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General => The Common Room => Topic started by: sarah on Tuesday 07 October 14 14:33 BST (UK)
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Did anyone see these photographs from the Daily Mail last week..Such tough living conditions and not that long ago.
http://www.rootschat.com/links/01am0/
Sarah
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Hi Sarah
I did and what I found most appalling was that this was during my lifetime, I grew up in the 1970s and I always think of that sort of poverty as being a lot lot earlier, even post war poverty and slums.
Just goes to show!
Kerry
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My son went to Aston university in 1987. I was horrified to find that the accommodation he was housed in was no better than that shown in the Balsall Heath picture early in this series. There are still serious pockets of bad housing in many parts of the UK. Some of them very unlikely.
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I can't recall it being that bad but I know from photos and videos it was in some areas.
Our house seemed very nice but we had no hot water, no fridge and an outside tippler toilet until I was 21 yrs old. Then the luxury of a council flat. :)
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Of course Cathy Come Home which dealt with homelessness and poverty was first aired in 1966.
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Poverty has aways exsited in this country. It exists in a place near you today! Please bear that in mind as you go about your daily lives!
For myself, being 78 yrs old I know precisely what poverty is and what poverty does. I thank God for my brilliant teachers at my poverty stricken primary school, in poverty stricken Hulme, Manchester.
Bill
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What's particularly unpleasant is that the Daily Mail wants its readers to think that there is no real poverty in the UK today, and that there aren't any children growing up in substandard housing with an inadequate diet, because being poor in Britain in 2014 means "just not having the latest PlayStation or trendy trainers" ::)
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What's particularly unpleasant is that the Daily Mail wants its readers to think that there is no real poverty in the UK today, and that there aren't any children growing up in substandard housing with an inadequate diet, because being poor in Britain in 2014 means "just not having the latest PlayStation or trendy trainers" ::)
So true, some people haven't a clue or just don't care
Mo
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Those photos leave me speechless.
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I know it's not as bad as the photos shown, but I used to live in what had once been a fine Edwardian house in Scotland, which the landlord had let go to rack and ruin.
The old washhouse was still attached to the basement kitchen, and accessed from outside. It had a toilet and washbasin in it. We never used it - it was outside, FHS, and we had a small indoor bathroom! What's more in winter the pipes would freeze -not just the taps but even the water in toilet cistern would freeze solid, sometimes for a couple of weeks at a time.
The landlord described this as a "second bathroom" and expected it be used as such.
This was in the 1980s.
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Of course Cathy Come Home which dealt with homelessness and poverty was first aired in 1966.
You can still see this programme on youtube, I think it must have had a re-run at some time because I remember watching it.
Now, I don't want to get political; however it makes my blood boil when all I here is MP's calling for "affordable housing" and expecting that all families or indeed single people should own/buy their own home. For many people this is never going to happen.
If you are already on benefits or low wages plus benefits how are you supposed to afford to rent. Here locally you cannot find any private rental accommodation under £500 a month, if you're looking at something like a 2 bed flat you can add another £250+ to that. Add to that fees and deposits, then you still have to feed yourself and keep warm.
Sorry rant over..........
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What's particularly unpleasant is that the Daily Mail wants its readers to think that there is no real poverty in the UK today, and that there aren't any children growing up in substandard housing with an inadequate diet, because being poor in Britain in 2014 means "just not having the latest PlayStation or trendy trainers" ::)
So true, some people haven't a clue or just don't care
Mo
But that is the press, or at least most of it. Doing its bit by distortion to perpetuate a rotten system.
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Those pics look like us, well at least the dirt does.
Reminds me of when I was a kid and used to walk to school.
We were so poor, back then, that when we walked past the farm duck pond,
the ducks used to throw bread AT US!
;D
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Looked at them and found them really shocking. Growing up in that period, I'd not seen anything like that! Makes me realise how fortunate I and many others were.
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What infuriates me is that given the political will both inside and outside Parliament it is all preventable.
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I know it's not as bad as the photos shown, but I used to live in what had once been a fine Edwardian house in Scotland, which the landlord had let go to rack and ruin.
I obviously don't know the facts of your case, but I think we have to be a little bit careful of the attitude that landlords just "let their properties go to rack and ruin" and dig down a little deeper.
In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, many rented properties were owned by landlords who had no private pensions and had done what their parents and grandparents had done - invested their savings in rented housing that they expected to provide them with a retirement income.
