Child's play history continued
In Victorian times a great many children had an unhappy childhood. They worked hard to satisfy the needs of their parents because families were very poor and they didn't have enough money, so children worked. They underwent very difficult conditions of employment. Days were long for them: usually eight or twelve hours a day, six days a week. Children worked in very sad conditions when they were in rags.The building could collapse because at that times, streets were very poor. In the industrial revolution,they looked like slaves A great many children worked in manufactories. At that time, there was no insurance and when children had accidents or were ill they didn't have any help. Many children often worked with adults: they worked under the same conditions. Children were small, they could go into narrow spaces, children were clever too and employers appreciated these qualities. In the 19th century, children lived in very difficult conditions because they lived near factories and in unhealthy flats or in suburbs with poor hygiene. They had bad nutrition. They ate some bread, pork, milk or cheese (not everyday. This favoured infant mortality and diseases. Towards 1830 charity associations came to help children and their families. It gave food and clothes to everybody. After 1840 school was an obligation and children stopped working. But the conditions remained very difficult for all because streets and suburbs were very dirty in England.
In 1830, children could be ill with cholera when they drank water. Streets in London were dirty. Conditions of life were very difficult. Children lived in the street and the industrial revolution caused pollution. Many children were very ill. Children's lungs infected and they blackened. They had tuberculosis. These diseases were the infection of the lungs. Whooping cough was practically the same as tuberculosis. It was a virus. In the 19th century vaccines didn't exist. Therefore the rate of mortality was high.
Parents of rich children often were bankers, merchants, industrials or civil servants. They lived in beautiful suburbs, sometimes in private hotels. The upper class organized parties and could go to festivals whereas the poor worked. Only children from rich families went to school. But these ones were not many. Boys were in famous schools like Eton,where education was very strict.
They could go to school invented by Thomas ARNOLD, a rugby man, where behaviour, friendship, fair play were more important than others. Thomas ARNOLD and parents thought it was more important for gentlemen to learn classical authors than sciences. Girls didn't have the same education as boys. They learned to become good wives and good mothers. This education was very unfair so in 1870, the Education Act was passed. It offered schools for all children between the age of 5 and 13.
Numerous Attempts were now made to provide some form of organized play activities for children. These ranged from country excursions for slum children, organized by The Fresh Air Fund and The Children's Holiday Fund. To church groups such as The Children's Happy Evening Association, The Salvation Army, The Band of Hope and the Shining Light. These church groups organized a variety of play activities in the evenings, sundays and during school holidays. These included religious education, teas, prizes and magic lantern shows. All children attending were expected to learn religious texts. Recreational Spaces
For centuries, the street was the primary play space for European and American children. Children spent a great deal of unsupervised time away from both home and school, often establishing their own social structure. Boys' gangs had their own territory and often engaged in fierce battles with trespassers. This tendency for children to create their own rules for the use of public space continued among working-class children into the twentieth century; in New York's working-class neighborhoods, for instance, in the early years of the century, stoops and sidewalks were reserved for girls, who looked after babies and toddlers, while the center of the street "belonged" to older boys, who patrolled their turf and guarded against incursions by boys from other neighborhoods.
By about 1800, however, the upper middle class began to devote greater attention to child rearing, and so began to supervise the activities of their children more closely. Kept inside the house to play with toys (rather than with cohorts from a different class), upper middle-class children only ventured out onto the street on "walks" in the company of adults. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, middle-class observers became increasingly alarmed by the idea of children roaming the streets and ever more critical of working-class play, which was dominated by games of chance that might reinforce "the taste for unearned pleasures." While such concerns prompted the establishment of ragged schools and other institutions aimed at removing poor children from the street, they also gave impetus for the establishment of parks and playgrounds. Although largely ornamental in nature, the great urban parks of the nineteenth century often included play spaces for children. Queen's Park in Manchester, England (designed in 1849), included circular swings, a ball and shuttle-cock ground, skipping rope and swing grounds, another shuttle-cock ground, a quoit alley, a skittle alley, an archery ground, and a cricket ground (some of these activities may have been intended for adults as well).
