A Victorian Woman of Substance

Some talk of Alexander, and some of Hercules, of Hector and Lysander, and such great names as these. But of all the world's great heroes and heroines, there's none that can compare with my Nana Johnson. Nana Johnson of course was not born a Nana she was born Annie Shingla in 1895 while Queen Victoria was still on the throne and she married my granddad William Johnson some where before 1919 when my mum was born.

This is a photo of William and Annie Johnson taken sometime in 1919 with their first born Jeanie Johnson. The first thing you notice is that they were an extremely attractive couple and some of my female cousins have been blessed through inheriting her good looks. Unfortunately the scribble that you can see on the photograph was put there by me as a small child.

As you can imagine scribbling on this precious photograph with the then new ball point pens that were coming into common usage did not make me very popular with my mum. If only it had been a pencil it could have been erased. I am working at the moment to clean this image up and restore it.

When ever I think that times are hard for me I only have to remember this remarkable woman and of how she overcame things that would seem to most impossible to overcome. Unlike in my life when trying times come along every now and again, Annie had to battle all her early life just to keep her family together and healthy. Every day was a battle nothing that happened to her was trivial because of the times that she lived in.

When Annie and William married they moved into a small two up two down terraced house on Brook Street in Birkenhead. When I say a two up two down I mean this literally. Granddad at some point added a small lean-to to the back of the house to give nana some much needed space. The lean to granddad added gave nana a scullery that housed a gas cooker and a cold water sink. There was no indoor plumbing in the house except the cold water tap in the scullery. The toilet was outside and down the bottom of the backyard and it was a place that I did not like to have to visit. I put this down to the encounter I had with a rat on one of my visits to the toilet. The rat had come up out of the toilet bowl and was sat on the toilet seat when I entered holding an old oil lamp to see by. As I entered the rat promptly jumped back into the toilet and disappeared from view. Never again were my visits to the toilet carefree I lived from then on in fear that a rat would come up out of the toilet as I was sitting on it and bite my bum.  

In this small two bed roomed terraced house in Birkenhead Annie gave birth to ten children, my mum Jeanie being the eldest. The girls slept in one bedroom and the boys slept in the other and some of the bedding was known to have pockets. In the cold winters it was not unusual to have the bedding augmented by adult overcoats. Nana and granddad didn’t have the luxury of a bedroom instead they had a settee in the parlour downstairs that converted at night into a double bed. Originally there was no electricity in the house and the lights were run off mans gas. One of my uncles lived a few streets over from my nana and I can remember that right up until the 1950’s they still had gaslight instead of electric.

Just try to imagine the hardships of Annie’s way of life, ten children who had to be kept warm, fed and clean in a house with only two bedrooms, one wage coming in it is hard to imagine managing those things today with all the help you get from the state and modern appliances. Nana had no Hoover, no washing machine, no electric iron, no carpets on the floor, no Health Service as if that was not enough she lived through both World Wars which was no easy feat in Birkenhead because it was an area that was bombed heavily during the war because of the Docks. I never heard mum moaning about how hard they had it or what they had to do without. Mum told me stories that were funny and full of things that they did not full of things they did not have. Mum enjoyed being from a large family especially being the eldest.

 Annie was just like so many women of her time, she lived into her nineties stayed married to the same man celebrated a Golden Wedding, and she was a joy to know she was also loving kind and funny. Annie is not the sort of person the world seeks out to laud and honour, nor the sort the world would call a heroine but if it were in my gift I would give her and all the other Annies like her a medal  she is in my opinion a real woman of substance and my heroine.

If you enjoyed this hub I have put links to some of my other hubs that deal with similar material below.

All these Hubs have the common theme of coming from a Working Class perspective which differs quite a lot from that of the Middle Class and which has virtually nothing in common with the Upper Class perspective.

There is one period in modern times when all three classes had experiences in common and that was during the second world war.

I hope that enjoyed your foray into Working Class England if you did please leave a comment perhaps some feed back or if I didn't cover what you were looking for let me know and perhaps I can do another hub about that,

• Working Class Life in the 1930's The 1930s in England was a time when the Government rode roughshod over the already impoverished working class.

• Working Class life in the 1950’s – Train Sets and Train Spotting Trains featured in our childhood not just as a means of transport for taking us on holiday but also in our playtimes too.
  

• Working Class life in the 1940’s and 1950´s Britain ~ Train Travel ...When I was growing up in the late forties early fifties one of the things that stand out in my memory is the old steam trains, of course they weren’t the old steam trains back then they were just trains. Like most working class people back then we didn’t own a car and the only means of transport my father ever owned was a bicycle, which he would use to cycle to work.

• Working Class Life in the 1940s & 50s When I look back on my childhood the late 1940s and into the 1950s it seems almost like it happened in another world. In a way it did because so many things have changed since then that if I were magically plucked up from that time and brought here to 2009 it would be easy to imagine that I had been transported by aliens to another planet rather than just another time.
• Working Class Life in the 1940’s Working Class life in the 1940’s was a time of great change mostly brought about by the fact that war had been declared on September 3rd 1939. The way most people got this news in September 1939 was via the radio more usually called the wireless.
• A Victorian Woman of Substance ...she was born Annie Shingla in 1895 while Queen Victoria was still on the throne and she married my granddad William Johnson some where before 1919 when my mum was born.
• Stay at Home Mom or Working Mom? The choice of a Working Class Mum I was a stay at home mum in the seventies, before the birth of my first child I had suffered three miscarriages. Although I don’t think that was a particular factor in my decision to be a stay at home mum it certainly made me even more aware of how precious the life of my child was.
• Stay at Home Mom or Working Mom? The choice of a Working Class Mum part Two ..The seventies, was the time into which my children were born, it was a time when women were being bombarded with all sorts of new ideas that challenged the traditional role of women in the home and workplace.
• Stay at Home Mom or Working Mom? The choice of a Working Class Mum part three ... I think that this final hub has given me the most joy and it is the one that I haven’t had to write. I wrote an email to my daughter telling her about TamCor’s three questions and I asked her if she would answer the final question for me so that I could write this final hub.
• A 1950's Working Class Mum's Answer to Children Biting ..My mum Jeanie was one in a million she was born in 1919 the eldest of ten children, and you could tell right away she was used to being obeyed. In many ways Jeanie was no different from many of the mothers of that time but is some areas she had some novel ideas.

• Working Class Girl in Singapore in the late 1960's ...In March1967 I got married to my husband Malcolm who was a Petty Officer in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. Just three and a half months later Malcolm got a married accompanied posting to Singapore. I had heard of Singapore but I hadn’t a clue where it was, so Malcolm had to show me where it was on a map.

• Bonfire Night in a Working Class area in the 1950’s ...Each November the fifth in England we remember the foiled plot of Guy Fawkes who plotted to blow up Parliament and the King. Fortunately this plot was discovered and Guy Fawkes was arrested before he could put a match to the gunpowder that he had secreted below the Houses of Parliament.