The School Magazine 100 Years Ago

“As usual there was no water for the Baths, but the new pipe is laid and there should not be any difficulties on that score in the future. (Not half!) Fortunately there was plenty of sea bathing, so the Baths were not missed as much as they might have been.”

“The comedy of life in sleeping carriages continues. They are too funny for words. The number of the berths are only hung on the curtains and sometimes they get pushed along to the wrong berth. Therefore no lady ever enters the berth without the greatest precautions lest she should encounter revelations of pyjamas. If she has to enter an upper berth the attendant brings a ladder and holds her skirts round her ankles while she mounts, having previously taken off her boots and placed them under the lower berth, very often beside a strange man’s. Sleeping berths certainly test the stuff a woman is made of, or perhaps it would be more correct to say, made up of! She cannot undress until she gets into her bunk, and she has to dress in the same aggravating way in the morning.”

(This latter item was an extract from a boy’s holiday trip to Canada describing the Canadian Pacific Railway).