Village Life

Mrs Wainwright: We were tenants of Beaumanor. We had an old lady used to come for eggs and she told me so much: Mrs Herrick, she reigned as queen. She had a donkey carriage and she used to drive, or rather someone used to lead the donkey. She used to see some of the children, if the girls didn’t curtsey to her their names were taken down and reported to the school master and they got a good hiding when they went to school.

Interviewer:When would this have been?

Mrs Wainwright: That would be in the 1870s I suppose, that area, from then up to 1900. This old lady was saying how difficult things were. She used to go to the Sunday School at old Woodhouse Church, St Mary’s in the Elms, and the children were all provided with a cloak and they had to wear them on Sunday, and this old lady’s mother used to do beading and there were a few beads left over from doing those to have the beaded blouses in those days, and dresses, and she used to, she made a necklace for this little girl. And when Mrs Herrick was inspecting them she saw this necklace and was horrified, and she said, ‘You awful child, fancy you wearing this on a Sunday!’, and she snatched it off and broke it. But, she did a lot of good. Women in the village used to go around, down to Beaumanor, scrubbing out, they had to be there at seven o’clock in the morning ‘til seven o’clock at night and it was for one shilling [5p] a day and golly it wasn’t very well paid was it? But you see they had very poor wages and they were glad to earn a little more, and a shilling was a lot in those days. Also, they used to kill a beast and those things, pigs, every week and they used to make soup and the villagers used to queue up at the kitchen door with cans for soup. They also used to have a terrific lot of dripping, well that was distributed amongst the poor people, they used to send the children down and of course if you had bread and dripping that was super wasn’t it, you’d got a meal hadn’t you. She went in state to church every Sunday, Mrs Herrick, and she was going down the aisle one day to – it should have been a triumphal march which she always used to have, the organist had to play this thing for her – but he got a spot too much whiskey and he played ‘Ta ra ra boom de yay’ instead of the march and promptly got the sack.

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