It had worked for their parents and grandparents; but it didn't work for them.
Why not?
Two things - the Rent Acts, which gave their tenants the right to register a "fair rent" which could not be easily increased, and rampant inflation (which, let us not forget, hit 27% in 1974).
In the 1950s my grandfather invested in a block of four newly built maisonettes in Buckhurst Hill, which he doubtless expected to provide a healthy income in retirement (if you know Buckhurst Hill, it was 67 Palmerston Road). He died in the 1960s. In the 1970s, though, I remember the maisonettes being the bane of my grandmother's life. They were all "fair rented", and what remained of the rent after tax was an absolute pittance - scarcely enough to meet her landlord's routine repairing obligations, and she lived in abject terror of needing to replace the roof, since the income from the maisonettes was never going to pay for that.
And she was reasonably wealthy (my grandfather's estate, when he died in 1963, was valued at £52,000 odd).
Many landlords were less well placed than her, and found that having sunk their savings into property, the returns were scarcely enough to provide them with enough to live on. They didn't WANT to leave their houses to go to rack and ruin ... but they lacked the means to do anything else.
Yes, doubtless there WERE the occasional Rachmanns; but for the most part, I think that in many cases the landlords were victims of circumstances no less than their unfortunate tenants.
I found these photographs deeply moving - many of the children shown would be about my age (I was born in 1967) and it is a poignant reminder of how things were.
One thing really did jar, though ... one of the captions refers to a "buggy".
The photograph does NOT feature a buggy. It features a PUSHCHAIR. It was not until the 1980s that the word pushchair began to fall out of use, as new designs of pushchair began to appear which were dubbed "baby buggies" to make them appear swish and up-to-the-minute and must-have accessories. So much more modern than a staid old pushchair, don't you think? By the 90s, of course, "baby buggy" had been contracted to "buggy", and nobody ever spoke of a pushchair.
But in the 1960s and 1970s? It's a pushchair, every time.
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As a teenager in the 60's it didn't take me long to spot that the way to avoid poverty was to not have children until you could afford to house and feed them properly. Folk who produced too many babies when they were very young themselves invariably had a poor quality of life, I noticed.
By the mid60's it was perfectly possible to avoid unwise pregnancies and thus poor housing etc.
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As a teenager in the 60's it didn't take me long to spot that the way to avoid poverty was to not have children until you could afford to house and feed them properly. Folk who produced too many babies when they were very young themselves invariably had a poor quality of life, I noticed.
By the mid60's it was perfectly possible to avoid unwise pregnancies and thus poor housing etc.
The husband of Cathy (in Cathy Come Home) had a steady job and presumably felt in a position to afford a house and feed a family. He was sensible enough......until he lost his job, when all his caution went out of the window.
We all live in the hope that something catastrophic will not happen to throw us into a really difficult situation.
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Yes, Igor, I doagree.
Maybe I sounded a bit harsh.
Perhaps I should have added that families are much more secure if the wife/mother also works and can provide an additional income stream.
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Until 1968 I lived in flats similar to those in those photos. And I lived in Sth London.
We had no bathroom, and our toilet was a bricked off corner in the kitchen. Mum always said she could sit on the loo and cook the dinner!
They were bug, rat and mice infested. But we were happy. Very cold in the winter, especially when money was tight and my parents could not afford coal.
When we moved to a flat at the Elephant and Castle that had a bathroom, it was sheer luxury!!!
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I have not seen the article but when we grew up in the 50's / 60's we had coal fires and no central heating, no washing machine and in my early years a larder in the pantry instead of a fridge. When my grandmother came to live with us, Mum had her first washing machine and we had a big fridge.
The village we lived in had 4 grocer shops, 2 butchers, a chemist shop and a bakery as well as a shoe shop, a newsagent and a separate post office, and a sweet shop and every week we had a visit by a baker in a van, a fishmonger and a horse and cart came laden with fruit and vegetables. We were never short of food but we bought as we needed it rather than loading up from supermarkets ,which did not exist. Treats were for Christmas and birthdays only.We could buy small quantities as we needed them and we ate simply but well. We did not have many clothes apart from our school uniforms and Sunday best. I made a lot of my clothes as a teenager and was proud to wear them even though they were not bought.
