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00:00We've been following the story of one village through the whole of our history with the
00:08help of the villagers tracing the tale from the Romans to the present day, through the
00:16Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons.
00:18It's got this thick black and white residue, that's the Anglo-Saxon food or the carbonised
00:23remains of it.
00:24So basically we're going to have to dig up your entire garden.
00:28Set in the village of Kibworth in Leicestershire, it's not the tale of the rulers, but of the
00:33ordinary people.
00:34Henry Button, Freeman.
00:35Alice Starr, Matilda Starr, sisters.
00:36Is that a cannonball?
00:37Well that's what we think it is.
00:38Civil war you reckon?
00:39Yeah.
00:40Matthias Wood, he's a musketeer.
00:41William Smith.
00:42We've seen how the national story is always mirrored in the local and the local in the
00:55national.
00:57There is no race of people under the sun so depressed as we are, who work the hours we
01:02do for the money we get.
01:04We've seen how our history is not just theirs, but ours.
01:07It's amazing to think that 90% of us didn't have the vote up to 1832 and women didn't
01:14get the vote until 1928.
01:18In the story of Kibworth and the story of England, we've reached the modern age, a time
01:23when what happened to the ordinary people of England was as rich and dramatic and exciting
01:30as at any other time in our past.
01:31Right ladies and gentlemen, can you hear me in the back?
01:32Ladies and gentlemen, can you hear me in the back?
01:43Ladies and gentlemen, can you hear me in the back?
01:56Ladies and gentlemen, can you hear me in the back?
02:19It's Husting's night in Kibworth in the general election of 2010.
02:29The right to vote is just one of the things we've gained in our recent history.
02:33We've seen the shaping of our popular culture and education, the tremendous impact of the
02:41World Wars and the growth of our multicultural society.
02:48We have choices now never dreamed of by our ancestors, and as we'll see, all these great
02:54changes are mirrored in the tale of the village.
02:59To see how the men and women of the village became citizens of a modern democratic Britain,
03:04we have to go back to the 1830s, to England in the age of reform, when Queen Victoria
03:10was new to the throne.
03:14That's exactly what the villagers are going to do.
03:17They've laid on this fantastic conference chamber with piles of documents.
03:20Can we get excited now?
03:23At the National Archive in Kew, the villagers have come down to examine their poor law records
03:28from early Victorian England, when poverty and social justice became a huge issue.
03:33These records relate to the Market Harbour Poor Law Union.
03:37I know a number of you were involved in the dig.
03:40What we're going to do today is we're going to do a similar thing, but in this material.
03:43We're going to dig into the archive.
03:45It's a seriously big place.
03:47We hold 11 million records here, and they cover 1,000 years of history.
03:54So, what are you going to find in here today?
03:57And the answer is, I don't know.
04:01And neither does Sarah.
04:03And neither does Michael.
04:05Because what you're undertaking today is real historical research.
04:09And the nature of historical research is looking in material that isn't listed,
04:14that is rarely used, in order to find out the way people lived in the past.
04:20Now, I couldn't tell you the last time anybody looked at these records,
04:24and it may well be that nobody has.
04:27It's going to be incredibly valuable for understanding
04:31how that particular area in Leicestershire operated in the 19th century.
04:39Like Britain as a whole, the village was changing fast at the start of Victoria's reign,
04:45with industrialisation and the rapid growth of transport and communications.
04:55This is also the age of photography,
04:58and we can now see exactly what Victorian Kibworth looked like
05:01with shops, post office and newsagents.
05:05But the old rural world was still there in the background.
05:14The Victorian age was one of the greatest periods in our history,
05:18when the influence of our language and culture,
05:21our institutions and politics, went out across the whole world.
05:29But here, back at home,
05:31it's also the time that shaped us as modern Britons more than any other,
05:35not just in buildings like this, in schools and railways and local government,
05:40but also in mentalities.
05:42But their achievements were so great
05:45that it's easy to forget that in the early years of Victoria,
05:49the late 1830s and early 1840s,
05:52the social situation, the class tensions were so inflammable
05:57that many observers were expecting revolution.
06:00But that's not what happened.
06:04The early 19th century saw the emergence of the British working class.
06:08Landless wage earners preyed to the ups and downs of the economy.
06:12But the poor and jobless had to survive on charity from the pre-industrial age.
06:17In 1834, a centralised poor law came in,
06:21administered through local poor law unions.
06:25It's a notice, it's hereby given,
06:27that a meeting of the ratepayers in this parish
06:30at Mr Mitchell's shop on Friday 4th April,
06:35and it's the liquidation of a debt from the parish
06:39to Mr John Sarson of Leicester, amounting to £90.
06:43It's the real beginning of the welfare state.
06:46With the names of the people who have got to move out,
06:49and it includes an eye lift in there, I think.
06:52I write to inform you that I am a poor man
06:55belonging to the parish of Kibworth Harcourt,
06:57and I am in the 85th year of my age.
06:59The old system of charity simply couldn't cope
07:02with the sheer numbers in poverty.
07:04Now, gentlemen, how is it possible for any person
07:07to subsist on such a scanty allowance?
07:10We have the case of Harriet Cox, who was a widow of four years.
07:16She says that she did have three shillings and one loaf,
07:20but that was taken off her.
07:22And then you read this further on,
07:24and the reason that it was taken off her
07:27was because she had the misfortune
07:30to have another child by a young man.
