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?

This thread is simply wonderful. The best side of Mumsnet, sharing of anecdotes and book recommendations. I’m making a list. I am addicted to Who Do You Think You Are? and have been doing a bit of my own family history delving recently. I always knew that my maternal grandmother was one of 7 but it was only very recently, now having a child myself, that I really really started to think about what life must have been like for them and marvel at how they managed. Yet according to the stories here, 7 was a really small family! Sadly my own parents and grandparents all dead (very bad luck as I’m only 45) but I have been relentlessly questioning one aunt by marriage who knew a few of the 7 siblings and my great grandparents.

The anecdotes about the myth of the Blitz spirit, and the small stature of men enlisting in WWI, the poster who is probably now realising that the baby “born at 55” was actually a grandchild, the poster whose Mum growing up poor in India pitied the poor in cold climates..fascinating. And so sad about the nurse more traumatised by diphtheria than the Blitz, and the thought of the women just being pregnant all the time....there must have been so many pregnant women around them, I bet nobody gave a monkeys about giving them special seats on the bus.

My own contribution is that my Uncle was born before the war, then my Grandad went away to fight for 5 years. Suddenly this man appeared in my 5 year old Uncle’s life after all that time getting his Mum’s undivided attention, followed pretty swiftly by a new baby sister (my Mum). My Uncle never really got on with my Grandparents after that (even though Grandad was apparently a very kind and gentle man) and he actually died quite young due to alcoholism. Very sad.

My husband’s Granny just turned 100. Sadly she only speaks Norwegian as I would love to talk to her endlessly about her life.

My mother was born to a family of eight who lived in a two room cottage with no electricity on the edge of the sea in Ireland. They also had my grandfather's mother living with them so eleven people lived together on a small subsistance farm. They had a donkey and animals and cut turf for winter fuel and for cooking.

Mum's mother boiled water on a range and baked soda bread every day. As a treat one of the children would get the top of my grandad's egg. Mum walked miles to a one roomed village school where she gained a surprisingly high level of literacy and numeracy. Discipline there was harsh as some of the children were fairly wild. The Catholic church instilled values and my mother had good manners and a strict moral code.

The children were hardy as they were out all day and had few health problems except for childhood illnesses like chicken pox - which led later to mum getting shingles.

Given their deprivation, compared with today's luxurious living, you would never have known the family were poor. They were educated and 'civilised' to a high degree despite having no access to secondary schooling compared with many communities living with deprivation around the world.

The children all moved to the UK where they helped each other and prospered.

The children of the five girls and two boys are doing extremely well. They number teachers, nurses, own businessmen and managers. Three grandchildren attended independent schools and two gained grammar school places. Many attended English universities. Two granddaughters gained three A's at A level.

I think the important things for survival and prospering are the values and discipline instilled in youth. In this case the Christian, specifically Catholic, mindset underpinned the paths of my mother's relatives.

As for how the mothers survived, my grandmother found three children very hard to cope with and ran away for a couple of years, had another child and returned to have four more. My mother looked after her siblings while her mother was away.

They were tough in those days.

spitalfieldslife.com/2011/04/02/spitalfields-nippers/
The pictures of the Spitalfields nippers fascinate me. There's various sites on them, some with the children named. Adelaide Springett, who was so ashamed of her boots that she took them off for the photo, is particularly heart breaking. Though I've read that she lived into her 90's and died in 1986.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=adelaide+springett&safe=strict&client=safari&hl=en-gb&prmd=minv&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwji36mVkcjgAhUBUhUIHZwoASUQAUoAnoECAwQAg&biw=414&bih=692#imgrc=Og7QsCqs99_027M&imgdii=wZWQvz-SeQUWvM

My grandma had 8 kids, of whom 7 lived to adulthood (one died as a toddler of whooping cough). The eldest basically were farmed out to lodge with her sister next door but one or two, except they came home for meals. They ate in shifts at the table which meant as adults the eldest were all very fast eaters because they had to finish quickly to let the younger ones eat. At Christmas they got an orange and sixpence. The girls got landed with the housework as they got old enough and were expected to do the boys' cleaning and washing. TBF, the boys spent their weekends on the allotment. They kept chickens in a shed. There were no extras, no carpets, for example, and bath night was once a week with shared bathwater between heaven knows how many kids. God knows what it was like being a teenage girl and having periods under such circumstances.

If you watch Who Do You Think You Are, it is striking how many families ended up in the workhouse. It was feared and loathed. Without a welfare state or healthcare, there was no other option if you were destitute.
Also, so many women died of "exhaustion'. A life of endless toil with no respite, no treats, no holidays and no proper rest (often whole families sleeping in one room). Very inadequate food and endless pregnancies. Not surprising. Men often died of work related illnesses or just poor health. They also all smoked.
We really need to wake up to how lucky we all are.

