If this had happened 40-50 years ago...

[Swissrollypoly]

Do you think things would be different? Do you think we’d just have to get on with things as we wouldn’t have the means to work from home or communicate via Zoom or Microsoft teams etc.
Social media didn’t exist, so there wouldn’t be as much panic and scaremongering.
I just wonder how different it would all be, had it happened in another time period.

Badedas. loved this, smell divine

in the 1980s people were travelling and lots of them, they often would only go for a two week holiday or even 3 weeks but now we have more shorter breaks rather than one longer two week package holiday

I grew up in a town in commuterland in a large 4-bedrooms house, dm didn’t work - I couldn’t hope to buy a garage there now. Yet we never holidayed abroad or went out to eat (there was hardly anywhere to eat out, and most pubs did not serve food as we think of it today; maybe a ploughman’s). My friends were all the same. Large houses - plain lives!

Yeah we had regimented meals too. My dad got home at 5.45 and dinner was always on the table at 6pm. It was nearly always some variation on meat, boiled potatoes, plain boiled veg. I had friends with Indian parents so I tried Indian food at their houses, but my mum didn't try cooking with spices until I was in my late teens in the 80s (I think there was a tv cooking show with Madhur Jaffrey in the early 80s and I remember her trying recipes from that). If we went out for a meal it was Berni Inn, which was steak and chips or similar.

I think it probably was a class thing and also to do with age. My parents didn't go on the hippy trail as they had young kids by the mid 60s. Both left school at 15 and had lives very similar to their parents. I think that was a common experience, certainly for working class families. I did have an uncle who was a bit of a hippy but there was a lot of disapproval of his lifestyle and it was unusual. Maybe that wouldn't have been the case for a middle class family.

Badedas. loved this, smell divine

in the 1980s people were travelling and lots of them, they often would only go for a two week holiday or even 3 weeks but now we have more shorter breaks rather than one longer two week package holiday. We have changed the way we travel and holiday

wowfudge

I said 'fewer women with school age children worked in the 70s'

You replied 'This is wrong ... the only ones (of my friends mothers) who didn't work had younger children'.

This is either not much of a disagreement, or not one at all.

(From the point of view of the pandemic, I should really have said 'school or nursery age' anyway.)

However, you're right to say this is just my experience. All we can do here is swap anecdotes until someone shows up with the statistics!

All this "people were happy to do what they were told". I must have imagined all the strikes and the winter of discontent. Greenham Common, anti apartheid protests, CND marches 🤣🤣🤣🤣. All figments of my imagination

I was shocked enough by the comment to remember it 30 years later. But I do think that for people with severe dementia etc, respiratory viruses can offer a kinder death.

This is something that has confused me (and made me wonder if we were lied to at the time) during this - there have been so many graphic depictions of what a uniquely terrible death coronavirus is, 'drowning in your own lungs' etc - but when my grandmother died of pneumonia we were told it was a comparatively good death, that it used to be known as 'the old man's friend', etc but I think the mechanism of death is the same? To be honest her death did seem like a kindness at the time - she had dementia and terminal cancer - but I've wondered whether the idea that it was a reasonable death, as they go, was a white lie that they told us as a family since reading all these things about how awful death from respiratory failure is?

The biggest difference in terms of eating out of the last 50 years is the sheer number of takeaways now. At one time fish and chips was the only takeaway meal available. That changed and I remember Indian and Chinese takeaways in the 80s. They were probably around earlier and I just don't remember them.

@plainviola

Yeah we had regimented meals too. My dad got home at 5.45 and dinner was always on the table at 6pm. It was nearly always some variation on meat, boiled potatoes, plain boiled veg. I had friends with Indian parents so I tried Indian food at their houses, but my mum didn't try cooking with spices until I was in my late teens in the 80s (I think there was a tv cooking show with Madhur Jaffrey in the early 80s and I remember her trying recipes from that). If we went out for a meal it was Berni Inn, which was steak and chips or similar.

