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?

Unfortunately my DDad's memories of being evacuated are of being abused by the family he was evacuated to as they didn't really want a dirty city boy.

He also got arrested for crop trampling as he was running through fields and being from London, didn't know what crops were.

Equally my DM has memories of the Germans shooting in her house and being unable to recognise her mother when she returned from prison camp as she had been very young when her mother was arrested and had no idea who she was when she returned.

My DGM never thought the Royal Family could look the East End in the face after Buckingham Palace was bombed. As far as she was concerned that was total rubbish - yes there was a Blitz spirit but it wasn't what is sold to us now, it was pure survival.

People went to bed earlier and were fitter due to constantly doing housework or manual labour. They didn't have such high expectations of life and just got on with things as best they could. Neighbours helped each other and children knew better than to whinge and demand attention all the time.

My grandparents grew up like this in the 30s their family lives were grim. Like a nightmare they describe it as. Lots of domestic abuse and no money. Eating grass as they were so hungry. Begging at the chip shop for leftovers etc. As for mental health there was no time for such nonsense. They had to get on with it and cope best they could. The kids had to drag each other up.
Needless to say they both came from families with 7 kids. Out of the 14 there's 8 I know of that have suffered lifelong mental health problems that surely stem from their upbringing.

LoniceraJaponica

MiGi777
I am 48 and we moved to this house when I was about 5.
We had an outside toilet, definitely no central heating and old rattling windows, no double glazing. The main room was heated by a death trap gas fire on wheels and we had a bucket in the bedroom so the doors did not have to be unlocked to go outside in the night. It’s wasnt unusual for this water in this to freeze in the winter.
We filled the gaps in the windows with newspaper and covered the glass itself with plastic sheets.

Yanbu, this thought kept coming into my head after having my first baby.
My great grandmother brought up 11 children in a cottage on some moorland, no electricity/ running water / proper toilet etc. My great grandad was a miner.
I found first few weeks with new baby incredibly difficult, health wise, no sleep, lots of painkillers after section etc and just thought how did they manage, hospital wasn't an option for them, just a midwife, fingers crossed and hope for the best.
It made me feel incredibly lucky and grateful for the NHS and paternity leave.

My Grandfather would not talk about the war, had the tremors from "Shell shock" and was obviously deeply traumatised from his time served in ww2. Luckily when he passed 16 years ago we found a letter he had written to his sister, but never posted, that detailed in great detail his time in the war. Including a Royal inspection where he refers to "The king and his missus"

My Nan on the other hand loved talking about that time. She was so incredibly proud of being part of the women's land army. They were already brought up with the make do and mend mentality so rationing was just normal to them.

My nan saw it as a time of liberation for women where they could escape the limitations of being a housewife and take on the jobs and responsibilities of the men. She mentioned friends being swept off their feet by the G.I's with with their Nylons.

If anything she said it was harder after the war as the women were expected to slot back into their usual roles and also deal with the broken men that returned.

Two people who loved each other very much, had an amazingly long marriage and both had completely different memories from the exact same time because of how vastly different their personal experiences were.

I have a school photo taken of my great-grandmother. It’s absolutely heartbreaking. Most of the children look so poor and unhappy. They’re wearing their ‘best’ for the photo, and some are obviously in their mum’s clothes. They’re skinny, their faces look old and there are uncorrected squints, dark circles, etc. Not many are smiling.

It's possibly unwise to put too much emphasis on smiles in photographs. It's only relatively recently that it's become the acceptable way to smile to show your teeth (maybe to do with the advent of NHS dentistry). If the photograph is old enough, then long exposure times meant you didn't smile (holding a smile for several minutes doesn't do much for your facial expression), and in any case, early photographs were momentous and serious occasions.

All the rest, of course, is indication of hardships that aren't as common now.

I think people look back with rose tinted glasses tbh or use it as an excuse to bash younger generations now for being so “frivolous”.
My great grandmother died in childbirth thanks to a terrible midwife who didn’t remove all of the placenta resulting in blood poisoning. My Nan and her sister were raised by her grandmother, who’d already had 5 children, the sons expected to have everything don for them well into adulthood. When I look at photographs of her she looks understandably miserable and knackered.

