To think Call the Midwife is too depressing

[jewelledsky]

for a Sunday night and to almost be tempted by Top Gear as a light viewing alternative? Where is Downton Abbey?

[SarfEasticated]

where do they get the constant stream of newborns from? they do look pretty new...

[Tansie]

One thing I've definitely noticed, over the years, is how newborn the newborns appear to be now, compared with, say 20 years ago. I still recall my mother harrumphing on the sofa next to me as we sat through a TV birth 'THAT baby's at least 6 months old!'

I shall be yellow cardie spotting!

[NeverKnowinglyUnderstood]

there was an article in the paper a couple of weeks ago by the director saying that they are not older than 2 weeks as they lose thier crinkled look by then.
There are parents signing up when pregnant to offer their babies for filming once born

[WhatNow2013]

I'm a midwife and I am pretty sure from what I've been told that they recruit from the local maternity units! Babies do lose their crinkled squashed look pretty quickly so it's good that they use proper newborns.

My Granny was a midwife and nurse 'on the district' at the time CTM is set and she said the books were an accurate description of what it was like. Also re Chummy- of course me and a lot of my friends read the books a long time before it was dramatised and everyone I know has always said 'if they made it into a TV series Miranda Hart should play Chummy' so I think she really is just perfect typecasting!

In regards to the midwives getting so close to the action: Midwives nowadays tend to be a bit more hands off (and squeamish in my opinion about getting too close!) but when you think that the only way to listen to baby's heartbeat was with a Pinards stethoscope (the ear trumpet thing) midwives would have been used to getting quite close to the women. I still use a Pinards and make sure my students learn to do it too. It's a vital skill... however a lot of my clients do laugh about it!

(You should listen with Pinards because electronic monitors can 'double' the maternal heart rate and think you're listening to baby when you're actually listening to mum. With a Pinards you are actually hearing the baby's heart rate. You can also use this to help determine position of baby as you can generally only hear clearly through baby's shoulders, so you won't hear it low down if baby is breech, for instance).

[PennyBrowne]

Personally, I'm in love with the programme- although it may have something to do with the fact I adore Miranda Hart, not forgetting the Fifties!

[stubbornstains]

I love the dressing gowns, myself. No pink fluffy towelling or stupid cartoon characters in sight. Why can't we get lovely print dressing gowns nowadays?

[stubbornstains]

And yes LRD I too find the Jimmy/Jenny storyline really annoying. It must be actually illegal to have a prime time TV programme without a love interest storyline....

[ppeatfruit]

Interesting thoughts from RL midwives esp. about the Pinards fascinating! thanks !

Comparing CTM with the midwives that were at my own 3 births in hospital it seems that now (well in the 80s actually ) they seemed to be less experienced and too ready to use 'speed up the process' drugs. I understand that they weren't available in the 50s but the odd midwife who was hands on was SOOO much better.

[BoffinMum]

The mw that delivered my first trained in that era and she had all the 'old skills'. She had seen it all. A real 'wise woman', which is kind of what you want, isn't it?

[BoffinMum]

There were houses in this village without bathrooms until the late 1990s, by the way.

Martha, people were slimmer because they walked more but also because they didn't snack as much as we do.

I am always amazed at how much cake they all ate though.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

There are still houses without bathrooms - my mates when I was at university rented a house that had the shower and loo in an outhouse, and that was 2004!

[NeverKnowinglyUnderstood]

we went to look at a house last year and the outside loo and washroom (converted coalshed) were connected to the house by some corrogated plastic roofing sheets (no sides) so that you could come and go without getting wet
no planning would be given for building it in and there was no room in the tiny 2 up 2 down to add a bathroom anywhere else.

[BertieBotts]

My bathroom is a tiny extension on the back of the house, again tiny Victorian 2 up 2 down here.

[Tansie]

As a child, neither of my grandparents' homes had an indoor bathroom! (Rural Cornwall).

One was a council house where the council converted one of the 3 upstairs bedrooms into a bathroom (ooh! the luxury!) so at night, one didn't have to remember which of the rickety wooden doors out on the patio lead to the loo and which to the coal-shed... but my other grandad lived in an isolated, old, old cottage that had 16th century origins. Thick thatch, cobbles on earth floors and the upstairs floor was cut from the same oak, its lines swooping and buckled along with the growth of the original tree! He had a hand pump to draw water from a well outside til I was 10! A persistent skin rash and a persistent GP who blamed contamination of the ground water forced the council, eventually, to lay on 'mains water' to the house, but he never had 'hot water on tap'! He had 'a scullery' which was half buried in the soil, beyond the 4' cobb walls. It was damp, dank and smelly, so as kids, when we stayed, we'd troop up to his sister's council house up on 'The Green' where she'd charge my mum 50p a bath!

