Call the midwife

[NimbleHiker]

The Christmas special of call the midwife is on bbc 1 in 2 parts again. The first part is on at 20:15 on Christmas day and the second part is on at 20:30 on boxing day. I am not a fan of the Christmas special been in 2 parts. I wonder how doctor Turner and his simpering wife will save the world.

I dont remember women being advised to take the mini pill until fifty five in the nineteen eighties or nineties either. Im nearly fifty three and still taking it because of the current advice. Yet if i walked into a GP surgery and said i was trying for a baby they would laugh in my face.

I grew up in a house built in 1946 and our bathroom was downstairs, the entire street had the same.

The house we bought in 1976 had a downstairs bathroom beyond the kitchen. It was a Victorian terraced house so I imagine most of the rest of the row did, too.
I think before the bathroom was built that space was occupied by an outside loo and a coal house. The alternative would have been converting one of the bedrooms upstairs and making the 3 bedroomed house into a 2-bed.
The retired man next door had lived in the rented house next door since he was 2. I'm not sure he had a bathroom at all: his lavatory was reached by going outside. The woman who owned his house wanted him to move into another of her properties while she did up his house, but he didn't want to.

In the 1950s to 1963, in a Yorkshire pit village, my aunt, uncle and cousins lived in a terraced house with no bathroom, just a kitchen at the back. The only heating was a coal-fired range in the middle room. The front room was barely used. The gardens at the back of the row of houses was one big tarmacked space, with a row of toilets at the bottom of it. There was one per house, and you only used the one which was 'yours.'

They moved in 1963/4. All my four cousins went to university. One went to Oxford and stayed to do a DPhil.

My nephew and his wife and children lived in a tiny terrace that didn’t have a proper bathroom. They had a converted cupboard under the stairs which had a loo, sink and shower in it but as you can imagine that was really small. So they had an old fashioned tin bath in the front room that they used as the children were very small and still really needed a bath.

This was ten years ago!

My great gran (born 1900) lived in the same house from her marriage in 1920 until 1998 and only had a downstairs bathroom, it was through the kitchen. Just a sink and a toilet. She had a coal range until the late 60s.

I had DDs with community midwives leading the care and birth in 2005 and 2009, and though I was married, everyone had Ms on their notes as they didn't want to distinguish between married and unmarried women. So I think this was acknowledging that there could be still a stigma, but they were at least trying not to amplify it. What I do clearly remember as a kid and teenager under the Thatcher and Major administrations, that they absolutely went to town on single mums being responsible for the ills of society, and the right wing press went with it. While having one sex scandal after another themselves. One of the many reasons for my abiding hatred for the Conservatives and the right wing press. And Reform are totally misogynistic.

Maybe they should rename the programme ‘Call the Turners’?

My school did one in about 1987! Under a new tree. Didn’t Blue Peter do another one around that time?

Ps that was random musing rather than a question aimed at you particularly @5foot5 , I am sure you weren’t still watching Blue Peter by then 🤣

Bit belated but I was born in the 70s and I can’t remember ever not having an egg hunt. Also easter biscuits and in the old days a walk on Easter Monday involving egg rolling down a hill. The Easter bunny was definitely a thing but he didn’t being us the eggs, well not in a Father Christmas way. My Dad hid them and frequently forgot where.

A school in Dublin opened their 2000 time capsule during the week. And created a new one. (I would have thought 2025 would have been the year for opening it).

Perhaps they forgot.

On unmarried mothers. I remember when Mel Blatt from All Saints was pregnant there was a lot of rumblings in the press about her potentially encouraging teenagers to run off and get pregnant so they could look as cool as her or something. Single mothers, especially teen ones were the cause of all society's woes in the Tory 90s of course as someone already mentioned. It was all "they're only doing it to get a flat and the benefits".

I’m finding all the amazement at houses only having downstairs bathrooms a bit surprising. DM’s house still only has a downstairs bathroom as do many houses round here.

Less usual in a house built postwar as The Turners have.

Yes indeed. Ours, 1970, similar sort of house to the Turners from what I can see, had no downstairs loo. I think in post war housing, many were built with no downstairs loo until the 80s. Now of course every new build has at least three loos.

There is an episode of steptoe and son that was rediscovered from the early 60s where Hariiiiiild! decides they will go up in the world and get a bathroom installed rather than the tin bath (or in the film, kitchen sink) that Albert usually uses to wash himself.

He says at one point there are something like 2 million homes without a bathroom.

These I assume would be pre 1919 housing act, which for the first time actually stipulated that houses should have stuff like toilets. Or foundations. Or windows.

My parents house was postwar.

We still had the extra toilet in the outhouse in the garden. It wasn't functional, but it was there. With an asbestos roof.

We were lucky, our new build house my dps bought circa 1971/2 had ensuite and downstairs loo or cloakroom as it was called

had an upstairs bathroom at previous house but barely remember it

In the late 50s we lived in a cottage with an outside toilet but a bath plumbed in in the kitchen.

My husband grew up in a terraced house with an outside toilet and a tin bath until his parents got a council house. That would have been around 1970.

I remember one of the episodes with Susan (the little girl with no arms and legs) when she was older - aged about 6.
Her mum was carrying her to what seemed to be an outside toilet.
You'd think the family would have been given priority for a new council flat or bungalow but they still appeared to be living in a old Victorian terrace.

I remember that episode too.

I have been reading the books for the first time. I'm on the second now. They really are absorbing and as others have said, definitely grittier and certainly less sentimental than the TV depictions. I highly recommend for anyone who has not read them.

I really enjoyed the books. I have reread them several times and i don't think that i will ever get bored of them.

Hilarious episode Its the same one where Albert is eating pickled onions in the tin bath in the front room.