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

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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.

I would imagine working class men would
Be swearing amongst themselves women too,

My aunt was a midwife in Rotten Row Glasgow in the late 40's/ early 50s. She said the midwives were treated with such respect and could walk safely through the slums in the middle of the night. They wore very distinctive hats and the local people loved them. She saw some terrible poverty and awful conditions though.

Back then you had whole families living in one street . People talked more and socialised more . Not many people travelled far from their birthplace . Life was basically work, pub and home . Children played outside as not many people owned cars . Life was simpler.

@Velvetcatfur I would say life was "smaller" not simpler - if that makes sense.

People could be arrested for using bad language. If you went on a pub there would be signs at the bar asking people to refrain from swearing or they would be asked to leave . It was a big no no to swear in front of women and children and people would tell you to watch your language if you swore in public. It was unthinkable to swear on TV or on the radio.

Yes . I was going to type insular in my original post .

Yes. Back then not even electricity. From that to Jumbo jets and the moon landings. Amazing.

@Velvetcatfur although many of the characters are off the age that would have been children during the second world war so some would have been likely to have been evacuated out of Poplar (at least at the beginning - many children came back). They would have had very different experiences from their usual close-knit community.
In the CTM era many families were moving out to Essex etc - I wonder if the experience of leaving London as a child made it easier to leave Poplar behind?
I just had a quick Google. Apparently several schools in Poplar were evacuated to Oxford - what a difference of a place to live !

The post-war slum clearance was managed very very badly. The tenement accommodation in the Poplar area was awful in terms of physical living conditions but the communities in them were extremely close-knit from having grown up together over generations.

When people were moved out they were placed with no attention paid at all to these relationships. It completely destroyed community and many people lost connection with people who were as close as family to them, sometimes literal family members were also placed apart, and they lost valuable support too, especially women who would have gone from having a network of social contacts and childcare support to often nothing at all, apart from a husband who may have been abusive or drunk a lot of the time. It was expensive and a luxury to have a telephone at home and a car even more so, so they had no way to keep in touch with one another. Many people ended up extremely depressed and isolated. It is probably one of the factors which has led to tower blocks becoming such difficult places to live today. The decisions about where and how to relocate people were made by well-off councillors, mainly men, who had no experience of those communities and the supportive bonds that women often form in those situations, especially where leaving your husband was unheard of or terribly stigmatised. They didn't understand it and only saw the deprivation and terrible living conditions. It was well meaning but it was wrong, IMO.

You can see some similar community stuff having built up now in some of the older council estates where families have been living there for generations. Very loyal and closed within the community, extremely hostile and dangerous for outsiders - that is typically what happens where groups of people do not feel that authority such as the government, have their best interests at heart.

And evacuation was often a traumatic experience for children. A lot of farming families took evacuees in in order to use them as free labour. There was such a disparity of experience between the city-dwelling children and the countryside children that adults thought they were delinquent and they would often be beaten or ostracised. Plus very little understanding in those days that things like stress or anxiety relating to being ripped away from your parents (!) could cause behavioural issues, bed wetting etc. It was essentially luck if they even got sent to stay with somebody kind. I am sure there was also likely sexual abuse which went on but was not recorded or talked about, either by the hosts themselves or their own older children etc. Absolutely grim. Some of the children were shockingly young too, although the very youngest were evacuated with their mothers. I think it was school age which was the cut off, so four year olds.

What on earth did you think life was like back then?

I can't comprehend that we've watched the same show.

The first few seasons which were based on Jennifer Worth's books and real life experiences were much grittier and realistic than the many series since which have been written by Heidi Thomas. They're entertaining enough in their own way, but they depict that period about as realistically as Mary Poppins does Edwardian London. The saccharine background music and Vanessa Redgrave's voice overs are particularly nauseating IMHO.

I haven't seen the programme but I agree with you. I was born at the beginning of the 60s. We had a lovely house, with a huge garden and nice bathroom. (Despite my grandparents being steel worker/and painter and decorator, and my widowed mother a teacher). By the mid 60s we had both central heating and double glazing (the internal, secondary sort - but still). I saw no poverty (in Sheffield). I'm sure it existed but not in my bit of Sheffield.

My dad's family are from that general area. I remember when call the midwife first came out, he was disgusted at the portrayal of washing hung across the road. Everyone was poor, but they all had Standards. Washing would be out the back and front steps would be scrubbed clean by wives with rollers in their hair.

