Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:03 Welcome to brain junk. I'm trace Kerr and I'm Amy Barton. And this is a brainstorm. Tracy, you know, recently we went to London and we did all kinds of touristy things and one of the touristy things that we did was visit the Jack the river museum because, Oh no, rainy afternoon in London. What else are you going to do or in the neighborhood? Um, and I learned a fun fact there. Our tour guide, we went ahead and we took the walking tour cause we wanted to see the neighborhood of white chapel and we'd read all the facts. And so we took the walking tour with our guides, Sam Perkins. We were the only ones. It was a rainy day. And when you're the only ones you get to ask anything you want, you get the extra low down to terrific. Cause most people that do that sort of work are excited about history.
Speaker 0 00:50 They know more than just Jack the ripper. This isn't just there. Uh, and, and he of course did lots of neighborhood trivia and he, interesting touristy historical fact. In one of the things Sam told us was that the term hangover came from the two penny hangover. That term comes from the shelter days in Victorian London. The salvation army at that time was dealing with the large homeless population with, they had a number of different interventions. If you had four pennies, you could go to the four penny coffin beds and they are exactly what they sound like. It's wooden. It's like pine boxes. Like if you don't survive the night, they just screw lid on, nail it down and off you go early, you would get a little piece of tarp to lay over you. That was actually a pretty posh accommodation. Wow. Okay. So way to go.
Speaker 0 01:45 Salvation army get you off the street. It gets you warm for the night and you have your own personal space bubble with a tarp covering. So very nice. Which in that era in homeless Victorian London, not very safe on the streets. That is pretty great. The next down, the next option below that price was a two penny hangover, which meant they had benches and you could sit on the bench and they would tie a rope and you could lean against the rope, lean back against it, or you could hang over it. And that is where he says the term two penny hangover came from. And indeed the term does seem to have been popularized by George Orwell in down and out in Paris and London. And it's a 1933 book where he talks about the two penny hangover. Oh man, you, you know, I'm thinking about draping your arms over your rope.
Speaker 0 02:38 So it would be maybe up in your armpits. Your hands would be dead by morning mornings, but if you were hung over, if you were passed out. Oh, and your neck. Yeah. So he said you were especially lucky to find yourself hung over the line in the morning. You had good friends if you were woke up, hung over the line because it means they got two pennies together and took you somewhere. Save you. Yes, because the, the, they had a one penny option. You could come, you could stay in the evening. I think there was a little bit of food you could not stay and you could not lay down. And the same for the two penny hangover. You couldn't lay down. Sleep was limited. And one of the things in the Orwell novel was the joke that, uh, in the morning at like 5:00 AM the, they humorously called them the Valley.
Speaker 0 03:25 He'd come at 5:00 AM and cut the rope and everybody's out. So all flat on your face. Apparently. Ori man. So this homeless shelters now doing a little better for accommodations, but very not fun. Although man, that rope cutting that territorians had no time, right? No. Yeah. <inaudible> Nope. If you choose to get drunk and you don't have a lot of money, yeah. You should feel grateful for this rope. Yeah. Until 5:00 AM wow. I wonder if they weren't letting them lay down because of just like space issues could, no, it would just be, cause you could probably get 10 guys on a bench versus three guys on the floor. <inaudible> yeah. Yeah. So if it was rainy and yucky, you could be inside, but she couldn't lay down and then you had to leave. And it's my brainstorm. Well, we are on Facebook and Instagram as brain junk podcast and you can find us on Twitter as at my brain junk. Amy and I will catch you next time if you're not dealing with a two penny hangover when we share more of everything you never knew you wanted to know, and I guarantee you will not be bored.
