While wandering through an antiques centre yesterday, I spotted this print of St Christopher's Orphanage in Derby, otherwise known as the Railway Servant's Orphanage. Not a very good photo and it wasn't a particularly good print. Priced at £10, I didn't buy it.
I remember St Christopher's quite well as it stood next to my primary school. I also knew one or two children from there because of course they were bound to go to the school next door. They all wore matching pullovers if I remember rightly. This was the nineteen fifties, but it seems like another age now and I suppose it is.
4 comments:
I often wonder about how people thought in times gone by, and also how many generations does it take for those changes to be considerable.
I reckon around 7 to 10 years for social attitudes to vary a little, but not enough to fall out about. A generation (approx 25 - 30 years) for differences that need a little effort to ignore. A hundred years to be disconcerting and meanings of words to have varied so much that some have turned into their reverse - and tombstones move from 'pray for me' to 'sadly missed'.
An age for worldviews to be completely different... in Medieval times (and before) the supernatural was ubiquitous and unremarkable - rather like electricity today, and more than 95% of people worked on the land.
So since we are the products of our upbringing and society... are we now different people?
I have a distant memory of being on annual holiday in Hastings, walking along the promenade with my parents. I must have been about 7. Along came a big group of children, about my age, supervised by a few adults. An odd musty smell which reminded me of stale biscuits, and they were all - as you say - wearing identical jumpers. Grey, I believe. After they had passed, my parents answered my questions with a whispered "Orphanage!"
It can't have been an easy childhood. There was a palpable air of sadness which hung over them.
I stayed in a childrens home in the mid 70s, not as a child, I was going out with one of the staff. Some of the stories I heard of the children, were indeed sad and even tragic.
DJ - "are we now different people?" It's a question I keep coming back to because the implications are fascinating. We clearly are different people in many important respects and that places behavioural influences at the centre as B.F. Skinner described. Yet we are wedded to the idea of a core personality in charge of these things.
Sam - yes, even at that age I knew there was something profoundly sad about it, although I don't remember the children being tearful or isolated at school. Maybe because there were a number of them in the same class.
Tammly - I don't think I'd care to visit such a place now, children having to endure tragedy is itself tragic.
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