Today we went back to Portsmouth to visit Strawberry banke as we hadn’t had time yesterday. This was an area of Portsmouth that has 323 buildings that are either on their original site or were moved here to save them from demolition. The area is called Strawberry Banke as this is what Portsmouth was originally known as because wild strawberries grew on the banks of the river, the name was changed to Portsmouth after the war of independence as they felt it was more befitting of a major ship building area. In high season there are a number of people that role play but as this is low season there were only two people in period costume. Not all the houses were open but most of them were, and those that were had a flag flying outside, interestingly some of the flags represented the situation when the houses were built. The oldest house had a union flag outside, those built while the country was still an English colony have the stripes with the union flag in the corner and those built after the war of independence had the US flag with a variety of stars as the commonwealth expanded. The first role player we met was Mr Shapiro who was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who brought his house in 1909 and he was representing 1919. He told the story of how he immigrated to America, he was one of four brothers who had to escape Russia, the first brother made it to England and found that all his money had been stolen so he boarded with a family in London and worked to earn the money to continue his journey to America, he landed in Canada who at the time were not very keen on the Jews so as he landed he decided to change his name to Shapiro after the person that he boarded with in London. He left Canada and made his way to America where the rest of his brothers joined him, his sister stayed in Ukraine and it isn’t clear what happened to her. Two of the brothers decided that Shapiro didn’t sound American enough so they changed their name to Brown which was more American! The other place where there was someone in character was Pitt Tavern, this was the daughter of the inn keeper who was playing her life in 1777. A lot of the houses were furnished to match the period, but a few were left as they had been ‘found’ to show how the archaeologists work out how the house has either expanded or contracted, and also showed how they establish the decoration and the different time periods, this was really interesting as you hardly ever see anything like this you tend to only see the finished article. Another house was divided into two when Portsmouth was really busy and they needed a lot of affordable housing, after they moved it to the site, they have left the two front doors and staged one side of the house as 1950s ‘duplex’ – two up two down to us, with the sitting room and kitchen, the other side represents the 1790’s where the front was a store and the back was the living room / kitchen. The other really interesting part was the 1940s store, I hadn’t released that rationing took place in America during the war, but it only started in 1943 and ended in 1946. Talking to the person in there it seems that it was more about fare distribution of food than actual rationing as nothing was ever actually unavailable but they were sending so much overseas to the troops they needed to make sure that everyone had access to things like red meat rather than just the rich buying it all up. At no point were chickens or eggs rationed and also had a big selection of sweets on sale. It is said that without WWII M&M’s would never have been invented. They needed to find a solution to the fact that when they sent chocolate bars to the troops in the desert they melted, so they ‘wrapped’ them in candy and called them ‘M’ and ‘M’s By the time we had finished walking round it was gone 3pm and we had spent 5 hours walking round which included a stop for lunch. We headed back to the hotel for a relax before heading out to get something to eat.