Playgrounds designed specifically for the use of children were introduced gradually in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the first English example–the Burberry Street Recreation Ground in Birmingham–established in 1877. Most nineteenth-century English playgrounds were sponsored by private organizations, such as the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association (which opened four playgrounds in London between 1882 and 1886) or the Children's Happy Evenings Association (which opened six play centers in London by 1888 and a total of ninety-six centers by World War I). By the turn of the century, however, there was an international movement to establish playgrounds in small parks in working-class neighborhoods, often with municipal support. The London County Council, for instance, opened over one hundred acres of London School Board playgrounds for Saturday use in 1890. In the United States, settlement house workers played an important role in establishing neighborhood parks (like Pulaski Park in Chicago), and also inspired the activities of playground associations abroad (including the Playground Association of Queensland, which opened three supervised playgrounds in Brisbane, Australia, between 1913 and 1927). Established at least in part to guide working-class recreational practices, these parks emphasized formal designs, containing well-defined spaces that allowed the sorting of park users by gender and age, as well as their supervision by professional, middle-class play leaders. In the 1940s, as playground supervision dropped off, municipalities depended more heavily on manufactured play equipment that was both low maintenance and safe. Stripped of dangerous equipment (such as the teeter-totter), the standard playground was comprised of a paved surface, fence, sandpit, swings and jungle gym, although by the 1960s, free-form play sculptures in bright colors began to supplement standardized equipment. Film of Band of Hope /Click link below.
MOVIE. Children at the factory gates 1901. PLAY ENCYCLOPEDIA USA
A popular rhyme of the period. . NIPPLE NIPPLE. "Nipple Nipple with one eye went to church on Sundays Children then were also encouraged to call on their neighbors on Sundays, with collection cards to raise church funds. For religion played a great part in influencing the child's morality and behavior. Rocking horses and swings were now frowned upon by the moralistic Victorians and considered to be too stimulating to the child's sexual feelings. Mothers were now advised by many not to play with their young children for a young delicate and nervous baby needs rest and quiet.If he cried and was not in pain she was advised to ignore him. Prayed to God to give him strength To whack the kids on Mondays".
Jane Adams a commentator of that time commented, "The inveterate demands of youth, that life shall offer a large measure of excitement, that this love of excitement". "This desire for adventure is basic and will be envied by each generation as a challenge to their elders."
Children continued to mimic adults and the world as they saw it in their play world. Small children in London played games of mothers and soldiers, nurses and hospitals, carts and horses, shops, convicts and warders and railway stations.
 
Children now found it difficult to play barefooted on the streets, as there was now so much dirt, filth and broken glass around. During this period a great many poor children from the working classes who lived in the towns and cities suffered from poor mental or physical health. Such as poor vision, nervousness and rickets, along with a variety of mental illnesses. The poorer child's height, weight and general health was shown to be lacking when compared to the wealthier child, with children's diet being the main contributory factor.
As Trussell wrote in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, (1905) "Ere we see the inside of another room of slum town, with the father and mother and four children sitting down to dinner of bread and dripping and tea". As soon as they became of age children received half time certificates, until they were fourteen years of age and left school to work full time. Homeless or destitute children could attend workhouses at a cost to the ratepayers of twelve shillings per child per week. Such workhouses as were in Charles Dickens classic story of Oliver Twist . These places were inhospitable and squalid. One of the sites of such a workhouse was at mint street in Southwark which is now the home of the Mint street adventure playground site. Another is at Poole in Dorset. Quay in Poole Dorset.   Children living within these regimes had to live on meals of gruel, which consisted in the main of greasy water with lumps of floating gristle, or a hunk of bread and a jug of skilly. Skilly being a compound of oatmeal and water. These workhouses had no sanitation and little comfort. Although on Sundays the children were permitted to spend some time with their mothers in the women's room and there permitted to have cheese with their bread.
Country working life 1904.
In 1907 Baden Powell took a group of boys camping at Brownsea Island near Poole in Dorset and formed the Boy Scout Movement.
Shortly after in 1908, children had their very own children's encyclopedia and their own newspaper which was called The Little Paper. This was published for the first time in 1910. Some children in 1911 sprang a surprise on their parents and the authorities by going on strike from school, demanding less caning and more holidays.
The first official Free school, The Little Commonwealth, was established in 1913 by Homer Lane at Shaftesbury in Dorset. A few years later in 1917 Coldwell Cook had published The Free Way. The free play movement was to have a great influence on child's play in the future and was the forerunner to many fresh ideas in later years including A.S. Neils Summerhill and Michael Duanes Risinghill.
Children's street games of London as stated by Norman Douglas, in his book London Street Games, (1916), now included old and new favorites.
Games such as king Caesar, king of banbury, queen Anne, king john says no, green man, rise o, hiding hats in the house of parliament, high treason and we are Romans. As well as Chinese orders, sally round the jam pot, hat under the moon, piling the donkey, fly Dutchman, black scalings, grulley, hot rice, swolo, frozen foot, daggles, hark, the robbers coming through and broken bottles.
In 1918 the government introduced The Children and Young Persons Act, to protect children from abuse, neglect and all manner of ill treatment. Most popular games were skipping, marbles, whip and top, ring games and ball games. The whip and tops had special names such as carrot granny, window breaker and spinny jenny. The lads had iron hoops whilst the girls had smaller wooden hoops. Children usually managed with discarded bike wheels.
