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?

GinandTonic another great one is Mayhew's the Life and Labour of the London Poor.

A sort of chronicle of different people...all working class. The book is separated into jobs...so one section looks at the street sellers, another looks at street performers...yet another plumbers and so on. Heartbreaking read but very academic in it's structure. Perfect balance.

Sorry it's "London Labour and the London Poor"

www.booktopia.com.au/london-labour-and-the-london-poor-henry-mayhew/prod9781840226195.html?source=pla&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI55W3lZTC4AIVEhWPCh2mOAgjEAYYASABEgKmcfD_BwE

I recommend reading Victoria's Children of the Dark by Alan Gallop. It depicts life in a Yorkshire mining village in the 1830s, and the terrible tragedy that happened in 1838. It really brings to life just how grim life was if you were poor.

My dhs mum had six kids but she just used to leave them too it. Consequently none of them exercise, apart from dh they struggle to hold down well paid jobs ir work at all. We parent differently now. It takes more energy and thought.

MrsPworkingmummy pre industrial revolution poor women would have only had on average 2 to 3 periods in their life time due to malnutrition.

I think children were helping and working from a young age. If they were too young they were probably just left to themselves or to be cared for by older siblings. My grandmother had 8 children in a three bed house in Canada. One died but 7 survived. My mom was the second youngest. She tells some horrendous stories ( the whole family shared a toothbrush for example). My Nan did have a nervous breakdown after having her youngest and went away to a hospital for 6 months. I think they just concentrated on the basics getting everyone fed and clean and that was it. Sounded miserable hard work and this was in the 50s/ 60s.

My mam was one of ten children. Her mam died in childbirth with the youngest (obviously)! And her dad was a miner.
The youngest went to live with a close relative, the rest stayed with my granddad.
He continued working and my Aunty Mag, the eldest, basically became the matriarch.

I think pp were right. Expectations were low, no one had ambitions beyond working in the local factory or shop. Benign neglect is probably the best way of putting it, although my granddad was much more involved with the lives of his children than other men at that time.
In later life, when I was old enough to understand, i realised that none of the family were physically demonstrative. There were never any hugs, indeed, my mam would stiffen like an ironing board if you tried to hug her.
Theye would do anything to help you out, but emotionally they were actually quite cold.

They are all dead and gone now, apart from the youngest who I see a few times a yearand who does give lovely hugs!

I'm only 42 but I caught the tail end of things and saw them change so much. I remember we had a tin bath hung up on the wall, once a week we all had a bath. No central heating, a coal fire so I remember constantly being cold and wearing lots of clothes even to bed. Ice on the inside of the bedroom windows. Lots of baking and they'd knit us jumpers, nan was a seamstress and made all our clothes. I remember nan getting her first washing machine and microwave. We all used to play in the street and I think everyone looked out for everyone else. Sweets were an absolute treat never mind anything else! It was completely different. Outside loo, I can remember nan having her third bedroom converted into a bathroom. I suppose we lived in poverty by today's standards but we were happy and didn't know any different.

A lot of people died. Especially in infancy.

But also older children helped.

My grandad (passed away some time ago) was born in 1906. He was the oldest of 14 children who survived into adulthood. His mum gave birth to 22 (some multiples. Some still births, but a few died of childhood illnesses or accidents. One little girl had the ceiling of the back to back they were renting at the time fall on her and crush her.) My grandad picked up a lot of the parenting duties fairly young. He was apprenticed to his uncle (who only had two daughters) in a skilled trade.

This was early 20th Century Birmingham.

Contraception, the NHS, vaccines and antibiotics have made life for many a lot easier. Crazy to think it wasn't that long ago things were so much harder

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.

I imagine it's was like the Radford family

Life back then isn’t life as we know it. It was a battle every single day for survival.
They had much lower hygiene standards. It wasn’t unusual to wear the same clothes all week or longer.
Bathed once a week.
Cleaned house once a week
Most didn’t work outside the house
Support from neighbours and friends
Children were expected to do chores, look after young siblings and entertain themselves
Children were often neglected and ignored but learnt resilience

We are tired today because our lives are hard in a different way. We have swapped 12 children for full time jobs and hands on parenting.
I don’t think it is any easier, just a different source of exhaustion.

I only clean my house once a week. It doesn't get very dirty.