When I became a student, my first year was spent in comfortable digs but in the second year three of us ventured into a flat. The kitchen was filfthy and we spent three days cleaning the grease from the cooker and floor, the bath was heated by a geezer fed with old pennies. Each time it fired up the lid blew in the air and it was quite a terrifying experience - a bath cost 4 pennies. There was a metal framed sofa bed which had a habit of folding up unexpectedly and all the furniture was old and battered but it was home for a year. We brightened it up by decorating large boxes with magazine cuttings and turning them into bookcases or waste bins and covered up the walls with big posters.
The next flat we had was half a house with a cellar that filled up with rainwater in the winter and we could hear the mice. Again the furniture was sparse and old and I recall my first bed had a horsehair mattress which I replaced as soon as I could with a cheap mattress which three of us carried through the streets as we could not afford delivery costs. I painted the dull and scuffed boards a nice pale blue and kept warm over a little convector heater with my duffle coat over the bed to keep warm. there was no central heating, no washing machine and a shared fridge. We never thought of ourselves as poor but had very little money to spare, walked everywhere to save money ( no need to diet then!! ) and supplemented our income with little part time jobs that were advertised from time to time in the student union. I found one which gave me sixteen shillings a week - enough to have a few treats. By the end of term there was little money left and it is amazing how good a fried onion and pea sandwich can taste!!
Married life in a rented flat started for us - with our bed, my wardrobe from home, a second hand three piece suite with one collapsed chair, an old television cabinet to hold our food , two fold up garden chairs and a little table with a hole in the centre that had been used in the garden with a parasol. After a few months we could afford a rented television and bought a spin drier and a fridge on twelve months instalments and a pre-used cooker. We had very little cash to spare, did not smoke and went out infrequently but we did not expect to have everything at once.
I do not dispute the fact that there is poverty now and it is very hard for people to manage on low wages with high living costs and things have changed very much since I was young but we did struggle at times and did without things rather than go into debt.
The freecycle sites and freegle sites are great now if you do need things and it is amazing what you can do with old furniture and a can of paint.
Today, it is very hard for young people to start off in homes of their own and some landlords can exploit people with high rents and there should be more social housing so that people can live in their homes at reasonable rates. Life in the old days was probably better and we did learn how to live within our means because we were not able to have everything we wanted and had to learn to wait for things as children.
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GillyJ,
Without hijacking this thread, or jumping on my soapbox (too much), I have to say the difference today to back then is that today people largely don't want second-hand, or hand-me-downs, and how can we really feel sympathy for the poorer sections of society when they all have mobile phones, big flat screen TV's, etc.?
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Some may, but they don't "all" have those luxury items. Don't believe everything that the right-wing tabloid press tells you
(you don't really believe everything you read in the newspapers, do you?)
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GillyJ,
Without hijacking this thread, or jumping on my soapbox (too much), I have to say the difference today to back then is that today people largely don't want second-hand, or hand-me-downs, and how can we really feel sympathy for the poorer sections of society when they all have mobile phones, big flat screen TV's, etc.?
There isn't the same poverty today, thankfully, but publicity like this is politically motivated so when attacks come on the poorer sections of society, sympathy is much reduced, as they aren't that poor!
The state of housing in those pictures are appalling, and they seem to be slum dwellings. Mostly slums in the UK were demolished in 1950's and 1960's, but many survived longer. If you look at back-to-back houses, mostly built in 18th & 19thC due to great influx into cities, these were typical slums, but they haven't all gone. Back-to-backs were built up to 1909, when they were banned by a government act as they were deemed "unfit for human occupation", though in Leeds at least there was a last minute rush of applications pushed through which saw them being built up to 1930's (http://www.leedscivictrust.org.uk/?idno=1166).
The article does say that the photographs were done for Shelter to highlight poverty, but it was also opportunistic as many were getting demolished - I wonder if they have been? Leeds, currently, has the highest portion of back-to-back housing still standing in the UK, some 30,000 houses. This was not because any desire to keep them (though it seems there is an affinity with them, such that the National Trust spent £3m restoring some in Birmingham (http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g186402-d595860-Reviews-Birmingham_Back_to_Backs-Birmingham_West_Midlands_England.html)!) but budget constraints curtailed their demolition.
