First time watching call the midwife. I am shocked how different life was in the 50s

[Grest]

I am very late to the party here. But just getting in to this now. It’s so shocking how much society has changed. I was a 70s baby which isn’t really all that much later. It’s weird to think how much different life is now.

Don't forget that like practically any TV program, it has been sanitised for the target audience and will never show the true, gritty nature of the life some lived back then.

The books are amazing if you ever get to read them.

Oh did it start as a book?

I was loving the first few episodes and looked up when it was set. I thought it would be 1930s. Was so surprised it was 1957.

when you think how much has changed. All the travel changes - cars , planes etc. all the medical advances. And also how everyone has phones now. Teenagers all attached to phones and looking at them all day. It’s like such a different world in such a relatively short space of time.

I just looked up the books and see they are a true story. So amazing. Makes it even better

I'm old enough to remember the late 50s as a small child. When Call the Midwife started I thought it was set in the 1930s. I led a very different life in the 50s. We did not live in area with the blocks of flats without bathrooms as the programme showed. There was a lot more poverty than now and most of us did not have the luxuries we take for granted now, but I lived first in a maisonette and then in a 3 bed house, always with indoor bathroom/hot water. Parks and green areas were close by.
You could compare to now when some of us live in nice detached houses and take several holidays a year and others are struggling in overcrowed, expensive rented flats on benefits.
I do love Call the Midwife.

CTM is not, and has never been, remotely realistic. Nobody swears. Almost nobody smokes. Nobody is racist.

The show shoehorns a liberal 21st century worldview into a sentimentalised version of a Britain which never existed.

Have you ever seen the early series? EVERYONE was smoking, including the doctor and midwives. And some of the storylines are very shocking. I won't go into the details for the sake of the OP.

I was born in the 50s. We lived in a Victorian terraced house with no heating system, just a coal fire in the main room, an outside toilet and no hot water. Bath night was once a week in a tin bath in front of the fire. Despite this I had a lovely childhood and have such happy memories of that time.

My grandad and.great aunts and uncles lived in back to back terraced houses in Liverpool with no inside loo or bathroom with hot water when I was a small child in the late 60s. Then the council renovated them and put in bathrooms or knocked them down and moved them into modern flats.

So it was pretty normal for poorer city dwellers!

I think we watched a different programme they were all smoking including the midwives and the racism was rife, no swearing because it was pre watershed . The later series were probably sanitised but not in the beginning they had very gritty stories.

@Grest But it isn’t a short space of time. It’s 70 years. That’s a huge amount of time. Go from the 1880s to the 1950s and arguably that’s even more drastic.

edit - haven’t watched the program but really surprised that anyone can consider that a small amount of time. Or expect changes NOT to be drastic over 70 years!

I live in a terraced 1829 Georgian cottage. I went to a talk last week about a local family/oligarch who dominated locally.

When the speaker went through the family tree, it was quite amazing that some family members born in the late 19th century lived into the 70s and the speaker (I'd say he was in his 80s) knew some professionally from the 60s. He also knew some of the family born mid 19thC but obviously he was a child then.

The family started in 1784, lots of inter marriage, huge influence locally. Now there is just one 91yr old relative left.

You think about the 1800s, yet it is still in a grasp of living memory.

Sorry, got side tracked!! My DGM gave birth to my DM at home (as was usual) in 1947. It didn't go well and my DGF had to call for, and pay, the doctor who used chloroform (?) and forceps to get DM out.

DM never had any siblings!

Those days were horrid. I was born in 1944 did no live in London. Terrace house (see Coronation Street) One cold water tap in kitchen. No electricity, Landlord would not pay for connection. Gas lighting in main rooms. Paraffin heater on Landing.
The winters were ferociously cold. It was a mini ice age. Power cuts because of lack of coal to power stations, usually because of strikes. Dock workers on strike was also common. Dockers hated it when shipping containers were adopted. Little chance of thefts.

I was born in the East End of London in 1947 & my DM often reminded me "I had to pay to have you". As if it was my fault she was pregnant !

The depiction of life at that time & place seems accurate to me - a bit sanitised perhaps, but no glaring anomalies.

