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Really interesting documentary on YouTube oldstyles might like

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  • maryb
    maryb Posts: 4,658
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    When I was 10 we moved into an Edwardian house which had had all its garden sold for development. Old houses were quite cheap then.

    It had a bathroom indoors, but it also had an outside loo - for the gardener originally! Handy for us when we were playing outside
    It doesn't matter if you are a glass half full or half empty sort of person. Keep it topped up! Cheers!
  • THIRZAH
    THIRZAH Posts: 1,465 Forumite
    We had an indoor loo but quite a few people in the village only had outdoor ones. Every year we used to go to a birthday party at the house of a girl who only had an outdoor loo. It was at the bottom of the garden down a rough path and her birthday was in November so it got dark early. If we needed the loo her mother provided us with a torch but we were too scared to go down the garden by ourselves so two or three of us would go at the same time. The trouble was that there was no light in the loo so then there would be a debate about whether the person actually using the loo got the torch which they then put on the plank seat or did the girls waiting outside hang on to it.

    Perhaps it was a good thing that the party was in November as the loo was an old fashioned earth closet type with no flush so must have really smelt in the summer.
  • VfM4meplse
    VfM4meplse Posts: 34,269
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    I am so glad I was born in relatively recent times. There is no way I could bear to share a bathroom with strangers, as for an outside loo I dread that too. I dislike having to use facilities at the best of times, I can't imagine venturing outside / weeing in a bucket in the middle of the night :o

    Looking forward to streaming the video now.
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  • Just watched the video and I was wondering how that hard-pressed Mum was today bless her she was doing her best on very little and I really felt for her
  • Si_Clist
    Si_Clist Posts: 1,461
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    There was a lot of it about until well into the 1980s ...

    There still is round here, according to our doctor on Friday ...
    A positive attitude won't solve all your problems, but with luck it'll annoy enough people to make the effort worthwhile.
  • Florence_J
    Florence_J Posts: 1,942
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    I am 27. I always remember never seeming to have enough as a child but somehow my family got through it. We were fed well and even managed yearly camping trips so I feel the first 10 years or so of my life may not have been as ritzy as some, but me and my siblings had nothing to complain about. My dad owned a small building company and my mum was a teaching assistant.

    But then in my teens things took a turn for the worse. My mum was an alcoholic, my dad's business went bankrupt. Then my mum ran off. We now lived off benefits and the kindness of family members. As a result of my dad's bankruptcy he didn't have a bank account, and we didn't have energy direct debits. we had a gas and electricity meter and an immersion heater for the water. I would have cold showers in winter and often slept in my coat and a wooly hat. But we didn't freeze.

    I remember the fridge would hold little more than milk and most of our meals involved bread or potatoes, but we didn't starve.

    I needed black shoes for school. I only had white trainers. I would sit in detention with the true troublemakers despite being one of the best students in terms of grades and behaviour because I had broken the uniform rules. My dad once had the 'bright' idea of covering my white trainers in black shoe polish. Eventually my school gave me the money to buy shoes with.

    Once my window broke and we had a sheet of plastic in place for a good while before we could afford to replace the glass.

    I don't say any of this because I want people to feel sorry for me, or to say my life was as hard as others in previous times. I didn't starve, I didn't freeze and I had clothes to wear. I merely wish to show that you can find people living in not too dissimilar types of conditions now.

    This show sounds interesting, thanks for posting about it.
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  • suki1964
    suki1964 Posts: 14,313
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    It's a shame Florence that you suffered that less then a generation ago. In the 70's I walked the 3 mile to school and back, one winter in just sandals and a cardigan cos we didn't have the money for school shoes and my coat was stolen in school

    Do watch the link.

    It's very telling

    Nothing has changed really in the 40 years that has passed
  • thriftwizard
    thriftwizard Posts: 4,652
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    We lived in some big houses, often with servants' quarters, but we didn't actually have any servants or even the money to heat the house; the kitchen was usually the only warm room & my mother had to clean it all & keep it presentable for the public herself. In the one I was born into in the late 50s, we had an outside two-holer, but we did also have two inside loos, and a bathroom in which we could take our weekly bath in 4" of lukewarm water, with the parafin heater hissing away beside us IF we could afford parafin that week! I still remember the patterns the frost made inside my bedroom window...