07:37So these are men in their 60s and 70s who are still looking for work?
07:41They want to work, yes.
07:43But they keep getting threatened with...
07:45Well, now, after four years,
07:46they're being threatened with a workhouse.
07:48Religious dissenters were especially hard hit.
07:51We are poor men belonging to the parishes of Kibworth Beecham
07:54and Kibworth Harcourt in the county of Leicester,
07:57and being out of employ,
07:58we've repeatedly applied to the Guardian for work,
08:02but he invariably refuses to employ us.
08:05The fact is, we are dissenters, the unpardonable crime.
08:09Therefore, we are neither to have law nor justice,
08:13but be sent to such dens of iniquity as a workhouse.
08:18Men will not submit to be incarcerated in a workhouse
08:22merely for want of work.
08:24No dissenter can submit to be transported into such dens of iniquity,
08:29which are worse than West Indian slavery.
08:35At least one of them is obviously very educated
08:38and they've actually managed to get an investigation
08:41against Kibworth Beecham.
08:43Against the parish?
08:44Against the parish of Kibworth Beecham.
08:47However, the commissioner challenges their knowledge of the poor law
08:51and claims that they've had to have had some assistance
08:54of some persons who are able to clearly explain to you what the laws are.
08:57You know, they're just making this assumption
08:59that they can't possibly put forward this argument themselves.
09:04But, of course, they could.
09:06The village had a long tradition of literacy,
09:09and now the religious independents and dissenters
09:12became a voice for change.
09:14Congregationalists, Baptists and Methodists,
09:17Protestant groups outside the Church of England.
09:22And, after all, the village had run its own grammar school since Tudor times.
09:26There'd been a village school since 1812.
09:29But the dissenters challenged the status quo.
09:33People who are more concerned about religion,
09:35more concerned about religious faith,
09:37obviously have the ability to read,
09:39because they've studied the Bible for themselves.
09:41So they tend to be a little bit above, obviously, farm labourers.
09:46In the background was Kibworth's 18th-century dissenting academy
09:50with its amazing range of learning,
09:52which had underlined the role of literacy in the village.
09:56They were trying to offer the same level of education as a university.
10:00So it's beyond grammar school.
10:03Logic, ethics, continue to study Greek and grammar,
10:07learn Hebrew and divinity.
10:09It eventually comes to London,
10:11and we now have the books here in the library.
10:13We're the inheritors of the books.
10:15You're the inheritors of the Kibworth Academy.
10:17Yeah, the books and the manuscripts and so on.
10:19And this union of religious dissent and working aspirations
10:22helped win many of the rights we now take for granted.
10:25Read the Bible for yourself, and, as you know, it can be very contradictory.
10:28You have to balance passages against other passages,
10:30and, of course, people put different weights on different things.
10:33The toleration, the real legacy of dissent,
10:35our civil liberties,
10:37the fact that we have freedom of speech,
10:39and it's written into... We don't have a constitution,
10:41but, you know, this is an expectation.
10:43That's one of the things that dissenters really fought for,
10:46the right to be able to worship as they wished
10:48in their own places of religion
10:50and not be forced to go to a state religion.
10:54The civil and religious liberties that we enjoy today
10:56is, I think, the great legacy.
11:08Rights and duties begin in childhood,
11:11and the Victorians redefined what the British childhood was all about.
11:18At a nearby stately home, the children from Kibworth Primary School
11:21are going to get a taste of what life was like for young people
11:25back in Victoria's day.
11:31So you can't possibly...
11:32And, as you'd expect, the Victorian ruling class
11:34wanted to raise a workforce who knew their place.
11:37Now, then, how many people do you think actually lived
11:41in this great big house that is owned by William Herrick?
11:4611 or 12?
11:48Do you know there were three?
11:52All that house for three people.
11:56In a house like this,
11:58you need to have lots and lots of people looking after it.
12:02There's no way that William Herrick is going to be looking after his house.
12:05That's what you people are for.
12:07And this afternoon, you're going to be in the cellars
12:11applying for a job as a servant at Bow Manor Hall.
12:21That's it.
12:22With the old rural world in decline,
12:24new forms of employment for the young were taking over.
12:27Good. Well done. Good girl.
12:29Servants which we sacked before...
12:32Sacked?
12:33Sacked without any pay.
12:36I owned these items, but they didn't do them very well.
12:3913% of all women in England, well over a million were in domestic service,
12:44and they started as young as 12.
12:52The Victorians believed that every child should go to school.
12:56You will be watching all the children here
12:59to make sure they are well behaved.
13:02If anybody starts messing about,
13:06you put your hand up,
13:08and when I say yes, you will tell me.
13:11Good. Right. We're going to do some writing.
13:15Education from five to 12 came in in 1870
13:18and became mandatory, as it is today, in 1880.
13:23At the core of Victorian education, the three Rs,
13:26reading, writing and arithmetic.
13:31When your pen runs out,
13:33you prime it again by putting it back into the inkwell
13:37to get it full up again.
13:39Since Tudor times,
13:40England had been the most literate society in history.
13:44Victoria's can-do culture made the next big push,
13:47by 1900 achieving 90% adult literacy,
13:51not far off what we've got today.
13:56And they did it with strict discipline.
14:00Yes?
14:02He was slouching and talking.
14:05Slouching and talking when I had my back turned?
