Early1900s

Early 1900s

The early 1900s, the last days of the reign of Queen Victoria, early days of King Edward VII, in Britain, was like two separate worlds.

There was the world of the rich or comfortably off, the upcoming middle classes, who had their own houses, a few servants and definitely a cook, and they could live pseudo gentile lives, pretending everything was perfect.

The wealthy ladies in the early 1900s dressed to perfection, on the outside, but I for one would not want to be squashed into one of those corsets all day. They were the reason Victorian and Edwardian women fainted at the slightest shock, not because their poor little brains were so fragile.

It seems that the smaller one's waist, the more attractive one was, and the result was difficulty in breathing and often miscarriages and deformed babies. Pregnancy did not stop women from lacing their corsets as tight as possible. Some even had ribs removed to accommodate a tighter lacing.

These ladies oversaw various charities as well as dinner parties, and most importantly, they made up the ladies of the poor board. The poor board was somewhere people from that other world would come, in order to beg for some of that charity to feed themselves and their children.

They might be widows, left with no income; they might be the wives of men who had found themselves out of work (and note it was usually the wives who came begging, rarely the husbands).

In dire cases they might be unmarried mothers, which was almost a crime back then. But it was a crime for the woman, never for the man.

If the ladies of the poor board deemed one worthy, they might be given a few pennies on which to survive until the next time. But if they were deemed unworthy, those women often ended on the streets, selling the only thing they had left to sell, their bodies. They would rather do that than go to the Union workhouse, where they were punished just for being poor.

Sometimes those very wealthy had servants and finding employment as a servant, although a hard life, meant three meals a day and a roof over one's head.

That other world was only a smidgeon away from Hell itself. Living in slums where rats were an everyday sight in their living rooms, wondering where the next meal was coming from and even sharing their underwear. It was often a case that the daughter who attended school was the one whose turn it was to wear the knickers. They always shared the same bed.

In the early 1900s, disease was rife and very often incurable.

My novels set during this period are not what one might call romance, but they have received some excellent feedback from readers. My very first, The Romany Princess, is based on stories my mother used to tell me and set in London. The second is a series, Knight's Acre; three books so far, Till Death do us Part, The Forgotten Witness, The Countess of Harrisford. I intend to add to those in the future. Then we have The Million Dollar Bride, a novel set around the custom of American millionaires wanting British titles for their daughters and the British nobility being a bit hard up and wanting money to keep their estates going.

Click here to learn more about Knight's Acre

The Titanic Disaster 1912

In April 1912, the world's biggest liner of the day, the RMS Titanic, set sail from Southampton to collect passengers in Cherbourg, France, then in Queenstown, Ireland. It's final destination was going to be New York.

Many of those Irish passengers were third class emigrants, hoping for a new life in the USA. At the time, many people emigrated to America, where they could pull themselves up from poverty to anything they wanted. The sky was the limit and many gathered from all over the world at Ellis Island.

But it was those third class passengers, trapped in the lowest deck when the iceberg scraped its way through the side of the ship, tearing a hole large enough to flood the entire ship, who made up the majority of fatalities. The third class deck got the water first.

In the first lass section, everything was luxurious. It was a floating palace and people paid a small fortune for a first class ticket.

The Titanic has always fascinated, and it certainly fascinates me. The ship was advertised as unsinkable, and the White Star Line believed that so much that they provided enough lifeboats for only a third of the number of people on board.

It struck at 2 am when all the passengers were sleeping. Can you imagine? You have got onto this famous and wonderful ship, you are, perhaps, wealthy, and are tucked up and dreaming on a calm sea.

When the stewards came along and told you to get up and put on your lifebelt, you must have thought it was part of your dream. It could not be real, could it? The ship was unsinkable; what possible harm could a lump of ice do to it?

1600 people lost their lives on that ship and investigations are still going on, a hundred years later, to decide who was to blame for such a massive loss of life.

One of the characters in The Romany Princess found himself on the Titanic. I hope you'll all read what happened to him.

The Royals of the Early 1900s

A word about the royals of the early 1900s. Queen Victoria, as most people know, had nine children, who populated the royal families of Europe. The Tsar of Russia was a cousin, as was Kaiser Wilhelm with whom Great Britain was at war during World War I. She also carried the Haemophilia disease, which appeared in her own son, Leopold, as well as the young Alexei, the son of Tsar Nicholas II.

King Edward VII was not King for very long, but while he was and earlier while Prince of Wales, he made no secret of his philandering and his wild and merry lifestyle. He often turned up with a mistress instead of his wife, the long suffering Queen Alexandra.

I think myself that Edward was a bit of a sex maniac. He even had a chair made specially for the purpose. Although many have thought it was designed for two women to lie on, it is still a puzzle how that bottom layer actually worked. Well, it is to me, anyway!

The top layer is obvious but I'd really rather not go into details. Learn about it here.

One thing that happened in the early 1900s that always pulls at my heart strings was the murder of the Russian royal family, the Romanovs.

Tsar Nicholas was the cousin of Britain's then King George V and he told Nicholas that he and his family could come to England to seek refuge from the Bolshevik revolution. But parliament were not eager to upset the new Russian government, so he had to retract his offer.

The result was that Nicholas, along with his wife and five children, were murdered in the cellar of a house in Ekaterinberg where they had been held captive.

It was a tragedy that need never have happened.

World War I

World War I broke out in 1912. It was called the Great War, the war to end all wars, then 25 years later we went to war with Germany again.

If that period in the early 1900s interests you, you might was to read an eye witness account by clicking on the picture above. This is a journal written by my husband's grandfather, who spent time in a German prisoner of war camp.

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