Most of the generation before my dad were shockingly racist and were all smoking at 14. My nan wasn't racist, possibly because she was the youngest, with an older husband, so of a "new" time. They still didn't have an inside toilet until the mid 80's and I remember hating using the outside one with cold and spiders.

My DF was an east ender. After he died I commented to DB that my DF never swore. He said “He bloody well did, he swore like an old docker in front of other men. But I never once heard him swear in front of a woman or children”. I think that was common then.

I can remember women going to work in factories in the 1970s with curlers in their hair under a scarf or hair net on Fridays ready for a night out .

Terry Pratchett had some very astute observations on the people who lived in these kinds of communities (as he did in so many other areas of life). Here's my favourite of them, from Night Watch:

“When you got right down to the bottom of the ladder, the rungs were very close together and, oh my, weren’t the women careful about them. In their own way, they were as haughty as any duchess. You might not have much, but you could have Standards. Clothes might be cheap and old, but at least they could be scrubbed. There might be nothing behind the front door worth stealing but at least the doorstep could be clean enough to eat your dinner off, if you could’ve afforded dinner. And no one ever bought their clothes from the pawn shop. You’d hit bottom when you did that. No, you bought them from Mr. Sun at the shonky shop, and you never asked where he got them from.”

Nobody I knew ever used the F word as seems to be prevalent on here.

I was born in 1947 in the middle of the worst winter for decades. My father (a farmer) swore in the country way and would rule the household with a iron fist but he never ever raised a hand to us.
Most men smoked - but women much less so.

FYI - no-one was ever racist in the rural area I grew up in - the numbers of non-English or non-European people were minimal so of course no-one felt threatened by foreigners and their numbers. There were quite a few children of ex-POWs who stayed on after the war in my primary school and they were all accepted as children will always accept.

Rationing was in place still until I was 5, weekly baths were the order and we drank water from a stream uphill from our small farm

Was it a tough life - not really - we were loved as children, we learn the value of things that really mattered and it has stood that generation in good stead - many of us are still here.

I've remembered one episode that did not ring true to me.

Ordinary, white, working class, married couple.
Wife has an affair . We'd call him "black" now, but that was incredibly rude at that time. He was "coloured".

Wife became pregnant, & hoping desperately she won't be found out.
Well, she was. Husband calmly accepted the black baby & said "we'll call him George".

I just don't believe that could happen. Black & White were friends, neighbours, workmates. There were mixed marriages. But I don't think the baby would have been accepted by the cuckolded husband.

My family are from Sheffield. My dad was born in 1959 and has similar memories to you. The area he lived isn’t desirable in any way now but they had a nice 3 bed home with a big garden. My grandfather worked for a large local engineering firm (you can probably guess where) and my granny didn’t work until my dad and his siblings were all at school. She then cleaned at lodge moor hospital.

Yes, they are. Much tougher than 'Call the Midwife'.

There were two stories about mixed race babies in the book that the first series was based on iirc, one of them as you describe where the father accepted the child, which the writer Jennifer Worth reflected on - she couldn't work out whether he really didn't realise, or whether (she thought more likely) that he desperately loved his wife and lied to protect her.

The other storyline was less happy, angry husband came back, violent scene, baby given up for adoption :(

Both my sets of grandparents were lucky to get council houses in the 1950s with inside bathrooms, heating etc. Semi-detached with long gardens. Prior to that they were in terraced houses with outside plumbing. It must have been such a step up to get a new council house in those days.

It happened to my godmother, born in Liverpool in 1944. Her mother had an affair with a Caribbean soldier while her husband was serving in France.

He never let a single thing hint that he wasn’t her father. He adored her. Her mother put about a story of having a black great grandmother, and my godmother believed it. “Genetic throwback,” they said.

My godmother and her father were so close, it was lovely. Her mother hated her, I guess because she was living proof of her affair.

So yes, it could and did happen.

Andrew Lovell, the drummer from M People, was born in the 60's. He arrived much darker than his supposed father, so it was obvious that his mum had experienced relations with a black man. He grew up "knowing" that he had been adopted into a white family. Really, his parents told everyone that their baby was stillborn and he was fostered for a few months. They then pretended to adopt him, but she was his biological mum all along.