Couldn’t disagree more with this and you clearly have not watched the earlier series or you didn’t pay attention enough. I’ve watched all of them and there has been plenty of racism and homophobia shown. The swearing will have been removed due to the earlier time slot but the first few series were pretty realistic. It has been sanitised a lot more recently but to say it has never been realistic at all is just not true. They certainly haven’t shied away from showing expectant mothers smoking while waiting for ante natal appointments or leaving their babies outside in their prams. All very common practices back then. The early series also portrayed well the desperation some women felt at continuously getting pregnant before the pill or abortion act came in.

My grandfather was born in 1871 and remarkably lived until 1971. I sometimes marvel at the changes he saw in his long life, being born in the reign of Queen Victoria, and dying in the reign of the late Queen Elizabeth.

Born in the 1950s. We lived in a one bed house with an outside toilet and wash house. The cities were even worse and for many years. I think the other aspect of this show is the sheer misery that many women lived in - their role in society was minimal. They had these babies and lived in appalling conditions with little money and often no support at home from husbands. They had child after child and abortion was illegal until 1967. It's also how mental attitudes were - none of this " how are you?"stuff. You got on and made the best of it. These photos are from the 1960s.

Ha, I was born in the mid 70s in northern England . I was a surprise baby to young parents. The flat in an old Victorian terrace had an outside toilet and no heating. It was a while before they bought a tiny terrace with an indoor bathroom but still no central heating. I don’t think we had central heating until the mid to late 80s!

@StripedPiggy i have really enjoyed call the midwife. Its dealt with some horrible storyline which unfortunately happened in real life. I think it's a fantastic series and I can't wait till the next one. The way they dealt with babies being abandoned and the abortion storyline.... fantastic story writing and acting

What about the story where Chummy attends to birth of twins/triplets, no help, only seems to be cold water and a 40Watt bulb in the flat. Chummy uses her own clothes to wrap the babies.
I remember houses like that.

Yes it's odd how time shifts.

I was born in 1980 44 ago. 44 years before that was 1936 which is weird to comprehend

CTM is excellent and I became fascinated with the social history/ geography of the East End and looking for Chrisp Street. On google earth is a revelation.

The books are good too.

Just bear in mind that it's dramatised and this is the worse of the conditions in the UK. The dockland has undergone a huge period of change through the post war era- deindustrialistion (containerisation) dereliction and deprivation. WWII destroyed many building and bombsites were commonness in the late 1950s - Jennifer worth describes the meths drinkers.

I'm watching my way through - I am up to season 7 now.
In the earlier seasons they all puff away on cigarettes like chimneys (even in the baby clinic or while sat in bed in the maternity hospital) and there's loads of episodes that have racism storylines in them.
It is very much the typical TV nostalgia "we had it good even though we were poor" even though in reality it wasn't like that.
It is a fascinating view into social history. The families that live in new tower block flats are considered the lucky ones - yet now so many of those estates are now practically considered the "slum" estates. The old Victorian buildings that still remain - which would have been the ones people were desperate to move out of - are probably the sought after expensive properties.
I looked up on Google Earth the house in Poplar that the real Nuns lived in.
There are still lots of those 60s tower blocks but the docks have obviously changed completely.
I absolutely love the character of Sister Monica Joan. She's like a cheeky little child sometimes (sneaking sweets and cake) but then comes out with the most complex book or bible quotes.

I love call the midwife. I was watching the early episodes of casualty recently and found that an eye opener. It was filmed in about 1986 I think so in my lifetime. But I was surprised at the lack of technology/equipment compared to now. I always think of 36 years ago as not that long ago but it is really.

People didn't swear in polite company back then though did they? It was not seen as casually as it is now. I know that my late grandfather was very distressed by swearing on TV and would turn it off in disgust, he found it extremely vulgar whereas it does not bother people of my generation.

Perhaps I have an incorrect impression based on TV, but I feel like people didn't swear anywhere near as casually as they do these days, even among friends/family, and the way of speaking was much more formal in general. And honestly, I would be shocked even today to hear a midwife or doctor swear in conversation with a patient. I moved to Germany and when doctors speak English with me, I have been surprised on about 3-4 occasions to hear them use words like "shit" or "bullshit" because I would never ever expect that from a HCP whose normal working language is English - it is just inappropriate. It didn't upset me from the doctors I heard it from, it was just jarring because it was so unexpected.