- Photographs taken of residents of James Turner Street in post-war Britain
- Location is now featured in Channel 4's Benefits Street
- Residents, almost all of whom are on benefits, shown living in squalor
- Locals say area was starkly different after the war - with a strong community spirit and work ethic
By PAUL BENTLEY
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A little girl in a white silk dress poses shyly with a basket of flowers, in a garden bordered by a neat privet hedge. The roofs of terraced houses can be seen beyond. She is about to attend a church parade.
A small boy, of perhaps the same age, stands to attention in a double-breasted coat and school cap outside the bay window of his redbrick home. His shoes and shirt are immaculate and only an errant right sock, which has begun to wrinkle and slide down his leg, suggests anything less than a dedication to military smartness - by his parents, at least.
Both photographs were taken in the same street, in the same period of immediate post-war Britain. No litter. No television aerials. Both evoke an urban working-class pride in family, home and hard work, as well as a sense of community and making the best of a tough situation.
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Looking smart: Martin Hanchett (left) stands in his school uniform on the street and Nina Clayton, aged 6, all dressed up for the church procession
The girl’s dress is made from parachute silk; a luxury commodity only made available by a parent’s involvement in the recently ended world war.
In that respect the photographs are wholly unremarkable. Thousands like them must exist. And yet they are not mundane. In their modest good order they are both shocking and sad, because the street in which they were taken is today the most notorious in Britain; made so by a television programme which has shown the current residents’ lifestyles, squalor, habitual criminality and an overall social disintegration.
James Turner Street in Winson Green, Birmingham, is infamous after being featured in Channel 4’s highly controversial series Benefits Street.
Today the majority of residents in the Victorian terrace houses claim benefits. The road is filthy, with rubbish strewn across the street and dirty mattresses abandoned on the pavements.
Many of those featured are criminals, drunks or class-A drug addicts. Neighbours rob each other and children fend for themselves while their parents smoke and drink outside.
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Nina Clayton, aged 6, pictured middle, with her family all dressed up for the church procession
But it was not always this way. This week, we spoke to members of families who lived in the ‘golden age’ of ‘Benefits Street’ in the Forties through to the Seventies. They have long since moved away and now say they are saddened by how far their former home has fallen and the ‘scrounging vermin’ who live there now.
Martin Hanchett was the small chap in the cap and wrinkled sock. His family lived two doors away from the house now inhabited by the mother known as White Dee.
His great-grandparents, grandparents and his mother Helen all lived on the road, the family having settled there at the start of the 20th century.
Mr Hanchett, 65, said the family all worked in manual jobs, some from as young as ten years old, and moved to the area from Nottingham because Birmingham was renowned as the ‘city of 1,000 trades’.
The women would work in cafes or wash neighbours’ clothes for change, he recalled.
‘Everybody was working,’ he said. ‘People had to because there was no welfare. Attitudes are different now. There’s a lot of people on benefits today. My parents and grandparents wouldn’t believe it. When they were alive, if you didn’t work you didn’t get anything.’
The retired engraver, who now lives in Halesowen, West Midlands, with his wife said he was dismayed at the state of the street and how moral standards have disappeared.
‘Nobody ever swore like that when we were there. If you were caught swearing in the street and a passer-by heard you, he’d give you a clip round the ear. That’s how it was.
‘The way they now swear at the young kids is dreadful.
‘I can’t remember as a kid any robberies or thefts. I never knew anyone who was a drunk. There wasn’t anyone taking drugs. There was never rubbish on the road like there is now.
‘You kept your doors open. It used to be a nice road, with privet bushes outside every house. People had pride in their appearance.
‘It was a community — a village within a city, really.
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Changes: The street is now featured in Channel 4 documentary Benefits Street
‘A lot of people I know can’t bring themselves to watch the programme. We’re shocked at what has happened to the street.’
Nina Clayton was six when her photograph was taken as she wore the parachute silk dress, made by her mother.
In the Forties she lived with her parents and two brothers a few houses away from where White Dee now lives.
‘Our house was a small grocer’s shop,’ she said. ‘I was only five or six at the time but I remember it so well, cigarettes kept under the counter for regulars, sacks of liquorice root, the fish and chip shop around the corner where you could get free scratchings.’
John Cahill, 56, lived on the street in the Sixties and Seventies before leaving to join the forces. He is now a bricklayer and lives in Wolverhampton with his wife, with whom he has three adult children.
He said: ‘It infuriates me that these people are wallowing in their mire. They enjoy the lifestyle they are leading. It just dismays me to see what sort of vermin have colonised the area. They have turned it into a cesspit.
‘It is such a shame because of all the happy memories I had growing up there. I am ashamed to tell anyone I spent my childhood there because people will think I am as bad as the people in the programme. But my parents and their neighbours were a world apart.
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Two residents sit drinking beer on their doorstep while talking to a child on a bicycle
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Piles of rubbish are often seen scattered all over the street - which was very different in the post-war era
‘My parents would be disgusted if they saw what it was like now.’
Mr Cahill was brought up with his three siblings on James Turner Street by his father Joseph, a lathe turner, and mother Edna, who worked in a factory.
He said all the residents worked, even most mothers, and they took pride in their children’s discipline and appearance.
‘My dad worked all the time. My mum was also at work. They couldn’t afford not to.
‘You never swore in front of your parents because you knew what you were going to get if you answered back. Now the children are effing and blinding, and that’s even the toddlers.
‘I can’t believe how bad it has got. It is filthy now. There is this greed — people want something for nothing.’
The road is believed to be named after James Turner, a 19th-century master at the local King Edward’s School, who never missed a day of work.
‘He went out, worked hard and earned that honour,’ says Mr Cahill. ‘Now his name is associated with everything he was not.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2545563/Two-faces-Benefits-Street-No-drugs-no-drunks-no-crime-no-foul-language-Now-hard-working-communitys-turned-moral-cesspit-say-families-raised-prouder-age.html#ixzz2rNigEOup
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