I do agree with @Tinkly about the future of society.

@Jessie, that's exactly what happened in my own family re the story about the war.
What strikes me about the photos above is how the children are often holding each others hands or have their arms round each other. There is a lot of affection there, though many of them look downright miserable.
There is an exhibition on in the City Art Centre in Edinburgh at the moment of photographs which feature many children playing in the streets. They were taken in the 60's yet look like a completely different age. The poverty is obvious, and so many children roaming the streets on their own or in groups, even in a city.

I watched a documentary about Mary Bell and was shocked at children, toddlers, playing out unsupervised on the waste ground and in derelict buildings with other children from the street or neighbourhood.

No wonder she was able to get access to the children she killed.

The writer Ian Jack was talking about a similar exhibition of photographs taken in 1909 in Fife.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/19/strange-and-familiar-barbican-photographs-of-life-i-lived-are-eye-opening
But my father recognised something else and went up close. “That’s me on the left there,” he said. “I remember the day the photographer came.”

We looked at a boy with bare feet and a fringe cropped straight across his forehead. Could this be dad? Bare feet? Surely he wasn’t that poor? “It was summer,” he said.

If you watch Who Do You Think You Are, it is striking how many families ended up in the workhouse. It was feared and loathed. Without a welfare state or healthcare, there was no other option if you were destitute.

In 1862 there was a pit disaster where I live, 204 men and boys killed leaving behind 400+ dependents. If a family lived in housing owned by the pit and the person working down the pit was killed or disabled, they would have four days to pack up and leave so what used to happen is that they'd send the oldest son (or next oldest) to work at the pit instead so they could keep the house. With the pit disaster though almost the entire workforce was wiped out and the pit was unworkable afterwards, some families lost all of their men/boys so there was no one to send and even if there had been there was nowhere to send them. It was calculated that £20,000 was needed to keep the widows and children out of destitution (i.e., the workhouse) and there was a big fundraising effort which raised £79,000 - over £2 million in today's money.

The full story is here
www.ndfhs.org/Articles/HartleyDis.html

And here
www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/history/mining/coal/3183911.The_beam_in_the_eye_of_the_pit

It must have been such a precarious position to be in, being a mining family. On the one hand it was a steady job, often with housing attached, the opportunity for progression over the years and a pension at the end of it but at the same time you would only ever be one accident away from losing everything including your home.

Another TV programme that delves into past lives is Heir Hunters. It isn't on at the moment, but is fascinating.

In the 1830s children as young as 7 were sent down the mines. The Huskar Pit Disaster was a horrific tragedy where 26 children lost their lives.

Most rich people just didn't know that children worked in mines. Even Queen Victoria was shocked. As a result of this Lord Shaftesbury was instrumental in having the law changed so that children couldn't work down the mines.

This thread is fascinating! My great grandmother was born around 1860. She got married at 20 and in less than 5 years she was a widow with four DC. Within a year she married a widower who also had 4 DC, they had another 3 together and she was pregnant when he died too. So she was left penniless at age 30 with 11 DC and another on the way!

Some really very sad stories here. What a testament to those strong women though and their courage and tenacity.

Most rich people just didn't know that children worked in mines.

They were more shocked at the immorality, of girls and boys, men and women often working semi-naked, and not having enough education even to know their Bible. That was what really swung it for the 1842 Mines Act, not their age so much.

Many weren't so shocked at children working. They had to learn their place and to contribute to the family income. It meant they were being useful, not roaming free and getting up to mischief. Plenty of children also worked in factories, in farming, sweeping streets, sweeping chimneys (another thing Shaftesbury brought to an end,) and so on. There was a growing sense of public responsibility and philanthropy through the 19th century, but plenty of people didn't know about child labour or coal production or life in factories because the didn't really care. And where they did care, it was often around the fear of a revolution like France rather than real concern for workers' welfare.

Plenty of people today don't know much about how goods are produced. It's just we have mostly exported the problem to other countries. Humans have always been good at being shirty to each other. They still are.

