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 think it is sanitised in that amongst the poverty etc there is amusing hijinks, people saying silly things and often the characters have very in depth and intelligent insight into their own situation. Sometimes the characters reflect on things with a very modern view to highlight something that back then wouldn’t have been commented on/noted. But surely everyone can recognise that’s just making good tv? The writer probably attended lots of births that were very boring and wouldn’t write about those. She also wouldn’t write things about herself or her friends that would paint them in a terrible light due to changes attitudes since then. E.g if the other midwives made racist comments or encouraged violent discipline of children or excused domestic violence who I’m sure of them would have back then .

My mum worked in an office in the early 60s and from the window she could see an old, dilapidated tenement building and dozens of children who lived there playing outside barefoot. It shocked here even then.

Those poor women look so ground down and dejected in those photos, the kids sadly just accepting. I usually see court and slum photos taken from the 30s and 40s but 1971 is really shocking.

The books were written by the Midwife as her Memoires if you read them it's very gritty....nursing I'm the 50s was often done by middle classes from homes where swearing wasn't the norm...
Neither was it the norm for everyone particularly women.
It's very sanitised on TV for teatime viewing.

Op have you seen the film Kathy Come Home? It changed the law after it was screened in the 60s?

@thecatneuterer you were very lucky I was in outer London no central heating until the 1979....council house ..our secondary glazing was fitted a bit before because of the noise from Heathrow.
We had a paraffin heater in the bathroom that could easily have been knocked over, coal boiler in kitchen for hot water and open fire in living room. Used to get ice on the inside of bedroom windows. Mum and dad both smoked but no swearing....my dad did at work but not in front of a lady or child.

The paraffin heaters we had would immediately snuff out if knocked over . And I agree no one sweared at home in front of their family .There was no swearing on the Tv either .

As usual people who had middle class pr better off backgrounds claim that life was not like that then. The series is about a very poor area. It is like someone today making a film about Jaywick and someone claiming life is not like that because they live in a semi detached house in Bath.

In 1961 7% of households did not have an inside toilet or a toilet externally attached to the house (often called an outside toilet). So while most people did have one, a significant number did not.

My father during the fifties was living with his two siblings and parents in one room and a toilet shared with 4 other families and no electricity. They were very poor. He was born at home and they had to call a private Dr because he got stuck - a breech birth. The Dr managed to turn him and he was born unharmed. But he was born by candlelight as they did not even have enough money for an oil lamp. My mother at the time was living in a house with an indoor bathroom that was fine.

Even in the seventies I remember going into houses of friends that had hardly any furniture. I had hardly any clothes as a teenager because my family could not afford many.

In terms of swearing, I remember a woman on the bus having a real go at a young lad who was swearing to his friends when there were children on the bus. She was saying how disgraceful it was to speak like that in front of children. Because anyone decent didn't.
Even when I was young in the seventies we had paraffin heaters to heat our living room. There was no heating in our bedrooms and they were freezing.
I think it was only about 25 years ago that our local council closed the baths in the last leisure centre. The baths were literally baths you paid to use to have a wash in and were commonly used in the past by people who did not have a bathroom at home.