14:10It's easy to think they were just like us.
14:13But they weren't.
14:15The cane.
14:17Hold your hand out.
14:20I don't want you to get any blood on your right hand,
14:24which you're going to write with.
14:26Are you ready?
14:31Missed.
14:34Aren't you lucky?
14:39Go and stand where you were before you came in.
14:43Second row.
14:45In fixing the school age and making schooling universal,
14:48the Victorians, in a sense, invented modern childhood.
14:52The dog walks away.
14:55Beehive walks down.
15:00For the first time in our history,
15:02the world of childhood was separated from the world of work.
15:08CHILDREN LAUGH
15:18Now, Kibworth in Victoria's day was still a rural place.
15:27But that changed in the 1850s.
15:33That is amazing.
15:36So this is in Kibworth, is it?
15:38Gosh, I thought he was going to hit the camera for a minute there.
15:41You can see the driver shaking his fist at one point.
15:45Armies of navvies shifting millions of tonnes by hand
15:49cut great swathes through Midland England
15:52and they brought us the railways.
15:56The first engine came through Kibworth on Wednesday evening
16:00when at least 200 villagers came to see it.
16:03It stopped for a short time and two of the trucks filled with people,
16:07anxious to say they rode in the first train through Kibworth.
16:17It was formally opened in May 1857,
16:21the very moment when far away in India
16:24the British were fighting their terrible war
16:27against what they called the Indian Mutiny.
16:30Kibworth would be changed forever.
16:34No community was isolated now
16:37and the speed-up of communications
16:39would help build a national culture for the first time.
16:42My lords, ladies and gentlemen, good evening.
16:45Good evening.
16:46And even Kibworth became part of it
16:48with regular concerts by the villagers themselves.
16:5125th April 1882, an amateur dramatic entertainment
16:55was given in the village hall on Wednesday and Thursday evenings.
16:58What a lot of these programmes consisted of, of course,
17:01was what we would consider today really rather sedate and very genteel.
17:05It was the kind of entertainment that the vicar would very likely introduce
17:09and may even do a genteel turn or two himself.
17:12What used to come round the professional entertainment
17:15were very family-orientated.
17:17You'd get a man and his wife and their children
17:19and they would go round the country
17:21and with the spread of the railways it was much easier for people to travel.
17:25Like Harry Clifton, who was a very celebrated songwriter,
17:28and his wife was Fanny Adwood.
17:30She appeared in the village hall here on the 16th February 1874
17:34to give an entertainment.
17:35She will be assisted by six other artistes of superior ability
17:40and the different characters will be represented in appropriate costumes.
17:44Gosh, what a fun evening that sounds!
17:47LAUGHTER
17:48Does anybody have any ideas?
17:51So as another piece of historical research,
17:54we asked the villagers to re-enact a Kibworth Victorian concert.
17:57I'll do a song of twilight.
17:59Just a song of twilight.
18:01Do you have the music for it yourself?
18:03At home, yes.
18:04You've got it, you've got the music?
18:05Yes.
18:06What a pro!
18:07Once in the dear...
18:08No.
18:09Once in the dear
18:11Dead days beyond recall
18:14When on the world
18:16A mist began to fall
18:19Lovely.
18:20Everybody.
18:23Just a song of twilight
18:28These village shows were infused by the Victorian middle-class ethos.
18:34It was a received culture, sentimental and moralising.
18:38At twilight
18:42Comes love's old song
18:47Love's old sweet song
18:54APPLAUSE
18:59You got the part.
19:05But the villagers appear very differently
19:07in a contemporary portrait of the community
19:10by a Kibworth writer, Francis Woodford.
19:14The first house in Kibworth Harcourt,
19:17nearest to the north gate of the church...
19:21Which house do you think that is?
19:23This one here, yeah?
19:2527.
19:28..was lived in by Mr William Thompson,
19:31who was a builder and a stonemason,
19:34who had a workshop and a stables
19:37between the house and the church wall,
19:40which is there.
19:43I think this would have been a house of a rich person or a poor person.
19:47Rich. Quite rich.
19:49Woodford describes a rural village on the cusp of the modern world.
19:53Like Dickens, his characters are often eccentric, larger than life.
19:58But Woodford's people are all real.
20:03John Collins, the blacksmith, was a very clever and curious man.
20:07He made almost all his own furniture.
20:10His chairs and table legs were made of iron.
20:13He covered the soles of his boots with steel plates.
20:17Their clatter on the cobblestones always gave notice of his approach.
20:26Samuel Burdett, the shoemaker, played bassoon in the church choir.
20:30I was told he was an atheist,
20:32which it was explained to me was a very wicked person,
20:35though I remember him as a kind and jolly man.
20:41Mrs Weston-the-Milliner kept a large dressmaking establishment.
20:45A number of young lady apprentices lived with her,
20:48and from her house two or three romantic elopements were made.
20:55Mr Loveday, the builder, was an ardent local politician.
20:59One of the earliest and most energetic supporters of the franchise,
21:03free education and a nine-hour working day.
21:07Tom Tolton, the mower, was one of the characters in the Plough Monday processions.
21:12Dressed in his glory as a countrywoman and primed with drink,
21:16he would dance wild country dances with his partner,
21:19John T. Jesson, till fairly tired out.
21:22George Gray, the farmer, was a big, jolly, good-natured man.
