To ask you to remember a time when Health and Safety hadn't been invented (lighthearted)!

[CulturePigeon]

My work has always involved careful risk assessments for children doing a range of activities and of course, I've had my own children to bring up so I would like to emphasise that I'm not in favour of turning the clock back to a more reckless era!

But I'm horrified when I think of the things which I experienced as a child and the reaction they would get now. One example: I went to a schoolfriend's party (age 11) and her dad got 11 of us into the car by putting 3 girls, curled up in the foetal position, in the boot (not a hatchback boot - a big saloon where the boot was totally out of sight and sound contact with the rest of the car), 6 into the back seat, sitting on each other's knees, and 2 in the front seat. This was all long before seat belts were either compulsory or even commonly used. He then proceeded to drive at a good lick along some very hilly roads until we got to a local forest. I remember we were all helpless with laughter.

I think I knew this was not a good idea - and that my parents wouldn't have done it - but at the same time, I was happy to join in and didn't really question it. It makes me go weak at the knees now!

Any other horrific memories of hair-raising activities in those far-off days before H & S?

Yes, we did this as part of our ‘help the aged’ after school club.

As a 14 year old and as part of our Duke of Edinburgh, we also volunteered at a local hospital for the very severely disabled, with no checks on us ( or the patients). I saw some quite horrifying things which kept me awake for days and was badly bitten on the breast by a male patient.

However, the worst was my Saturday job, with my mum who was an estate agent … it was my role, aged 13 to do the ‘accompanied’ viewings, to empty houses.
Customers (Strangers!) would book an appointment to see an empty property, pull up outside the office in their car and off I went, house keys in hand to show them around!

Meeting my dad at the end of the road and riding home sitting on the car bonnet holding on to the windscreen wipers

Oh yes! Except it was my mum and I'd be on the roof.

My dad drove a van with no back seat. No problem about where the 4 year old me was going to sit( as my mum was sitting in the only passenger seat,) my uncle made me a nice little seat that fitted over the handbrake .
My friends and I probably about the age of 8 or 9 had roller skates, the type that fitted over your shoes and adjusted size wise as your feet grew bigger. We used to try to stretch them as much as we could, stick a large book on it and sit on it . I lived at the top of a steep hill and used to love whizzing down it on my skating book.

This sounds so cool - and I think you guys didn't know how damn eco you were then! I would have loved that :)

We played on the heavy plant machinery and in the foundations where my mil s house is built. No seatbelts in cars. Being allowed to go to the library near school if we had finished our work or to the shop to buy a chocolate bar if we won the weekly quiz. Swings in the playground along with a bit done climbing frame with a fall onto concrete. Only 1 child fell and broke his arm in the 3 years I was there. 7 year olds guarding the gate to stop the younger children escaping at playtime. Oh and making black ice slides in winter. Happy days

I remember playing on building sites, crossing railway lines and squeezing loads of kids into cars. I remember my friends family taking loads of us out for the day. I was in the passenger seat in the front, on her mums knee and some poor sod was squashed down by her feet. There were another 6 kids in the back seat!

In the local London park drinking from a metal cup chained to the water fountain.

God I’d forgotten that, but so did we! What the hell was Brown Owl thinking?

We used to do that too!
Oh happy days 😁

I remember the high monkey bars on the school climbing frame on the tarmac playground. I think there were a couple of broken arms while I was at the school.

We used to go up the Rec to play after school and had to be home before dark. Never any supervision. I also passed my cycling proficiency test when I was ten and so I was allowed out on my bike on the roads in town – it was a bit scary at times but perfectly normal. Our parents never knew where we were.

Before welded plugs and extension leads I remember I only had one socket in my bedroom as a teenager so would put the bare wires of the hairdryer and curling tongs straight into the socket and wedge them in with the plug on the record player. It was the only way to have all three things on at once whilst getting ready to go out.

