OFF TOPIC. 18TH CENTURY LONDON.

Over the last few weeks, I've been doing some research into my wife's family, who I've found much to my surprise, were convicts who arrived in Australia in the first three fleets. Amazing stuff. But it also sent me searching for what life might have been like in those days. The link below is a real eye opener.

http://forums.canadiancontent.net/history/48176-18th-century-london-its-daily.html

 

My entire family, save one Scottish grandfather, came from the smoke, so will read in full later, looks a great read. Some of the footnote comments were very good!

Many thanks.

 

I loved the comment on that forum from Finder ‘it's like Utopia compared to 21 century London’. Made I chuckle anyway.

Must confess that being a simple country boy London scares me somewhat!

 

Ask some of the forum members what it was like Cyclonic - they were schoolboys at the time

 

Nice Dan. I notice you didn't name names.

 

He doesn't have to, these baby boomers were always cheeky sods. Actually, that baker in Pudding Lane used to sell great meat pies, shame it got burnt down. Sainsbury's just doesn't compare.

 

Cyc, you should console ‘Er Indoors with the news that we no longer export the dregs of society Down Under. Nowadays we give them jobs in investment banking with huge bonuses or we elect them to Parliament.

For 18th Century London, I think you can read 21st Century Kingston-Upon-Hull.

On the BBC local news last evening, they were reporting that Hull has the highest rate of under-age smoking in the UK. Glasgow must be devastated to miss out. Hull already ranks in the top five for adult smoking so I have no idea where their kids get the habit.

1) Unplanned housing – lots of empty buy-to-let flats but it is largely something else that is ‘unplanned’.
2) Dirty, stinking, dangerous streets and alleys – no smell of wet horses as they went in supermarket lasagne years ago.
3) Water and waste – the river Humber is not sluggish; and they drink lager not gin instead of water.
4) Coal, fog and the smell of the grave – not foggy often and the ‘thick clouds of black soot’ are cigarettes not coal.
5) Untimely death – smoking and obesity rather than bad sanitation.
6) Learned pigs and other diversions – the pigs are all in sausages and there is no guide book to the red light district.
7) Law and disorder – they might have that on DVD; or is that Law and Order?
8) Thief Taker, Constable, Police – they might have that on DVD; or is that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy?
9) Trial and punishment – they might have that book in the library; or is that Crime and Punishment?

 

QM, it's only been the last 50-60 years that Australians have begun to embrace the convict era. Before that, families hid that kind of lineage is some dark, unopened closet. It was a shameful thing to have a convict in the family. Almost from the very arrival of the first fleet in 1788, convicts were considered the birth stain of the new land. Even today, some still live with that idea. As something to do, I started to look back into my wife's history, because I knew that they stretched back to the mid eighteen hundreds. Within an hour, I'd discovered that a direct male line went back to the third fleet. The man's surname was my wife's maiden name. I was over the moon to find the link, but my wife wasn't all that excited by it all. I think this relates back to her mother, an 80 year old lady who thinks along the old lines. It took me a week to drive home how bit a deal this is. She's now quite happy with the finding. After further research, I found that the son of the convict married the grand daughter of a man who came out in the first fleet, who married a lady from the second fleet. This is going to sound a little strange, but these people from the first three fleets are now being referred to as Australian Royalty. And here's me, the son of a Scottish gent who's dad was a journeyman plasterer. Boy have I come a long way.

 

QMII - whilst Glasgow does have a little to do to catch up on Hull, this weekends match will bring us to the fore on the news front for ALL the wrong reasons. I think the underagers in Glasgow are concentrating on the youngest Grandmother competition. That title currently held by a 22 year old Dundonian

 

Cyc, I know that you have your own version of the BBC TV program “Who Do You Think You Are?” that traces the family trees of celebrities. It can throw up some interesting ancestors and demonstrates that we should not worry too much about inheriting anything but DNA. In the last series here, they traced TV cook Mary Berry and found that she was descended from a family of bakers that had made their wealth doing public contract bread baking for the poor. In previous years they have traced some celebs back to foreign lands and to various European Royal families and other scoundrels.

One day I will go and trace my own family tree further than the great grandparents that I already know. I have no expectation of finding anything but manual labourers.

Are you sure that your grandfather was not just listed as “Scottish and plastered”?

 

QM, I don't know about all of the family, but I do know the the old man didn't mind throwing down a few.

 

I won't advise anyone to read Peter Ackroyd's Biography of London but was amused to read in it that there was a specific thoroughfare in a particularly seedy area named Gropec**t Lane. Sadly at some stage it was renamed..............political correctness gone mad.