General Chat

One thing about hardship seems to be that it doesn't matter so much if many of your friends are in the same boat.

My grandmother was born in 1875 and was married to a coal miner and I remember visiting her as a little girl when she was in her mid 70s. She had 9 children and lost one aged 2 with a fever and fits. When I visited her she lived in a 2 up and 2 down cottage with an outside soil toilet and no electricity. All cooking was done on the black lead range and candles lit the way to bed, with a brick warmed in the oven to warm the bed. There was only a battery radio. Grandad had a coal allowance so the house was always warm and baths were in the tin bath in front of the fire. Grandad grew vegetables in the garden, had a whippet he caught rabbits with for the pot and he bred and raced pigeons which they also ate. Grandma and grandad would scour the markets for secondhand clothes for grandad and their sons to wear in the pit. Grandad was working in the pits till he was in his late 70s. Grandma had lino on the floor, oilcloth on the table and made peg rugs for the fireside and had gleaming brass fenders I would help clean. Grandma would colour her hair with a cold tea rinse and always had her stockings on when she went out, never without a hat with her fancy hatpins in.

When I visited, out would come the ragbag and bits of wool for me to make doll's clothes and pompoms and a tin full of old buttons for me to use. There was always enough money for me to have a cheap toy from Woolworths and for a milk lolly when the icecream van came.

My grandparents were very poor, but they lived a reasonable life because they were well and very resourceful and didn't complain. They made what little money they had go a long way, something I have never forgotten. Also, as Gwyn says, neighbours helped each other more then.

Probably each generation has had it's share of hardships, unless they were from the gentry class. I avidly watch all the programmes of The Victorian Kitchen, and it was in some ways an eye opener. My ancestors at the time it was set, 1881, were in agriculture, though they did own their land. One lady landowner, my 4x Gt. Grandmother, aswell as amassing 100 acres, also found time to have13 children. Definitely no telly in their house.
In more recent times, my father had a step-mother fron the age of 6. She would not have his comb in the house, it was kept on the outside window sill. She never gave him meat, and he has been a lifelong vegitarian. Even jam was considered too good for him.
In the 2nd WW, he was on the Russian convoys, and that must have been a living hell. On a lighterside, he was allowed a meat ration, but he swopped with someone for their chocolate ration. Elder sister never went without chocolate all through the war, and when they docked if there was a ship in from the West Indies, she got bananas aswell
Julia in Derbyshire

As it seems all of mine were ag-labs,I think they did.
But that was considered to be a normal way of life then.
Most of them got better off with the advent of the railways it seems.
Several were in the military too
But what we consider a hard life,maybe they didnt

My lot seem to be either stinking rich or beggerly poor so some had pretty tough lives and some had to pinch themselves to make sure they were alive

I don't have to go back far to find a hardworking lifestyle.
My Mum was raised in a house without electricity or water supply, which we take so much for granted now.
Water was fetched from the village pump, quite a walk away, until, ....height of luxury,... a standpipe was fitted outside the front of the house by the garden wall.
Her grandparents moved from Herefordshire to South Wales, so that G grandfather could work in the mines,but that would have been a tough existance in a small valley cottage, shared with his married brother and his family.
In later years they left the valley for a rural setting once more.

Although times were hard, they seemed cheerful and Mum used to tell me of the neighbours sharing their crops, so that if you had plenty, you gave to those with little, then they would do the same for a different crop.

Now some people don't even know their neighbours, so although we have material gains, perhaps we have lost alot too.

Gwyn

I think in some ways life used to be simpler. Working class people had less aspirations and expectations and knew they had to work to live and so on. Some of mine had lovely lives - hard working and not much dosh but generally healthy lives amongst friends and family in places they loved. But others had it very hard, mostly because they were from poor families and were poor themselves.

One of my great grandmothers had the first of her twelve children in the workhouse, where a lot of her relations died and/or visited intermittently. In 1911, she and her husband and their first five surviving children are living with her brother and sister-in-law and the first two surviving of theirs in three rooms in one of the poor areas of North London. Many of their relations died of tb and they never appeared to have enough to subsist on. She bluffed and pawned her way through life and wasn't the best of mothers, caring more about getting enough money together to get drink rather than encouraging any of her brighter children to get on in life and became a ahrdened and embittered woman. This is only the last century and she had more opportunity than some of her ancestors so I'd say life was very hard for some of them.

The current generation has never been both materially rich and so emotionally poor.

Difficult this one.
Depends on what you're used to!
My ag lab ancestors had enough money to go drinking (according to the 'petty sessions' part of the local newspapers) LOL
Mum was brought up in a 2 up 2 down in a rough area of Southampton - and a family of 5 lived upstairs - but it was what she was used to.
I spent a lot of my life living in a caravan - but it was home.
I didn't have an easy life bringing up 2 children on my own, and being a single income household now isn't easy either!

my mum was fostered out when her dads second wife was jailed for neglect and cruelty to the children, her foster parents were old never had children and were really strict church goes, my mum hated them with a passion

Not necessarily Dermot, your ancestors may have come from landed gentry. ;)

Every generation has had its own set of hardships - yet each one might probably agree that their forefathers had a worse existence.

We take so much for granted don't we Wenders?

I was just looking at some records where people were transported back to Ireland under the Poor laws of the time. (Not my relatives as far as I know) It must have been awful to have been uprooted like that.

my mum had a hard live when younger let alone anyone else SRS

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