To wonder about sunburnt children before suncream was popularised?

People covered up more.

People wore more clothes and if it was sunny your Mum told you to put a t-shirt and hat on. Hats were part of school uniform, bare shoulders were less common apart from on the beach or in the back garden.

You'd sit in the shade for a bit or be called indoors for a while around lunchtime.

But people also built up a tan.

Yep, we just burned badly. Bright red skin and whole sheaths of it peeling off at once.

My sibling once had the soles of their feet burn, aged about 4 I think. So painful.

Grew up in the 70s and 80s and wore factor 2 oil. I tan well and used to so dark. My fair siblings though burned and blistered. Now smother myself in factor 50 but miss the days of deep mahogany tans.

You must have been mostly in the shade, or not very fair skinned. Perhaps other people you knew were using suncream and you didn't notice.

Humans haven't become any more sensitive to the sun in the last 50 years.

Grew up in the 70s/80s north west uk and nobody ever had suncream. All the kids used to take turns peeling each others sunburnt skin off at the start of Summer till we hardened off and stopped burning. Its totally gross when you think about it.

I was born in the mid-80s, in a western European country (non UK). I have quite strong childhood memories of lots of very red, badly sunburnt people on the beach. My mother was considered quite extreme / eccentric for slathering us in factor 15 sun cream at the time. It just wasn't the done thing back then. Glad she did though.
My grandfather who mostly had jobs "outside in all weather" had skin cancer on his ear in the 90s. It was luckily successfully removed.

Children did burn in the seventies. I remember many occasions when we peeled off loose skin that was peeling!

DH and I born in the 50s. He's got brown eyes, did have dark brown hair,he burnt a few times when he visited his aunt who lived in Spain. He had a bcc removed from his face,a few years ago. The scar goes from his mouth to his chin, they cut right through into his mouth, this was done under local anaesthetic by a max fax surgeon. I'm a blue eyed blonde, never burnt in the sun. We were on the beach a lot late DF had a boat. By the mid 60s was using Amber solar,then Bergasol always careful. My DF also the blue eyed blonde did his National Service in hot countries, got skin cancer on his legs in his 60s. I had a bcc removed about 5 years ago from my back, which has hardly seen the sun since. A few years ago, I asked my GP, while I went about something else, about a small red spot on my chest he said it was just a spot. The last 6months,it grew then itched. I was already under a dermatologist, I ended up going private, getting no where. I knew by now it was a bcc. They remove a 2 inch margin, this one was incredibly painful.she said because the skin is thin and near the bone.I now have a ruddy great scar in the middle of my chest. .
The downtime was much longer than my back,no bending,lifting, for 6 weeks.

As a child back in the 60s & 70s I don't recall ever getting burnt, in fact I don't really remember it happening to others very often.

we burned horribly and have terribly sun damaged prematurely aged skin and skin cancer. I’ve had 16 moles removed over 25 years my DB has just had his third skin cancer removed.

we were 1980s kids ; sunscreen was around but we had neglectful parents.

Yes, also I grew up in the 90's and we only had it when on holiday in the very height of summer. I burned a lot.

It's probably also a bit of a class thing and also to do with where you live (we were very rural). I imagine middle class southern/ urban folk might have been using it a little earlier.

I remember having sun cream put on me as a kid in the 60s.
Family of gingers.

I remember getting burnt as a child in the 70s/80s, mostly after a trip to the beach. We had suncream, but I only remember using it at the beach and never anywhere else. We got burnt anyway, probably it wasn't as good as it is now, but also I don't think my mum applied it often enough. I remember lying in bed at night not being able to sleep because my skin was too hot.
In the mid/late 80s, as teenagers, we used to lie in the sun a lot without suncream on as people liked getting a tan. I used to get burnt then too and thought nothing of it. The thought of doing that now is awful.

We used to go to Spain back then and I remember we wore white t shirts for the first few days before we got a bit of a tan. Also avoided the sun in the middle of the day (we played lots of Monopoly). We always wore hats too. But occasionally we did get burnt.

Well the sun hasn't changed. If fair-skinned people don't put suncream on and spend too long in the sun, they burn. This was the same in the 70's (and before that). We are lucky to live in an age of sun cream!

I did burn as a child in the 60s and 70s. As an adult I use factor 50 when on holiday and don’t care if I tan or not.

Are you sure it was suncream and not just cream or calamine , it was only invented in the late 1920s and in the fifties would have been very expensive and not easy to get . Even in 1977 factor 15 was the highest and that was Piz Buin, SPF as a concept was invented in 1974 before that sun cream was focused on tanning rather than preventing damage .

Funnily enough, that 1940s manual of child safety The Famous Five mentions sun cream, although it extols far more “getting a really good suntan”.

I don't really recognise this - born late 60s, suncream was always thoroughly applied as a child and I don't remember getting burnt until I was a dumb teenager. Family of redheads though who burn at a touch of sun, so maybe my parents were more cautious than most.

I remember a Brownie pack holiday in about 1975/76. We spent a day at the beach and literally everyone but me and one friend had sunburn. We changed the words of a campfire song to include a refrain about calamine lotion because there was so much of it for the rest of the holiday.

Always worth remembering that children often wore more clothes in the past. No way my mum would have been outdoors without a top in the 1940s/50s. I think those of us from the 1960s/70s had a bit of the hippy letting it all hang out before realising the need to cover our pale and pasty shoulders.

I was born in the 1960s and have memories of the sheer joy of me and my siblings peeling our own and one another's sunburnt skin. Good times.

Holidays overseas were rare-to-nonexistant, though, so it was only the pallid UK sun that we had to contend with.

We never went abroad when I was a child so it was just a case of playing outside for much of the year and gradually getting used to it. I remember being very brown, but as a child, never burnt.

As teens we all used the Ambre Solaire oil - no SPF! - to fry ourselves. That would have been in the 60s. I still don’t remember ever burning - just dying for brown legs. I didn’t experience hot ‘foreign’ sun until I was 21.

There were always kids that looked burnt when I was a child in the 80s but I don't remember getting burnt. I do recall wearing hats and seeking shade if I was hot. Have photos of me in Morocco as a kid and I am very brown but do remember we'd always go in out of the midday sun.

We had to wear hats in the summer, and Tshirts with sleeves so our shoulders didn't burn. In the height of the day we were called in to wash our hands for lunch and a few chores like set the table, so missed 12.00-13.30ish peak sun.

We went on holiday to the UK mostly, and not all holidays were beach ones, we didn't sit all day on the beach in the sun, but if we did, we sat in the shade of a windbreak/umbrella/side with shade of the car or a picnic spot was chosen under a tree or similar for eating lunch. We were encouraged to sit quietly in the shade till 2.30ish and read (we had a box of holiday books, secondhand in the car to pick from), never got sunburn