The Woman of Substance: The Life and Work of Barbara Taylor Bradford. Piers Dudgeon

now existing in the poorer quarters – where it is not unusual to find numbers of homes crowded round a common midden, which is constructed to hold several months’ deposit of closet and vegetable matter, ashes and every sort of household refuse imaginable, and which remains in a festering and decaying condition, poisoning what pure air may reach the narrow courts . . .’

      A Ripon Council report, dated seven years before Freda was born, records one domicile ‘where ten human beings have been herded together in a space scarcely adequate for a self-respecting litter of pigs,’ and it is recorded in A Ripon Record 1887–1986 that in 1906, when Freda was two, increasing numbers of children were turning up at school without shoes.

      The awful conditions in which unskilled working-class people lived in Edwardian England was so widely appreciated that in the hard winter of 1903, the New York Independent could find no more deserving case than England to cover: ‘The workhouses have no space left in which to pack the starving crowds who are craving every day and night at their doors for food and shelter. All the charitable institutions have exhausted their means in trying to raise supplies of food for the famishing residents of the garrets and cellars of London lanes and alleys.’

      As in London, so in Ripon. These horrors were to be found ‘within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces’, as William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, noted in his book, In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890). George R. Sims, a respected journalist writing a year earlier, had conjured up a picture that would not have seemed out of place in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, of ‘underground cellars where the vilest outcasts hide from the light of day . . . [where] it is dangerous to breathe for some hours at a stretch an atmosphere charged with infection and poisoned with indescribable effluvia.’