The Metropolis

History: Meet the "impudent urchins" who held 1930s London together

Mike Pollitt | Monday 30 July, 2012 13:15

A time when letters and telegrams were the most efficient means of communication will be hard for your Tweet-addled brain to imagine. But technology giveth as it taketh away, and you don’t have to imagine this primitive era because you can read about it in Peter Bethoud’s post about 1930s messenger boys. Peter’s source is the contemporary journalist James A Jones.

“All day long the messengers of London pass through the streets. They are the links which hold together the affairs of the capital. They are the bearers of urgent tidings. They carry, quite impartially, love letters and secret treaties, theatre tickets and telegrams that are the tidings of death.”

And yet they were just boys for all that. One of them got in trouble and explained himself like this:

“Master Smith called me a woodenhead, so I poured hot tar over his dinner and punched him on the nose.”

The post contains at least 10 other details which are as evocative of the time and of the lives these boys lived. There are also original illustrations.

Discovering London – Remarkable Lives of London Messengers in the 1930s

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