AIBU to wonder how some people coped in former times?

[Flyingfish2019]

When they had 12 children, husband was working down the mines 16 hours a day, no transportation, no frozen/canned food, no fridge, constantly pregnant. No help if somebody suffered a disability (and I think this was likely working down the mines those days).

I just wondered because I have far less then 12 children and dh does not work down the mines and still we are often soooooo tired. Children keeping us awake play a role in this... how would we cope if there was 12 of them and we had to live under the conditions described above?

I was born in 63. We lived in a little terraced house and my DD was a miner. We didn’t have central heating until 1970 and no heating upstairs. We always had a big roaring fire in the living room though and lovely food to eat.

I walked a round trip of three miles to school regardless of the weather but I had a decent coat and I’ve never had a chilblain in my life. And we certainly bathed more than once a week. We had a shower put in in 1970; it was lovely. I remember my childhood in the 70s as good times. I never wanted for anything.

Older kids looked after the younger kids. They were out out to "play" most days. My mum had a huge roll in bringing up her youngest sister, she took her everywhere, made dinner when she got home from school because her mum and dad were at work and took care of the youngest kids. My dad's family was 3 girls and 3 boys, same there, the older girls raised the younger kids while mum worked and their dad was away working in the merchant navy.
One of my uncle's (By marriage) had 12 brothers and sister, exactly the same situation there.
My mum's family were unusual because there was only 4 kids.
I think family helped out a lot more then. I know my mum's aunts, that didn't work looked after them befor my mum was an age she could take care of the younger kids.

I love learning about the past aswell OP, I find it fascinating.

I've got a baby who is crawling at the moment and I always wonder how mothers used to keep them safe when they're crawling around putting everything in their mouths. Especially with other children, an open fire/range and tons of housework and washing to do all the time as they didn't have labour saving devices. But obviously people did survive!

Older kids looked after the younger kids.

They did and they didn't because of course, they were often left in charge of younger kids when they themselves were not capable of being neurologically sensible enough to do so as they were children themselves. My mother is 78. Over the course of her childhood, 2 friends lost younger siblings they were supposed to be looking out for, and even on MN you hear of these 'sensible' 8 or 10-year-olds. They're not sensible as any adult because they're a kid! In one instance, the girl's sister was hit by a car and in the other the brother drowned.

Sadly this was not uncommon.

A poster on here years ago told of how her friend was left in charge of her 8-month-old sister. She being a child herself, the baby managed to fall down stairs in her walker and die.

My grandfather was one of 17, 15 of who lived to adulthood. He was one of the elder ones. They were all ostensibly supposed to stay together, but c'mon, they're still kids not sensible babysitters, and would often leave the younger ones to their own devices whilst they socialised with their own mates.

Really interesting thread.

My family history is different to lots of these because poverty was not an issue. However I am sure that both my father and grandparents were deprived and had it hard in different ways.

My grandfather was born in the 1880s. He died before I was born. Obvs! He was the third child of nine born to aristocracy. I suspect that they were brought up in distant nurseries with nanny and wet nurse; certainly they’d remain at home whilst parents were away often for weeks at a time in other homes. Boarding school from 7. Oxbridge expected afterwards. They lived on a country estate.

Grandad was disinherited due to lifestyle choices that he made - don’t want to be too specific in case it is outing. Anyway, he became a headteacher, married another upper class girl, my granny. (I don’t know anything about her early life, my father was not at all close to her and knew very little)

My grandparents had 7 children including my dad, born outside of the Uk due to my grandads work. My father was born during the First World War and had a nanny. At 7, he was sent to boarding prep in England, travelling on a boat with a tutor for several weeks, returning home every 2 years. During the school holidays, he stayed with various maiden aunts of his dad’s. His grandparents had died by this time and my grandfather was on good terms with his sisters. My father had to come to England because it was deemed to have the best schools, despite the fact that his dad was teaching in the country that they lived in.

So no slaving away and lots of food but emotionally deprived for both of them.

Just to add to my message, my dad was at boarding school the same time as Roald Dahl; my dad read ‘boy’ before he died and thought it a realistic account of boarding school life.

Well I am not sure about the 12 children, as she only had 4, but my grandmother "coped" by having a cook, a housemaid and a laundrymaid.

We lived in a little terraced house and my DD was a miner.

This is where the MN acronyms fall down

Although some women in the 1800s in the NE were women and they were very cross indeed when men tried to stop them working there as the pay was very good.

We had no central heating in Newcastle when I was born in the 60s but that was pretty normal and we certainly had a much better house than my parents' parents had either rented or owned.

I was going to add that I remember when we got central heating and the old coal area stopped being used for coal - i was very little about 4 or 5.

I think many children were mostly born due to ignorance of or lack of contraception rather than being wanted or planned.

My paternal grandmother told us she wasn't allowed to say "no" to her husband. There was no such thing as rape when you were married, she just had to let him "do his thing". Which meant creating more children.

My maternal grandmother loved having a big family, none were planned but they did actively decide not to use contraception. Each child was seen as a gift from god.

And by contraception they meant the rythm method.

