales. However, transport difficulties sometimes turned even journeys that were relatively short in miles into drawn-out tests of endurance. “I remember crying all the way to Wales,” evacuee Beryl Fermor (née Hedges) later wrote. In London, in particular, the pressure to quickly clear mainline stations saw evacuees packed onto trains as they arrived, breaking up school parties and disrupting organisation in reception areas. In some cases, it was weeks before billeting officers and teachers tracked down all their charges. Patriotically eager to bolster morale and reassure parents, journalists conjured up visions of the positive reception evacuees received. Reporting from “somewhere in Buckinghamshire”, the Daily Express painted a picture of women preparing spare rooms and putting “hot water bottles in the beds in which London children would sleep”. In practice, the situation was more varied and often chaotic. In some cases, billeting officers got the children they had been expecting and had already allocated to receiving households, and children were dropped off to their hosts in a process that was brusque but at least efficient. In others, unexpected parties of exhausted evacuees were left in draughty church halls while locals came to choose the ones they’d like. Even when things went well, there were inevitable confusions and complications that compounded the uncertainty and distress. Hostile hosts Some evacuees enjoyed warm welcomes from kind strangers who recognised the novelty and terror of the children’s situation. Having been instructed by his mother to look after his younger sister and “never let go of her hand”, one former evacuee remembered his eight-year-old self watching anxiously as all the other children in their party were found a billet. Every potential host found reasons not to take on two siblings. Finally, however, a married couple arrived who asked how they could help and, when the situation was explained, “without any hesitation they offered to take us both into their home”. Read more | Rationing, school closures and 'Blitz spirit': how did people cope in WW2? Conversely, some evacuees found themselves picked by those grudgingly looking for the least filthy or the most useful for household labour. “In retrospect,” Audrey Demers (née Jones) recalled, “we were treated in a similar fashion to cattle, as the villagers came and looked us over and selected or rejected.” Split up from friends and siblings, some children found themselves living with hosts who were abusive, neglectful or simply unwilling to tolerate for long this strange imposition on their home. Maintaining the dignity and welfare of evacuees in reception areas had been less of a concern in the planning than the need to get people out of the cities quickly. Even judged on these terms, however, the official scheme fell short. Take-up was highly variable. Only about half of London’s eligible schoolchildren were evacuated. In Newcastle, the figure was as high as 70 per cent. In Sheffield, only 15 per cent of those eligible took part. Some families could not organise themselves to meet the timetable of evacuation. Others were unwilling to trust their children to strangers. For many, warnings of the horrors of war only strengthened a protective desire to keep their families together. In the event, the UK did not come under sustained air attack until the summer of 1940 and the Blitz. As a result, adult evacuees soon left the reception areas and families brought their children home. The rate of return varied substantially. Many London children stayed away for the whole war. Conversely, in Clydebank, Scotland, from where more than half of the children had been evacuated in 1939, all but 5 per cent had returned by the end of 1940. They were still there in March 1941 when the Luftwaffe launched catastrophic raids that, according to official figures, left 528 people dead and 617 seriously injured. The initial experience of evacuation often brought differences to the fore. At the household level, the mixing of families in such close proximity inevitably exposed gaps in habits, routine and religion. Clashes of cultures released a flood of rumours in the reception areas – stories that revealed and reinforced class-based and regional prejudices about the urban poor. It was said that dirty children and slatternly mothers had arrived in inadequate and lice-infested clothing. They lazed around billets that were left increasingly filthy by their ill-mannered incontinence, it was claimed, and never contributed to household chores. In an angry Commons debate, Sir Henry Fildes, the Liberal National MP for Dumfriesshire, called evacuation “the dreadful scourge… placed upon the homes of Britain”. Head lice and bed-wetting In practice, the deplorable condition of some evacuees was usually the result of poverty, not preference. Two in five child evacuees from Liverpool and Sunderland, for example, had parents who depended either on out-of-work benefits or on very low incomes. Evacuation came early on a Friday, when wages were most stretched. Many families simply could not afford to kit out their children with new clothes or items on the packing lists supplied by schools. Problems with head lice and bed-wetting were not helped by long journeys on packed trains or by billeting at unfamiliar houses with forbidding hosts. “I can honestly say that we enjoyed being evacuees,” remembered one, almost 65 years later, adding that “we were well treated and obviously loved by our adopted parents.” For him, the experience made a lasting difference. His parents also moved out of London when they were bombed out of their home, and he never returned to the capital. Yet his words indicate that he knew others had not been so fortunate. And evacuees’ experiences did not have to be awful to be painful or to leave a lasting mark. “Home is not where one lives,” said one girl, evacuated from London’s East End to Oxford, “but where one has all the people one loves and knows.” Another evacuee, interviewed at the same time, recalled the differences between their home lives and the repressed respectability of their middle-class hosts, explaining: “I cannot do as I like in the house; I must also come in when I am told and sit down and eat my meals properly and not run out into the street with a slice of bread in my hand.” A third bemoaned the fact that “If we play ball in the streets, a window opens and an old lady puts her head out and starts telling us off.” Mothers' misery Those women who had joined their children on evacuation had a particularly miserable time. Accompanying teachers quickly sought to organise education for school-age children. In contrast, there had been no official preparation to support evacuated mothers. Their presence impinged on the private lives of host families in ways that embarrassed everybody. They had been separated not only from the family groups that formed their closest networks of support, but also from the world of urban leisure – particularly cinemas and dance halls – that offered some temporary respite from the travails of motherhood. Read more | The cruel cost of the Blitz: how did everyday Britons rebuild their lives? Devon’s Inspector of Education reported that the lack of space and privacy created “a very bad psychological disturbance for both mothers and children. They become difficult, the children cry and are irritable, and the nervous energy of the mother is sapped. Sometimes she punishes them for nothing at all and at others she is over-indulgent and sentimental.” Yet if women sought to go out, they often had to traipse the streets idly or risk further condemnation for moral lassitude. Given all this, it was little wonder that mothers returned home quicker and in larger proportions than any other evacuees. Those providing accommodation didn’t have it much easier. Having offered their homes in a crisis, they found themselves committed to sharing space with evacuees with whom they might have little in common, for the duration of a war that, the government made plain, would probably last for years. Even those for whom this proved a joyous experience found it demanding – not least because the value of the allowance they received from the government was rapidly eroded by the pace of early war inflation. A phenomenon so large inevitably involved a full range of human characteristics. There were good and bad hosts among those opening up their homes, just as there were good and bad evacuees. While acknowledging the worst and the best behaviour, we also need to recognise the stoic tolerance of the majority who just tried to get by. Second World War evacuations across Europe and Asia The UK was not the only country in which civilians were evacuated – or evacuated themselves Japanese aggression during the Sino-Japanese war (starting 1937) forced 60 million people to flee their homes in China. Evacuating industries, ministries and civilians to the west became a key part of the Chinese Nationalist government’s strategy to survive the war. When fighting broke out in Europe in September 1939, France and Germany both evacuated civilians from areas on each side of their shared border in anticipation of military operations – although, just as in the UK, the lull in action over the winter of 1939–40 encouraged some to return. The surging tide of Axis military victories in 1940–42 spurred enormous waves of mass flight. The 9 million Belgian and French refugees who took to their country’s roads and railways in May–June 1940 offered a frightening vision of social dissolution and encouraged other states to put more effort into controlling population movements. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, one of the most violent but impressive state-organised evacuations of the conflict saw the core of the Soviet war industry relocated from the path of Axis forces and rebuilt beyond the Urals. In Malaya (now part of Malaysia), Burma (Myanmar) and India. Meanwhile, the chaotic efforts to manage the flood of refugees from Japanese advances after 1941 further delegitimised British colonial rule. Allied success in reversing early Axis victories depended on massive aerial and ground campaigns that forced evacuation and refugee flight. Through an expanding programme that came to include mothers as well as children, Germany evacuated millions of its urban inhabitants from the threat of Allied bombing and the advance of the Red Army. In France, occupation authorities required non-essential civilians to leave fortified coastal towns. As the fighting fronts swept back through Europe and Asia, millions fled the demolishing force of the ground campaigns. Events at the end of the conflict, including the territorial settlements, ethnic cleansing and politically violent nation-building that underpinned the post-1945 order, displaced still more people. There were many differences between the experiences of those in flight – what forced them to move, who organised their departure, and whether they could ever return. But there were also commonalities – physical relocation, tensions with those receiving them, and a sense of powerlessness. The experience of evacuees in Britain was distinct, but it was far from unique – and indeed more common than the stories of combatants. Altogether, about 175 million people became refugees because of the conflict – far more than were mobilised into all of the militaries and munitions factories. This was an unprecedented scale of simultaneous popular displacement, involving about 8 per cent of everyone alive on the planet at the time. Clearing the coast There were further waves of evacuation – officially organised and otherwise – later in the war. Following the fall of France in June 1940, the new proximity of German air bases and the threat of invasion sparked schemes to evacuate coastal cities. And after the start of concentrated German night-time bombing raids on British cities in September 1940, fresh rounds of urban evacuations were organised, both pre-emptively before the raids and afterwards to relocate those who had been bombed out. Uptake rates on later schemes were lower than in 1939. Only in 1944 did evacuation on a similar scale occur. That summer, as London was ravaged by V1 flying bombs, more than a million people temporarily left the capital, including 307,000 children and mothers. This time the danger was immediate and real, but once again few people stayed away long. Most returned even before the government declared that it was safe to do so. Read more | The dangers of the Blitz spirit By that point, evacuation had already been the subject of numerous publications. Even as it was ongoing, the process was being narrated back to the British people by journalists, commentators and comedians. It was also analysed by social scientists and, inevitably, co-opted by politicians eager to establish their own version of what the war should mean. The public discussion that followed demonstrated the widespread appeal of the idea that the conflict ought to lead to societal change, but also the persistence of older ideas – notably the urban-rural divide and the alleged irresponsibility of the poor. The potency of both radical and conservative narratives was such that even today, when we think about what evacuation might have meant, they can colour our thinking. In truth, what evacuation meant to those who experienced it very much depended on their individual experiences. Dan Todman is professor of modern history at Queen Mary University of London. His books include Britain’s War: A New World, 1942–1947 (Allen Lane, 2020) This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
From murder bottles to arsenic wallpaper: 5 hidden killers in Victorian Britain
The Victorian era is often romanticised as a time of progress, with technological advancements and societal changes reshaping how people lived and worked. But Victorian Britain was also full of hidden dangers that threatened the health and safety of its inhabitants – and the domestic sphere was rife with hazards that could kill or seriously harm. Here, we round up five hidden killers in the Victorian home…
Back-breaking back-to-backs While wealthier Victorians enjoyed spacious homes with servants to cater to their needs, working class people lived in cramped, badly ventilated, and often poorly constructed houses. Many families were packed into back-to-backs – small, terraced dwellings which had party walls on three of their four sides. Many of these properties had just a single room on each floor and only one window, on the front wall. Staircases could be steep and narrow – not ideal for multiple young children squeezing past one another or women wearing long flowing skirts. These cramped houses offered little privacy and even less comfort for the families that lived in them. The walls were often damp and prone to mould, contributing to respiratory problems. Toilet and water supplies were located outside and usually shared with multiple households – meaning disease and illness could spread quickly. The houses were typically so crammed together that sunlight – with its bacteria and virus-killing properties – would rarely reach the inside. WATCH | Ruth Goodman on what life was like in Victorian Britain View Green Video on the source website Water woes Water could be a huge health hazard in Victorian Britain, especially in poorer households. Most working-class homes didn’t have running water, relying instead on wells or communal pumps for drinking and cleaning. If a water source became contaminated with bacteria, disease and illness could sweep through communities. Four major outbreaks of cholera between 1832 and 1866, caused by contaminated drinking water, ravaged London communities – and led to the death of tens of thousands of people. Read more | The Broad Street cholera outbreak: how bad was it and how was it contained? In 1854, the physician John Snow began mapping incidences of deaths due to cholera and noted the deceased were mostly people whose nearest access to water was a water pump located in Broad Street, Soho. The well was disabled and the outbreak ended. It was a groundbreaking moment in public health history, highlighting the need for better sanitation and a greater awareness of how disease is spread. Poisonous products Victorian homes were filled to the brim with products that we would now recognise as extremely hazardous. Safety regulations were virtually non-existent, and many everyday household items contained toxic chemicals. Wallpaper, cosmetics, and even children’s toys were all known to have contained dangerous substances such as lead and arsenic. Read more | Arsenic: a brief history of Agatha Christie's favourite murder weapon While today we recognise that certain household products are toxic – bleach for example – we make sure that they are clearly identified and labelled as such. In the Victorian period, such products were often sold in unassuming packaging, meaning they could wrongly be mistaken for other non-toxic items. This could have disastrous consequences; in September 1888, the Aberdeen Evening Express reported that 13 people had been poisoned by carbolic acid – a common household item at the time – and five of these people died. It wasn’t until 1902 that the Pharmacy Act made it illegal for dangerous chemicals to be sold in bottles shaped similarly to ordinary liquids. Murderous milk bottles In the 19th century, the seemingly innocent baby feeding bottle became a chilling symbol of danger, earning the grim moniker ‘murder bottle’. Designed to make infant feeding more convenient, these bottles often featured a rubber tube attached to a glass or ceramic vessel, allowing milk to be sucked directly by the baby. However, their design made them nearly impossible to clean effectively. Milk residue would quickly spoil, creating a breeding ground for harmful bacteria. Combined with poor hygiene practices and a lack of understanding that germs caused disease, these bottles frequently caused fatal infections in infants. Tragically, the widespread use of these deadly devices contributed to high infant mortality rates. