What Was Wrong with the 70s????

[Menofsteel]

I wasn’t born until 1980 but my husband is a 60s child. He’s showed me public information films from the 70s and just introduced me to the original Survivors. I saw the remake with Julie Graham? Why is everything from the 70s so much creepier?!? I’m starting to believe we are a bit softer nowadays .

Eiderdowns which used to slip off in the night and hot water bottles that were freezing cold by morning.

Night storage heaters that were never warm.

Having to turn the wall mounted electric heater on in the bathroom half an hour before you wanted a bath or it would be freezing.

@Runmybathforme I can imagine. Fortunately for me I was a teenager in the 80s and things were a little different/better then (to some degree... bar Page 3 etc).

I get that monkey. But, I didn't have that though. We had central heating. No child was as ever hit when I was was at my school.

@UntamedWisteria wasn't there a programme called Mind Your Language?

@Oblomov20 re parenting. Well my baby boomer generation blame us gen Xers for it🤷‍♀️😳

@Oblomov20 remember my primary headmistress regularly getting the boys across her knee to smack them

[quote monkeytennis97]@Oblomov20 re parenting. Well my baby boomer generation blame us gen Xers for it🤷‍♀️😳[/quote]
My baby boomer generation parents that should say.

Born in1971, and had a very happy childhood. But:

No contral heating, waking up to ice coating the inside of our bedroom window. Freezing when you went to bed, so getting ready for bed in front of the gas fire downstairs, and running upstairs.

Being sent outside to play all days, just coming in for meals. We were only allowed to play inside of it was pouring with rain, because we'd be in the way.

Playing on the building site with the older boys, climbing chimneys of half built houses, playing hide and seek in the foundations. Hot wiring the diggers.

Being abused by the older boys, and avoiding the gangs hanging around the shops as we knew they were particularly bad.

Playing "chicken" on our bikes, literally having Wars with neighbouring streets, coming home covered in bruises. We had the run of the streets as there were hardly any cars once the men had gone to work.

I know everyone says that free range childhood was great, but my parents would've been so upset if they'd known what really went on. We lived in a nice area, and I was under 10 at this point.

I was born in the mid 60s and can relate to a lot of what has already been mentioned on this thread. We didn't have a lot of money and very little in terms of material possessions compared to the average child nowadays. Our house had no heating upstairs except a paraffin heater in the bathroom which was only lit on a Saturday which was bath night. I remember there being ice on the inside of my bedroom window regularly in Winter and I used to lie my clothes out on the end of my bed at night so that I could pull them into bed and get dressed before I got out from under the covers. I don't really remember being hungry as such, but I know we had far less food than my children have now. We didn't have a freezer until the 80s and I remember the huge excitement when we got our first fridge in the mid/late 70s. Until then my Mum used to walk to the local butchers and greengrocers every day to buy food freshly, and of course milk was delivered to the doorstep every day. We had little by the way of labour saving devices. I vividly remember my Mum doing the laundry with a twin tub machine on Mondays and Thursdays - it was a lot harder work than nowadays! Holidays were usually a week in a static caravan in North Wales and we very, very rarely ate out or had a takeaway, except I was allowed to get a bag of chips to eat on the way home from Guides on a Friday evening. And that was my only hobby - none of the expensive stuff that my children do now.
Clothes mainly came from the market or were home made and being the youngest child in the family I got lots of hand me downs, from clothes to school books. I remember feeling so excited and proud when my parents bought me my first brand new bike in the 80s - for my 21st birthday!
But I didn't feel deprived as all my friends lives were very similar. A few of the better off kids went to Spain or France for their holidays but mainly we were all very similar. It wasn't until I went to University in the 1980s that I started to feel like the poor relation when I met lots of young people who had had very different upbringings to me. But as I child, I never knew such people existed and it was abit of a shock to suddenly find myself being pitied and looked down on as "poor" at University.
However, comparatively speaking, we were comfortable. Well, when you compare to the way some people were living anyway. Only this afternoon I was looking at a forthcoming book on kickstarter as it happens. Some of the pictures look like they should have been taken in Victorian days, or the 1930s depression at the latest. It is very sobering to realise that they are all from the late 60s/early 70s.
www.kickstarter.com/projects/408499994/home-14?ref=thanks-tweet

I was born in 1960 so was 10 in 1970 and 20 in 1980.

