Songs of Innocence by Fran Abrams Page A

first, self second” should be your motto.’
    Fun, ancient and modern
    ‘My brother Leslie was continually falling into ponds,’ Olive Everson recalled. ‘In winter he would slide on too-thin ice, and in Summer, wading in streams in
order to catch “tiddlers”, he would suddenly find himself in deep water and arrive home soaked and miserable. My mother never knew what to expect at the end of the day, when he was due
to arrive home . . . he loved to go off on his own for a day’s fishing, with a bent pin, a worm and some string.’ 12
    Baden-Powell tapped into some powerful forces when he founded the Scout movement. There was the age-old tendency for boys – who always had more freedom – to go off exploring their
environment, and also this renewed sense that there was something fundamentally character-building and life-affirming about allowing children to roam the countryside, to breathe its healthy air and
even occasionally to come into contact with cold water or mud.
    The first weekly comic strip, which had appeared in 1884, had featured a raffish character called Ally Slope, who was always gettinginto scrapes. But it was during the
Edwardian period that children’s comics began to come into their own, with Alfred Harmsworth’s Amalgamated Press launching the
Daily Mail
on the profits from its
Comic
Cuts
and
Illustrated Chips
. 13 But the big excitement of the age, for the working-class child at least, was the cinema. The first films
were shown in the late nineteenth century at travelling fairground shows, and graduated to small shops known as ‘Penny Gaffs’. By 1909, larger cinemas were being built, licensed by
local authorities. 14 Yet these picture-houses were a working-class domain, not considered entirely safe or respectable for the more affluent
child. Elsie Oman, born around 1904 into a very poor family in Salford, remembered her local picture-house as a chaotic place: 15 ‘Sometimes
Auntie would give my cousin and I a penny each to go to the pictures matinée – “the bug house”, we called it. Sometimes we got a free orange or a comic as we entered. It
was like a madhouse inside. Some children got their entrance fee by taking empty jam jars or bottles back to the shops – they got a penny for three. The place reeked of oranges and every now
and then lumps of peel would come whizzing round our earholes . . . it was a good job they were silent pictures, as with the noise of the children it would have been difficult to hear.’
    The premises in which films were shown to children were often unsanitary and even unsafe. But it was the content of the films, and their possible effect on the morals of the children of the
urban poor, which now began to cause serious concern. The first known case of a film being blamed for encouraging juvenile delinquency occurred in 1913: 16 a magistrate named Mr Wallace, dealing at the London Sessions with a boy who pleaded guilty to burglary, blamed the pictures for the offence, according to the following
day’s newspaper: ‘Many of the lads who came before him owed their position to having been influenced by pictures of burglaries and thefts at such shows . . . these shows, as far as
young boys were concerned, were a grave danger to the community.’
    Similarly, the following year a group of boys who came before the Sutton Coldfield magistrates accused of theft were bound over not to enter a picture-house for twelve
months: ‘The chairman said the town had been made notorious as a den of young thieves, and shopkeepers had been terrorised. A petition, signed by clergy and ministers of religion and by the
local branch of the Women’s Temperance Association, was presented, suggesting the closer supervision of picture theatres. They urged that no picture should be allowed to be shown which
represented violence and wrongdoing, and objected to certain posters.’
    Yet the cinema was here to stay. In 1914, research by Manchester’s Director of Education,