THE “GOOD OLD DAYS”

Waipawa Mail, Volume XLIX, Issue 152, 14 September 1928, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE “GOOD OLD DAYS”

WERE THEY SO GOOD? FAMOUS JOURNALIST DISAGREES Hannen Swaffer, the famous English journalist and dramatic critic thinks the "gold o'd days” were really bad old days. Read what he says in an English weekly:— I am conscious sometimes of living in a moaning world. "What a dreadful world it is!” people say. "lt is worse than ever.” Don’t- you believe it! I blundered across a few old newspaper cuttings in a drawer the other day, and turned up a few old books. They revealed the iniquities of the past, the cruelties, the selfishness, and the sordidness of most people’s lives. They reminded me of much.

I wonder if you know that it was only in 1842 that a score of young men met in a tavern in High Holborn, tired of the fact that the life of shop assistants was "one round of bed to shop and shop to bed,” and passed a most modest resolution which twenty years later, led to England’s first Saturday half-hoiday being started in Government offices and a few large shops. Out of that humble meeting in High Holborn came the great modern movement which has ameliorated the lives of millions. There are now 1,750,000 peaceful, placid, and industrious shop workers whose labours end at eight o’clock by law, the only argument against them being such stupid remarks as "Mothers cannot buy milk and rubber comforters for their children after eight o’clock while, after that hour, others cannot buy kippers.” Yet, not many years ago, shops were open from half-past seven in the morning till ten o’clock at night, and until midnight on Saturday. Shop assistants worked from eighty to a hundred hours per week! Barmaids frequently drew beer from six o’clock in the morning ti 1 half-past twelve at night —thousands of them, all over the country! A few weeks ago, when a director of a great London store retired, he told me how, when he came to London from Strood in Kent as a shop assistant forty years before, he was not allowed to wear a moustache for fear it would make the lady cutomers want to flirt with him; how the food,, to eat which he was given only twenty minutes in the middle of the day, was horrible; and how, in those days, all the assistants had to "live in,” in into'erable conditions. Now the shop assistants in the big store have high wages. I know of ’Varsity men and famous sportsmen who share their labours, working with them side by side, proud of their jobs—and they all have their own sports club, while all of them leave off work at six o ’clock every night and at one o’clock on Saturdays. The degradations of factory life were so generally accepted as necessary, only forty years ago, that Mrs Sidney Webb was regarded as such a strange being, when she gave evidence about sweated industries before the House of Lords in 1888, that she went home and recorded in her diary. "Peeresses came down to staro at me ’’; while she wrote four days later, "Disagreeable consequences of appearing in public. Descriptions of my appearance and dress and offensive remarks by the newspapers. The question attracts abuse of all kinds.” Even after that, women were jeered at for riding bicycles! Now there is welfare work everywhere in the workshops, with the King’s second son as the head of it. Masters and men meet almost on equal terms.

You hear complaints, now and then, about how terrible sevants are and how hard it is to find them. My own experience is that if a servant is bad it is usua’ly my fault. Before the war, a -maid-servant worked all day in an area underneath the ground, and was a mere drudge. .She had "one Sunday out a month and an evening out every other week”; otherwise she was a prisoner and a slave. Now— A century ago "miserable sinners” meant' the people who went to the other kind of church. Religious strife was terrible in its callousness and cruelty. Chapel-goer were despised by those who went to church.

Do you know how they treated lunatics a century ago? People used to pay to go into asylums to jeer at them, and to mock! They would pelt them with stones and try to beat them into sanity!

It was no longer ago than 1821 that Richard Martin brought into the House of Commons a Bill to prevent "the illtreatment of horses and other animals” and the House of Commons roared with laughter. "I suggest that asses also should be protected from cruelty,” said one member. This joke was greeted with laughter, and when Martin went on to say that "asses a’so were entitled to protection,” the laughter became so loud that the reporters could not hear him.

"If a Bill for the protection of horses and asses were passed,” said another M.P., " I should not be surprised to find some other member proposing a Bill for the protection of dogs.” "And cats,” jeered yet another M.P. Now cats and dogs are idolised everywhere in the land. You strike a dog in the street and see what happens. In 1831 John Bell, a boy of thirteen, was hanged at Maidstone. Two years later Nicholas White, a boy aged nine, pushed a stick through the broken glass of a London shop window, and because ho raked out a few pieces of children’s painring colours valued at twopence was dragged before Mr Justice Bosanquet at the 0!d Bailey and sentenced to be hanged by the neck until he was dead. Now little Johnnie Bell and Nick White would be taken very quietly before a nice white-haired magistrate in a children’s court—no reporters would be present and there would be no idle eyes to stare—and they would be ta’kcd to kindly and told' not to be naughty boys. Yet, a century ago, all these ferocious sentences upon young children were invariably defended by the authorities as "essential if Society is to remain safe! ’> So late as 1810 a Bill to abolish capital punishment for shop-lifting to the value of five shiHngs so excited the animosity of the Solicitor-General that he declared, "I am proud to confess that I am an enemy of the opposition of theoretical speculation to practical good.”

I do not think these facts want comment from me. Do you! No, Ido not think the world is growing worse. Man is looking towards the sun of a better to mor ow.