21:27He was the last one to celebrate Harvest Day in the old English way,
21:31and he still left the corners of his fields unrimmed,
21:34as it says in the Bible, so that could be cleaned by the poor.
21:39Mrs Coleman was the landlady at the coach and horses,
21:43one of the best landladies a hostelry ever had.
21:46She dispensed charity liberally, studied the comfort of her customers seriously,
21:50and would refuse men drink when she knew the families needed more money.
21:57This way!
21:58We went on the Kibworth Victorian Trail.
22:01Three, two, one...
22:03Yay!
22:14The village in Woodford's portrait was class-driven but tolerant,
22:18a mix of bloody-mindedness and community spirit,
22:21boozy, sometimes violent,
22:23but with a marked streak of good-humoured individualism.
22:28But in the Kibworth penny concerts,
22:30you can see the other side of the Victorian mind.
22:33Supervised by the vicar, they were educative, morally uplifting, self-improving.
22:39At this point, ordinary people's culture was still mediated
22:43by the ethos of church, chapel and propriety.
22:58Ladies and gentlemen, as your vicar,
23:01it falls upon me to bid you all a very warm welcome
23:05to what I am sure is going to be yet another delightful evening
23:11of wholesome, rational entertainment.
23:14Miss Ellie McCann.
23:17One of the great evils of the day, as the middle classes saw it,
23:20was the working-class addiction to drink.
23:23Sir, will you listen a moment?
23:28I've something important to say.
23:33My mother has sent you a message.
23:39Receive it in kindness, I pray.
23:44Please sell no more drink to my father.
23:50Sell no more drink to my father.
23:55It makes him so strange and so wild.
24:00Heed the prayer of my heartbroken mother
24:06and pity the poor drunkard's child.
24:12Heed the prayer of my heartbroken mother
24:19and pity the poor drunkard's child.
24:34But the villagers wanted more than a good night out.
24:37They wanted representation at the ballot box.
24:40In 1867, the vote was extended to urban male householders,
24:45but still only 40% of men had the vote and no women.
24:49Here in Kibworth, one reformer who set about to change that
24:53was a builder, John Loveday.
24:57Tell us about Loveday and the new town.
24:59Most of the people up there were working men
25:02and they supported Loveday,
25:05so it became the radical part of Kibworth.
25:08The radical part? The radical, yeah.
25:10Radical Kibworth? Yeah, yeah.
25:12So this was emphatically the working men's part of Kibworth?
25:15Oh, yeah. Well, certainly from the coming of Loveday, you could say, really.
25:19If there's one person, if you could go back in time to meet,
25:22I'd like to meet John Loveday.
25:24He upset a lot of the gentry in the village,
25:27so I'd like to meet him and just...
25:30You'd like to meet him? Yeah, I would, really.
25:32I'll tell you what I'm going to ask you to do,
25:34which I'm going to ask you to just read me this little passage about him
25:37because I think it conveys him so wonderfully, doesn't it?
25:41Mr Loveday, would you read that for us?
25:43Mr Loveday, in addition to being a large contractor,
25:46was also a very ardent politician
25:49and one of the earliest and most energetic supporters of the franchise,
25:53Freedom Education Act, Nine Hours Movement and Kindred Measures.
25:58A man of ready wit, unfailing good temper and full of energy,
26:03he seemed to be in seventh heaven when expanding his views
26:06to the large audiences which used to gather to hear him,
26:10either in the village hall or from a platform
26:13erected at his own expense on the crossbank.
26:20In Kibworth Beecham, where a large hosiery factory would soon be built,
26:24it was Loveday who helped more working people get the vote
26:28by building them housing in what became known as the New Town.
26:36So this is some of the early housing then, is it, Philip?
26:39Beaconsfield Cottages, 1877.
26:43Good morning. Don't mind us admiring your house.
26:46Lord Beaconsfield was Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservative Prime Minister.
26:51Beaconsfield was built by the Conservative Association.
26:54By that time, the Conservatives realised that there was a losing vote
26:58by getting all these working class in the villages.
27:04So there's votes in it? If you're a householder, you can vote?
27:07Yeah. Yeah, if you're a householder, you can vote.
27:10That's Dunstan Street. Dunstan Street, yes.
27:13Behind quiet Kibworth suburbia,
27:15you suddenly see raging 19th-century political battles here.
27:22So even in the streets of Kibworth,
27:24you can see the story of industrial England.
27:31There was a factory at the back of this house there.
27:34You can see it from Dover Street. Yeah.
27:37And then the Morby Zoo lived in this house here.
27:43Next foot, next foot one. Yeah.
27:49Of course, you've got Stonehenge opposite.
27:52The terraced houses up there are some of the early ones.
27:55Oh, yes. Yeah.
27:57That was a working men's club, as it is today.
28:01Entirely different in, you know, when it was built.
28:05These are all reasonably well-to-do working people.
28:08Yes, I would say so.
28:10Oh, haberdashers, drapers, grocers,
28:12middle-class shopping habits coming to late Victorian Kibworth.
28:16So Love Day began the modern expansion of the village.
28:20What, doubles in the Victorian era? More or less, yes.
28:23From about, what was it, 2,500 for the three villages, really,
28:28up to about, what, 5,500, 6,000, what it must be today.
28:31Today. Yeah, almost a small town.
28:33Well, yes, it is, isn't it? Yeah.
28:35And it begins here in the new town in the Victorians' day.