I think it probably was a class thing and also to do with age. My parents didn't go on the hippy trail as they had young kids by the mid 60s. Both left school at 15 and had lives very similar to their parents. I think that was a common experience, certainly for working class families. I did have an uncle who was a bit of a hippy but there was a lot of disapproval of his lifestyle and it was unusual. Maybe that wouldn't have been the case for a middle class family.

Lots of people still eat very bland, repetitive diets - probably more of them involve convenience food now, but lots of people still have very narrow palates and idea of what a meal is. Those people just don't much post on MN.

There were lots of troops stationed abroad as well who came home regularly. BOAR, bases in Hong Kong, masses of all 3 forces in various Mediterranean bases. More of my cousins were born in naval/army bases abroad than in the UK.

@mintkoala - you actually said most mothers of junior school children weren't in the workplace.

1960
Currently enjoying a Badedas bath because it reminds me of my grandma in the 60s.
I raise you a Bronnely soap in a sponge.

My grandmother ran the family farm during the war and after the war carried on doing so as well as the family business as one of her brothers was shot down and one never recovered from being a pow in Japan. Grandad had other businesses. My mother trained as a ballerina and worked as a professional dancer until her late 30s. Then ran the accounts and admin side of my stepfather's significant business. I'll add both my grandmother and mother could drive a tractor.

DH's mother qualified as a teacher in 1959. She taught until pg with DH when she had to leave before she started to show. No employment rights but it didn't stop her going back to work in 1970 when her youngest was 5 or from becoming a Deputy Head in 1978.

We have become unused to death and it has turned into a taboo subject that we are supposed to brush off whilst extending life beyond that which is bearable.

Interestingly we know of two Covid deaths that happened in summer. My stepfather's uncle who was 96 and had defied a stroke and pneumonia the year before who caught Covid in his care home and died a few weeks later, having recovered from Covid, but from a stroke. Very sadly DH had a 2nd cousin in his early 40s who had stage 4 cancer with metastes on the brain, lung and liver. He too caught covid about a month before he'd died but recovered from it. Covid on both death certificates. Paperwork has been significantly truncated following a Covid death and it has been liberally applied because of that.

I shall read the investigative journalism articles in 10 years' time with great interest.

The 60s and 70s were fab times. So much fun. So few woke arseholes about. Life is serious enough without humourless people making it worse. The young today seem so intense abut things. I wish they could let it go and just have some fun.

Equal Pay Act was in 1970.

I think that happens less today because people there's more of a sense of what our rights are and also less pressure to conform

You had better conform to the "Right" views though. The sheeple will condemn you if you don't follow the prescribed viewpoint of hive-think. Look whats happening to JKR and Maya Forstater, numerous academics etc.
As my Dad would say, "There's nobody more intolerant than a Liberal"

@mintkoala

wowfudge

I said 'fewer women with school age children worked in the 70s'

You replied 'This is wrong ... the only ones (of my friends mothers) who didn't work had younger children'.

This is either not much of a disagreement, or not one at all.

(From the point of view of the pandemic, I should really have said 'school or nursery age' anyway.)

However, you're right to say this is just my experience. All we can do here is swap anecdotes until someone shows up with the statistics!

48% of mothers worked outside the home in 1975, 72% did in 2015. I can't find figures broken down by age of child for the 70s though, on a quick look - presumably the number working with young children was considerably lower; in 2018 64% of women whose youngest child was two worked but 78% of women whose youngest child was 11 did.

@viques - closely followed by Camay Soap and Fenjal Bath Oil!

But we were latchkey kids.

I was often left all day age 10. No one bothered.

The statement that 40 yars ago as 1980 is unbelievable! I refuse to believe it. That was the year I left school, how can I have left school 40 years ago?

