Readers’ wildlife photos

Today we have a text-and-picture essay by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior. It’s a wonderful set of pictures and narrative that takes us back to 1913.

Athayde’s text is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

One fine day in 1913

If you find yourself in northern England and in search of history—after all, ‘Europe is where history comes from’ (Eddie Izzard)—you could hike along Hadrian’s Wall and visit the excellent Vindolanda Museum. You could also consider a trip to Beamish Museum, which is a ~30 min drive from Newcastle. This open-air museum is dedicated to ‘preserving an example of everyday life in urban and rural North-East England at the climax of industrialisation in the early 20th century.’ You could spend a whole day exploring its 140 ha on foot, tram or bus, and still not see it all.

From the entrance, you can walk to town (about 20 min), take a bus…

… or a tram. In Britain, electric trams began replacing horse-drawn trams in the 1890s, which was a huge environmental improvement. In 1900s London, over 50,000 horses transported people around the city. Each horse produced 7 to 15 kg of manure/day, to the joy of millions of flies that transmitted typhoid fever and other unpleasantries:

The town area, depicting a 1913 British urban environment. You can visit a printer’s office, a bakery, a Masonic Hall, a Co-operative Society store, a bank, the stables, or this motor garage, which holds a collection of cars, motorcycles and bicycles. Only one in 230 Britons owned a car in 1913, and motorist Rudyard Kipling described automobile journeys as a catalogue of ‘agonies, shames, delays, rages, chills, parboilings, road-walkings, water-drawings, burns and starvations’. Nonetheless, 1913 marked the start of a motoring revolution with the car factory built by Henry Ford in Manchester:

Jubilee Confectioners, purveyors of traditional sweets and chocolate, which the hoi-polloi could not afford in 1913. Among all the operating stores in the museum, the sweet shop has the longest queue. Not surprising, as the UK is working hard to catch up with America on the Fatso Index. 1 in every 4 adult Britons and 1 in every 5 children (10 to 11 yrs.) are ‘living with obesity’, according to the emotionally he​mo​phil​i​ac (h/t Bill Maher) National Health Service:

You can buy Beamish soap, Beamish perfume and other Beamish beatification goods at the local apothecary, but the products in the coloured bottles and on shelves are for display only. They include old favourites such as leeches, sulfa, morphine, arsenic, mercury (for those ignominiously afflicted with syphilis), cocaine drops (for toothache) and assorted quackery. The pharmacy would make Gwyneth Paltrow envious:

All your smoking needs at the General Store. Cigarettes (Woodbine was a favourite brand) overtook pipes during World War I, as they were a more convenient way to get your nicotine fix while manning the trenches. Tobacco helped soldiers endure the horrors of war, so newspapers, the government and of course the tobacco companies did their best to keep the boys well supplied. Smoking was a man’s pastime until the 1920s – the general view was that only women of loose morals did it. Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich and other female celebrities made cigs glamorous, thus encouraging women to have the same lung cancer and emphysema rights as men:

Just a glance at this foot-powered, agonisingly slow dental drill in the dentist office will remind you how lucky you are not to be alive then. The rack of canisters just seen on the lower right side are bottles of laughing gas, which was the only anaesthetic available. But you had to pay extra for it. And as you may have guessed, most people couldn’t afford it:

The town’s attorney’s office, which was manned by a man. Women were barred from practising law in England until the 1919 Sex Disqualification Act. Gwyneth Bebb (1889-1921) challenged the ban in 1913 (Bebb v The Law Society), but the judge in charge ruled with the superb Catch-22 logic that no woman had ever been a solicitor, therefore no women could be solicitors. Back then, the quality of your legal representation was directly related to how much you could pay. Imagine that:

From 1850 to 1913, over 41 million people left Europe for a new life elsewhere, mostly the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. About one third of these migrants were from the United Kingdom (Hatton, 2021). If you wanted to try your luck abroad, you needed to procure an emigration agent, who would tell you that all your worldly possessions had to fit in a suitcase such as the one on the counter. The agent would issue you a one-way ticket to your destination. In 1913, the British Empire was 10 years from its territorial peak, so there were plenty of places to choose from. But if things didn’t work out in Johnny Foreigner land, you’d have to pay for your journey back. Very few who wanted to return could afford it:

Troublemakers’ mark in 1913. ‘Deeds Not Words’ was the battle cry of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). The Daily Mail (who else?) derided pesky women demanding the right to vote, or suffrage – from medieval Latin suffragium (support, ballot) – so it scornfully labelled WSPU members suffragettes. The slight backfired, because the activists though the term catchy and adopted it. And what were the suffragettes’ deeds? Fund-raising events, demonstrations, protests, a weekly newspaper. Also, assaults against public figures, arson, vandalism and lots of bombings. Way before the IRA and Just Stop Oil, the suffragettes pioneered the techniques of packing explosives with nuts and bolts for maximum damage, and crying for attention by attacking art, such as the slashing of Velazquez’s Toilette of Venus. As the saying goes, one woman’s terrorist is another woman’s freedom fighter. But the suffragettes had a long struggle ahead of them: voting rights equal to men’s in Britain were not achieved until 1928:

A pit village (mining village), built and owned by the colliery company. Pit villages popped up wherever there was coal, and their survival and growth depended on the mine’s production:

A miner’s home, comprising a living room/bedroom, a kitchen, and an outhouse. This abode may look modest, but miners’ wages were above average. Housing and coal were free, but the ever-present worry of losing them bedeviled those who could not work because of injury or infirmity; eviction was their fate. Having many sons, who were likely to follow dad’s footsteps into the earth’s bowels, was a good insurance against destitution. Notice Queen Vic on the wall, surveying the surroundings:

Each family tended their vegetable garden and raised fowl for meat and eggs. The building at the back is the village chapel, and the shacks over the right fence are canary aviaries. These delicate birds are highly sensitive to carbon monoxide, which is colourless, odourless, and deadly. If a caged canary dropped dead inside a mine, the miners would skedaddle. Canaries were under involuntary employment until 1986, when electronic detectors became available:

Children experiencing school in 1913. Notice they all had tablets (slates). No TikTok, though. Pupils would leave school at the age of 12 and the lucky ones would be employed by the company, although they could not go underground until 14:

Goin’ to haul King Coal. Which, according to today’s Woke canon, was the sustenance of the Industrial Revolution, the mother of white evil. George Orwell had a different view: ‘Our civilization… is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil’. (Down the Mine, 1937). Collieries employed over a million British miners in 1913, the industry’s height. In the Beamish area alone (County Durham), over 165,000 men and boys worked in 304 mines:

Men going down, coal coming up. After 92 miners died in the Felling Mine explosions in 1812, the Society for the Prevention of Accidents in Coal Mines pushed hard for a safety solution, which resulted in the development of the mining safety lamp, an ingenious device that became a miner’s inseparable friend. Many retired miners have their lamp on display in their homes. In the National Coal Mining Museum, you can go into a pit and have the claustrophobic experience of a lifetime: