The Long Shadow - ITV1 - Monday September 25th at 9pm

[Southeastdweller]

Anyone else looking forward to watching this seven part drama?

https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/the-long-shadow-release-date-newsupdate/

That is authentic. This is a time when the UK was just coming out of an energy crisis.

And remember no one has mobile phones at this point, relatively few women had cars or could drive. You are out walking back home and completely isolated walking down very badly lit streets. It's not unconnected that crime reduction measures are linked to better street lighting

I was wondering what the benefits system was like back in 1975? I wasn’t alive then. It seems crazy that Emily resorted to sex work to provide for her family, and with her husband’s agreement.

I was trying to work out how much in today' s money £5 would have been. i don't think a lot - maybe £50 (I have a vague recollection of crisps being 15p in the seventies). But I guess if you are desperate for cash any helps.

I think it highlights how poor the benefits system was.
Thats why both of the victims last night had to resort to prostitution. Totally shocking. Also how women were treated.
I remember seeing footage of the lead police officer speaking about one of the victims. He called her a ‘woman of ill repute’ because she was in a pub without her husband.
And people wonder why women don’t report crimes to the police.

I think it's only after the mid 70s that child allowance expanded to cover a 2nd child.also most benefits would be paid to your husband.

And single women were not given mortgages so had to get a male guarantor

https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/1688

Beer was about 30p a pint at the time so as she seemed to make at least £15 from the fivers she was counting he'd have been unconscious if he'd spent all she earned.

It wasn't an unusual scenario for the husband/boyfriend to be local in the pub while the woman worked.

I used to work for the vice squad.

If I remember correctly (I was getting child benefit for 2 at the time) it was about £2.50 for 2 children. I used to collect it from the post office, I can't remember if it was weekly or monthly.

I don't know about other benefits.

He was on GMB this morning. He said he cried when he watched it. He asked them not to refer to the Yorkshire Ripper.

I know the amounts aren't comparable and I don't doubt it happened, just made/would make me angry.

I just can’t comprehend the mindset of a husband who when his wife tells him her idea of making money to provide for the family is selling herself, that he agrees rather than look for another source of income? But who knows how bleak the job situation was like then in Leeds. I do know inflation back then was really high.

It’s really interesting on this thread seeing the 70s viewed through the lens of the 21st century. There were no benefits for a household with an income from work. I was earning £18 a week in 1975 and apparently £15 was the equivalent of about £161 today.

i don't think a lot - maybe £50
I think £50 is a lot to many people now. I think £5 was a lot to many people then.

I can see how a family with no safety net could quickly become desperate at that time. When we were young children, a friend's father died suddenly and unexpectedly. Her mother had been a housewife (to use the word of the time - all the childcare outside school age/hours, all the cleaning, all the cooking from scratch, all the dressmaking for herself and the children, all the decorating, managing the finances etc) and her father had worked full time (also doing the gardening, DIY and car maintenance). They were not wealthy, but had a comfortable standard of living with the essentials covered and could afford a car (essential for his job), a modest UK holiday and so on. All that changed overnight. The benefits were just not there and so the grieving children lost their mum in a way too - to grief and to work. She juggled up to five cleaning and shop assistant jobs at a time, six long days a week to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Even then, the car had to go and holidays stopped. After being a housewife for 15 years or so, and before the days of (more) equal pay, those sorts of jobs, low pay and exorbitant doorstep loans was all that was available to her. Sundays she cleaned, cooked, washed, and then, before bed, bathed the children. It must have been exhausting. My friend remembers her mum receiving a 'generous' £5 note in a letter from a wealthy old friend one Christmas for the whole family, and my friend received a 50p gift token and thought it was the world. Sadly the situation made my friend a 'latch key kid' - lonely, vulnerable and with no help available at the time either with her confusion and grief.

That's understandable but that was generally how it worked, well in my city I guess London might have been different. Many of the street prostitutes where I lived were women with kids out making a bit of money, many of them married. You did get some vulnerable teenagers and the older women looked out for them, would keep us informed if girls were being exploited. I used to wonder if it was a mix of being concerned for them and them not liking the competition. It was very different to now.

To be fair to the husband it wasn't his idea and she talked him into it. Lots of women really didn't have many options.

Inflation was going mad, interest rates were high, unemployment was high, benefits low. Women were generally low paid. Who knows what you'd do if your kids were already going without and facing being homeless.

There were t benefits like they are today. I doubt there was anything to make absent parents pay for their children. The CMS or whatever it was/is called was set up much later.
My mum told me you did not get child benefit for your first child. There were no after school clubs or breakfast clubs. I think that’s why lots of women worked 10 am-2pm that sort of thing.
Unemployment was high it wasn’t as simple as go and get another job straight away. Wasn’t this when there was the 3 day week too?
Times were grim. That’s why women didn’t get divorced as easily as they do now. It was too hard to manage.

The CMS was the Child Support Agency which was set up in 1993, before that men could just walk away from their kids with no legal obligation to support them. No in work benefits, no child (family) allowance for the first child. It was bloody grim for single mothers.

I remember when it was no family allowance for the first child, it was ten bob after the first child. (ten bob was 50p)

Going to catch up on this tonight.

Red Riding was brilliant and horrifying. Watch it if you can find it.

The visual aesthetic of 70s Britain, for anyone who doesn't remember it, is fairly accurately shown in the Scarfolk websites/ artwork

https://www.instagram.com/scarfolk/?hl=en-gb

Red Riding is on ITVX. I’ve just added it to my list.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/26/itv-yorkshire-ripper-drama-the-long-shadow

How did you find it? I tried searching for it on ITVX but nothing came up.

Blossom did you mean All4 Red Riding was on Channel 4 originally

My Dad earned about
£30/week.in the early 70,s in a fairly well.paid job apparentlly my mum.and dad found found £5 in the street just before my sister was born in in 1972_and thought they had found a fortune ...

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