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-514910408-ca423f2.jpg" width="2919" height="3247" alt="A baby sucks contentedly from his glass milk bottle in 1892. Such bottles earned themselves the nickname 'murder bottles' due to their difficulty to clean and the bacteria they harboured. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="A baby sucks contentedly from his glass milk bottle in 1892. Such bottles earned themselves the nickname 'murder bottles' due to their difficulty to clean and the bacteria they harboured. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> Lethal lighting Gas lighting was a hallmark of modernity in Victorian homes, illuminating spaces more brightly than candles or oil lamps. Yet beneath its warm glow lay a multitude of dangers. The systems, powered by coal gas, were prone to leaks. What’s more, gas pipes and fittings often degraded over time or were improperly installed, releasing toxic gases like carbon monoxide into the air. The popular image of a Victorian lady fainting is as likely to have been due to lack of oxygen caused by gas lighting as an overly tight corset! Additionally, the presence of combustible gas in enclosed spaces created a significant fire and explosion risk. Even the routine lighting of a gas lamp could be fraught with danger – improperly adjusted burners could cause flaring or accidents, and if a flame came into contact with a leaking gas pipe, the results could be catastrophic. Many Victorian newspapers carried harrowing accounts of fatal explosions caused by gas accumulations in confined spaces, with entire buildings sometimes destroyed.
Victorian education and school | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture
It was in the Victorian period that school shifted to becoming a more universal experience. Ruth Goodman explores the Ragged school movement, the social mobility that schooling offered and how the classroom was a different experience depending on whether you were a boy or a girl
View Green Video on the source website Were you paying attention? Now test your knowledge with our Victorian education quiz! Ruth Goodman is a historian of the social and domestic life of Britain. She has advised the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Globe Theatre and presented a number of BBC television series, including Victorian Farm
Week three quiz: education and school in Victorian Britain
Test your knowledge on what school and education was like in Victorian Britain with our quiz...
Watch our video lecture with Ruth Goodman on what education and school was like in Victorian Britain – and test your knowledge below with our quiz! View Riddle on the source website
Class warfare: a day in the life of a Victorian schoolchild
Victorian schools could be ideological battlegrounds, where harassed teachers did their best against a backdrop of grinding poverty. Ellie Cawthorne and Susannah Wright study an era's education
The 4th of May 1899 was not a good day for the head-teacher of St Mark’s School in Leicester. Less than two weeks into her job, she recorded in her school logbook an incident that had begun with the caning of a boy for lying and disobedience. Revolting against his punishment, the boy had started “flinging himself about”, before kicking her and even threatening her with “a clasp knife open in his hand”. To make matters worse, the child’s mother had arrived at the school to castigate the head-teacher in “abusive and threatening language” before demanding that magistrates investigate the school’s conduct. While incidents like this led to lengthy logbook entries, most school days in Victorian Britain were not so dramatic. But daily life in the elementary school classroom was often a battleground between idealistic educationalists, governmental interlopers, struggling parents and hard-pressed teachers. Not to mention the children. Over the course of the 19th century, a patchwork of school systems operated across the country, and the experience of learning in one classroom could be very different from the next. Those who could afford the small fee might attend local parish or church schools. Another alternative, for those willing to embrace a more informal approach to education, were privately run ‘dame schools’ that operated out of local teachers’ homes. From 1833 onwards, child labourers were supposed to receive schooling from their employers under the Factory Act, while those found homeless or begging might be sent to tough industrial schools to learn a trade. Another option for those unable to fund their own education was schools established by charitable organisations. Most notable were the so-called ‘ragged schools’, formed in 1844 to offer free education to Britain’s poorest children. By the 1870s, there were around 350 such institutions across the country, which (in the words of Charles Dickens) “stretch[ed] out a hand” to those children “too ragged, wretched, filthy and forlorn to enter any other place”. For many of these children, just making it to school each morning was an achievement in itself. “I generally find the same parents frequently keep their children away from school on the most trivial and frivolous excuses,” stated the headmaster of Willow Street School, Leicester, in 1883. However, for many poor families, truancy was far from ‘frivolous’ – it was an economic necessity. A child attending school often meant the household losing an income. Records show that girls were more likely to miss school than their brothers – in families that couldn’t cope, they would be the first to be hauled back home to help out. Truancy levels also rocketed when seasonal work was available. Birmingham’s Floodgate Street School recorded a rise in absences over the Christmas period, when several students were found hawking “Xmas novelties” on the streets rather than in the classroom. Not having winter boots to walk to school in was another often-cited reason for absence. By 1880, however, the Elementary Education Act had made school attendance compulsory, meaning that specially appointed officers could slap parents with fines and even threaten them with prosecution. As such, attendance and punctuality became central components of ‘good behaviour’ – in 1892, the pupils of Floodgate Street who weren’t out peddling festive wares were rewarded for their good attendance with a trip to see the whale skeleton at Curzon Hall. Those who did make it to the school gates each morning were not necessarily ready to learn. Many children were on the ‘half-time system’, which allowed them to fit schooling in alongside work. This relentless schedule undoubtedly took its toll on young learners – teachers frequently recorded concerns about children arriving already exhausted after a long shift at work. Humanist FJ Gould (the self-described “most restless teacher in London”) recalled the boys at his school in Limehouse turning up “poor, ill-nourished and frequently shoeless”. National pride Bells marking the beginning of the school day rang at different times across Britain. With evening and weekend sessions employed to fit in alongside working hours, there was no universal starting time. At Hampton Industrial School in Middlesex in 1862, students arrived from 9am, ready for lessons in scripture to begin at 9.15am sharp. At the National Society’s Central Boys’ School in London, the school day started when the “doors shut at nine o’clock”. According to an 1845 timetable, each morning there began with “prayers and singing”, swiftly followed by “catechism with analysis and scripture proofs”. Religion was a key element of every school day. Expectations of biblical knowledge were high – unattainably so, critics thought. FJ Gould bemoaned having to interrogate “half-starved” children on complex theological questions, while Dickens criticised ragged schools for “presenting too many religious mysteries and difficulties to minds not sufficiently prepared for their reception”. Religious wellbeing was not the only moral instruction children were expected to take away from their lessons. As fears spread that urbanisation and industrialisation were breaking down the social bonds of Britain's communities, schools were seen as a way to re-civilise the next generation, teaching them lessons of cleanliness and discipline that they could carry back to their homes. 