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?

Fantastic thread

I’m 40 but my parents are in their 70’s and my gran was born in 1921 (died when I was a teenager)

My gran was an amazing lady - she had an abusive husband and threw him out as he was having an affair. She was left with two children who she brought up alone at a time when it was highly stigmatised to be a single parent. I have always wondered how bad it was for to take that step - both her children have never talked about their childhood as it was very very tough.

My sister did our family tree and one relative she researched was drafted into the Navy for WW1 and on joining up he was 4ft 11!! It’s no bloody wonder I’m so short!

This is such an interesting thread. I'm from an Indian family so it's fascinating to read about British history and all the hardships suffered.

I just spoke to my mum and she said that the hardships in the UK were greater than those she remembers in India just due to the weather. She can't imagine being so poor and dealing with the freezing temperatures too.

My great grandmother had 13 children, the last at 55! 11 survived. I have no idea how she coped, I can't imagine having more than one! I suppose there were less distractions so less to do and people focused on daily tasks and everyone mucked in to help.

I often wonder if women felt fearful about childbirth. Everyone must have known someone who died in childbirth. My grandmother was orphaned at age three when her mother died in childbirth.
Without modern medicine I would have died of appendicitis as would two of my sisters. One of my sisters would have died of post partum haemorrhage. (The only one of us that hasn't had appendicitis).

My grandad was never sure how many siblings he had as he left home at 16 and lost track of his family. He knows he had a brother who died as a toddler after falling into the fireplace at home.

The child your great grandmother had at 55 was probably a grandchild meow

Lower expectations certainly. My gran who was born in 1902 thought you had a great husband if he didn't beat you or cheat on you. And religion. The church was a great comfort to many, and still is in many countries. People were promised a better life in heaven.

I am very sceptical about the greater community help. I have heard some practical tales of that, but also a lot of tales of gossiping and neighbours being nasty. There is a reason the much older generation cared so much about what their neighbours thought of them.

I live in the north of the US, where we've just had a polar vortex. Can you imagine what winters were like dealing with -20C? I know the real extremes are recent, but there have always been cold winters, tornadoes etc her.
How would you like to have been an early settler in a log cabin with a fire, and having to light it in the morning? Or the other extreme, when it's over 35 in the summer, and the only way to cook food was on a real fire stove?
I'm so glad for modern life.

Both my grandfathers were from mining families. One of them was down the mines as a child as a ‘lamp boy’. Presumably to light the way for the men. He must have left school by then. He joined the Army to escape.
My grandmother was in labour for days with her first child and ended up having a section.. very rare then. This was mid 1930’s. She only had one more child 12 years later so I assume without birth control that meant no sex between children.

Midnite I would love to know what island you’re on!

My father was living in a caravan, the winter of 1963, working on a farm. My parents' house didn't have central heating in their lifetimes, i.e. just 10 years ago. You do acclimatise to it to some extent and wear extra layers and so on - I don't heat my bedroom and sleep with the window open all year, because of this upbringing.
(Though I'm also glad I never had to live through Laura Ingalls Wilder's the Long Winter.) I've also spent time living where else had to collect and purify water from the river. Again, you adapt. Humans in general are very resilient in that way. I do have an appreciation of potable water straight from the tap and light at the flick of a switch.

Everyone except the very poorest had help in the house - if you had any spare cash, you would have a girl in to help for a couple of hours or so each day. Big houses had full staff. That didn't really change till WW2 and household mechanization in the latter part of the 20th century. My grandmother and great aunts mostly had cleaners come in - as do plenty of people now, but now it's because both adults are out at work, whereas they had been brought up with maids in their childhoods.

It’s lot easier to have a nervous breakdown if you were of a class where you knew the children would be looked after, things cleaned and meals cooked while you languished on the chaise longue.

Babies would have been looked after by older siblings. I think gripe water still contained alcohol even in my 1970s childhood, and Victorian preparations like paregoric contained opiates. Opiates were the main painkillers and a necessity before modern medicine - they're still very important for pain relief with serious illness and injury. There were efforts to control the sale of opiates from the 1860s or so, but it was mostly the 1916 Defence of the Realm Act which really restricted access. DORA also brought in licensing hours in pubs, among other things.

And lots of people didn't survive and thrive.

It might have been no sex, but it might have been fertility problems certainlymerry, they’re not a modern thing.

I remember one of my great aunts, who only had one child, saying that she’d always hoped for more children, but it never happened. And back when she was of child bearing age, medical fertility treatments weren’t available.

You get stories about “barren” women and couples desperately wanting children way back through history. And usually it was the woman blamed for the infertility, not the man.
So while fertile couples might well have a pregnancy every other year, you’d still get couples with fertility problems who never had a baby, or just had one or two babies over a lifetime of contraceptive free sex.

She only had one more child 12 years later so I assume without birth control that meant no sex between children.

Marie Stopes published Married Love in the 1920s, so knowledge of how things worked was more widespread. But it could also be she had problems conceiving, or had miscarriages. Such things weren't talked about (many women still don't talk much about having had miscarriages) and there was bog all you could do about it anyway.