Also one who is taken aback at how some younger people think we lived in the 70s and 80s! OK, I grew up in South Africa during those years, so some things were very different, no TV for a start (until 1977, and then only one channel). But we ate pretty normal food and went to the movies and ate out. No overseas holidays though, that was prohibitively expensive, (although wealthier schoolfriends did go to Europe). My mother didn't work but she did drive a car, and I went to medical school in 981, where one third of my class was female.

This thread is brilliant! How can people not realise that different people do different things? That there is a difference between “less people went abroad” and “none went abroad”. To not realise that people have been travelling abroad forever even though your family haven’t. Or that people have been eating out FOREVER even if your family couldn’t afford too.
This is going to sound horribly snobby but this lack of imagination and inward looking small-lives attitude seems to me to be growing rather than shrinking. Despite all the information in the world being available to us people think that what they do is what everyone dies. It’s so bizarre.
I read an article a while ago that rather than thinking about class we should think about attitude- inward/outward looking, prepared to move for education and work vs wanting to stay in the local area, knowing people from different backgrounds vs only knowing people with a similar background, interested in lifelong learning vs dismissive of ‘eliteism’.
This thread is really making me think it’s true!

Just to add to the anecdotes - my mum trained as a primary school teacher in the early 1950s. She carried on after marriage, gave up when pregnant with me, SAHM for about four years (early 1960s), then did a bit of supply teaching on and off for a few years as and when she could get someone to look after my little brother. Later she could do more because we were both at school. Eventually she got a permanent part-time job as a class teacher, jobsharing. This was some time in the mid 70s. She did the mornings and her JS partner did the afternoons. Later there was a rumour of cuts in education, with part-time staff first in line for the chop, so she went full-time until she retired in her late 50s (late 1980s).

Both my aunts, who were a similar age, worked full-time before having children, then they had a SAHM period, then back to work part-time and eventually full-time as the children grew up. Secretarial work in one case, retail in the other. Greatly helped by having grandmothers on hand for childcare in both cases.

I don’t remember the 70’s as fab.

Strikes, power cuts, National Front, oil crisis, stagflation. They were crap. I remember from about age 7-13, having endless power cuts in the depth of winter.🥶

I do think it would have been very different 40/50 years ago compared to today, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, there would still have been people around who remembered the Spanish flu pandemic. I think following masks, hands, space would have been much better followed snd not a lot if the deniers or entitled people who like to say they can’t wear a mask and those few who really do have a physical reason for not wearing one would stay at home.

Yes, more people would due because of not having the level of medical care available today.

Some people would still be going to work and I should imagine the similar things done as happened during the miners strikes when there was no electricity. Some things just couldn’t be done.

Also think more people would e started growing their own veg, Keeping chickens etc as they did during the war and afterwards- be more self reliant. I think there would have been much more ingenuity going into this, cottage industries and so forth.

There most definitely would not have been a furlough scheme and for that I don’t think many people realise how fortunate they are.

And if you grew up in an area where the 80s were like the 30s, surely you were aware that other places were different- did you not watch television or films? And mainly, why not leave?!

@countrygirl99

All this "people were happy to do what they were told". I must have imagined all the strikes and the winter of discontent. Greenham Common, anti apartheid protests, CND marches 🤣🤣🤣🤣. All figments of my imagination

I'm not belittling those protests, and I went on lots of marches in the 80s, but, as today with BLM, many people weren't interested or were openly critical of 'hippies', 'do-gooders', etc. I don't think the protestors were anywhere representative of the majority view.

I think strikes were a different thing. My granddad and other relatives were miners, on strike a few times during my childhood, but also from a VERY conforming and traditional community. The strikes were about rights, but the right to things like a job for life, pay that enabled a man to be the breadwinner, pension, decent safe conditions, etc - defending a very traditional way of life, not a demand for social change. I remember another male relative being incensed when apprenticeships in the factory where he worked were opened to women because they were taking jobs from men. I think it's a mistake to lump all of those together as evidence of a rebellious population.