'Readers' intended to aid literacy contained patriotic and imperialistic messages. One of the books found most frequently in elementary classrooms was HO Arnold-Forster's The Citizen Reader. First published in 1885, it extolled to children "the duties owed by British citizens to their country, their countrymen and themselves", warning that those "who really love their country, and are truly proud of its great history, will be particularly careful not to do anything by which it may be dishonoured". The classrooms in which these lessons took place varied as much as the schools themselves. In the early 19th-century, many schools were run on a monitorial system – in which all children were massed in one large hall, to be taught in small groups by older pupils. By the middle of the century, classrooms as we might recognise them had begun to emerge. Classes of up to 40 pupils were not uncommon, and sizes could stretch to 80 during staff shortages. As there were no set ages for entering and leaving the education system, classes would be organised according to ability, rather than age, in a system known as ‘standards’. If possible, girls and boys would be separated (gendered entrances were a common architectural feature in purpose-built schools), but resources often simply didn’t extend far enough. When it came to health and safety, many classrooms would not have won over Ofsted. Inspectors commented on overcrowding, poor heating and a lack of ventilation. In 1843, Charles Dickens visited Field Lane Ragged School in Clerkenwell, and found "two or three miserable rooms upstairs in a miserable house… The close low chamber, in which the boys were crowded, was so foul and stifling as to be, at first, almost insupportable." What Dickens saw that day left such an impression on him that he wrote an appeal in The Daily News for better school funding. Community centres By 12pm, pupils at the Central Boys’ School and Hampton Industrial School were ready for lunch. With schools generally placed in the centre of communities, pupils would usually be given a long lunch break (up to two hours) in order to head home for food. Although free lunches were not provided on a national scale until the early 20th century, food would sometimes be donated by charitable organisations, or even teachers themselves. This demonstrated the important welfare role that a school could play in a poor community. Social reformer Charles Booth declared that “each school stands up from its playground like a church in God’s acre ringing its bell”. When the girls of Hampton Industrial School returned to the classroom after their lunch break, a monotonous afternoon stretched out ahead of them – devoted entirely to needlework. Vocational subjects were mainstays of industrial schools. These would often be divided according to gender – while girls studied sewing and later cooking, boys might be offered commercially orientated drawing, or woodwork. At the National Society’s Central Boys’ School, afternoon lessons resumed at 2pm, and had a more academic bent, including “reading miscellaneous books”, “writing on slates”, and “arithmetic from blackboard”. Alongside religious studies, the ‘three Rs’ were the backbone of most school programmes. While idealistic reformers preached the benefits of literacy and numeracy for personal development, other theories were swirling beneath the desire to educate the next generation. From the mid-19th century, much of the discussion around elementary schooling focused not on opportunities for children, but on Britain’s industrial capacity. Commentators fretted that European competitors were gaining the upper hand, and one way of countering the threat was to produce a better-skilled workforce. In 1870, industrialist WE Forster introduced the Education Act in parliament by declaring: “Upon the speedy provision of elementary education depends our industrial prosperity.” The act extended funding for school building and aimed to guarantee school places for all children aged between five and thirteen. All of these lofty governmental ambitions had a direct impact on life in the classroom. From 1862, government grants were offered for each child who passed an inspection in reading, writing and arithmetic. In this 'payment by results' system, schools could receive an extra eight shillings per child who passed – a financial reward that had a direct impact on teacher salaries. Critics accused the new system of fostering a frenzied culture of exam obsession, as well as over emphasising the three Rs. Parliament debated the 'overpressure controversy', and medics were called in to assess the physical and mental state of overstretched pupils. Writing to The Schoolmaster newspaper in 1880, FJ Gould admitted: "When one of my backward boys died of bronchitis a few weeks back I felt a measure of relief, for his death would make one failure the less." He later reflected: “The test was applied to all children alike – clever, average or crass. Hence the teachers worried, bullied, caned and ‘kept in’ after school hours. Scholars and teachers were miserable. To the souls of millions of children, this system brought a slavery as grim as the bodily slavery introduced by the industrial revolution of the 18th century.” One method of raising classroom standards was to enforce stricter discipline. The stereotype of corporal punishment in the Victorian school is all too familiar. Take the hypocritical schoolmaster Mr Brocklehurst in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, advocating his teachers to "punish her [Jane's] body to save her soul", or Nicholas Nickleby's sadistic Mr Squeers, who relentlessly persecutes the boys under his charge before receiving a highly cathartic comeuppance. Yet while physical punishment of children was both legal and widely accepted at home and even in the street, these literary depictions of schools terrorised by merciless cane-wielding masters were not universally accurate. In fact, overuse of corporal punishment was seen as a sign of failing to maintain classroom control. One headmaster in 1887 wrote that a staff member who was over-zealous with the cane had "great obstacles to overcome in class", and from the 1890s, it became standard practice to record all punishments in a book, to be checked by inspectors. Teachers noted that the most effective forms of punishment were often non-physical, especially those that involved an element of 'naming and shaming' – whether that meant a child wearing a dunce's hat or a sign around their neck. Fascination and boredom By the 1890s, reforms to the restrictive ‘payment by results’ system meant that those wishing to broaden the minds of their young charges could increasingly afford to venture into subjects such as geography, science and history. Much like today, whether these lessons would inspire fascination or boredom was largely down to the teacher. While inspectors criticised a master at Slater Street School in Leicester for delivering lessons “taken from the syllabus with little lively instruction”, others like FJ Gould attempted to inspire their pupils with storytelling and excursions to museums and galleries. Lessons at the Central Boys’ School reached an end at 4.45pm. After more prayers and singing, books and slates were collected and the boys sent on their way. By the time they left the public school system for good, pupils aged 12 (the minimum leaving age from 1899) and above were expected to reach the ‘fourth level’ – requiring them to write dictated phrases with fewer than three spelling mistakes, read with fluency and expression, recite eight lines of poetry and answer maths problems. For many children, however, it was not the academic lessons that stayed with them the most. As Arthur Goffin, a typesetter’s son born in 1879, recalled: “We were taught direction and guidance, and acquired soundness, contentment, control and stability... [Our teacher] had always something beyond the textbook for us, and drove his lessons home by unforgettable anecdotes and stories... I can recall so many things [my teachers] said which I realised in later life have helped me in different ways.” Ellie Cawthorne is staff writer on BBC History Magazine. Dr Susannah Wright is a senior lecturer in education studies at Oxford Brookes. This article was first published in the March 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
