“I was confronted by my childhood”

In its first years in the early 1980s, the Museum was advertising for a volunteer tea lady.  Louie, who was in her seventies, responded to the advert; recently widowed, she had returned to Bath (where she was born) after 14 years living in Ireland, and was looking for something interesting to do.  In 1988 she recalled visiting the Museum and meeting Dr Marianna Clark (one of the founders): “I was confronted by my childhood”.  As I will show in this article, this wasn’t necessarily in a good way – although Louie was impressed with the Museum.

It emerged that she had an extraordinary life story which she had written down in exercise books.  Marianna contacted historian Graham Davis who read Louie’s handwritten notes and undertook to edit it for publication, resulting in Louie Stride: Memoirs of a Street Urchin published by Bath University Press in 1984.  This book is fairly easy to find online.

The quote is from a BBC Radio Bristol programme broadcast in 1988, which is in Bath Record Office.  The digitised recording comprises an informal interview and then two pieces with Louie talking about her life, but unfortunately the second of these stops mid-sentence and the remainder of the programme is lost.  What comes over is a bubbly, bright, intelligent person – Louie was nearly 80 when she was interviewed, and she is obviously brimming with energy and very articulate.  This is all the more striking when the facts of her childhood are known.

Louie (Louisa) was born in 1907, the child of Lucy Stride a charwoman (cleaner) and an unknown father.  Lucy had some form of personality disorder; Louie describes her as acting “normal” and “charming” during the day, but in the evenings and at night she would become angry and violent and would shut Louie in a cupboard.  She was also a prostitute, “her evening profession”, and when Louie was a child her mother “had soldiers in”.  At this time (1914-18) they lived in Broad Street, and paid no rent because the rent collector was paid in sexual services.  When Lucy married John Smith, one of her soldier customers, in 1916, the rent collector lost his privileges and they were kicked out.

Louie Stride from school picture age 6-7 at Walcot Infants school

They then went to a “horrible place” in Corn Street – the street where Bowler’s mineral water factory was located.  Louie recalls the slaughterhouses behind Corn Street, where poor people (including herself) queued up to buy cheap offal.  This is why her remark “I was confronted by my childhood” could be somewhat ambiguous.  She was permanently hungry; there was literally no food in the house and she would faint at school on Monday mornings because she had eaten nothing all weekend; she scavenged for scraps in the street or stole from shops in desperation.

She describes her mother as an “outcast”, rejected by her family because she was a prostitute.  Louie too was ostracised by other children because she had no father.  When her mother married, Louie (aged 9) was thrilled to have a Dad at last – but he was a heavy drinker, never got permanent jobs and eventually re-joined the Army and disappeared from their lives.  Her mother meanwhile became more and more mentally unstable and sometime around 1918-1920 was admitted to the Bath Asylum at Horrington near Wells; she died there in 1936.

But Louie was bright, as her school teachers spotted; she also attended Sunday school regularly.  She passed the exam for entry into the Civil Service – but could not proceed because the form asked for her father’s name and she could not give one.  So she had to take “menial” jobs, mostly as a chambermaid in hotels or cleaning.  In summer she could get a lot of work at seaside hotels, staying for the whole season, and in winter picked up what she could in Bath.  In the 1930s she worked at Pratt’s Hotel in South Parade (now transformed into Hotel Indigo), and Bath Record Office has about 12 pages of Louie’s handwritten notes remembering all the eccentric people who stayed there when she was a chambermaid.

In 1957 Louie married widower William Ross and went to live in County Louth in Ireland, his birthplace, coming back to Bath on his death in 1980.  In the 1950s, Louie had lived in a house that she loved on the Englishcombe side of Bath.  While she was away this was compulsorily purchased for re-development of the area.  When she returned to the city, she was incensed to find that new bungalows had been built exactly where her house used to be – this seemed to her so fundamentally wrong, to pull down her house only to build new ones in its place.  Louie then lived in sheltered housing (but not happily), and the last chapter of her life is desperately sad.  On 8 January 1990 the Bristol Evening Post reported that she was missing from her old people’s home with concern for her welfare.  She was not found – until more than two months later in March her body was discovered in the river at Saltford, a few miles from Bath.  It is probable that the distress about her housing situation led her to take her own life.  She was 82.
Ann Cullis
January 2025

Walcot Infants school c.1914. Louie is sat on right of teacher

“Here I was sent to Walcot Infants School and I remember the young teacher giving me a nice warm dress which my mother took to a pawn-shop and I never saw it again”

All the quotes are from the BBC Radio Bristol programme broadcast in 1988, digitised audio copy in Bath Record Office.  The National Archives reference here relates to this audio material and the Pratt’s Hotel memoir.