    But my aunt's house, down in the village, was just as it had been a hundred years before; little rooms, which were easy to heat, although as it was cob-built it was always a bit damp. Steep, twisty stairs rising from the kitchen, behind a latched tongue & groove door. Underneath the stairs was a little larder cupboard, with a wire-mesh window with no glass, which kept food pretty cool even in high summer. It was always full of jars of jam, honey & salted beans, with a ham hanging from the underneath of the stairs.

    The front part of the house had a slate roof but the back was thatch; I can remember listening to the rain hissing down on that. The walls were about two feet thick, which meant great window-seats, always with cushions, looking out at the church, the pub and the rest of the village. Outside at the back was a scullery yard, with the cold-water sink running into an open drain that ran across the yard; any hot water had to be heated in the kitchen, on the black-lead range. There was a tin bath hanging on a nail on the outside of the outhouse, which was on the edge of the yard. She did have a flush loo, with a high cistern, and was quite proud of it!

    It wasn't at all squalid, but usually squeaky-clean, all swept & scrubbed daily (which took all of half an hour) and she and most of the villagers that I remember were the very picture of slim, wiry good west-country health. They always seemed to have plenty of time for gossip and to play with a small & curious girl. I know things were very different in the cities; we moved into one when I was six, in '65, and the bomb sites and the poverty & ill-health of the parishioners living in the poorer areas were a complete & horrible shock to me, as was the constant smell of coal-smoke and the noise of traffic & the dockyard. Yet my mother was hugely relieved to be back in "civilisation" with a choice of shops, schools and piano lessons.

    But in both places, and the ones we lived in afterwards, I had to walk at least a mile to school; three miles each way in the case of the one I took my "A" levels at. In any kind of weather, with or without a raincoat or (secondhand) duffle coat. My mother didn't drive, was at work by 8am anyway, and the buses, even if we could have afforded a pass, didn't go that way. Most of my friends did, too - no wonder we were so slim!

    Whilst I'm very appreciative of central heating, easy hot water, being able to cook at the touch of a button, being able to access good things to cook, good health care and all sorts of modern blessings, I remember my aunt's antiquated home with fondness and do wonder sometimes if a number of babies have been thrown out with the bathwater...
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  • Very interesting - thanks for sharing :)

    The documentary was based on the work of Ken Coates and Richard Silburn who were interviewed in it.

    St Ann's: Poverty, Deprivation and Morale in a Nottingham Community.

    "Can the problem of poverty simply be confined to a lack of adequate money income? Does the degree of social deprivation correlate with individual poverty? In 1966, a social survey was conducted into the living, social and working conditions of the residents of the St Ann's area of Nottingham. It asked: are such areas more delinquent than others? How far did the existence of areas of poverty correlate with political and social apathy? And above all what were the attitudes of people who lived in such conditions: were they aware of their position as being in any sense deprived or underprivileged and did they accept their status or challenge it? The survey was conducted under the auspices of the Adult Education Department of the University of Nottingham and it gave rise to a film directed by Stephen Frears".

    They also published Poverty: The Forgotten Englishman.

    Both are well worth a read.
  • moneyistooshorttomention
    moneyistooshorttomention Posts: 17,940 Forumite
    edited 17 October 2016 at 8:13AM
    Thanks for comments re those books. I think I might look them up. Interested to see that, amongst the points made was wondering how aware of their relative position the people were. The 1960s is the last decade, I feel, where one can see such widescale imposed poverty - ie limited ability to choose family size and having lots of "mouths to feed" because of it.

    My father taught me that lesson well - ie "Big families mean poverty - even for those on decent income" - from his own experience growing up. He drummed that message into me.

    I'm interested in it being that area of the country - ie St Ann's in Nottingham. Barely remembered - but I did stay there in a commune very briefly only a few years after that. It wasn't "full immersion" - as it subsequently emerged the people running it probably knew they would have a way out of it in the future and duly got it. But it was clearly a very poor area.
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