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?

*'point obviously'

Plenty of them did die early as a result of harder lives. I’m sure exhaustion contributed to the lower life expectancy, whether by it’s effects on health or by making accidents more likely.

And as for keeping kids alive - again, far higher child mortality rate. The children who did survive were often under nourished and had to help out in one way or another as soon as they were old enough, whether that’s bringing up younger siblings or going out to work and bringing a few extra pennies in. Less than 200 years ago, in poor families, it would have been commonplace for children as young as 5 yrs old to be going out to work.

I always think about the smell. Lots of people must have stunk.

My parents both came from large families (6&8)

1. The older helped a lot with the younger ones.
2. Onve grown up with a job the older ones helped pay for the younger ones (till they married themselves).
3. There wasn't a lot of time spent on each child. There just wasn't the possibility too. If they flunked at school, they flunked at school. No time to help. They also didn't care as much as now.
4. They wore clothes till they fell apart.
5. Clothes (excluding underwear and socks) were worn for a week till they were washed.
6. They were fed a simple diet. Sandwiches for breakfast and lunch (and teach them to make themselves a.s.a.p.) without there being much variation, potatoes and veg in the evening. Fruit one a day. Maybe some meat and an egg once a week or fortnight but that was it. No hours cooking in the kitchen. Cheap but healthy food. Sweets were something they seldom had.
7. Children went to school for a much longer day than now, in some places saturday morning schools was a thing. Holidays were much shorter (summer holiday was two weeks according to my oldest aunt). On sunday they went to church. They weren't at home as much.
8. They bathed once a week in a tub. The older ones first, the younger ones in the same bath water. Hygiene standards were different.
9. One of my uncles had behavioural problems, now you would test for autism or something like that and spend extra time overcoming the difficulties. Back then he was sent away to boarding school young because he was too much.

10. The boys had one bedroom, the girls the other. There were some toys and books but by todays standards it would be little. They went to the library a lot. They spent more time playing with other kids in the neighbourhood. Owning a ball gave endless possibilities for a whole group of children. 11. When their mum needed to be admitted to hospital for two months the kids were all divided over their many aunts and uncles. They couldn't stay home with dad. There wasn't much contact between them all at that time. They didn't see their parents. 12. No spare money so no clubs to go to, no sport unless someone else outside of the family paid for your equipment. Swimming costumes were home knitted.

Fetching but maybe they died because they got some horrible disease that they couldn't cure. Doesn't mean all there life was horrible or hard.

Does returing at 60 and living to 90 with very little resources and very little to do sound a lot better. Don't get me wrong, I am 50 plus (and no desire to die at 50!) but just living a long time doesn't mean life is easy.

stopitandtidyupp

"I always think about the smell. Lots of people must have stunk." I am sure they did but if everyone smelled (including you) then it would have seemed normal.

They have a special section on toilets at the Yorvik Viking centre!

www.jorvikvikingcentre.co.uk/

But again, sorry, I think I am going back further than the OP intended.

Children keeping us awake play a role in this.

Crying it out was much more a thing

retiring at 60 ...

'maybe they died because they got some horrible disease that they couldn't cure. Doesn't mean all there life was horrible or hard.

You're right. Dying of a horrible disease puts a much cheerier slant on things.

Gin. Lots of gin and other homebrew.

Fetching

"You're right. Dying of a horrible disease puts a much cheerier slant on things."

I didn't say it put a cheerier slant on things. Because many old people die of horrible diseases too. Even now. I said it didn't mean their life was horrible, or pointless. It just meant it ended sooner. So they most likely went from running about, working, doing all the usual stuff to... death. They didn't have 20 or 30 years of living on a pension and getting gradually sicker and less mobile and watching almost all their friends and older family die off.

And when you think of it that way it doesn't seem quite so terrible. Especially if you only expect to make it to 50 in the first place!

There's no dressing it up. Life was utterly shit for poor people in Day of Yore. Assuming Yore is pre welfare state and pre NHS.

It's slightly bizarre this peppy approach you're putting on low life expectancy. Working people worked till they dropped and then died with little to no medical assistance. It was painful and it was undignified. If they were lucky it was swift.

Obviously if you were merchant class or upper class you had more access to laudanum.

It was sheer drudgery for the women in those days. They worked incredibly hard and were worn out young. I don’t know how the women coped physically, I have to say because medical care was limited, but in terms of parenting all of what explodingkitten says is correct.

My grandmother had 8 children and from what my father said, it was basically him and his 5 brothers roaming the countryside in a gang as soon as they were old enough to keep up, getting up to all kinds of mischief. School in the winter / spring kept them busy and then they worked on the farm all the rest of the time. His oldest sister was second-in-command to his mother and did everything around the house and was taken out of school early to do it. His younger sister was fostered out to an aunt and uncle as a child because they had no children of their own and needed company around the house.

So in summary: total drudgery for women, lack of opportunities for girls and mostly free range parenting.

Re. thrush - tbh I don't suppose they did have it so much until the rise of non-cotton materials, like nylon tights, and polyester pants/knickers.
Not saying it didn't exist, but it wouldn't have perhaps been so prevalent.

My grandmother and her sister used to tell the tale of when they had just washed out their "monthly rags" and hung them on the door of the range to dry, when their brother came in and snatched one up to dust his shoes, occasioning much outrage. That would have been in the 1940s.