Not that unusually rurally.
My neighbours only got electricity in the 60's, central heating in the 90's. They were still using the well into the 50's.

My granny was born in 1900 and one of 8 children. Family lore is that the cried when the final one was born as it was twins and she didn't know how they'd feed them. She was 18 by that point.

Another AMAZING book about life on olden times is A medieval woman, sometimes known as Down the Common. It's like visiting a friend you know in the 14th century.

My mum is one of 9! Older ones helped yonger ones. The children left home by 18 or 19 though. Everyone helped around the house. My grandad had a good job so money was not too much of a concern. Lots of playing outside with neighbours kids so Nan could do house work. It was a happy childhood for mum. Nan and grandad died aged 84 with 17 grandchildren

No real concept ‘childhood’ meant that from the age of about 12 kids would have been working. Those younger than 12 would look after siblings.

Generally, life was just generally incredibly shit. Lots of kids died, lots of people lived in pain, those with disabilities who didn’t have family to support them ended up on the streets, poor people who fell behind on their debts were imprisoned, and if you couldn’t feed and house your kids you all ended up in a workhouse.

At secondary school in the 70s rememb

Hewlett Packard moved to a site in Winnersh. One of my teachers was getting very excited, telling us all that we'd be entering a new era, 'the leisure age'! Because, new technology meant we'd all have so much more time on our hands / be working a shorter week. I also remember cynically thinking along the lines of, 'You haven't thought this through, have you, Miss?

They often didn’t cope, They died.

MH wasn’t understood or treated well, my grandma was born in 1901, she was bipolar. She was locked up in an asylum for years in the 30s and 40s and given electric shock treatment. My dad says he saw her as small boy in a straight jacket. He was disturbed all his life over her treatment.

The asylum is now student accommodation. Fortunately.

Some rose tinted views of the past on this thread! I suspect a lot of poor people were not happy with their lot. Up until industrialisation, most people lived rurally and you were pretty much dependent on how generous the lord of your manor was. Post-industrialisation, the poor were incredibly vulnerable to any change in circumstances. If you had 10 kids and your husband had an accident in the factory and died/couldn't work then you were in trouble. The woman would have to work and leave the kids to fend for themselves. If you were down on your luck, the choice was the workhouse or the streets.

When my parents were kids, they were kicked out of the house and expected to play out all day in all weathers. They had to come back for lunch and dinner. Parents didn't really play with their kids. They were expected to entertain themselves.

^Completely agree with this

My grandad (born 1930s) was one of 12 he once told me there was nothing good about the good old days. He said people were poor, cold and hungry. My grandma had 10 children when I asked her how she coped with lack of sleep when they were young she told me that they all slept well because once they were six weeks old she didn't go to them in the night other than to give them their dummy so they learned not to wake up! It was a very different time and I suppose people had to have their own ways of coping.

In Ukraine for example mothers will still have 10 children and they live in poverty.
While there is certainly poverty there, it is very unusual these days to have more than two (for an average household), the absolute majority of women stop at one. Where do you get your information from?

Greendale that was my life in the 70s as a kid. Nobody ever played with me...I was the youngest of four and there was a big gap between me and my siblings.

I remember HOURS alone in my room because as "the baby" I went to bed earlier...listening to everyone downstairs talking etc. Also hours "playing out" when in fact I was alone a lot as the kids on our estate were very rough and I hated it.

My dhs mum had six kids but she just used to leave them too it. Consequently none of them exercise, apart from dh they struggle to hold down well paid jobs ir work at all. We parent differently now. It takes more energy and thought

Er...I was left to it but definitely exercise and have a good career.

Fetching not necessarily. My Victorian grandmother had ten children, three died in childhood. She brought them up through two world wars, taking a job in a gun factory during WW2. She lived to be 92, and was as hard as nails.

My Victorian Great-grandma basically had a life straight out of a Catherine Cookson novel. Her mum literally ran off with the milkman, leaving Ggma to bring up her two younger siblings. She was only twelve. A year later, her mum returned, dumped another baby on her and pissed off again. Great-grandma went on to have 9 children of her own, only five made it to adulthood, and only three made it out of their thirties. She lived until her late seventies, and was apparently the sweetest lady you could ever meet, without a bad word to say about anyone - even her mum. She used to say ‘she went on a spree’.