Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
We ’d rather be in Downton!
Edwardian England looked positively rosy in the hit drama. But, as three families found out in a new TV series, life back then was tough whatever your class...
Who hasn’t dreamt about travelling through time? Not a Doctor Who- type of time travel, but a more domesticated, small-scale trip back through the ages. Wouldn’t it be fascinating to rewind 100 years in order to see what ordinary life was like for ordinary folk in an ordinary street?
That’s what the BBC’S history series Turn Back Time sets out to achieve. Over a few weeks this spring, the BBC performed a series of makeovers on a stretch of run-down terraced houses a few hundred yards from the seafront in Morecambe, Lancashire. They stripped out all remnants of the 21st century. Then they kitted out the homes just as they would have been in the early 1900s, with Edwardian coal-fired kitchen ranges, cast iron fireplaces and the need for plenty of elbow grease. Volunteer families moved into each of the houses and lived and worked just as an Edwardian family would have done.
There were two twists, though: first, the three houses each represented a different class – with one replicating the home of an upper-crust family, the next a middle-class family, and the final one (virtually a slum) a working-class family. The second twist was that after four days living a 1900-style life, the families moved out, the builders moved in – and the three houses moved three decades into the future. The families moved back in. Same rules, same idea.
This experiment was repeated, so that, by the end of filming, the families lived through five periods – from the rather formal existence of the Edwardian era right up to the socially liberal flares-and-formica days of the 1970s.
Yes, it’s a gimmick. But, on the evidence I saw when I visited the families at the end of their Edwardian week, they fully immersed themselves in their new lives. But far from being the serene, rosy existence painted by Downton Abbey, Edwardian life proved so tough that one of the volunteers threatened to pull out – and it was one you’d least expect.
None of the families knew which house they’d be assigned to when they agreed to take part. ‘As we walked into the street for the first time, we all looked at each other and thought, “Don’t put us in the working-class house!”’ says Naomi Golding, 39, who appears in the programme with her husband Ian and children Ciara, eight, Caitie, seven, and Jack, four. And you can see why: the working- class house was dilapidated and covered in grime. In real life, Naomi and Ian live a thoroughly middle- class existence in Chester – she trained as an accountant, and he is a business consultant – and, to their relief, they were delivered the comforts of middle- class Edwardian life. But the other families found themselves pushed in surprising directions.
The family in the upper-class home – in real life, electrician Michael Tay- lor, 39, his wife Adele, 37, and their four children, aged five to 15 – were greeted on arrival by a housekeeper and three maids. There was a chef in the kitchen and a live-in nanny to look after the children. Upstairs in the nursery, the children played with a grand, hand-made dolls-house; in the servants’ quarters, there was a new-fangled vacuum cleaner (albeit a hand-pumped one). It was a very different lifestyle to their usual one – Michael describes himself as ‘working class all the way’.
Meanwhile, a few doors down in the working-class house, Phil Meadows and his wife, Suzie, both 50 – who run a polo school at the Royal County of Berkshire Polo Club – found themselves in two soot-filled rooms with just a dirty open fire to heat themselves and their food. They used an outside loo, survived on bread and dripping, and their teenage daughters, Saskia and Genevieve, had to sleep on a grotty mattress on the floor.
As I entered Phil’s dark and grimy Edwardian house, I asked him what the smell was. ‘It could be coal. It could be cabbage. It could be us,’ he said. None of them washed properly all week. ‘It’s hell. This house is like a cave with a back door. All we’ve got is this room, the bedroom and the yard.’
In the show, he worked as an itinerant labourer – offering to do odd jobs for neighbours and people in the town. ‘Our existence is about finding enough food to be able to do enough work to get paid, so you can buy more food. That’s it.’ He looked relieved that it was over.
You’d think the other two families would be delighted with all the mod cons served up to them. Not a bit of it. ‘I can’t tell you how horrible it was,’ reveals Adele. ‘I had a breakdown within 24 hours of being in the house.’ A busy A&E nurse in real life, she says that her life felt pointless as an upper- class Edwardian woman. She was banned from lifting a finger at home, her children were taken away every day by the nanny, and her husband left the house to enjoy gentlemanly pursuits. ‘We weren’t even allowed to make a cup of tea for ourselves; we had to ring a bell for anything we wanted. I felt like a prisoner... I couldn’t cope with the idea that you were useless in your own home.’
When she was asked to host a dinner party (not that she’d have to cook, of course), Adele finally broke, ‘I threw the invitations on the sofa in disgust and said, “No more!”’ She stormed off the set. ‘I got to the bottom of the street and realised I was dressed in Edwardian costume and had nowhere to go. Only then was I able to calm down.’
So what of the middle-class family? Ian was sent to work as a clerk at the local municipal council, a proper white- collar job, dressed in a full morning suit. ‘This is how I dress every day. All I do at work is write addresses on envelopes with a fountain pen. All day, every day. You wouldn’t think that would be done by a man dressed in a bowler hat and a morning suit, would you?’ he said.
He hated his Edwardian life. ‘I am Mr Dull. The life of an Edwardian middle-class man is intensely boring: get up, go to work, come home, shout at the children, go back to work.’
In fact, what everybody seemed to have in common in the Edwardian stage of the experiment was a wish that they were in somebody else’s shoes.
Ian heard rumours that the chap next door – you know, that workingclass, soot- covered bloke with the grubby girls and that awful-smelling house – was living the high life. ‘I’m told he’s been washing the hulls of boats and digging ditches. I’m going to ask if he needs a hand. I just want to do something. Anything!’