"LoniceraJaponica

MiGi777 I think that was fairly unusual 42 years ago. I am 60 and we all had bathrooms and central heating. We weren't particularly well off. All my friends who lived in council houses lived in better conditions than you describe. This was in Greater London."

Depends where I think. When we bought our house up in the South Wales valleys our neighbour told us how it was when he bought his house, and there was no indoors toilet, no fences between the gardens, probably all still had coal fires. I think a lot of modernising was done in the 80s and 90s with grants from the council.

I'm 41 and when I was a small child we did have central heating, but the fuel was a big tank of oil in the garden, and we had ice on the inside of the windows in winter. I clearly remember us getting a freezer for the first time and the old top loading washing machine that had to be pulled out to use.

Going back, my DM was one of 11. My eldest Aunt was essentially a second mother to the younger children, and they all seem to have spent a lot of time roaming the surrounding countryside. My maternal grandmother died when I was a baby, both my grandfathers died before I was 10.

People were (and still are in poorer countries) much more stoic and had lower expectations. Also, many people were unhappy and crazy and aggressive and drunks etc etc, and that was (and is in poorer countries) just life. Everything is relative, you compare yourself to what you see around you. Its good to put your own small problems into perspective by thinking about how hard most other people say life is and how hard life was for generations before us. We've come so far that we don't even appreciate what we have. One day in our average lives would be like heaven for women a 100 years ago in this country, or for a woman from a poor family in a developing country. We are obscenely privileged.

I visited a lighthouse in Newfoundland, it had been kept as a museum with the original furniture. It as like a dolls house, mini beds, tables & chairs. Low doors etc.

Visiting Toronto. I learned in the period where all the men went for 6 months campaign logging. (providing timber to build London.) The babies had whisky in their feed to purify the water, if not they died from unfit water

Our next door neighbour when I was small was our gardener, they never had running water, they had a range lit year in, year out, his wife ironed with flat irons. & did all her cooking on it. He never believed that a man had set foot on the moon in-spite of reading it in the newspaper. His father had been a "mole catcher" he caught dozens a day for the local farms, the skins were used for purses & inside pockets

It was grim wasn’t it?
I often think how boring it must have been and I’m so happy to be born in these times.
I love working hard all week then weekends going out for the day/night going for dinner going round shops going for facials etc
Children are teenagers now so they do their own thing.
Feel like we can enjoy life more than they could.

The life expectancy figures are somewhat skewed by the high incidence of infant mortality. The average life expectancy in the mid 1800's might be (say) 47, but that doesn't mean that most adults died around that age. So many children died before their 5th birthday, it brings the average down hugely.

I've done a lot of family history research, and many of the adults in my trees survived well into their 60's/70's.

My grandmother was the youngest of 12. I genuinely don't know how my great-grandma coped.

I think one difference is that so many children died in infancy that only the strongest people physically made it to adulthood. They were better placed than some of us would be to deal with such a physically demanding life, although even then of course, they struggled and suffered and died at earlier ages.

I think alot of older generations have fond memories of their childhood because that was the only bit of life that wasn't shitty. The working class didn't even get holidays or only got like 1 week a year.

They had lower expectations. People mostly just did what their parents and grandparents had done, not many deviated. It was normal for women to barely leave the house, constantly be pregnant and always be struggling. Likewise it was normal for men to work like slaves.

They didn’t know any different, people barely (if ever) left the town they were born in and social media obviously didn’t exist so they had little knowledge of the world outside of their own small town/city.

Also because very few women went to work, they would all help one another while their husband’s were at work.

Billions of people today are still living in extreme poverty.

My grandfather (born 1911) was one of 11. He was very intelligent and passed the entrance exam for the local grammar school. But his parents couldn't afford the uniform, so he went to the other school, got a part time job in a timber yard, then left school altogether at 14 to work full time as his family needed the money.

My grandmother had a brother who was 'slow'. He helped out in my aunt's shop to keep him busy and out of trouble, but feeding him and clothing him as an adult had a big impact on the family finances when he would otherwise have been out earning a wage and contributing. A cousin had a similar condition but more severely - he was put into a home as a small child and they were encouraged to forget about him and move on. I know my grandmother was very involved in her church and would take food parcels, clothes and coal round to parishioners who had nothing. They were usually very ashamed of taking the help offered but had no other choice.

My grandparents had a baby boy who had a cleft palate. He failed to thrive, struggled to feed and died at six months old during the winter of 1947. After a few weeks no one spoke to her about him again and if she brought him up she was pushed to 'move on' and have more babies.

When I researched the history of my house (in the same family for 100+ years before I bought it) I discovered that eleven people were living in my two bedroomed house in 1901. A couple, their seven children and a set of grandparents. Where on earth did they all sleep? And this was before the kitchen and bathroom extension was added!

Infant mortality is being overstated. Huge rise due to Spanish flu post WW1 but even then it was about 8 in a 100 under a year and about 4 in a hundred under 5. From about 1950 the death rate had already plummeted to around 2 per 100 live births. Most children did reach adulthood in the UK.

Looks as if my great grandma was very unlucky then, she lost eight out of 15. My grandma lost two of her four.

My aunt was looking after baby siblings from a young age so granny could work. Everyone helped out, expectation was a lot lower. Family life was closer and more interdependent.