No child of today faces real poverty
DOMINIC SANDBROOK was right i ht t to ridicule the UN report that compares the relative poverty in Britain today to the Victorian workhouses (Mail). You can’t even compare today’s poverty to the hardship suffered by the poor in the Twenties and Thirties. When my grandfather, Arthur Henrick, was demobbed in 1918 after serving in the Great War, he struggled to find work and there was no generous welfare system to support his family. My grandparents had to rely on the draconian Poor Law. My father told me Grandad had to sell his mackintosh — literally, the coat off his back. My grandparents had nine children and, without the assistance of the Salvation Army, who provided hot food, they would have struggled to survive. They lived in a back-to-back slum in Birmingham with no electricity. The only toilet was a communal water closet in the yard. They lived in squalor with poorly-lit and d draughty d ht rooms, broken windows and a leaking roof. Six of the children shared d one bd bed. My grandmother, Florence, raised her family without any of the modern conveniences we take for granted today. So for a UN envoy to evoke the memory of Dickensian workhouses by way of a comparison to the plight of the poor today is laughable.
PETER HENRICK, Birmingham. ARE school children really going so hungry that they’re stealing ketchup sachets to make soup? I grew up when food and clothing were rationed in the Forties and Fifties and money was really tight. There were no state benefits, but I can’t recall ever being hungry. Our breakfast consisted of bread dipped in milk or sometimes warm water. Lunch would be corned beef rissoles, spam hash, rabbit stew or vegetable soup, and our tea was usually bread and dripping. Sometimes we had a tomato or raw onion with a slice of toast. A treat was winkles or a fried bloater or herring, as fish was not rationed. We never had the luxury of toothpaste or even a toothbrush. We cleaned our teeth with salt or soot rubbed on to pieces of cloth. Our toilet paper was old newspapers cut into squares. That is what being really poor was like for many families after the war. But throughout all of that austerity, I never once saw or knew any starving school children scouring bins for food, as the Archbishop of Canterbury and others state happens today. If our parents could feed and clothe us in those truly atrocious conditions, why can’t some parents with all the benefits available now do the same?
Mrs LESLEY SNAPE, Sheffield.