28:39Yes, and all brought about by Mr Love Day.
28:42By Mr Love Day. Yes.
28:44Progress.
28:46The new workers' town brought with it
28:48a more earthy working-class culture.
28:51Good evening! Good evening!
28:53And welcome to this coven of...
28:55And a very different idea of a good night out.
28:58Now, I don't know whether you read in the paper recently,
29:01there was a survey done which showed that 50%
29:04of the married women in Leicestershire
29:07are unfaithful to their husbands.
29:11And the Archbishop of Canterbury,
29:13he wrote a letter to the other 50%.
29:18Do you know what he said, madam?
29:20Oh, didn't you get one?
29:23This was the entertainment that working people wanted.
29:26I just shot my dog. You shot your dog? Was he mad?
29:28He wasn't very pleased.
29:30Rumbustuous and irreverent.
29:32That tuner tuned whenever he got an opera.
29:34And, of course, full of the great English double-entenge.
29:37My fears and my doubts are forevermore left on the shelf.
29:43Cos if ever our instrument gets out of tune,
29:47I can sit down and tune it myself.
29:50Thank you, sir, the ready gentlemen.
29:52And songs that were the soundtracks
29:54for our great-grandparents' lives.
29:56Surely Kipler's answer to Mary Lloyd,
29:58none other than Miss Claire Gibby!
30:04Now, if I were a duchess and had a lot of money
30:09I'd give it to the boy that's going to marry me
30:14But I haven't got a penny
30:17So we'll live on love and kisses
30:20And be just as happy...
30:22When they celebrated Queen Victoria's 60th Jubilee in 1897,
30:26the people of Kibworth, like those of Britain as a whole,
30:30at least most of them,
30:32had shared in the material benefits of industry and empire.
30:39And by good luck and good judgment, England had avoided revolution.
30:45But other trials lay ahead.
31:09The village celebrated the 1897 Jubilee
31:12in June, in the streets, in the church,
31:15and here in the village hall.
31:21Tremendous things have been achieved
31:23over the 60 years of Victoria's reign,
31:25and a justifiable pride in all that
31:28comes leaping out of the pages of the local newspapers.
31:31But with it, a shadow on the horizon,
31:35an unlocalised anxiety.
31:39The century was coming to an end,
31:41the reign clearly coming to an end soon,
31:44and a sense that progress, perhaps, was no longer assured.
31:51In 1905, a march for the unemployed from Leicester to London
31:55came through Kibworth.
31:57Working people had found their own voice now.
32:03And they had their own heroes.
32:06And none more so than the proletariat of the proletariat.
32:10Women.
32:11Half the workforce in the Industrial Age,
32:14as they'd been in the 14th century.
32:18In 1905, still less than half of men had the vote,
32:21and still no women.
32:24The response was the women's suffrage movement, the suffragettes.
32:29The Women's Library in London,
32:31the greatest collection of women's history in the world,
32:34holds many of their records.
32:36The suffragettes united middle class and working women
32:40all over the country,
32:42and they even drew women from our village.
32:44Like Nellie Taylor, who lived in Smeaton, Westerby.
32:48Nellie was from a very respectable background.
32:51Her father had been mayor of Leicester twice,
32:53but somehow she was drawn into the women's movement in Leicester.
32:57Probably swept in because there were so many meetings in Leicester.
33:00It's estimated that about 70% of women in Leicester were working.
33:04In what jobs?
33:06Boots and shoe, mostly. Boots and shoe, yes.
33:09So I think they came to Leicester a lot
33:11because they saw it as a fertile ground.
33:14On March the 4th, she went out with two others from Nottingham
33:19and took a very circuitous route to Sloane Square,
33:23trying to throw off the police following her,
33:26and eventually she took out a hammer with the other three women,
33:29smashed a post office window, which was about 9ft by 6.
33:32That must have been quite impressive.
33:35And was arrested for that.
33:37This letter's just written on March the 7th,
33:39so just after she'd been put on remand.
33:42And she's talking to my dearest Tom and my precious children.
33:46I felt rather bad the first day.
33:48I think it was caused by the effort to bring oneself up
33:51to the point of breaking a window at all.
33:54She goes on, say, the clanging of the iron doors
33:56and the sound of keys that lock you up in cells, which are dark,
33:59and this one has no window that opens at all.
34:03Women of a certain upbringing, as these women were mainly,
34:07I think it was a great shock to the system.
34:11The only comfort came from the fact that they were with each other.
34:15You know, a lot of the letters from the suffragettes in jail
34:18referred to this camaraderie and the fact that, you know,
34:21having Mrs Pankhurst there a lot of the time
34:23really cheered their spirits.
34:31The charge sheet actually said she assaulted a policeman,
34:35she slapped him in the face.
34:37Nellie categorically denied this.
34:39She said it was beneath her dignity to slap anyone in the face.
34:43Looking at the effect of the First World War,
34:46did the suffragettes make a difference, do you think?
34:49I think it suited Lloyd George to pretend that,
34:52oh, women have been working hard in the First World War,
34:55and it sort of soothed his ego to take that.
34:59But, of course, I think it wouldn't have happened
35:02without women making sacrifices like that, I don't think.
35:08The struggle of British men and women for the vote
35:11was put on hold by the First World War.
35:16In the East Midlands,
35:18the recruiting drive drew patriotic and optimistic crowds.