I was adopted from a few months old and all I had to go on was my bm name, no father, and nobody to ask.
i wanted to be able to give my children some sort of family history from my side.
Note my name, not one romany name missing from my tree
I'm learning so much about where and how my ancestors lived.
Roast Hedgehog or Rabbit stew, anyone?

certainlymerry: did you know that those workhouse buildings were in use right up to the 1970's and probably beyond? They became homes for the elderly and the cost of that was one of the reasons why Bevan costed his NHS on the elderly being housed in them. They were gradually pulled down in the 1970's and new homes built at a higher cost than anyone thought. Then in the 1990's grumbles about shared bedrooms and no ensuites caused even more expensive homes to be built. These homes are paid for from taxation - Government and LA - then handed over to off-shore charities to run them on a non-profit basis, (La's will say it would cost them more if they ran them) which sounds fine until you wonder how much the executives get paid, probably a lot higher than the workers, and depending on how much profit they might have made had they not spent it all on salaries to satisfy the non-profit status. Most of the people working in these homes are from abroad so much of their wages is sent abroad. What we end up with is the taxpayer building homes for residents who pay for care to charities offshore, and that is called importing and what we need are exports to balance it.
Having said all that, it is a wonderful thing that the Victorian workhouses no longer exist.

It would be interesting to see what posters on here could suggest now that there are more elderly people because there has not been a war. Recently the news told us that people are no longer living longer as they were the last time the stats were given. I hope that means that the NHS does not keep blaming the elderly for taking up beds and being a burden when young working folk have to wait for treatment.

Really interesting thread, thanks! I know my paternal grandmothers had more than twenty children between the two of them. I wish I knew more about them but, sadly, my father was always ashamed of his family and took half an hour even to recall his mother's maiden name when I asked him.

It does rather put modern parenting worries in perspective though. I know so many mums who worry because they can't give every child 24-7 individual attention. We agonize over whether we'll "break" our baby if we leave them for three minutes to take a shower, or worry that we're a bad mother because we left our toddler playing independently for twenty minutes while we cooked dinner. But conversations with my older relatives suggest that, in their day, even the babies didn't have the luxury of constant 1-1 attention and input from mum - other (female) relatives and especially siblings always had to muck in because there was so much to do. Family lore has it that my mother's cousins chose to remain childfree because they spent so much of their teens looking after other family members' babies that they never wanted to change another nappy.

Fascinating thread, social history is so very interesting and healthy for us all to contemplate. So much to be grateful for.

Just to throw in another idea- don’t forget that what passed for ‘ultimate luxury lifestyle’ in the past would seem like hardship to many of us today. The Emperors and industrialists (and their families) didn’t have much to spend their riches on. No 2019 fun to be had or imported goods or yummy food. And if they caught a cough or broke a bone (sliding down their pile of gold and gems?) they died a week later like the rest of society. Got a better burial, I s’pose!

It can be quite a comfort to know that with our easy access to, say, antiseptic eye-drops, we are ahead of all rich people ever to have lived on the planet.

You should watch Casualty 1909 on the BBC. Its a drama but based on real medicine of the time and its fascinating.

Its amazing that anyone survived hospital treatment, strichnine and other poisons as treatments, doctors just starting to invent xrays and the awful results of that experimentation.

The Jack The Tooper case had an influence of social changes. The crimes absolutely shocked the Victorians even though London was quite violent. The press printed all the details but what people were also shocked by were the horrendous living conditions many were simply oblivious to how many lived and it bought about many changes to the slum areas of the East End

Do you not think our expectations have evolved more as the years went on. In past times women’s sole purpose (mostly) was to get married and have lots of babies and the men thrived on working long hours to provide for their families. So this would’ve made them happy. They would have felt contentment. These days we are put under lots of pressures cos we should be working and staying at home and are always made to think we’re not good enough. Plus we have lost our ‘get on with it’ type of grit they had years ago so that will be why mh issues are on the rise and we just can’t cope with normal life anymore??

I feel like there is a lack of understanding about mental health issues here.

Mental health issues are not because people lack grit and the ability to cope. It’s just that there is more help and treaty for lower level stuff so people can have time and medicine to treat it. 100 years ago if you were unwell you had to just get on with it, regardless of whether it was depression or a chest infection. Those that were too unwell either died, or ended up in the work house or asylum.

@Ploppymoodypants I just meant that our attitudes to life have gradually changed and our expectations so we are bound to feel disappointed in what we have and what we achieve if we are always seen as failing. It’s only natural. We get upset/offended much easier these days (which is not always a bad thing)

Bit cheeky to link to your own thread I know, but I started one (inspired by this thread) about mental health & parenting then & now, a few days ago, here www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3511206-To-wonder-if-changes-in-parenting-approaches-have-affected-MH-on-a-population-level

Just mentioning it cos a few recent posts here touch on the same issues.

I remember hearing about one of my great grandmothers - one of her children was killed in an accident. She took to her bed and never came out again until she died, over a decade later.

She clearly couldn’t cope with the bereavement at all and had some sort of major depression. I guess she was lucky not to end up sent to an asylum.