1900 Island - Episode 2

Good morning!  We are back visiting the 1900 Island.  The families are entering their second week and the weather is finally good enough to go fishing.  Food rations are running low again, even after the boost of cash.  One family struggles to feed their large family.  Another family struggles to keep a tight rein on their finances as well.  A flair-up of gout is to blame for the situation.
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Additionally, there are questions as to how the community should function.  What does communal living mean in the 1900s?  Each of the families has a different vision for communal living.  The men need to fish and they need to make money.  The one compromise for this experience is the modern life vest.

While the men are off fishing, the women are taking care of the chores.  It has been nonstop since they arrived on the island.  It is Monday and it is wash day.  The women find handwashing the challenge.  The fishermen return triumph with a bit of a catch.  At last, the fishermen are successful in catching forty-four mackerel and three dogfish.  They sell the mackerel and eat the dogfish.  The families have their first fish supper and it lifts the spirits of the people on the island.  One man comments that it was either feast for famine with the 1900’s man.

The triumph is short-lived as the weather turns against them.  The men will not be heading out to fish.  The families do have a second source of protein: chickens.  However, the eggs are three pennies for eggs.  One family is making a good trade on eggs.  Another family runs a small grocery store in their cottage.  A third family is making bread to sell.

The children then head off to school.  Children between the ages of five and twelve had to go to school.  So the modern children are going to school on the 1900 Island.  They are being taught by a modern teacher and she comes daily for lessons.  There were only a select group of women who became teachers and the rest went into domestic service.  The teens are working at home and are finally contributing to the chores.  As teens, the girls would have been sent to wealthy households to work.

The teens are finding working a bit of a challenge.  So they find work at another family's cottage and they earned three pennies for two hours of work.  In their modern life, they did not do any chores.  The father of the family comments that he would have been pushing them out of the house as they would have been “one less mouth to feed.”

The wind and the swell are still putting fishing on hold for the men.  The families are tightening their belts.  Less money is coming into the community and the egg business is suffering.  The chicken farmers are trying to figure out a new marketing technique to sell the eggs.  To continue to learn more about what the families went through on the 1900 Island continue to watch this episode.

Week two proved to be interesting as the families tried to adjust to the realities of 1900 living.  The teen girls were annoying and lazy.  It was too bad that the weather was against them and perhaps it should have been filmed at a different time.  There were also some creeping in of modern ideas into this episode as well that I did not care too much for.  I enjoyed the retired couple and was a bit sad that the old man could not go fishing because of his gout.   If I was a teacher, I would bypass this episode.