'Twas Christmas Day in the Workhouse. (An Ellpus waffle)

Lord Ellpus,

Not surprisingly, my missus knew that poem. She was born and raised in Liverpool not many years after the time of which your father spoke. Fortunately, my wife's father always had a "good" job, and he eventually retired in the early 60's, having worked his way up to being a foreman at B.A.T., knocking down a princely £12 a week.

So, they never went hungry, but then they never owned a home, either. My mum-in-law continued paying £5 a week rent for their three bedroom house. When they first moved there in the late 40's, the house could have been purchased for not over £400. When she died in 1983, the landlord (finally freed of the controlled rental) sold the place for £95,000. Not so economically astute, me in-laws?

Needless to say, I enjoyed your post. I'm aquainted with several folks who came from such stock, particularly some of large families who came over from Ireland in those bad old days.

Such is the lot of the poor, even in democratic lands. Some of it is hidden, some plain to see. The gift to the beggar, to quote Weiss, in Marat/Sade, little more than a kick.

My mother and father could recite "Christmas Day in the Workhouse" as one of the "party pieces" they learned to perform for family entertainment.

Very interesting.

I dunno if it's generational, cultural, some combination, or something else entirely, but one thing that struck me is that this amazing story didn't come out until Ellpus was a teenager. I mean, that's pretty major information not to have. That your father had a dozen full siblings but only had contact with one of them, and that the fate of nine was completely unknown.

Interesting poem, fascinating history.

Thank you for the family history and the poem, LordE. It's undoubtedly true and stunning therefore, that this wasn't an unusual family story either.


On real estate, even this sophisticated californian spent, well, not so much on rent, though I rented for years, but stupidly much on new cars when I could have been buying property for fairly little. My parents had no clue at all of investment in anything, as a concept, although they did have one mortgage at a time, when they could.

Don't worry Soz, there were some other bits and pieces that we never found out until later on, including the fact that he was married to a young Welsh lady at the beginning of the war, and she went missing one night during a bombing raid.
She'd gone out dancing with a group of girls, and the Ballroom received a direct hit.
Her body was never found, and my Dad apparently spent the next few months trawling London in the hope of finding her.
She was finally declared "missing presumed dead" about a year later.

Personally, I just think that he had so many bad memories from that time, he just closed off that part of his life and started a new chapter, as did so many other folk.

Wow, what a piece! I teared up, too.