|
These recollections of children's street games are through the eyes of a child in the early 1900s in working class north London (then Middlesex). The recollections were recorded in the 1980s by my mother, Florence Edith Clarke (born Cole), and are here as a service to other researchers and a tribute to her memory. |
| In the early 1900s children were expected to entertain themselves.
There was no money for expensive toys, and the adults were too busy to
set anything up for us. We expected nothing else and we enjoyed
ourselves. Fortunately there was little of no traffic, so the street
was our playground: the road, the pavement, and the tiny front
gardens. It never occurred to us to ask permission to use front
gardens, and probably no-one would have expected it.
Skipping was my favourite game, either by myself holding one end of a rope in each hand or in a group where the ends of a longer rope were held by two different person. Any number of children could come in and skip together and sometimes we tried to see how many we could get in before someone stumbled over the rope and stopped it. Sometimes we would play at "calling in" a particular child by name and we would vary the speed of the rope so that the child doing the jumping had to jump faster or in some sort of fancy manner. I also liked leapfrog. This is where you bend over clutching your knees while the others would take three leaps and, with their hands on your back, over they would go. Sometimes you would get a clout on the head if they missed. The boys played marbles, and if there was a manhole cover, they would use the two dips in them that were there for the workmen as gulleys. I dread to think what their nails were like but hygiene was not so important then as now. Then there were our tops, peg tops for boys, smaller tops for girls, and whipping tops for everyone, all beautifully made of boxwood. The peg tops were made of ordinary wood about 2 inches long and about 1 ½ inches in diameter, and the sides were grooved. You would have a length of string two or 3 ft long which wound round the grooves. Then, keeping hold of the string, you would throw the top onto the pavement with a brisk jerk. This sent the top spinning on its metal peg at the bottom. You competed with your friends for how long it would spin for. The whipping tops were small and squat with only a small peg at the bottom, and they were made in two colours, usually red and blue. With a small whip you would wind the string around the top, then the child stooped on the ground and with one hand on the top she would pull the whip briskly and at the same time take her hand away from the top which was started spinning. Then you would whip it to keep it going. My brother Jim got into trouble one day with his top. The string, for some reason he clung to the bottom of the peg when he threw it. He swung around holding the string and then unfortunately he was only 1 ft away from somebody’s house, and the top went straight into the person’s front window. The lady was most indignant. So my father, when he came home from work, put a sheet of glass in right away and little was said to my brother. There were also the hoops. There were wooden ones in various sizes for girls with sticks to beat them along the pavement. The boys had iron hoops. They would start the hoops with their hands then run with them, using a sort of large hook to keep the hoops going. Then there was "Please we’ve come to learn the trade". This is what one of the children had to say. Then the others would say “What trade?”. The answer could be any trade. The team would say “Set to work and to do it”, and the trade would be mimed. The child who guessed correctly would then have the next turn. When we played cricket, the lamp post was the wicket. Lamp posts were not the tall fluorescent lights you see today but short and more artistic, and not automatically controlled. The lamplighter used to come along on his bike carrying his ladder on his shoulder. It was a wooden ladder which must have been very heavy, unlike the aluminium ones of today. The gas mantles were the same as those used by householders.The paving slabs of the pavements could easily be marked out with chalk for hopscotch. There were many variations. Hide and seek had to be behind people’s privet hedges because the street provided else to hide behind. It got us pretty dirty and I, for one, got into a lot of trouble as a result - but I still did it. |
version date: 08 January, 2008