Life was free, full of unsupervised cycling, swimming and haystacks. Along with seasonal fruit and veg and the excitement of strawberries in June, followed by peaches in late July. Shops closed on Sundays and Wednesday afternoons! My gran used to leave me under the eye of the staff in the Harrods Toy Dept when she shopped (though that may have been 60s), Lyons Tea Shops and Wimpy Bars, Gamages, Marshall & Snelgrove, then Chelsea Girl and At an.

TV was of its time and there were horrors such as Benny Hill and Love Thu Neighbour but On The Buses and Alf Garner were classics, along with Dads Army and Charlie's Angels and the Avengers notwithstanding Monty Python. As for music, it seemed to start with Lulu, Cliff Richard and David Cassidy and then evolved through The Doors, T Rex, Sweet, Slade, Bowie, Queen, and into Debbie Harry and Punk. Radio Caroline and Luxembourg and listening to a single in a booth at the co-op before buying it. That was such fun.

I also remember some fabulous and whacky fashion from mini skirts and hot pants through to tank tops satin leg of mutton sleeves, loons, platforms, wet look, midis, maxis, summer boots, Biba and then as we hit the 80s it all got a bit staid.

Holidays abroad started taking off with the rise of Freddie Laker and Spain and there were some fabulous films, a ballet version of Beatrix Potter, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Jaws, Inspector Clouseau.

Food was a bit grim and not adventurous but not in my house, not everyone had central heating and living in sin was still an issue.

We became Europeans, had the first woman PM, still had grammar schools and the upward mobility they conveyed. I do remember the awfulness of the three day week and Denis Healey having to go to the IMF. But on the whole I had a brilliant time in the 70s. Oh and restaurant cars on trains and the national anthem at the cinema. And smoking carriages.

The 70s were tough. One political crisis after another,

I remember high inflation, and our mortgage interest rate going up to 17 %. We had the Three Day Week (businesses only allowed to open for three fixed days out of 7) to conserve electricity. Streetlights were turned off, pubs were shut, TV went off every night after the 10 pm news. Every home suffered rolling power blackouts. Political chaos for years leading to Margaret Thatcher as PM :-(

Yes, hand me downs and homemade clothes! My mum even made my school uniform, other than my blouse which she bought. We would choose a pattern from Debenhams, she'd buy the fabric from the market, and she make my sister and I three summer dresses each. And my jumpsuit, which I loved.

Otherwise, it was hand me downs from my cousin.

I remember my first pair of shop bought jeans. I adored them!

70s child here too.

@Neonjumper I know your pain. I remember the skinheads too. Mum and me being followed down the roads by skinheads from my school spitting at us and calling us names, who looking back probably weren't older than 14 or 15 at the time.

Walking past flats with broken windows filled with heroin addicts, with swastikas and NF grafitti'd on the walls. Sometimes some skinhead/junkie type would try to corner you as you walked past! This was my commute to school.

The news was full of stories of Asians being targeted by NF. I remember a story about an Asian girl who was attacked and had her braids cut off by skinheads and I remember being deathly afraid.

People were more ignorant then, in general. I remember a teacher saying to the class "oh a white person can have black hair but a black face with blonde hair would look really funny, wouldn't it". (!) Another made comments on the fact that I had oil in my hair, when a (white) girl in my class asked why do they have oil in their hair, she said "I don't know why they do that, it looks dirty". (In primary school!!)

I had some happy times though, playing outside all day with friends (I had lots at the time) and I remember that it was always sunny. Really hot and sunny. I don't remember rain at all then!