35:30The first Kibweth volunteers had grown up together,
35:33played cricket together.
35:35The Eyliffs, Bromleys, Holyoaks and Colemans
35:38had all been in the village since Tudor times.
35:44The war fought by communities
35:46on whose solidarity the government could depend.
35:49He was called Harold Bromley,
35:52and he was wounded at Ypres.
35:59We went out about the end of March 1918,
36:03and our position was on the banks of the La Bassée Canal.
36:07I was one of four who had to fetch rations up from the Limbers
36:11that first night, and what a night.
36:14At about midnight, the Germans put up a heavy barrage.
36:18It pounded our trenches.
36:20And behind a smoke screen and with gas
36:23overcame the Huns in their thousands.
36:26And what sights I saw, I shall never forget.
36:29Dead and wounded everywhere.
36:34The story of the boys from Kibweth, of course,
36:37can be repeated in any place in Britain.
36:40The first to die was Bertie Pell.
36:45For the first time in the history of Kibweth,
36:49a military funeral has taken place in the village.
36:54On Thursday afternoon, upwards of 2,000 people assembled
36:59for the interment of Private Bertie Pell, aged 20.
37:04Bertie was a typical Kibweth boy.
37:07A grammar school, a footballer, a chorister at St Wilfrid's.
37:12Wounded once, he'd gone back to the front
37:15and was killed three months later.
37:20People that lived in the same village or the same street
37:23quite often joined up together.
37:26It's bad enough seeing anybody killed or injured.
37:29If it's the people that come from your town, your area, your friends,
37:33that would have really taken a terrible toll.
37:37My great-great-great-granddad, Walter Holvey,
37:42who fought on the Somme,
37:45and all I know that he was sent over the top
37:49and was killed instantly.
37:51My great-great-great-uncle, Ralph Buttress,
37:55he fought in France and he died of common war death,
38:00which I suppose was shot or blown up,
38:03and he's in Philosophy British Cemetery in France.
38:11They gave their lives for our freedom so that we could live free.
38:22Every year, Kibweth High School does a coach trip
38:25to the Somme battlefields from the First World War.
38:34MUSIC PLAYS
38:49This is a photograph taken by Godfrey Mallins
38:52and it's where you're sitting now.
38:55This is this very place where we are now.
38:58OK? You see that?
39:04I'm sure there was a smattering of 15-year-olds amongst them,
39:07only a year older than some of you people,
39:10and they thought exactly the same as you do.
39:13How do you think you would be feeling at this time of the morning,
39:17maybe four o'clock, five o'clock in the morning,
39:19waiting to go over the top at 7.30?
39:21How do you think you would be feeling as individuals?
39:25Scared!
39:27Anyone who says he's not scared is a liar.
39:31For a young machine knitter,
39:33it was a long way from Johnson & Barnes' hosiery factory.
39:37In you come. Over you come.
39:41Well done, James. That's good.
39:43Here's a man from Kibweth,
39:45ready to fight in the Leicestershire Regiment.
39:47First World War bayonet, the real thing.
39:49This bit here is known as the blood gutter.
39:52That's its official name.
39:54And the whole idea is that when you stick it in him,
39:57it allows the blood to pump out either side
39:59and the flesh doesn't seal it off.
40:01When you're doing bayonet fighting, everything is aggression.
40:05It is no good going into the fight thinking,
40:07oh, my God, I'm a married man with two children,
40:09I wish I was somewhere else.
40:11You hit him with the power of your body behind you.
40:13In!
40:15Exactly. You bring him down, and he will go down,
40:18out by stamping on his chest, out like that.
40:22You knock his bayonet to one side
40:24and then smash his teeth out with the butt.
40:26You get the idea of that.
40:28The only thing that they don't teach you,
40:30because the British Army is fairly formal,
40:32is your own battle cry. For example...
40:34Ah!
40:35Could you have put up with what your grandparents
40:37had to put up with all those years ago?
40:39Probably not. You just had to do it in them times.
40:41You just had to do it, yeah.
40:43Could you have managed it?
40:45No. I'd have probably run away.
40:4940 village boys were killed between 1914 and 1918.
40:55The tale of just one village during the war to end all wars.
41:06Seen any names you recognise?
41:09Yeah? Where?
41:13Yeah? Where?
41:20Waldron E.J.?
41:24Oh, yes. Yeah.
41:26And did you know you got a family member here?
41:29No. So that's him.
41:43You might just see her on one panel, on one wall.
41:48Yeah. Sad.
41:50Yeah, it is sad, isn't it? Very sad.
41:56I think without war, we wouldn't be where we are today.
42:02I don't think it's right, but then without her,
42:06we might not be here.
42:13BIRDS CHIRP
42:25In Kibworth, they still commemorate the dead
42:28every November on Armistice Day,
42:31led by the brass band, some of whose members died back then.
42:36BAND PLAYS
42:41The First World War was a great and terrible communal experience,
42:46shared by everyone.
42:49And perhaps that's why, even though all the veterans are now dead,
42:53we still can't let it go.
42:56Lest we forget.
42:59George Garrett.
43:02Ernest Dunkley.
43:06Bertie Pell.
43:10Jay Harry Polio.
43:14Robert Day.
43:17Charles Coleman.
43:21Ralph Butteris.
43:25Percy Bromley.
43:31In the brief period between the two world wars,
43:35the hosiery factory in Kibworth prospered.
