london street urchins
TRANSCRIPT
PowerPoint Show by Andrew
Their boots barely hang together. Their clothes are ragged hand-me-downs. And for most a hot bath is a distant memory.
But in the eyes of these children there is a self-possession and a quiet confidence that belies the appalling circumstances in which they grew up.
These East London youngsters lived amid deprivation, violence and squalor that defies imagination today. At the beginning of the last century, thousands existed in abject poverty on streets that are now among the most fashionable and expensive in the capital.
The E. London urchins growing up in one the most deprived areas of London.
Annie, seven, and one-year-old Nellie, sit sad and hungry on sacking outside their house in Spitalfields.
They were among ten children born to single mother Annie Daniels. Five of their siblings died in childhood.
Tommy Nail pushes one of his brothers in a make-shift wheelbarrow. The boys' mother died two years ago, her death certificate starkly citing the cause as "exhaustion".
Nine-year-old Charlie Long (left) lived in a workers' eating-house run by his parents. Adelaide Springett (right) was so ashamed of her tattered boots, she took them off for this 1901 photograph.
Jeremiah Donovan, six, was nicknamed Dick Whittington because of his pet cat. But the newspaper vendor's son did not find London's streets paved with gold.
Two children, their toes poking out of their boots, tend a fire in a battered tin brazier to heat buckets and bowls of water in which to scrub clothes.
The clean garments would be hung on lines strung across the street.
Scruffy but happy.... a boy poses in a wide-brim hat.
A girl and a boy making kindling.
Two girls wash clothes in the street.
Barefoot and carefree?
A young girl cuddles with a cat.
A young boy washes windows for food.
A neighborhood in West London where living was much easier.