An act of love: breastfeeding in the medieval period
HistoryExtra Academy late-medieval England course
What does the history of breastfeeding tell us about medieval society? Hannah Skoda discovers stories of miracle cures, bizarre beliefs and caring communities
In the late 13th century, a little boy crawled out of his crib while his parents were at a funeral. He was two years old. His name was Roger, and he was the son of one of the cooks at Conwy Castle in north Wales. The curious toddler crawled out of the house, through the dark, and tragically fell off the drawbridge and into the moat. A passer-by spotted his apparently lifeless body: he swiftly prayed and promised a pilgrimage to Hereford if the miracle-working late bishop Thomas Cantilupe would help. The boy’s mother arrived and began to wail and beat her breast: it was all onlookers could do to prevent her from hurling herself into the moat after her son. When the child’s body was handed to her, she tore open her cloak to warm him against her chest. The little boy began to breathe again and suckled at his mother’s breast. Revived, he began to laugh and smile. This moving story was recounted as part of the canonisation process for Thomas Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford. On account of this, and various other miracles, Cantilupe was made a saint of the Catholic church. It’s a story that provides a wonderful insight into the lives of the humblest strata of medieval society. It’s full of familial love, deep emotion, and – importantly – a wider community invested in the well-being of children. Read more | Midwifery and childbirth: a historical A–Z guide The history of breastfeeding lies at the heart of the history of humanity. And it was much talked about in the Middle Ages. The image of the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus at her breast was pervasive in medieval Europe. In some ways, this perfect image denigrated real women, who could never hope to live up to this lofty ideal. But breastfeeding was nevertheless widely eulogised, particularly by theologians and medical writers. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, a 13th-century scholastic, wrote that a mother “conceives her children voluptuously, having carried them in her womb where they are nourished by her blood, she bears them in pain, she loves them and kisses them: because of her love, her nursing is the best, and the nursing helps to sustain her motherly love”. He was echoing the dominant view among medieval (male) thinkers that infants should best be breastfed by their biological mothers, rather than wet nurses or even milk substitutes being used. Moreover, he saw love and affection at the heart of this physical bond. Bartholomaeus talks about how the mother’s blood nourished the child during pregnancy and that breast milk was the logical next stage. He was following the medieval belief that breast milk was effectively a transformation of blood which would continue to sustain the infant once out of the womb. Some medical beliefs were idiosyncratic and seem problematic to us: colostrum, the substance which is produced by new mothers right after birth – now recognised as essential for the well-being of the infant – was deemed poisonous. Medics suggested a range of ways to dispose of it, including hiring old women or orphans who could suck it off the breast of the new mother. Listen | Joanna Wolfarth investigates what we can learn from changing attitudes to breastfeeding through history Contraceptive effect Many medical beliefs, drawing on ancient and Arabic thinkers, were less bizarre. It was widely believed that breastfeeding had a contraceptive effect. A 15th-century physician from Padua, Michele Savaronola, even went so far as to recommend that new mothers should breastfeed in order to protect their bodies from having to deal with another pregnancy too soon. It was a rare moment of concern for nursing mothers, whose well-being was not usually the motivation so much as that of the infants. Part of the concern also came from the widespread belief that breast milk also had the potential to pass on certain characteristics to the child. This was rooted in medieval ideas about complexions. Medieval people believed that the complexion – that is, the appearance, temperament and character – of the mother subsisted in, and could be transferred through, the milk. Interestingly, these claims seem to have originated in the work of moral philosophers, rather than medical texts per se. There was a pastoral dimension, too. Breast milk was believed to be imbued with the love of a mother for her child. The 14th-century saint Catherine of Siena was apparently her mother’s 24th child. She was the only one to be breastfed by her own mother, and her hagiographer tells us that this accounted for her very special bond with her mother. But this is the history of nursing mothers, not just male intellectuals who wrote about what they should do. And we know a surprising amount about the practices of breastfeeding, and how breastfeeding women across the social spectrum felt. Miracle stories (which were compiled in order to demonstrate that a particular dead person deserved to be canonised as a saint) provide wonderful insights into the travails and joys of parents who prayed to saints for cures for their infants. Read more | Pregnancy & childbirth in the 19th century Miraculous recovery Breastfeeding until the age of two was typical – interestingly, this is in line with modern medical advice from the World Health Organisation, and certainly at odds with modern social norms. The little boy Roger, who was rescued from the moat of Conwy Castle, was a two-year-old toddler. Another miracle story tells of a little girl who was “suckling at the breast and crawling”. She apparently crawled towards a river and fell in. Her parents prayed to Count Simon for her miraculous recovery, and she was resuscitated. Her parents were thrilled, but even more so when they set their little girl down after giving her a cuddle and “she then walked for the first time”. The parents’ pride in the moment at which their little girl learned to walk is palpable. And she was still being breastfed. There is also clear evidence that medieval infants were fed on demand rather than according to a strict routine – a debate that persists to this day. In another story, we hear of a mother who went to find her child to nurse him when she heard him crying: his wails were her cue to breastfeed. We learn, too, that many infants were nursed in their parents’ beds. Sadly, some of this evidence comes from legal cases after infants were accidentally smothered by their parents in the night. A story with a happier ending from medieval Italy tells of a mother who fell asleep while breastfeeding two of her children simultaneously in her bed, crushing one. He was apparently miraculously resuscitated after entreaties to Nicholas of Tolentino (who was later canonised). Many modern mothers will surely identify with the sheer sense of exhaustion at the heart of this story. Most importantly, though, medieval breastfeeding is not simply the history of exclusive mother-baby bonds. Medieval nursing was about wider family and wider community. The story of little Roger in Conwy is typical. He was spotted in the moat by a passer-by, rescued by members of the community, joyfully held by both his parents, and celebrated by a large number of friends. This was not just a story of a devoted mother and baby, but one involving a whole network of people who cared about Roger. In another miracle tale, a woman was unable to bond with her baby. It was the priest’s partner who helped her to feed the child, placing the infant on her lap and standing beside her. Milk sharing was also not uncommon: one woman named Johanna recalled in a later legal case how she had breastfed a baby, Katherine, when her mother could not. Medieval breastfeeding embedded mothers and children in wider networks of support. Disapproving preachers Milk sharing is obviously a different phenomenon to that of wet-nursing, which, as a contractual form of labour, was commonplace. Preachers and physicians disapproved strongly of wet-nursing, urging mothers to breastfeed their own children – and yet they offered advice on how best to choose a wet nurse for one’s child. The 13th-century intellectual Aldebrandin of Siena told parents that they should ensure any prospective wet nurse was of good character, partly to ensure that the baby would receive good care. Bernard of Gordon, a medical professor in Montpellier, advised that parents should avoid cowardly, greedy, stupid, melancholic or drunken wet nurses, because they would neglect their charges. But this was also because the milk itself would apparently be affected by the nurse’s character. Some believed that the milk itself was altered by the emotional state of the lactating woman and could become more or less nourishing. The belief that the milk might also pass on aspects of the complexion and disposition of the carer made choosing a wet nurse a fraught decision. Wet nurses were most sought after by families of high social status: this was, after all, an expensive way to nourish one’s child. Importantly, since breastfeeding was believed to delay conception, wet nurses were particularly popular among wealthy families seeking to safeguard their lineage with as many pregnancies as possible. Read more | 16 things you (probably) didn't know about the rituals behind royal births, from the medieval era to the present day <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/02/BAL4578732-239710f.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A 14th-century miniature depicts the birth and education of King Louis IX of France." title="A 14th-century miniature depicts the birth and education of King Louis IX of France. High-status mothers were more likely to employ wet nurses because they believed that breastfeeding could delay them falling pregnant again. (Image from Bridgeman)" /> A number of preachers voiced their opposition to this practice. Among them was Jacques Despars, who claimed that mothers who employed wet nurses did so because they vainly wished to preserve the appearance of their breasts, and were too self-indulgent to look after their newborns. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/02/M4GENR-06c633b.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A 1571 painting called A Lady in Her Bath, showing a lady bathing, whilst a woman breastfeeds in the background." title="A c1571 painting shows A Lady in Her Bath, while a wet nurse breastfeeds a child. Some theologians accused women who used wet nurses of putting vanity before the well-being of their offspring. (Image from Alamy)" /> But infants from a whole range of backgrounds might be fed in this way. After all, maternal mortality was extremely high, and babies that survived still needed to be fed. Examples of wet nurses appear in the records in surprising places: an ecclesiastical visitation record of Hereford in the 14th century mentions in passing the involvement of a wet nurse who was feeding a couple of peasant babies in the community. Babies from the foundling hospitals across Europe were effectively farmed out to wet nurses in the countryside. Visitation records survive from the orphanage officials in Florence and Siena and detail the checks that were carried out to ensure that infants were not being neglected. Many of these relationships between wet nurses and their charges may have been merely contractual, but there is substantial evidence about the feelings of those involved. Wet nurses would either have lost their own babies or were obliged to shortchange them. This was acutely painful, and a case from the Canterbury consistory court tells of a woman who refused to wet-nurse a neighbour’s child because “she loved her son just as much as Ellen loved hers, and consequently she could not allow her son to perish on account of Ellen’s”. Some wet nurses developed close emotional relationships with the children they fed. Testamentary evidence from southern France tells of people leaving substantial sums of money to the women who had wet-nursed them decades previously in recognition of their bond. The 11th-century life of St Kenelm describes the reaction of the saint’s wet nurse to the assassination of her young charge. “Woe is me,” she said. “My sweet son, alas for my milk-bearing, and my sweet nourishment.” Inhumane solution There was, however, a more sinister side to wet nursing. In southern European cities, slavery was rife in the later Middle Ages. Slaves were largely female and domestic – and they were often used as wet nurses. It was an appalling solution; and one used again in the most inhumane circumstances in the later context of plantation slavery. Read more | How slavery thrived in Renaissance Europe Slaves were imported largely via the Black Sea, and the phenomenon was increasingly racialised over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries. We have little surviving evidence to tell us how this felt for enslaved wet nurses, although a number of surviving cases where enslaved mothers litigated to try to protect their offspring remind us of the importance of their own relationships. Their suffering must never be underestimated. These women had most likely been impregnated by their masters, restricted from nourishing their own children, and forced to nurse other mothers’ infants. And the enslavers tied themselves in knots. Enslaved wet nurses were convenient. But in an era when people believed that breast milk might also pass on maternal characteristics, the growth of racist attitudes meant that there was a real tension between the robust nourishment these people wished to provide to their children, and a growing fear of the kinds of traits that the babies might then inherit. This came into particularly sharp focus in the Iberian peninsula, where different religious communities coexisted. When Christian households used Muslim wet nurses, there was widespread unease about the implications for the babies. And yet households benefited from the convenience. Networks of love The story of medieval breastfeeding is rich in emotion and the personalities and relationships of families of the past. It is also the tale of the acute suffering of many wet nurses and their own children. And it is one that sets in relief many modern assumptions about what breastfeeding looks like. In the Middle Ages, this was rarely about an exclusive and intimate scene between mother and child: many fathers were involved and wider networks of community and friends were part of the dynamic. There was a sense that breastfeeding lay at the heart of caregiving as an expression of deep love rather than just biology. This idea is expressed most powerfully in a wonderful story about a Bolognese man who found an infant abandoned at the gate of a hospital where he and his wife worked. They took the baby home, undid the swaddles in which it was wrapped, and found the tiny body emaciated and covered in ulcers. The woman was far too old to nurse the child. The couple prayed and prayed, and the woman’s breasts miraculously filled with milk. The child flourished under their care. Hannah Skoda is a fellow at St John’s College, University of Oxford, and a regular contributor to our ‘History Behind the Headlines’ podcast Discover more learning from week two of our short course on life in late- medieval England Video lecture: family and community – watching time 16 mins Medieval childhood: a historical A-Z – reading time 12 mins Social mobility in the Middle Ages: could medieval people improve their station? – reading time 6 mins Podcast: The Black Death and social change – listening time 36 mins What was life like for a medieval housewife? – reading time 7 mins Medieval immigrants: moving to England in the Middle Ages – reading time 10 mins The medieval childbirth guide: 6 tips for pregnant mothers in the Middle Ages – 9 mins
The children who fought for the abolition of slavery