I also think of the 70s as the last decade before the "plastic age". The 80s (in my mind) was when plastic really took off, everything seemed to be made of plastic after, whereas in the 70s everything was more wooden. That's just my impression anyway, from my memories.

I had my Brothers old clothes.

Clothes were definitely less gendered from old photos I have seen of relatives.

One new outfit at Christmas. One at Easter. These were for best.

The rest of the time I wore hand me downs.

@AldiAisleofCrap

Clothes were definitely less gendered from old photos I have seen of relatives.

Yes most of my 'tween' years I looked like a little boy- purdy hair cut (bowl) and velvet dungarees or trousers and a polo neck jumper (shudder-hate them now and am sure that's because I lived in them at that age).

Or corduroy dungarees

I was born in the mid 60s so had a 70s childhood/teens.

I was always cold. House had no central heating - and if we'd been to visit Grandparents for the day (hour and a half each way to an industrial Northern city, in a car with my dad chain smoking) you got back in winter and it was freezing and dark. Ma would say, 'I'll get a fire on' but it was a coal fire and you knew the room wouldn't be warm by bed time.

Freezing cold at school - sent out to play in all weathers for long lunchtimes so they could feed proper cooked meals to all kids in different sittings. I remember standing about the playground with a bitter wind cutting through you because you were too tired to run about any longer. Quite often you were wet, because they still sent you out in the rain, whilst teachers drank coffee/smoked in the staff room. Dinner ladies were horrible to you if you fell and cut your knees and cried. Told you to stop being a baby. We were pretty tough! A fair amount of bullying in school and name calling. Kids could be cruel and teachers weren't interested in 'tale telling'. You didn't report stuff to adults because they wouldn't do anything and you'd probably get in trouble if you made waves. Lots of fights in the playground and no adult appeared bothered.

No snacks between meals, and meals were fairly skimpy. I can remember having my first Indian meal for my 21st birthday! Takeaways - fish and chips/Chinese - were literally just a couple of times a year.

I lived a lot in my imagination - fuelled by a lot of books and creepy TV series. I wasn't unhappy as a child, but neither was I particularly happy.

As a teen - if I was going to the youth club disco I would have to phone my best friend's Aunty Mavis, who lived across the road from them, and if she wasn't watching Corrie she might go across the road and tell my mate to phone me back. My friend would then have to walk to the phone box at the end of the road to phone me (we had a phone at home and they didn't) so that I could ask what she was wearing...

Different days indeed!

I loved being a child of the 70s. There were bad things about it obviously. But I do think kids then were tougher and more self sufficient. And it was fun.

Beige corduroy featured a lot in my life.

I attended prep school in the early 70s, and there the boys were punished by slipper on the backside, and the girls had a ruler across the hand. All children were regularly made to stand facing the corner if they misbehaved. One teacher used to throw the blackboard rubber at the boys' heads if they were noisy.

I also remember the power cuts, playing draughts by candlelight, and my dad boiling a small kettle on a camping stove for tea made with a squirt of condensed milk from a tube.

I think the slipper was actually an old plimsoll, it just wasn't called that.

Who else used to have to back their school books with brown paper or wallpaper?!
I remember everyone used to write their name inside school textbooks that we would be given for the year and sometimes there would be names going back 15 or 20 years in there. I guess syllabi didn't change so rapidly then, or maybe it just reflected the relative poverty of my school. It was the done thing at our school that if you were given a book which had previously belonged to a classmate's sibling then you had to swap with them and I used to quite enjoy adding my name.
I thought I was very sophisticated as I had my own book of log tables (remember them?!). Hand me down from my brother of course, but still my own, rather than school's. I think my kids would pass out if I gave them a set of log tables instead of a calculator! At least we were allowed to use calculators to some degree. My poor elder brother had to do A level maths with a slide rule as his only help....what on earth were they all about? I wish I could speak to my very anti calculator maths teacher now mind you. I'd be rich if I had a pound for every time she said "You 'll never carry a calculator with you all the time will you?". Well actually miss....

Wallpaper 😂😂