Belinda Norman-Butler (1908-2008) was Charles Booth’s granddaughter and author of Victorian Aspirations, a biography of Charles and his wife Mary. Back in 2006, before getting stuck in to the Booth Archive (I wanted to use extensive quotations in The Blackest Streets), I sought permission from Mrs Norman-Butler to quote from the original notebooks written by her grandfather and his team of researchers for his monumental survey, Life and Labour of the People in London (1889-1903).

Mrs Norman-Butler phoned me in response to my letter, and during our conversation told me her childhood memories of her grandfather (Charles Booth died in 1916). I found it amazing that I was having a conversation with someone who had had a conversation with Charles Booth.

I treasure the letter she sent me (written after she had broken her wrist in a fall), in which she mentions other relatives and literary acquaintances of yore; and I thank her relations, Catherine Wilson and Richard Martineau, for permission to publish it, below.

Above left: Belinda Norman-Butler with her grandmother, Mary Booth, in 1936. Both these photographs are to be found in Mrs Norman-Butler’s biography Victorian Aspirations: The Life and Labour of Charles and Mary Booth (1972).