We lived near a timber yard. It had a sort of small windowless room that collected all the sawdust. It could only be entered by climbing a ladder then crawling along a short tunnel. I used to pop over aged about 7 or 8 to crawl through the tunnel to collect sawdust in a sack for our rabbit’s bedding. When I emerged from the sawdust room I usually sat with the old fellas who worked there. We would have mugs of tea with condensed milk in it. Never spoke a word to them then off I would go with my sack of sawdust.

Dad tied a rope to the headrest of the passenger seat in the car and towed us up and down the road on roller skates!

Mum didn't find out until about 5 years ago 🤣

My family went to Majorca with another family. There wer four adults and three kids - me and my sister (aged 3 and 1) and the other child (4).

To save money they got one hire car between two families and everyone just piled in. No car seats or seat belts and the kids just on peoples laps. Unthinkable today.

Lads in the village used to climb the maypole. It was as tall as the church steeple!

About 5 years ago DP and I went on a group holiday to Malta, which still doesn't expect UK health and safety standards.

We were picked up in a minibus with insufficient seats for us all. I sat on DPs lap, where I had a good view over the drivers shoulder of all the fault lights that were lit on the dashboard and someone else sat on the floor.

On the same holiday the fire alarm went off in the hotel in the middle of the night and the hotel wouldn't call the fire brigade because it costs money.

We sat by the pool for an hour not knowing what to do. As it happens there was a fire fighter and a care home maintenance man in the group and they went into the hotel to decide if it was safe to return.

Why would this be an article? 🙄 Certainly not interesting enough for one.

Not every question is a journalist

Yes to the piling in cars
Going to the shop for my mum's cigarettes - I would have been 9/10
Mum blowing the smoke upwards so it wouldn't affect me
Going out to play from after breakfast to dinner time - early 80s - you knew where I was from my bike being in the driveway!

That definitely wasn't allowed in the early 90s, nor normal. 60s & 70s maybe.

This is my kids school right now in a European country! Very open no gates backs on to a forest and next to a residential area.

Kids have had pe lessons in the forest, we do get told when they have taken them to the lake for ice skating though!

We played on the railway lines. We used to put our heads on the rails and if you could hear a buzzing sound you knew a train was on the way. 😮There were no barriers, just a small embankment to climb over.

One day me and my friend were in the local park and a mounted policeman was going round on his horse. There was a police stables nearby so this was a common sight. The policeman asked us to hold his horse for him while he went into the bushes to smoke a cigarette! We both stood there holding the reins and when he had finished he gave us both a ride on the horse. We ran home and told everyone. My parents thought it was marvellous that a policeman had trusted us with his horse. 😀

I grew up in Pakistan, health and safety very much wasn’t a thing, if someone died in an industrial accident they were just replaced, systems and machinery etc would remain the same.

From the age of about three we went with an Aunty to work and we were left to wander around, she worked on an industrial brick making site, so we would wander around trucks etc, open water.

I live in South Africa, builders here don’t bother with scaffolding when working on your roof. I got a bit of a shock when coming home from work recently to find people running around on my roof with not a safety rope in sight.
At my mums in London they have to install scaffolding to clean the gutters.
People here also think it’s funny to let their very young kids drive their cars sitting on their lap in the driving seat or standing up with heads out of the sun roof.

When my older brothers were at primary school, the older boys had a rota for jobs such as breaking the ice in the outside toilets in winter and laying and lighting a fire in the headteacher's house over the road (including breaking up large lumps of coal with a hammer). They were very popular jobs because they got you out of prayers. By the time I came to school, they had inside toilets and the head had electric fires, so I missed all that, but we did have a medieval moat, still full of water running unfenced past the playground.

We were looking at the old minutes for our Scouts. In the 1950s the Scout Hall electric wiring was redone BY THE SCOUTS. Terrifying.

I spent my childhood and schooldays in the 1950s and some of the things we did would give people fits now.
I had my two children in the 1970s .We all thought nothing of leaving our babies in prams outside shops and other buildings when we were inside.When I remember it now it makes my blood turn cold. We had things for the pram called toddler seats, the older child would be sat in one of those seats completely unrestrained, which was fixed across the carriage type pram body.We always lifted them off when going into a shop, taking the toddler inside but leaving often a very young baby unattended outside.