LiveTheirStory

The 1939 survey of England and Wales is a fascinating document of life just before WWII, and the many redacted names of those still alive reflects its use as the basis for NHS central records right up until digitisation in 2007.

The newspaper seller who is the subject of this post is named, so we know she is no longer alive. Born in 1920, we meet Ivy in the records for the first time aged 1, living in Doddington poor institution and listed as an orphan. Ivy was one of the hundreds of children who passed through the care of the North Witchford Board of Guardians. Their stories often included parental poverty or abandonment, and the BoG sought to place children with paid foster carers in the hope of finding them a home.

Ivy appears in the BoG records in June 1930, aged 10, having just been returned to Doddington by a set of foster parents. No reason is given. She was boarded out again in September 1930 to a couple living in March. They were to receive 8 shillings per week for her board, and 20 shillings per quarter for clothing.

As a ten-year-old, Ivy would be expected to attend school, but likely also had to ‘earn her keep’ like many children of her age at this time by helping around the house. In July 1931 she is reported as having absconded from her foster home, but was returned briefly to Doddington and then back to the same placement. By 1930 the BoG was in fact under severe pressure from the Ministry of Health to provide a separate children’s home, rather than have children living alongside adults at Doddington, but this pressure was strongly resisted, meaning that children’s lives continue to be recorded in the minutes.

Thus January 1932 we have a detail that Ivy had been in Addenbrookes Hospital to have her tonsils removed. (The necessity of such operations on children – for which surgeons were paid – was already provoking lively debate in the press, as an article by Louis Dwyer-Hemmings explains.) There was an additional cost implication too, as Ivy was provided with ‘malt and cod liver oil’ for 3 months after the operation. Reports on the child’s ongoing health were a requisite element of boarding-out, hence in January 1933 the minutes also report that Ivy had been provided with spectacles.

Soon afterwards, we might imagine, Ivy left school and went to work, at which point the BoG support for her foster parents would be withdrawn. By 1939 she was working as a newspaper seller. The silence in the records after this would normally suggest she was eventually adopted and changed her name, but in fact she was still living with her foster parents at the age of 19. Her birth surname, however, was added as a later correction to the Register entry, which consists only of her given names. It would be good to think that after a shaky start this means she and her foster parents considered her to be part of their family, and presented her as such, necessitating an official to put the record straight. But there is no further trace to confirm this.