Among the Bohemians Read Online Free PDF Page A

parlourmaids and calling-cards were paid for out of tight incomes, nor did families like Ursula Bloom’s have any of the expectations that we have today.The daughter of a country clergyman, she gives us a picture of her family’s life both before and after the First World War.They lived an impeccably respectable life in a country vicarage on three hundred pounds a year: ‘Few people realise today how careful the whole of England was about the spending of money, and all families saved a little for the rainy day…’ remembered Ursula.
    Servants’ wages had to come out of the budget, because the middle classes took a certain retinue of staff for granted, but the family made economies on every front.They never bought expensive joints; clothes and furniture had to last; rooms were rarely redecorated, and nobody bought manufactured toilet paper because it was too expensive.Socks were always darned; middle-class formalities like the tipping of servants could leave one disastrously short of cash.With careful penny-pinching, nobody went hungry, but no housewife worth her salt omitted to keep scrupulous accounts, or to pay the butcher’s bill on the nail.
    What is striking about such examples as the Blooms is that one would expect such families to have more spending power today.Undoubtedly atthe beginning of the twenty-first century we are accustomed to spending a far higher proportion of our available income on what would, just fifty years ago, have been seen as impossible luxuries.Today a country vicar would automatically expect to own a car, a refrigerator and a telephone, to travel and have holidays, to purchase ready-made clothes at regular intervals, eat convenience foods and occasionally eat out, buy cheap medicines and afford a television and radio.Not one of these things was generally affordable by the Blooms, never mind taken for granted.Before 1945 this was the general state of affairs.The only thing that our generation no longer expects, which our grandparents counted upon, was servants.At the beginning of the twentieth century the labour market was such that every middle-class household could afford servants, and it was not until the Second World War that even people on moderate incomes found it hard to afford the minimum of one maid and a charwoman.
    Returning to the Bohemian artists of this period, we have to adjust our own expectations in order to understand what living on a low income meant in England in the first half of the twentieth century.The middle classes already lived frugally enough; they had no modern-day superfluities.Cutting loose from cramped conventional middle-class society and from regular sources of income didn’t mean renouncing luxuries, it meant renouncing necessities.It meant going without regular meals, economising on heat and clothing, reducing one’s living to the essentials.The fact is that by opting for a life independent of the rat race, many artists were forced to become déclassé, and this was a genuine sacrifice, albeit a willing one.It took real courage to opt for the life of a ‘struggling artist’.
    Remember too that for self-employed people before the Second World War there was no automatic benefit system, as there is today.Skilled artisans or their widows might claim from the Friendly Benefit Societies; ex-employees could draw the dole in times of hardship, and low earners who had paid their compulsory contributions were also entitled to free medical treatment by the ‘panel’, otherwise the doctor expected prompt settlement.The prospect for an unsalaried freelance artist who could not sell his or her work, or survive by other means, was starvation.
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    These realities give a context to the evidence gleaned from artists’ memoirs, letters and biographies of the period.
    Turn-of-the-century London: the impoverished Arthur Ransome finds himself unable to earn, and is compelled for a week to live off apples and cheese which cost 2d a pound.Slade student Edna Waugh stands