Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Life in 1918 was UTTER TRIPE!
It wasn’t just the food this family found unpalatable when they time-travelled for a reality show
You can’t help realising how far life has advanced when, confronted by an old washing mangle, 16-year-old Freya Ellis mistakes it for something else. ‘Is it... a pasta maker?’ she ventures.
If only. In fact pasta is a distant dream because Freya, along with the rest of her family – mother Lesley, father Jonathan, sister Caitlin, 18, and 14-year-old brother Harvey – has stepped back 100 years to sample life in 1918.
That means an outdoor toilet, very basic home comforts and a major challenge for the taste buds: no lovely lasagnes here, but instead unappetising fare like suet puddings, stale bread and tripe.
The Bradford-based family are at the centre of a new six-part instalment of the BBC’s popular Back In Time series. The first edition, 2015’s Back In Time For Dinner, saw a south London family spend a week living through different decades from the 1950s to the 1990s. A number of specials followed, and last year’s Further Back In Time For Dinner focused on 1900 to 1949 in the south.
This time, the Ellis family are transported from the late 1910s through to today, to reveal through our changing homes – and what’s on our kitchen tables – what life was like for working-class families in the north of England.
The answer is that things were pretty hard. ‘The whole experience has really underlined how comfortably we live now,’ says Lesley, 46, who used to run her own catering business. ‘It brought home how many people lived on the poverty line.’
Taking part was Lesley’s idea. A fan of previous series, she put the family’s name forward without telling husband Jon.
‘He’s laid-back so I figured he’d be OK with it,’ she says with a smile. Just about. ‘When I found out, I did wonder what she was letting us in for,’ says Jon, 49, who is managing director of a company that makes medical devices.
And who can blame him? The family’s trip back in time, over eight weeks, begins just after the First World War – and involves their comfortable four-bedroom, double-fronted terrace home being effectively chopped in half with partitions to turn it into a traditional two-up-two-down.
This re-creates a time when the North was the beating heart of the British economy and life was far from easy, particularly for women: alongside long hours on the factory floor, they had hours of back-breaking domestic work too.
Vegetables were a luxury, with dishes like tripe – the stomach lining of a cow – on the menu. This doesn’t go down well with the Ellis family on screen. ‘None of us could stomach the tripe,’ recalls Lesley. ‘Poor Harvey was almost sick when he tried it.’ Freya adds, ‘And it stank the house out.’
The girls and their parents are sent to work at a cotton mill – and return home to chores, and no hot baths. ‘It was just grim, it was dark and cold,’ says Freya. ‘It was a hard life, you had to fight for everything.’
The first episode takes the family up to 1939. In the second episode they experience life post-WWII, and later they sample the 1960s through to the 90s.
The family admit now that they were overjoyed to finally return to their old life. ‘I’m very glad I was born in 2001 and not 1901,’ says Freya. Lesley is glad to have her modern kitchen back, but has made one small change. ‘I got rid of my electric kettle for one that whistles on the hob,’ she says.
Back In Time For Tea starts on Tuesday at 8pm on BBC2.