43:38In 1928, the vote finally came for all.
43:42For women, too.
43:46The village saw the coming of radio, telephones,
43:50a piped water supply,
43:52and even the first package holidays abroad,
43:55courtesy of a local man, Thomas Cook.
43:58Life seemed to have returned to normal.
44:07But Hitler's war was on the horizon,
44:10and in the Village History Day,
44:12we came up with two of the most gripping documents
44:15in the whole of the village story.
44:19Oh, this is wonderful.
44:21Look at this.
44:23Air raid precautions.
44:25Is that the one with the telephone numbers on?
44:28It's March 1939.
44:30Yeah.
44:31So this is before...
44:32This is just before the war.
44:34Where is the date on it?
44:35Air raid precautions.
44:37Kibworth Beecham, Kibworth Harcourt, Kibworth Smeets and Westerby.
44:40Telephone number 38.
44:43Who's got number one?
44:45Isn't that fantastic?
44:47Fantastic, eh?
44:49Oh, yes, more telephone numbers, all of them.
44:51Mrs Norman is 31.
44:54Evans' house in Smeets is number two.
44:57So these are the warden's posts, then, aren't we?
45:00And there's a first-aid point in the village hall in Kibworth.
45:04Dressings at the pharmacy, first-aid parties, ambulance drivers.
45:09Auxiliary fire.
45:12DOG BARKS
45:15This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin...
45:18And now the story of the village finally enters the realm of living memory.
45:23I think everybody was listening to the wireless that morning.
45:26Unless they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland,
45:31a state of war would exist between us.
45:36We knew that there'd been negotiations with Germany and Hitler
45:41and that things had gone a bit wrong
45:44and the government gave them an ultimatum.
45:48I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received
45:54and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.
46:00We were playing upstairs and I remember Mother coming upstairs
46:04and saying, there's a war on, so things are going to be difficult from now on.
46:08That was it. She was very straightforward.
46:11It was quite a shock, even though we expected it.
46:16I don't think we really thought it would happen.
46:20And my mother said to Dad, thank God we had the girl first.
46:27She thought that if it didn't go on for long,
46:30the boys wouldn't be old enough to go fighting.
46:35One went in the RAF aircrew and the other one went in the navy
46:40and did several years.
46:44Children had been evacuated to the villages.
46:47It was over a year, nearly two years, before they started bombing seriously.
46:53So half these children had gone back again.
46:57Like the little boys said, there's far too much sky in the country.
47:02They didn't like the sky.
47:13Where I lived on the Leicester boundary, the noise was horrendous.
47:18So you couldn't get any sleep.
47:20The bombers were falling, then you'd hear another wave of bombers coming.
47:24And we knew they were German bombers by the sounds of the engines.
47:29Kibworth was on the line of the massed German air attacks
47:32on the Midlands, the Black Country,
47:35and on 14th November 1940, on Coventry.
47:41A friend of my father's came to see that we were all right,
47:44and I remember being carried up into the garden in Manatee by him
47:49to have a look at the sky towards Coventry, which was absolutely red.
48:05We had a few bombs in Kibworth.
48:08This German bomber, he flew across there and dropped some bombs
48:12where your school is now.
48:15And we also had a German plane came over one Sunday afternoon machine-gunning us.
48:27He was flying so low, you could see the swastikas on his plane.
48:32He flew round the village with a machine gun.
48:36That was a terrible thing to do.
48:39Quite nasty, some of those Germans were.
48:46Here in Kibworth, as across Britain, the countryside was mobilised,
48:51and especially the land girls.
48:56These groups grew up, I think they did, in every village and town.
49:01Little groups of people who were ready to work if need be.
49:06I think that's one way how we got through it all.
49:10Rose Holyoake drove tractors.
49:13Betty Ward milked the cows.
49:22They held out and they did it
49:25until the first of the prisoners started to arrive on the scene.
49:30Two of them stayed at the farmhouse along the road.
49:34Mrs Bromley wanted them to have a bath,
49:38and she didn't know how to tell them they got to get the tin bath off the wall
49:43and get the water out of the copper to put in.
49:46They couldn't understand why there was no bath in the house.
49:50Both of them stayed here and they married local girls.
49:59Hello Marjorie and Sheila, also Mother and Dad.
50:03This is just the moment I've been waiting for to let you know I'm in the best of health,
50:07as you can see.
50:09Meanwhile, local men send their greetings back home from the Far East.
50:13Give my love to all at home and cheerio.
50:16OK, thanks.
50:20Hello Mother, Dad and Betty.
50:22Back home, the village made its own Forces newspaper,
50:25sent to 400 serving villagers.
50:28The Kibworth News and Forces Journal, 1944.
50:32We send affectionate New Year greetings to our lads and lasses on sea land,
50:37and the air is terribly touching, isn't it?
50:39Yes, it is.
50:40It gives all the news of what's happened in the villages.
50:45It really gives you a sense of what one small village could,
50:49you know, how it could be involved.
50:52Hello Dad and Bromley.
50:53I'm glad to say they're really fit and well.
50:55I hope you're all the same.
50:57Well, tell Tony I've got a few more souvenirs for him,
50:59and I hope to be seeing you soon.
51:01This is somebody, some Kibworthian sitting in the middle of Baghdad.
51:05Yes.
51:06I want to feel the rain again and mow a tennis lawn.
