The Sunderland heroes who stepped up during Wearside's darkest days

Starvation and begging - Sunderland Antiquarian Society remembers the year when thousands of Wearside families had nothing to live on.

Transcript

00:00 Imagine a time when people were so poor they died from hunger in their homes.

00:07 It happened in Sunderland 140 years ago during a Great Depression. More than 10,000

00:13 families had no money. Things got so hard that winter that families pawned

00:19 everything they had - furniture, clothes, bedding. The Sunderland Daily Echo sent a

00:26 specialist to investigate how people were coping. The reporter found children

00:32 being sent out to beg in one house, a 78 year old woman lay dying in an attic

00:38 with no furniture. Help came through distress funds, relief committees and the

00:44 owners of shipbuilding firms. The wife of James Lang, Theresa Lang, did more than

00:50 anyone. She took over a building beside her husband's shipyard at Detford to feed

00:57 up to 400 hungry children at a time. Youngsters with no shoes or stockings

01:03 walked across frozen snow to be fed and the manager of an entertainment company

01:09 handed out 1,000 loaves of bread to those in distress. Thanks to Sunderland

01:16 Antiquarian Society and historian Philip Curtis for sharing a truly sad tale of

01:22 real-life weirside in times of need.