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We’re moving house in a few days, and with some serious illness in the family also to contend with I’m not going to be able to maintain the usual range of posts over the next few days – so I thought I’d show you some pages of an extraordinary children’s book I picked up in a charity shop in Somerset recently.
Once again, it offers a glimpse into a very different era that wasn’t so very long ago. I hope you enjoy this material as much as I do.
Steam enthusiasts should look out for illustrations of steam-powered paddle-wheel tugs a little later, and also a smattering of shipyard tank engines.
As always, click on each image for a larger and clearer view.
Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, I promise!
Gavin gmatkin@gmail.com
Follow this link for more Ships that Saved the Empire!
Coal mining was s dangerous game , as now. I notice the women in the picture in clogs and the cowl-capes reminiscent of the straw capes that their agricultural ancestors had worn for thousands of years. I presume the women were miners too, but in skirts?
There certainly were children and women working in the mines in the UK in the early half of the 19th century, but I don't think women were working in the pits themselves at the time of the First World War. My guess is that they would have had pithead jobs, or perhaps worked scavenging coal from spoil.
I think the appeal to decency would have been a big issue, and the thought of women working among all those weeing and occasionally defecating naked men would have horrified the kind of people who thought that it was only decent to put little skirts around piano legs.
One of the themes of Ships that Saved the Empire is about ordinary people – throughout they seem to be heroes carrying out noble work in dreadful conditions. I love the thing a bit later about chainmaking, where the workers are all reliable types because the consequences of a weak link are so serious.
Gav