51:09I want to see a pantomime, a parish magazine.
51:12I want to scurry home again as quickly as I can,
51:15to settle back in Kibworth and be an ordinary man.
51:19Yes.
51:20It's just mesmerisingly fantastic, isn't it?
51:23You've got the Forces pin-up girls.
51:25Yes, yes.
51:26It's just so fantastic.
51:28They've been chosen by the young farmers of the district
51:31at a dance in aid of the Red Cross Agricultural Fund.
51:35CHILDREN SING
51:49And when victory came, the village held a party.
51:59Like everybody else, they wanted things to change in post-war Britain.
52:07In 1948, Kibworth got its own Homes for Heroes,
52:10the latest council houses.
52:15But I can't begin this conversation
52:17without showing you this picture of a man of action here.
52:24And this wonderful picture, which looks as if it's a still
52:27from one of those romantic wartime movies.
52:30He'd been married the day before.
52:32He'd been married the day before.
52:36I was in a forward unit doing reconnaissance
52:40and we outstripped the fighting men.
52:45There was a few army there, but not many,
52:48and we decided not to go any further.
52:50It was getting a bit dicey.
52:52So I went to this cafe, which her parents kept,
52:55and that's how we met.
52:57We got married in Belgium.
52:59And we were there for another few days
53:02and then you brought me to England.
53:04That's it, yeah.
53:05In an Air Force plane with a bucket for a seat.
53:10So how did you feel, Maria,
53:12when you walked in for the first time to your new house?
53:15It was a bit rough.
53:16Oh, it was a bit rough.
53:18They'd gone up fairly quickly
53:20and they hadn't been all that careful with the painting.
53:23We had to do a lot of work.
53:25But we were getting houses, you see,
53:27and a lot of other people weren't.
53:29So we were quite satisfied with what we had.
53:31Living room, pantry, hall, bathroom, three bedrooms.
53:38So that was quite nice.
53:45In the post-war baby boom, Eric and Maria had two daughters.
53:54She was a baby and he used to put little mittens on.
53:57He used to be cold and nearly frozen in the morning.
54:01The ice actually forming on the inside of the bedroom windows.
54:11Those far-off days of the 1950s are the bridge to our world.
54:17After the war, Britain offered homes not only to our own heroes
54:21but to the heroes of all the other places in the empire
54:24who had worked and fought for our freedoms.
54:28Today, nearby Leicester is the most multicultural city in Britain
54:33and perhaps in the world.
54:45And as for Kibworth itself, it's still caught up in change.
54:50It has more than 5,000 people now and it's still growing.
54:54With more than 600 new houses on the way, it will soon be a small town.
55:06There'll be new problems, no doubt,
55:08but new people to help solve them,
55:10as there have been through the whole of its story.
55:13We're originally from the Punjab area.
55:16I was born in Leicestershire. I've lived here all my life.
55:19My father came to Leicestershire in 1938
55:21and my grandfather first came to Leicester in 1919.
55:24He was actually a door-to-door salesman but he wanted to travel the world
55:27so he decided to travel the world and that's what he did.
55:30And he ended up in Leicestershire. He ended up in Leicestershire.
55:32It's absolutely terrific.
55:43So there's our story.
55:45The tale of one place in 21st century England
55:48and the previous generations who played their part in making us who we are.
56:00Having spent the last year here,
56:02it seems to me that Kibworth is an ordinary place, realistic and down-to-earth.
56:07But like thousands of others in Britain,
56:09it's a living testimony to the way our communities have crystallised over time.
56:17A pointer to the way deep-rooted ideas and habits are transmitted over long periods,
56:25persisting like a current just below the surface of history, unseen,
56:31but still moving things along.
56:33And looking at history through the eyes of one community over time,
56:36it becomes obvious that identity doesn't come from the top down at all.
56:42It's not fixed, safe or secure,
56:45for it is reshaped by history and culture,
56:49always in the making and never made.
56:54But it is the creation of the people themselves.
57:03Thank you so much for coming.
57:05I'm just so amazed how many people you know now.
57:08In autumn 2010, we invited the villagers to the Cochin Horses to bury a time capsule.
57:14Time capsule.
57:15Very sensitive.
57:16Very futuristic.
57:17Yeah.
57:18Very futuristic.
57:21I've got a mug from Kibworth Church.
57:24I'm going to bury it in the time capsule.
57:26Now that parish church has been there for hundreds of years,
57:28I suppose, when they opened this time capsule in hundreds of years.
57:31Yeah, it'll probably still be there.
57:34You've said it.
57:36This is the Village Street of Westby Village photograph.
57:39September 2010, and it's signed by us all.
57:42Gosh, any archivist could have dreamt up something so wonderful.
57:46If people learn anything from it, from our point of view,
57:49it's that they can do it in their local record office.
57:52Exactly the same thing.
57:53Now, why did you choose the symphony?
57:55I don't think it'll be on when we open it.
57:58Like in 500 or 1,000 years?
58:00Yeah.
58:04And so, with the Simpsons and the mugs and photos and school timetables,
58:08they buried the time capsule in the pit where, on the first weekend,
58:12we'd found part of an Anglo-Saxon bone cone.
58:19For the people of the future to find,
58:21just as we had found the people of the past.
58:30The Simpsons
58:36The Simpsons
58:40The Simpsons
58:46The Simpsons
58:51The Simpsons
58:53The Simpsons