But mostly I agree that expectations were not only lower, but different. And because there weren't all the mod-cons, people had less "leisure" time - it was largely work work work all day. And of course there was always "mother's little helpers" - valium, which used to be handed out like sweets until the addictive nature of it became apparent!

Oh, piffle.

"Life expectancy of 45-50" doesn't mean an average person died at 50. It was pretty unusual to die in that age range then, as it is now.

Childhood diseases, war, and childbirth killed many people before age 30. If you made it past that, odds are, you would live to your sixties to eighties, with a few people making it past 90.

The dirty secret of changing life expectancy is that all the advances have come from lowering the death rates on the low end. When very, very few four year old children die of communicable diseases and childbirth is relatively safe, life expectancy goes up.

"Workers used to die at 50" is such a clear misunderstanding of this simple statistical data that it's a wonder we don't teach about it in schools, to reverse this popular misconception.

Life was very very hard!

My nan was one of 12 and my other nan one of 13.

Poverty (by our standards) was an accepted norm. Women worked constantly to get chores done and if they had a decent husband, he worked all the hours he could to provide for them.

Older children were expected to help get the younger ones washed/dressed and all the children were expected to 'go out and play' for hours on end and the older children would take out the babies in prams and toddlers with them too.

Bathing was a weekly treat otherwise it was a strip wash if you were dirty! Worn clothing/shoes were repaired rather than replaced. My dad wore shoes with cardboard inside to cover the whole in the soles and his sister would get bras older better off relatives no longer wanted.

You have to remember they didn't have a fridge/microwave/washing machine/tumble dryer/tv/car because these things didn't exist until fairly recently and were considered 'luxuries' once they did. My dads family was one of the first in his road to get a tv and all the neighbours came in to look at it :)

I love historical stuff (books, shows, documentaries). Here are some recommendations:

If anyone wants a look at the poor in Victorian times, read The Condition of the Working Class in England by Engels. I read it in spurts because it's just a lot to take in.

If anyone wants to know more about medicine, Victorian Pharmacy on BBC is good.

Regarding periods, women used to make their own pads out of towelling (often recycling babies' nappies) and they were washed and reused. Some women would wash their own pads and others would send their used pads out to laundries (such as the Magdalen laundries) to be washed there......

Engels’ book was one of the first I read when I moved to the U.K., Bring. It was an eye opener to learn that many working class women were forced to leave their children ‘shut in’ at home while they went to work in factories because they were away from extended family and community suppprt and in those days there was no childcare as such. These were young children of course because from 8/9 onwards the children went out to work too.

Scandals of children dying in fires / accidents inspired reformers like Robert Owen to try out company-run childcare at experimental factory villages like New Lanark in Scotland and inspired the push for mandatory schooling.

I've wondered this. I have 3 kids and I adore them, any more would however be too much

Thank you Bring and Inion for the book recommendations, I LOVE social history!

A lot of miners died of lung disease. Certainly in the lead mines of northern England/southern Scotland

Life was very hard for the masses. Agricultural workers probably lived longer but their wives would have been exhausted. My great great grandmother had 12 children and lived in a tiny cottage in the Scottish Borders and apparently died of exhaustion age 35. I think of her a lot when I’m doing my chores.

From first hand recollections of my Grandmother who grew up in Liverpool with 8 siblings and a docker for a Dad....the kids did a lot.

The kids did baby minding, shopping, cleaning and even fetching coal.

Neighbours babysat too...and women had charring jobs to make up the wages as dock labourers were often out of work.

My Gran was born in 1910...

Older children raising younger children. Children doing all housework
Children having a job or helping parents with their jobs and contributing to the household
Children cooking for the family
Using cloth nappies and fabric for periods
Children washing clothes
Children not being parented
Parents not really knowing where children were
Malnourishment and neglect not being picked up on at schools
Using holistic and natural remedies more than going to the doctors
Cutting hair at home
Sewing clothes at home
Mending at home
Doing all home diy and only getting someone in if absolutely necessary
Never 'doing up the house' or 'updating it'
No double glazing
No boiler
Cooking on the fire if there was no gas
Parents often not eating if there was no food

This was what happened with one of my parents who lived in poverty.

There is thankfully support, welfare, nhs, interventions now to help. There was extreme poverty and parents 'just got on with it' but it was not from their own choosing and there was no real quality to childhood or the parents life.

I often hear older generations comparing themselves to people in my generation 20s/30s saying they were 'made of hard stuff' 'your generation are weak' 'snowflakes' these people would have experienced real poverty and see that 'you have it easy' but turn a blind eye to the fact that the list above happens to children now.

My Mum was one of seven, super poor in London. Like many have said the older ones helped out with the younger ones. As they as they grew older some would spend time big chunks of time various grandparents (caring) or childless aunts and uncles.

Food was simple, roasts, stews, soup, sandwiches and there were only 2-3 meals a day, snacking didn’t exist - my Nan was not making snacks for 9 people! LOL!

And basically I think they just ignored them more, they provided the basics food and shelter, but it was up to the kids to get to school, swimming if they wanted but there wasn’t holidays, dance classes etc.

Still don’t know how she did the washing for 9 people with her tin bath and mangel though, she didn’t have a washing machine until she was in her 70s. Maybe that’s where all her time went?