They boycotted sugar, signed petitions and played abolitionist board games. Ryan Hanley and Kathryn Gleadle explore the roles of the young people who fought against the slave trade in Georgian Britain, and consider whether these ‘juvenile abolitionists’ were just doing what they were told by the elders or making a stand on their own right
Young boys can be notoriously untidy – dirty, even. So perhaps it should have come as no surprise to Shropshire diarist Katherine Plymley when, in 1792, she noticed that her seven year-old nephew Panton’s shoes were “looking very brown”. What raised her eyebrows was the reason, discovered by questioning the servants, why he’d refused to have his shoes shined. He had heard that the polish contained sugar produced on plantations worked by enslaved people. Panton’s scruffiness wasn’t due to indolence or carelessness, but – as he saw it – a moral stand against slavery. And he was far from alone among his peers. Long before Greta Thunberg first raised her head above the climate change parapet, children and younger teenagers were being heralded as moral champions in mass movements for a better future. Notably, during the campaigns for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, children were applauded by many not just as participants but as leaders. But was this just window-dressing by canny abolitionists, keen to shame adults into taking more meaningful action? Were children only acting in accordance with the wishes of their parents? Or were young people truly influential anti-slavery activists in their own right? Read more | Abolition in Britain: the link between slavery and the British national identity The roots of the anti-slavery movement go back at least to the efforts of 17th-century Quakers, but it was only after the establishment of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787 that British activists began to explicitly seek wider public support. Thanks in part to first-hand accounts by formerly enslaved people such as Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince, and to the tireless efforts of travelling lecturers such as Thomas Clarkson and William Dickson, the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade – and, later, of slavery itself – became a hugely popular political and moral cause. In 1792, many consumers in Britain (more than 300,000, by Clarkson’s estimate) boycotted goods produced by enslaved people, bringing politics into the home. That number was even higher during a second wave of boycotts in the mid-1820s, when women took the lead. Though the direct economic impact of these ‘anti-saccharite’ movements on the system of slavery was probably not great, they represented an important barometer of public opinion and a significant weapon in the abolitionist campaigning arsenal. Generations of anti-slavery campaigns In 1807, an act was passed in parliament abolishing the transatlantic trade in humans. Further victories did not come easily. In 1833, following decades of uprisings in the Caribbean and political reforms in Britain, another act was passed to abolish slavery itself – while also compensating ‘slave-owners’ to the tune of £20 million (around 40 per cent of entire government expenditure in 1833) for the loss of their ‘human property’. Read more | Freedom fighters: the enslaved people who fought for the abolition of slavery Throughout these hard-fought campaigns, many abolitionists came to realise that their vision of a world without slavery would take the efforts of more than one generation to make reality. So, as part of the campaigns in Britain, dozens of children’s books and poems about the evils of slavery were produced. The Black Man’s Lament by Amelia Opie, brightly illustrated and published in 1826, opens with a plea to its young readers: “Ye tender hearts, and children dear!… Oh! try to end the griefs you hear.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/06/GettyImages-463917157webready-b836e82.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An illustration from Amelia Opie’s The Black Man’s Lament (1826), a brightly illustrated book about the iniquities of slavery designed to appeal to young people (Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="An illustration from Amelia Opie’s The Black Man’s Lament (1826), a brightly illustrated book about the iniquities of slavery designed to appeal to young people (Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> Anti-slavery ideas were also introduced into puzzles and games, including John Wallis’s 1796 board game Complete Voyage Round the World. Anyone unlucky enough to land on space 22, representing the Senegal river, would have to “stay one turn here, to lament the great traffic which is carried on by European vessels in the negro trade”. There were even collectible trading cards. In 1828, 11-year-old Anne Capper noted in her diary that: “My cousin Mary Bevan was so kind as to give me, a dozen cards, on the cruelty of the slave trade, each of them having a pretty copper plate.” Future abolitionists and social reformers There is little doubt that childhood exposure to anti-slavery ideas made a lasting impression on future pioneers. Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst claimed that her earliest memories were of attending anti-slavery bazaars in Manchester with her parents, and of her mother reading to her Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In her autobiography, Pankhurst credited these early experiences with awakening the “admiration for that spirit of fighting and heroic sacrifice” that guided her political outlook throughout her life. Even more influential were the abolitionist sugar boycotts of the 1790s and 1820s that swayed young Panton and led him to reject shoe polish. Many 19th-century notables recalled taking part as junior ‘anti-saccharists’. Looking back on her Bristol childhood of the 1820s, pioneering doctor Elizabeth Blackwell observed that “children voluntarily gave up the use of sugar” because it was a “slave product”. On the podcast | Alex Renton shares the story of his own family’s involvement in the slave trade Scientist Mary Somerville remembered taking “the anti-slavery cause so warmly to heart” as a girl that she “would not take sugar in my tea, or indeed taste anything with sugar in it”. Thomas Fowell Buxton – who, in the 1820s, took over from William Wilberforce as the leader of the parliamentary abolitionist campaign – claimed that he was first made to think about slavery as a young boy because his sister Anna participated in the boycotts. Many later emphasised how much they suffered for their convictions. Recalling the boycott of the early 1790s, writer Lucy Aikin complained of the “bitter persecutions we poor children underwent in the children’s parties we frequented, for the offence of denying ourselves on principle the dainties which children most delight in”. Mary-Anne Schimmelpennick, who went on to become a noted anti-slavery writer, complained that even her family and governess had mocked her for her sugar abstention as a child. In her 1839 history of the abolition movement, Esther Copley went so far as to say that children had “introduced into whole families the system of abstinence”. Yet, though it is clear that many children who abstained from slave-grown sugar grew up to be leading lights in abolitionism and other reform movements, the extent to which they took the initiative on their own is less clear-cut. Certainly, some pro-slavery advocates suggested that children were being coerced by unscrupulous adults. Persuading the youth to take part On 30 March 1792, The Times published a letter written – so the paper claimed – by a boy “under six years old” who had been pressured by an abolitionist “Lady L” to stop eating West Indian sugar. Now he had been convinced by some other adults that this was folly, and that the abolitionist “saints” were hypocrites. “I am sure,” the regretful boy had apparently written to Lady L, “you did not mean to impose on me, but have been imposed on yourself by the naughty people, who told you so for some wicked purposes of their own.” This remained a minor but consistent theme of the pro-slavery (or, rather, anti abolitionist) argument. In Cruikshank’s chaotic 1826 caricature John Bull Taking a Clear View of the Negro Slavery Question (seen as the lead image above) an abolitionist can be seen directing some credulous young boys to sign a petition while their toys lie on the ground nearby. We should, of course, treat any pro-slavery argument with scepticism, but the extent to which grown-ups used their authority over children to persuade them to participate in anti-slavery activities is worth considering. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/06/GettyImages-1141649319webready-39a858d.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Pages from the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano. The freedman and activist’s accounts of the evils of slavery was a call to action for abolitionists young and old (Photo by Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" title="Pages from the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano. The freedman and activist’s accounts of the evils of slavery was a call to action for abolitionists young and old (Photo by Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> Schools are a case in point. Many adult abolitionists were interested in a broad spectrum of social reform, including providing religious education to poor children. The famous anti-slavery writer Hannah More established a number of schools around Bristol and Bath with the encouragement of Wilberforce. In 1833, Liverpool abolitionist James Cropper built a school in Warrington, the opening of which was timed to coincide with the declaration of emancipation in the West Indies on 1 August 1834. Read more | David Olusoga: "Thousands of Britons opposed abolition – because they owned slaves" Many more establishments were set up by dissenting Christian groups with links to the anti-slavery movement, including Methodists and Quakers. It is hardly surprising, considering who ran them, that some of these schools appear to have been incubators for juvenile abolitionism. The scattered surviving references to day to-day teaching suggest that children were indeed sometimes placed under considerable emotional pressures to declare their support for the cause. An 1816 report from the Nether Chapel Sunday School near Sheffield recounts how one girl was quizzed by her teacher after reading an anti-slavery tract: “Being further examined concerning what she thought the best means of destroying slavery, she replied: ‘If everyone knew Jesus Christ there would be no slavery.’” This does not mean, however, that young people were simply doing as they were told. The youngest freedom fighters How enslaved children fought back against their oppressors The most active juvenile abolitionists were, unsurprisingly, enslaved children. Though British abolitionists often depicted these children as passive victims, in fact they commonly resisted their enslavement. Abolitionist and black British radical Ottobah Cugoano recalled participating in a failed plot to blow up the ship on which he was transported to the Americas when he was around 13 years old. “It was the women and boys which were to burn the ship,” he recalled, “with the approbation and groans of the rest.” In the British West Indies, children frequently got into trouble with the colonial authorities for insubordination, stealing supplies and alcohol from plantation stores, and using “violent and indecent language” toward enslavers in the streets. It’s worth remembering that colonial legislatures often gave no fixed definition of a ‘child’ for enslaved people, so there was no guarantee of protection for young offenders from the worst brutalities of corporal or even capital punishment. Research into these everyday forms of resistance by children remains sparse, but it is clear that even fairly common youthful acts of rebellion and testing boundaries – being a normal child, in other words – required tremendous personal bravery for enslaved children. As historian Colleen Vasconcellos has noted, the terror of the plantation system did not prevent some children from undertaking more serious forms of insurrection. Plantation owner and novelist Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis recorded how one 15-year-old girl named Minetta was put to death in Jamaica for attempting to poison her ‘owner’. And advertisements describing so-called ‘runaway slaves’, including children, abounded in West Indian newspapers. Intriguingly, enslaved young people brought to Britain by their masters also frequently escaped, as demonstrated by many adverts in British newspapers collected in a new database by researchers at the University of Glasgow. There was, for example, young Robert “from Jamaica, about 12 Years of Age”, wearing “a blue Coat turn’d up with red, and red Holes”, who ran away from a house in Brentford-Butts in December 1739. Alone and unprotected in a strange country, these young people risked everything to make a new life. Their bravery ultimately contributed to the economic and moral rationale of the fight against slavery. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/06/BAL3479582webready-cb2a68a.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Enslaved people cutting sugar cane in the West Indies. Young people on the plantations frequently fought the colonial authorities (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images)" title="Enslaved people cutting sugar cane in the West Indies. Young people on the plantations frequently fought the colonial authorities (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images)" /> Even within abolitionist families, children took action in ways that surprised their parents and carers – Katherine Plymley’s nephew Panton, with his unpolished shoes, providing one example. Young Panton and his sisters Jane and Josepha were clearly encouraged to think for themselves about slavery. Plymley recorded how they spent time chatting and putting together a jigsaw puzzle of Africa with her friend, notable abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. After discussing the issue, young Jane declared that she would eat sugar grown only in the new abolitionist territory in Sierra Leone – where Clarkson’s brother, John, was governor. Clarkson was a regular visitor to the house, and always spent time with the children. But he was not the only famous abolitionist to talk about the slave trade with Panton, Jane and Josepha. During one of his nationwide book tours in 1793, the famous black writer and activist Olaudah Equiano also visited the family, gifting a copy of his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative, to the children, and playfully asking if they would like to visit Africa with him one day. Plymley recorded in her diary that “The little people were much pleased with him.” Potent symbols of moral purity Clearly, children have long negotiated their own positions on contemporary political issues. This does not mean that they acted completely independently of the adults in their lives, as some retrospective personal accounts were keen to suggest. But neither does it mean that these ‘juvenile abolitionists’ were thoughtlessly doing as their parents and teachers instructed. They certainly took an interest in what adults had to say about the issue, but evidence suggests that their own views were also heard. Read more | Slavery's painful legacy: the British empire's role in the trade of enslaved people What, then, was the impact of children’s participation in the British anti-slavery movement? Economically, of course, they could not do much. The account books for women’s anti-slavery societies show occasional contributions – for instance, “a little boy” donating his shilling pocket money to the Birmingham Female Society for the Relief of British Negro Slaves in 1830. But, as we have seen, children’s actions – especially when they involved a degree of personal sacrifice – could be potent symbols of the moral purity of the abolitionist campaign, and quickly became part of the national and personal mythologies that surrounded British anti-slavery. This article was first published in the July 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine Explore more content from week four of our Regency course: Slavery and Abolition, with Dr Lizzie Rogers – watching time 12 mins The Haitian Revolution: the enslaved Africans who rose up against France – reading time 8 mins Did George III support the slave trade? – reading time 7 mins African American abolitionists in Britain – listening time 43 mins 9 key places connected to the abolition of the British slave trade – reading time 13 mins The Zong Massacre: what the dark episode meant for the British slave trade and abolition – reading time 8 mins David Olusoga on the extraordinary story of Olaudah Equiano – reading time 10 mins