That grandad's house had an outhouse down a muddy, dark, country lane, the loo a deep pit filled with Jeyes Fluid, that night-soil men emptied every month! ; the seat a plank of wood with a hole cut in it, a good 20m from the house, (yes, past the coal shed!). As you can imagine, us primary schoolers weren't that keen on grabbing a torch and setting out into the wind and rain lashed pitch black, trees thrashing in the wind all around us, wind howling through the eaves to relieve ourselves in an unlit, spider strewn, chemical fume-house of an outdoor loo, alone at night. So we had porcelain chamber pots.... that smelled the room out by day break! It was such an 'other' experience for us kids I could never understand how, latterly, we'd spend just a day with that grandad then head off 50 miles to spend the rest of the week with the other one, with the bathroom, but, as a mum myself,. now... I get it.

[MustTidyUpMustTidyUp]

I loved that tansie!

[LaVolcan]

Tansie you bring back memories too for me, of visiting a friend in the Peak District, early Seventies, living in a house which didn't have mains drainage. The loo was a chemical one in a shed at the end of the garden. I always made sure that I went at home before going to visit her. Urgh! It didn't seem to bother her though, although she now lives in a house with three loos.

[AmberLeaf]

Wow Tansie! how long ago was that?

I vaguely remember an outside loo at either my grandparents or great aunts house. I hated using it because of all the spiders or cobwebs at least!

I remember it was converted into a sort of shed once they'd had an 'inside lav' put in.

[AmberLeaf]

Love how this thread has turned out

[Tansie]

It would have been until 1977 when my grandad died!

My mums' older sister moved in with her dad in that cottage for 6 months with 2 children, one a baby in (cloth) nappies in 1965,

[AmberLeaf]

Omg! goes to show how lucky we are these days!

[ppeatfruit]

I always remember being shocked by my friend's late Victorian terraced North London house which had no bathroom (just a tin bath which lived under a wooden drainer in their kitchen\scullery. I didn't dare ask her about her toilet . This was in the early 60s

[CinnabarRed]

I've just finshed reading the Mrs Jenkins chapters of the first book.

It was 1916 that she had the industrial accident that meant that she couldn't support her family any longer.

In 1916 her baby died of starvation, and she had to weigh down his tiny body in an orange box and drop him in the Thames because she couldn't afford a funeral.

In 1916 she took her remaining 5 children to the workhouse. Her three children under 5 years old were separated from the oldest boy (9 years), the oldest girl (10 years) and their mother. She never saw them again.

In 1920 the last of her 5 children died in the workhouse.

Less than a century ago.

[BangOn]

i read the first book 3 years ago when dd2 was on the way. could only ever picture Chummy as Miranda Hart at the time.

For those who are saying 'yes but we had the nhs then'. The health service was in its infancy, if you'll excuse the pun. the doctors & midwives were struggling to fix what hundreds of years of private, unregulated 'healthcare' had done to the poor, & obviously, modern medicine still had a long way to go. A hundred & & fify years from now, when no-one living remembers the NHS & our decendents are having families if ten or more because of high infant mortality rates, perhaps some kind soul will come along & reinvent the wheel. that's the most optimistic thought i can contemplate when i think of the future of public services right now.

[BoffinMum]

I think that's a good point. There are many vested interests involved in attempting to privatise the NHS through the back door, but you only have to look at the appalling health of the poor in the US, combined with rising infant mortality rates, to see what it would be like not to have a proper health service. They spend a lot more than we do in total but get less for their money collectively. And they bitch about what they call 'socialised medicine'?

Think Staffordshire was bad? Multiply that by about 100 and that is how abysmal healthcare would be for the majority of people who happened to be out of work or ruled out from private insurance because they had pre-existing health conditions.

Don't get me wrong, I think a bit of minor private competition to the NHS is a good thing as it keeps it looking at standards and structures self-critically, but anything more than the most token private sector in this country would make me very concerned indeed.

[LaVolcan]

I think the USA's maternal mortality rate is poor too - something like 40th on the list of developed countries. What is worse it's probably an underestimate; there is no consistency in reporting deaths between States, so someone could have died from a complication of childbirth, but because the birth was some weeks earlier, it wouldn't go on the form as the cause.