Late summer, bank holiday

On Bank Holiday the townsfolk usually flock into the country and to the coast. If the weather is fine many families take a picnic-lunch or tea with them and enjoy their meal in the open. Seaside towns near London, such as Southend, are invaded by thousands of trippers who come in cars and coaches, trains, motor cycles and bicycles. Great amusement parks like Southend Kursaal do a roaring trade with their scenic railways, shooting galleries, water-shoots, Crazy Houses, Hunted Houses and so on. Trippers will wear comic paper hats with slogans such as "Kiss Me Quick", and they will eat and drink the weirdest mixture of stuff you can imagine, sea food like-cockles, mussels, whelks, shrimps and fried fish and chips, candy floss, beer, tea, soft drinks, everything you can imagine.

Bank Holiday is also an occasion for big sports meetings at places like the White City Stadium, mainly all kinds of athletics. There are also horse race meetings all over the country, and most traditional of all, there are large fairs with swings, roundabouts, coconut shies, a Punch and Judy show, hoop-la stalls and every kind of side-show including, in recent years, bingo. These fairs are pitched on open spaces of common land, and the most famous of them is the huge one on Hampstead Heath near London. It is at Hampstead Heath you will see the Pearly Kings, those Cockney costers (street traders), who wear suits or frocks with thousands of tiny pearl buttons stitched all over them, also over their caps and hats, in case of their Queens. They hold horse and cart parades in which prizes are given for the smartest turn out. Horses and carts are gaily decorated. Many Londoners will visit Whipsnade Zoo. There is also much boating activity on the Thames, regattas at Henley and on other rivers, and the English climate being what it is, it invariably rains.

Victorian england the class structure

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate;

God made them, high or lowly,

And ordered their estate.

These lines, now usually omitted, from the popular children's hymn 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' were penned in 1848 by Cecil Frances Alexander, wife of the Anglican Archbishop of Dublin. They serve to show that inequalities and social gulfs not merely existed but were taken for granted as part of the established scheme of things, at least by those on the comfortable side of the gate. In fact social mobility was much greater than such lines suggest. The old resilience in English society, which could be seen in much earlier times, was still there in the nineteenth century. A commoner, even someone born in poverty, could make his way by talent and good luck to the peak of society. Benjamin Disraeli was a prime example. Where once the church had been the means of ascent, now politics, commerce and industry all made occupancy of the castle possible to those who started with few material advantages. The success of the English upper class was in its absorption of such individuals. They assumed its habits, styles and attitudes, and if in the first generation they might be regarded as 'new money' and social upstarts, their children would blend in, by marriage and association, to maintain the social order. This was common ground between Whigs and Tories in politics; if the Whiggish interest tended to come from industry and trade, and the Tory interest from land, there was still a great deal of overlap between the two.

One of the consequences of the Reform Act was the consolidation of England's class structure. A simple breakdown into aristocracy, upper class, middle class and working class does not tackle the complex ordering of the social hierarchy. Its most numerous group was of course that of the workers, becoming ever more numerous as the population was on its way to doubling by mid-century, to double again by 1900. But the working class had its own strata and demarcations, of skilled labour and unskilled, of foremen and journeymen; of house owners and renters, of those in fixed employment and itinerants who sought seasonal work. Workers comprised men, women and children over theage of ten, and the greatest number were at the bottom end of the wage scale. Even if male and over twenty-one, they had no vote: the Reform Act's provision was that an elector must be a 'Ten Pound Householder' in a borough, and a 'Forty Shilling Freeholder' in the country constituencies. Hardly anyone of the working class could fit that requirement; indeed, to do so would place him in the lower reaches of the next socio-economic group. The lowest stratum of those actually working was found in the countryside, among the rural labourers, where a steadily dropping demand for workers – 18 per cent of the working population in 1851, down to 11 per cent by 1871 – helped to keep wage levels low. Until the 1870s these were also among the least organised of any working-class group, with no trade union and no bargaining power to increase their wages or improve their often scandalously bad housing. Picturesque enough from the outside, the countryman's cottage, in the various regional building styles which existed prior to the mass-producing industrial brickworks, was dark, damp and insanitary inside. In towns and cities, the unskilled workers were the lowest-paid. If they were male, they had some hopes of progressing towards the more skilled and better-paid trades, but for women workers there was scant chance of this. They remained as basic machine-minders. These groups also had little negotiating power. With no special skills to offer, they were easily replaceable, especially as the continuing drift of population from agricultural counties like Norfolk and Lincoln into the cities created a permanent supply of fresh labour. Skilled workers – miners, ironworkers, bricklayers, riveters, carpenters, engine-men, plasterers, glaziers and a host of other trades, some very recent – were in a stronger position to claim and hold out for higher wage scales.