ABSTRACT

Freddie richards, a man of the Midlands, was born at Russell Street, Wednesbury, Staffordshire on 25 March 1863 and he wrote an account of his early life in Pearson’s Weekly. 1 His father was a commercial traveller who described himself as a Conservative, although Freddie says he suspected ‘he was more of a democrat than a Tory’. When the Board schools started up in Wednesbury his father immediately took him out of the Church school and put him into the state school saying he did not wish Freddie to ‘grow up as an aristocratic pauper’. But there was nothing aristocratic about the poverty he subsequently endured.