A penny now bought twenty marbles all made of chalk, whilst the larger ones were called tallys and these were taken from the insides of glass bottles. The children carried the marbles in flannel bags.
CHILDS DREAMS Quiet he sleeps in his wee little bed the little man slumbers the hours forgets all that's been said sleeping the nightime dreams fast away far from the hours spent in his land of play
the spinning tops still now the soccer ball lays still whilst the fish are still swimming in the streams by the hill the lights have gone out in the streets down below for the storybooks over at the end of the show the feet that were swift have rested tonight amidst pillows of slumber and teeth pearly white just a nod of the head and a dream to recall whilst there's games left there strewn at the foot of the hall
the day it was hectic down at the fair with carousel rides and Ferris wheel there with candy's floss to lick and girls to give chase now a just a bundle of mischief sleeps in this place
With mornings of play times and games still to run birdsong and rabbits and those ding a ling songs trees to climb daily and a river to sail kites in the sky and a wish at the well frolics in forests and playmates to chase bundles of fun in this time and this space with antics and frolics and new sports to try all are the pleasures of play in his eyes
singing and dancing with friends down the lane spills in the park and splash in the rain splashing in puddles again and again a world to explore and not a moment to lose now sound asleep in his rhapsody snooze.
This century had heralded in new children's rights, reforms and social recreations and was therefore to be remembered by many historians as being, " The Century of the Child".
Jane Adams a commentator of that time commented, "The inveterate demands of youth, that life shall offer a large measure of excitement, that this love of excitement, this desire for adventure is basic and will be envied by each generation as a challenge to their elders".
Children continued to mimic adults and the world as they saw it in their play world. Small children in London played games of mothers and soldiers, nurses and hospitals, carts and horses, shops, convicts and warders and railway stations.
 playing in the street 
In London children played on the banks of the river serpentine, or tobogganed down Parliament hill. There was however still a marked difference in the play of the wealthy and that of the poor.
As portrayed in Robert Tressels The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, "Often rich and poor were seen to be playing together". Though the class differences were notably apparent. "Frequently in that street was to be seen the appalling spectacle of the ten year old son of the refined trafain dragging along a cart construction of a sugar box, an old pair of perambulator wheels with no tyres". "In which reposed the plebeian Frankie Owen, armed with a whip and the dandy daughter of a bankers clerk, while the nine year old heir of the coal merchant rushed up behind".
  Children on the streets of the city
During this period a great many poor children from the working classes who lived in the towns and cities suffered from poor mental or physical health. Such as poor vision, nervousness and rickets, along with a variety of mental illnesses. The poorer child's height, weight and general health was shown to be lacking when compared to the wealthier child, with children's diet being the main contributory factor. .
The poor urban family were bound together by a cat’s cradle of rites, and social traditions. There was chapel on Sundays, washdays at the public laundry on Mondays. There were choirs in welsh mining villages and there were pigeon fanciers, whippet racers and brass bands in northern towns.
The street was the hub of the community and folks liked to sit outside their front doors watching the world go by and gossip over tea. Such urban thoroughfares were noisy places populated by accordionists, ventriloquists, muffin men bearing trays of uncooked muffins on their heads, blind match sellers, musicians, sometimes and a man with a wind up gramophone.
Children played hopscotch on the pavements and alleyways,marbles,tag and kick the can, they skipped, pushed each other around in improvised go karts, kicked footballs made of rags or launched kites made from old newspapers etc.With parents at work children were often left to their own devices
Travelling funfairs were the fashion, with Romany showmen in brightly covered painted wagons with the raucous noise of the steam organs and hurdy gurdys.Here there were shooting galleries and coconut shies. Hawkers selling winkles and toffee apples, plus side shows of bearded ladies, performing dwarf's,snake women, Siamese twins, sword swallower's,gypsy fortune tellers and boxers who challenged all comers.
The introduction of the radio brought with it special children's programmers such as Children's Hour and Uncle Mac, which were first broadcast in 1922.
The childhood of the 1920s was very different to earlier times as Mollie Harris had first noted in her own account, entitled A Kind of Magic. (1961). Recounting her own childhood during these years.
"When I look back the ways of my childhood seem to have had a kind of magic about them, they are so colorful, exciting, demanding, full of discovery, joy and adventure".
Her account of village life tells of "Traveling men, milkmen who came with their shiny cans, rag and bone men, sweet sellers and there were also various tramps and gypsies". "Schooldays then were spent in overcrowded classrooms and started at three years of age for most children". Most popular games were skipping, marbles, whip and top, ring games and ball games.
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