The slum children of the Swinging Sixties
They grew up in Dickensian poverty a mere 50 years ago. Their stories will haunt affluent modern Britain
The Shocking poverty in these pictures seems to belong to a bygone age, a glimpse into Victorian days when families would rather starve than go into the workhouse. But the truth is that these photographs are not yet 50 years old. Many of the children in rags are not just alive today, but still years away from retirement age.
harold Wilson was Prime Minister when photographer Nick hedges was commissioned by Shelter, the newly formed charity to combat homelessness, to crisscross Britain and record the worst of the slum conditions in 1969. Dad’s Army was on the television, and the world was celebrating the Moon landings.
It was the modern world. But not for six-yearold Paul Pryde of Manchester’s Moss Side, raised in a row of back-to-back terrace houses, the kind familiar from Coronation Street.
The houses in Paul’s street had no running hot water or indoor toilets, and each one was split into two or three apartments. expecting the properties to be condemned within a few years, their landlords refused to make repairs. ‘It was a horrifying place,’ says hedges.
Today, Paul is 53, and he vividly remembers the day a young photographer came to his house. his mother told him to put his best clothes on, even though he and his brothers and sisters had just one outfit each, which they wore every day and often to bed.
In every photo, the rooms are lit by electric light. What that doesn’t reveal is that the Prydes had only one lightbulb, which they unscrewed and took into the other rooms as they showed hedges around. ‘Looking at at it now,’ Paul says, ‘it’s grim, but we never gave it a second thought. We were poor, but so was everyone else around us, so we didn’t know we were poor.’
In some ways, he believes, it’s more souldestroying to live in poverty today, because we are all expected to have so much more material wealth. Nobody looked twice at a boy kicking a bundle of rags in the street in the Sixties, but today he has to be wearing designer trainers.
‘Nowadays you’ve got to have the latest phone and a flatscreen TV, or you’re judged by everyone around you. They’ll think you’re a tramp.’
Paul’s father was a Scottish coal miner who moved south when the industry went into decline. What they found there was even worse: without a bath, the children had to wash at the kitchen sink in cold water. One of Paul’s most degrading memories is of a teacher saying: ‘Go away, you smelly little boy.’
After living in such deprivation, he constantly fears losing what little he has now. A council tenant with a lowpaid job, Paul is struggling with rent arrears and knows that he is only ever one pay slip away from going hungry. Last Christmas, he accepted aid from a charity, which he found humiliating.
But life in poverty has taught him one lesson above all, he says: ‘When it comes to family, growing up with seven brothers and sisters, I’m a very wealthy man.’
Claire evans’s memories of childhood are dominated by cold, dark, squalor, damp and hunger — always hunger. There were no Christmas celebrations — no tree, turkey, stockings or presents. Because Claire (who was born Shirley Rump but changed her name to Claire evans on her first marriage) and her five siblings grew up in abject poverty in one of east London’s worst slums — a ground-floor tenement in Flower and Dean Street, Whitechapel.
home, as seen in Channel 5’s Slum Britain: 50 Years On earlier this week, was a tiny two-bedroom basement flat with damp walls, one window, no bathroom, an outside loo and a hallway overflowing with other people’s rubbish. Today, Claire — now 53 and a mother of four — can remember all too clearly the pain and shame of extreme poverty. ‘It was always cold and we were always hungry,’ she says: so hungry that, aged six, she was still sucking a dummy — just to ease the stomach pangs. BuT The only food she can recall eating is chips and bread — consumed on laps (the Rump family had no dining table or chairs), or perched in the kitchen, passing the used plate to the next in line as mum Peggy fried batch after batch.
‘Our mother never smiled. ever,’ she says. ‘She had grown up in care and had never learned to read or cook, but she was very houseproud and deeply ashamed to be living like that, though she always gave us a wash down in the kitchen before bed — she made sure we were clean, She made the best of nothing.
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Their parents had little choice. There was no money. Their father was permanently out of work, but children kept arriving, including the twins, one of whom had a hole in the heart.
The public outcry caused by Hedge’s photographs helped convince MPs of the urgent need to address the excruciating poverty in Britain’s inner cities. More immediately, they helped transform the Rump family fortunes.
The family was rehomed in Peterborough, and Claire’s father found a job on the production line in the Perkins Engines factory, which still exists. The family’s new house had an outdoor loo, no bathroom, but there were three big bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room and — most magical — a garden. ‘It was like winning the Lottery!’ says Claire. ‘We couldn’t believe it. We had a massive house and it was ours — a proper home.’
Today, Claire’s siblings are spread far and wide. One sister is in Saudi Arabia. The twins live in north Norfolk.
CLAIRE, meanwhile, worked for years in an electronics factory making circuit boards and latterly in a bookmakers. She has four grown-up children, is happily married to her second husband — though they fight over the TV remote because she wants to watch history programmes — cooks endless roasts to make up for those she missed as a child and lives in a very warm house.
‘I always have the heating on,’ she says. ‘I never want to be cold or hungry again.’
Her father died in 1991 and, after a desperately hard life, her mother Peggy passed away four years ago, aged 78. There was one happy postscript. Aged 69, thanks to an adult literacy course, she finally learned to read.
Not every mother was so resilient. Hedges remembers one in Birmingham whose face was a flat mask of misery. ‘I have never seen such resignation, the loss of hope, the absence of any flame,’ he said.
Colin Newlove, who grew up in Bradford with his five brothers and sisters, blamed his mother for their poverty.
‘Mum and Dad had one bedroom,’ he said, ‘me, my two brothers and three sisters had the other.’ The smallest child slept in a drawer for her cot.
‘We used to put 50p in the TV to watch it, but then my dad would rob it out,’ he remembered. ‘He used to rob the gas meter, too. He never worked — spent most of the time at the bookies or with his racing pigeons. He spent top dollar on his pigeon food, but when it came to feeding us he seemed to have no money.’
Colin rebelled against his hungry, miserable childhood by getting into fights at school and causing trouble. As he got older he started stealing, and came to the attention of the police, but realised he was stumbling towards disaster.
He applied for jobs, took an apprenticeship, then joined the Army. After that, he says, he worked as hard as he could, terrified of falling back into poverty.
But instead of feeling angry at his lazy father, Colin continued to resent his mother. ‘I blamed me mum,’ he says, ‘and I shouldn’t have.’ During his Army leave, he refused to go home to visit her, and when he married he decided his children should not see her poverty either.
Colin’s parents never escaped from their wretched lives. ‘I feel bad now,’ he says. ‘I realise now it had nothing to do with me mum. She’s missed out on my kids. I shouldn’t feel guilty . . . but I do.’
It’s just one of countless scars left by the hideous poverty that still existed in Britain, so recently that for many it seems like almost yesterday.
Watch Slum Britain: 50 Years On online at my5.tv