I was born in 1966 & lived in a terraced house with only an outdoor toilet at the end of the garden, we didn't get an indoor toilet until I was 4, my dad used to drive up to my grandparents at the top of the hill if he wanted anything other than a wee as they had an indoor toilet. We only had a gas fire in the front & back rooms, no heating upstairs, yet I can never remember being cold. We lived 4 houses to a yard with each house having a postage stamp piece of grass, I was the only child in our yard until my brother was born when I was 6, I was spoilt rotten by everyone who lived there. My mum didn't work, one income was enough to live on, the street had most mothers not working, it was washday on a Monday, Tuesday was upstairs cleaning, Wednesday was downstairs, Thursday everyone took their orders to the greengrocers who delivered on a Friday afternoon, then scrubbed their front & back steps & cleaned the downstairs windows, if you didn't get seen cleaning it was a major scandal, Friday was big shop day when we went to the New supermarket which was Tesco, then to the butchers & to the Co-op for milk tokens & groceries. My mum would buy bread every few days on her way home after taking me to school, a journey she did 4 times a day as I came home for dinners. There were no freezers, everything was bought fresh, meals were cooked from scratch. My grandparents on my mum's side would visit on a Tuesday & Friday evening, I used to stand at the bus stop to meet them off the bus with my mum, I saw my other grandparents on a Sunday, I got my comics from the papershop at the end of the block we lived in, sometimes walked up to the off licence with my dad on a Saturday night if he went to buy a bottle of Double Diamond beer to make him & my mum a shandy & he would buy me some sweets, I spent Sunday mornings up at the garage he rented playing while he mended our beloved orange Mini. We didn't have foreign holidays, if we went away we rented a house or bungalow at Filey for a week, going in our orange mini with the pram on the roof rack & me sat cramped in the back surrounded with food for the week & sat on the bedding. I was safe & loved. They say it takes a village to raise a child, my village was the yard I grew up in & the row of terraced houses, I had so many aunties & uncles, none of them were blood relations but they probably gave me more love & care than many of my blood relations, I was born with a dislocated hip & was in spica pots for several months, my mum used to keep me occupied by taking me to wave to the people on the buses or to the trains that ran under the bridge down the road. we had no games consoles, only a black & white television until I was about 6, childrens television was 20 minutes in an afternoon for Watch with mother & then a couple of hours at teatime. A couple of my aunties from there were very special, I sadly lost both of them before I was 21, they were both younger than I am now, I cried buckets on special days like my wedding day because I knew that they would have been the first to arrive & last to go home & would have loved the day, I wish they could have met ds as well. Give me a choice of having the childhood I had then or how children grow up now & I know which one I would choose.

I'm from Sheffield, grew up in Woodseats.

Born in the early 1960s. Brought up in a rented Victorian semi in Southern England. No central heating (coal fires only) and the loo was 'down the garden path'. Didn't move to a home with heating or an inside loo until the early 1970s, and then had to share a bedroom with two older siblings.
Was amused to see the semi we lived in up for sale recently for £1.2 million 🤣.
Hartley was right. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there

I was a child in the 60s. This seems pretty representative to me. My great gran lived in “rooms” with a shared bathroom. Other older relatives also lived in rooms that were pretty grim. My grandad’s brother gambled his house away and moved him, his wife and their teenage son in with my grandparents’ 3 bed terraced house, where they lived with their two youngest children and a grandson. One cold tap in the kitchen and an outside loo.

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.

Barbara Windsor, in her autobiography, writes about experiencing sexual abuse when she was evacuated during WW2. Her hosts posed as a married couple but were in fact brother and sister. She was heard crying and screaming by a neighbour and rescued from the situation quite quickly, but the evacuation programme must have seemed like a gift to paedophiles at the time.

My pre-schooler inadvertently told somr teens off for swearing on the bus. This would have been latte 00s. They mumbled an apology and didn't swear again where we could hear them

Swearing being so acceptable is a very recent thing.
My friend grew up in the area billy elliot is set in and his mum was saying that the main thing about the film was how unrealistic the swearing was. She said men might have used that language in the pub or down the pit but it was never used in front of women or children.

I grew up in a working class home in the 70s and 80s and I think in my whole life I only ever heard my father swear twice.

It just wasn't a part of normal conversation like it is now.
I work with small children and you have 7 year olds calling each other fucking twats. It's absolutely horrible and completely unnecessary.

My mum was a midwife in the same era as the first couple of series. She remembers laying the fires in the wards as one of her first jobs as a trainee nurse.

It's fascinating the later series as it nears the year I was born!.

We are up to the time where bother my DB have been born, the elder fortunately avoiding any impact of Thalidomide due to not being able to keep it down! I'm up in the next series I think, but a lot is already familiar.

That's awful Sethera

It portrays a very poor area of London, or a leafy middle class suburb. The men are blue collar working class, the women didn't work as they stayed home with the babies, and the portrayal is pretty accurate for hundreds of thousands of wc people of the time. Of course there were different experiences out there, but this was true for so many.

But not in front of the midwife or doctor, and there tends to be one or the other in most scenes.

I found that episode beautiful. He loved her so much, but couldn't give her the baby they so wanted. He didn't care that it wasn't his child. He accepted the two of them because he loved her so much.

I know someone who did exactly that.

There's a heartbreaking scene in The Krays where their Mum talks about all the aborted babies in the lake.
Thank goodness for contraception too.

Well said!

Sh Mrs Jenkins- her howl of anguish will live with me. Played beautifully by Madge from Benidorm.