A Workhouse Death During the 1926 General Strike-The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I shouldn’t have survived my childhood during the 1920s because I was sick more often than well. Working-class children were easy prey for death in the early 20th century because healthcare was allotted to those who could afford it. It was considered normal by the middle class and, more importantly, the entitled class that the poor died earlier than them. We, the poor, did die earlier than the rich. We were weakened through malnutrition, unsafe housing conditions and general threats to life and limb that more affluent kids were protected from because wealth makes for safer living conditions.

I was lucky I made it through my first two years of life because my belly was more times empty than full. Too often, persistent malnutrition came close to killing me were it not for my mother’s stubborn determination to see me live into adulthood.

It was her that kept the fire of life burning inside of me no matter how ill I became as a bairn. At around 18 months, I developed a prolapsed rectum from malnutrition that caused a portion of my intestines to slip out of my backside. Later in life, when I questioned her erratic mothering skills, my mum roared back at me, “ You wouldn’t have been alive today if I hadn’t shoved your bowels back up your arsehole when you were a sickly lad. I told death to bugger off and you now thank me like this?”

To her lasting regret, mum was not able to say the same to Marion in adulthood because she didn't survive her childhood. Marion couldn’t be fixed like I was by shoving my guts back into me. TB wasn’t cured by brute force, and for Marion to survive her form of TB, she needed care in a sanatorium- and that was beyond my parent’s fiscal resources.

1926 was a horrible, hungry time to be dying if you were working class. The streets where the working class lived were angry because they had been cheated by their political leaders who promised a "Land fit for heroes," at the conclusion of the Great War in 1918. But eight years on, wages for miners hadn't gone up but instead were clawed back. Other workers felt a similar pinch from their employers who wanted more hours worked for less pay.