I remember reading about research on Greek women in the 70s or 80s who lived a very simple life in rural areas. Holiday makers travelling over there from Britain thought it looked marvellous. The research showed that these women were far more stressed and unhappy that women living in Cities in Britain.
I think a big difference was that people did not expect to be happy. If they were fed and clothed they thought they were lucky. Happiness was an extra bonus, like going on foreign holidays now are. Nice to have, but not expected.

I am very sceptical about the greater community help. I have heard some practical tales of that, but also a lot of tales of gossiping and neighbours being nasty. There is a reason the much older generation cared so much about what their neighbours thought of them.

Yes, where my grandad grew up what they lacked in competitive material wealth try made up for in a desire to be seen as the most busy and houseproud. There was an unofficial competition each day to see who could hang their washing out first, some got theirs out by 4-5am. I kind of saw the hangover from this in the 1980’s, if you mowed your lawn, 5 minutes later nearly every mower in the road would start up.

My grandmother had 8 kids. The older ones helped with the younger ones. There were no helicopter parents- no time for that! Kids went and played out for hours unattended and came back at sunset. No social services to worry about as such. Community spirit too. People could tell kids off without having the kids go back to their parents saying their rights had been violated. Lower expectations in general. 'make do and mend' culture too.

Plus my friends say after 3, one more makes no difference. You probably get used to it.

And this is from someone in their 30s :)

Oh shut yer face, Midnite Scribbler, you can really go off people you know 😁
Sounds idyllic. I’ve often wondered though whether Island life attracts a certain type of community minded folk or whether behaviour is dictated by the fact that everyone knows what everyone else is up to and there’s often no easy escape.
My mum had much older sisters so remained in London for the entire 6 years of WW2. she and my grandmother were evacuated to Durham but GM worried so much about her adult daughters, a clippie, a young housewife with a husband in a reserved occupation and a civilian clerical officer with the Met, that they returned after 3 weeks. They all told me that there was a degree of community, we’re all in this togetherness but what they remembered most were the record highs in opportunistic petty and domestic crime in the city, sexual crime in the blackouts, which the rosy glasses of history mostly gloss over and a great deal of pretty questionable behaviour among the married female population, especially after the GIs arrived. Suspect Island community is a very distinct and separate way of life.

Well I was inspired by this and downloaded and read Call the Midwife... then I did some local history research. Turns out the brick buildings I drive past most days are indeed, as I suspected, the old workhouse. It held 200 families - broken up by age and sex of course. So immensely cruel.

Midnite that does sound lovely, but it's the blend of old and new that sounds good to me. The community spirit and slower pace of life, but with clean water, paracetamol, antibiotics, vaccinations, electricity and the internet (indoors at least)! Sounds like a nice way to live.

SinisterBum - yes, there was also the "doorstep scrubbing" competition - and woe betide you if your stone door step was less than spotless!

"Helping people out" with their pain/end of life situation is still something that happens - it happened to my Mum, in ICU, and I couldn't have been gladder that they did it. I wouldn't complain at all - she was suffering, she wasn't coming back, and they gave her a huge bolus of morphine to try and help her on her way, which did work.
I don't know enough about the "Liverpool pathway" to be certain that that is what they invoked; but I believe it is and I'm still grateful to the ICU staff for doing it.

Helping people out happened until fairly recently, but I was told that Shipman changed all of that and there are now strict procedures in place.

Yes I think that in the absence of material one upness, respectability was the yardstick by which everyone was judged. That included how clean your house was, going to church and looking as clean as you could under the circumstances.
If people weren’t considered respectable they were treated like outcasts.

There did used to be more informal help with children, but expectation were lower. So I trained to look after children and remember as a young adult being asked to look after 3 kids, which I did for free. I went round and my relative said - I have stuck a video on for them, so that should keep them occupied, then went out. I was really only there in case of an emergency and the kids just sat and watched a cartoon on video. So helping out was easier.

I think people are still ‘helped in their way’ with larger and larger doses of morphine. For pain relief, but the doses are upped till the poor person is out of their misery.

The scrubbing was about keeping your family healthy though: keeping down the dirt, keeping everyone clean and there was much less chance of disease or infection. Don’t forget that pre antibiotics people could die from a dirty cut.

And I think also, certainly in my family, there was an element of channelling their energies. My grandma was born in 1912. Most women just didn’t work out of the home in our community. The men worked down the pit but there were no factories or mills for the women. And there was an element of being thought of as not being a very good provider if your wife had to go out to work.

My grandma was very bright and lively and probably quite artistic. Crucially she also only had two children. My Grandma was an absolute super housewife: her house was always immaculate but very cosy and wonderfully tasteful, she was a fantastic baker and cook, kept a beautiful flower garden (Grandad did the veg), sewed and knitted lovely things. The woman was so competent at everything she did she should have been running a multinational.

She was however a bit dodgy at reading and writing due to missing loads of school as a child to look after her siblings.

OP you might enjoy this documentary, it’s one of the best I’ve seen about childhood in earlier times.

The Children who built Victorian Britain

When we are judgemental about other countries’ Human Rights records, I always think how appallingly Britain (well, its powerful white men) have treated the working poor, the vulnerable and especially children.