Shoes Were For Sunday and other books by the actress Molly Weir are very good, they are about Glasgow after the First World War.

Conditions of the working class in England is free to download on kindle at the moment!

It made me feel incredibly lucky and grateful for the NHS and paternity leave.

I think our danger now is that the only people who can actually remember life before the welfare state are in their 80s and older. So those in positions of power have no memory of what it was like when medical treatment was hard to come by, or an industrial accident could throw you and your family into destitution.

Life was harder, people were tougher but also life was a lot simpler.

People could live work and socialise without ever leaving their small area, they may never have travelled more than 10 miles from their home.

Home for poorer families was at most 2 rooms, often 1 with everyone crowded together.

Food was plain, nourishing where possible.

Priorities were different, the focus wasn't on how often they could redecorate and whether their kitchen was as nice as that one down the road.

Communities worked together and supported each other rather than just being on nodding terms.

In a way I wish it was more like that now but without the life expectation of 45, and dying infants

Possibly slightly off-thread but related I think. Did anyone watching the recently restored They Shall not Grow Old notice how terrible everyone’s teeth were, even the presumably well-heeled officers? I just don’t understand why so many of our children today are having their milk teeth removed in hospital (I know we have fizzy drinks, fruit juice and a surfeit of sweets, though my parents drank sweet tea, sweetened condensed milk and, god forbid, porridge from bottles in the late 30s/early 40s) but every under 16 now has completely free dental care. Baffling.

One of my relatives was one of 14 children and not all of the children survived. I'm talking pre NHS days. In the times where children learnt to write using slates. Children left school at 14. One of my relatives worked in service in a bigger house & I assume they received food, lodgings and a small wage. Times with no fridge, some food was pickled, coal fires, no electricity, outside toilets, hand washing, metal bath in front of the fire and lots of people used the same water, transport was bicycle or walk. We live in a world with much more convenience and choice now

Another point from They Shall Not Grow Old was how skinny and short and generally malnourished many of the boys were. The propaganda films about the training boasted that in six weeks they had on average put on a stone and gained an inch in height.

The major cause of death in 15-25 years old, male and female, was Tuberculosis, until 1955.

I remember my great Aunt telling my mother how easy women have it these days with HRT. They never needed anything like that, etc. She then went on the tell us that they just used a bit more of 'the Roche' (i.e. Valium) obviously medication was more liberal....

There was a bit of a crises after the boer war which continued into the great war about the state of the men who signed up, horrendous teeth, childhood rickets and diseases meant that they had nothing like the amounts of men fit for service as they had thought. They also had Bantem battalions of men under 5 foot 3, and there was a lot of them. As well as that seual disease was copletely rife. Not a healthy society, made worse by living in wet holes in the ground.

*sexual disease

@Trills I read somewhere that during early call up for WW1 the malnourished state of the working class men signing up was put into sharp focus for the Government of the day.

If I think back to great grandparents on DM’s side I know for a fact they both had help in the form of a maid for one family - lived in Ladbroke Grove, DGGF was tallyman but they were well off eg had first car, first radio etc

DGGF on other side was employ of nobility but they had nanny, maid and even when they lost everything (due to DGGF being British in Germany) they still had a maid.

Cross post with Patroclus!

Oh lots of people including DGF had pneumonia, Spanish flu etc and died young. DGGM got breast or ovarian cancer in late 30s and died leaving DGM (my nana, mums mum) alone.

There are certainly different periods on the thread. My mother's granny born in 1876 would have had a very different life from my granny born in 1899 (she and all her many sisters despite being Catholics definitely used contraception for a start so did not have 11 children like their mother or else they married later on in life - into their 30s and a few married at 40 and had a baby in their 40s; and again different from my mother's generaiton born in 1929 got to university or college into teaching, nursing, dentistry, refusing to go down the mine.

I have a book of stories taken from very poor women about their maternity care which unusually allowed those women's stories to be told - I think in for the period well before the Call the Midwife books (which I also enjoyed before I watched the TV series).

i genuinely believe this rose-tinted view of britains history has contributed to the mess we're in today.

I agree. Most backwards-facing people I've ever met.