Rare BBC interview unearths teen life of the 1800s through two women’s eyes

The 'Victorian era' between 1837 and Queen Victoria's death in 1901, was considered a golden period in the history of England but at the same time, the underbelly of England was stuck between immense wealth and extreme poverty. It was also an age when innovation was thriving described as a “magic lantern” by Charles Dickens. From typewriters to telegraph to steamships and the telephone, the era became known for some of humankind's greatest inventions. But nothing can paint a more accurate picture of a period other than those who lived through it. A clip from the 1970 docuseries “Yesterdays’s Witness” preserved for the BBC Archive sheds light on life during the 1890s described by women in their 90s, in an episode titled “Two Victorian Girls.”

Speaking to BBC reporters, the nonagenarians, Frances “Effy” Jones and Berta Ruck shared their bold, bittersweet journeys during the Victorian era. “We never called ourselves teenagers - but we were certainly Victorians and quite proud to be it,” said Jones, who in 1892, at the age of 17, was one of the first women to use a typewriter.

“I was a very weedy, skinny, anemic child,” said Jones in the archived clip, “…and always what the boys called the ‘grizzle guts.’” When she turned 17, her brother said to her, “Why don’t you go and get something to do?” He told her that he had been to Victorian Street and had come across a big shop’s window where they had some sort of a little machine. These little machines were actually “typewriters” and shops were starting to hire ladies to operate these machines as a marketing strategy. At her brother’s suggestion, she visited the shop and asked the owner if she too could learn to type like the other women. She was soon hired in the shop’s staff for which she received a salary of about eight shillings a week.

During the same timeline, there was another girl named Berta Ruck. Unlike Jones, she was living a relatively sheltered life in her North Wales home. The headmistress of the girls’ school she attended, once asked her to stand up, and then told her that she was an “indolent and feckless girl,” because she was drawing doodles in her exercise book all the time when she ought to be concentrating on her classwork.

Berta had no idea what she was going to do with her life. When her father noticed that she couldn’t do anything well except drawing, he sent her to London where she found lodgings with an aunt, and joined an art school, before moving to Slade. Describing what she found in London, she said in the BBC clip, “Mud, mud everywhere.” Of course, she said, there were “handsome cabs slurring through the mud, and where there wasn’t mud, there was fog. In between, there was us, enjoying ourselves.” At 10 p.m. in the night when pubs were shut, cockneys, she said, would gather along the gutter and sing songs that she embedded in her memory as she went to bed, dreaming.

The elderly Berta also went on to recite some of these song lyrics she remembered from the bygone days. “She may have known better days / When she was in her prime / She may have known better days / Once upon a time / When by a roadside she fell / Oh never possibly / some poor old mother is waiting for her /  I had known better days.”

Another recollection Berta had was about traveling in “buses.” “You had to get into the front seat beside the driver where you could have a lovely view of the street,” she described. As for the fashion sense, she said, “Everybody wore hats over their profuse underclothes. [Women] wore long skirts that had to be held up out of the mud. We spent hours brushing our skirts.” And even though they had a very thick braid under the skirt made of horse hair that was supposed to absorb all the mud, it never did manage to. So, they had to brush the skirts anyway. Also, they had to darn the stockings. In Jones’ version of her teenage years, she mostly saw women donned in voluminous “bloomers” and “rational dresses.”

Meanwhile, Jones said that during that time, elites had the luxury of having good gin while the rest of the people were living in a great deal of poverty. “People worked in factories for two shillings a day,” said Berta. The salary that Jones made was all spent when she bought a bicycle to commute to and from work. Berta, who later turned out to be a romance novelist, said, “I was very glad I was an art student, for we did do things and see things and go about as well-bred, sheltered girls never did. In those days, the thing to be was decadent.”