When I see talk of affordable housing schemes, I often fume - affordable to who? New builds in Leeds tend to be well over £100k, and whilst schemes like shared ownership can reduce the mortgage demands you have to look at back-to-backs that go for £60-80k (unless you want one in the more sought after areas of Leeds then its double that, at least) and its no wonder why they remain popular starter homes. They will continue to be the bane of the Council who would dearly like to demolish them all, some about a mile or so from me were deemed unsustainable boarded up for several years, partially demolished in 2012 (http://theleedscitizen.wordpress.com/2012/11/30/empty-homes-week-2012-the-story-of-the-garnets-leeds-11/) to make temporary green space (i.e. wasteland until they build over them) that's still green space.
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Some may, but they don't "all" have those luxury items. Don't believe everything that the right-wing tabloid press tells you
(you don't really believe everything you read in the newspapers, do you?)
No, I don't believe everything I read or see in any mainstream media. That's why I get my news information from a variety of sources. I want to hear what is going on in the world, not what "they" want me to know.
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I think I agree with you that expectations are very different now. There were no mobile phones, not every house had a tv of any type and you could only buy alcohol from an off licence so most people did not drink. Our culture has changed a lot and there are many people in my locality who do recycle and are prepared to use hand me downs until they are in a position to buy new things.
Everyone is different but I do think that affordable housing is anything but that to the average wage earner.
Rented property is snapped up the minute it is on the market and yes it is very hard for some people to have an acceptable standard of living.
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Some may, but they don't "all" have those luxury items. Don't believe everything that the right-wing tabloid press tells you
(you don't really believe everything you read in the newspapers, do you?)
No, I don't believe everything I read or see in any mainstream media. That's why I get my news information from a variety of sources. I want to hear what is going on in the world, not what "they" want me to know.
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The point has been missed, those right wing papers control over 80% of the press and much of the TV news
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HI
"There were no mobile phones . . . . . "
Just street boxes.
People rang the nearest street box to the person/family they wanted to speak to.
With any luck someone (passing) would answer it AND go to the requisite house door to say "you have a call".
Then,
there were the shared lines, where upstairs would always be on the line.
Then,
when the family got their own line, daughter "Irene" would be in the hall "all evening" talking to her latest beau.
He'd be in the street box, 25 yards away, with loads of pennies frantically pushing button A.
Or, was it Button B?
Ray
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He'd be in the street box, 25 yards away, with loads of pennies frantically pushing button A.
Or, was it Button B?
Ray
If you knew how to do it, you didn't need any pennies at all - you could use the phonebox for free ;)
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Message to BumbleB . . . . .
Tap, tap, tap, shhhhhhhhhhh. ;D
Brings back so many memories.
Ray
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. . . . . and then there was that poor boy Bill Stickers.
Once we got the street boxes they started picking on him.
He WILL be prosecuted.
::)
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Have just looked at the awful photos, and no you can not believe all you see in the newspapers, I am not denying there was dreadful poverty, but some of the photos are false! In the first photo the woman is pushing a very Bonny baby in a brand new pram..... another photo it says a poor child in poor grubby clothes, but look at the spotless white socks and brand new shiny shoes.... ;D ;D ;D
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I was a student in Salford in 1969-71 and walked over those wastelands to get to our student house. I don't remember it being so bad. Clothes in the bedrooms got a bit damp, as did the bedding, but then we were young and didn't have a family to worry about.
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If I sound like a Victorian Moralist then I plead guilty.
I arrived in America as one of the “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” people. Not at Ellis Island but at Port Everglades, Florida the only person on the ship with an immigrant visa.
A month later I was standing in the grocery store checkout and observed a man who paid for his groceries with "food stamps" (government coupons to buy food) then then he handed over cash to pay for his cigarettes. I took a dislike to food stamps that very day.
Not all poverty is caused by lifestyle but how many of the poor:
Smoke tobacco
Drink alcohol
Use illegal drugs
Have tattoos
Have the latest electronic gadget
Gamble
All with money which they have so little.
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. . . . . and then there was that poor boy Bill Stickers.
Once we got the street boxes they started picking on him.
He WILL be prosecuted.
::)
My mum was a northerner (Macclesfield) and when she first came to London in 1947 and worked up town,travelling there by train,she felt really sorry for this Bill Stickers bloke and asked my grandma,her future mum in law,what he'd done and why was he going to be prosecuted.
Carol
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"but how many of the poor ... "
Dunno, barry. Probably about as many as finance their vices with income derived from, say, crop subsidies. They amount to around $20 billion per year in the US, but maybe you don't consider them to be welfare payments.
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The death of William Posters [Alan Sillitoe]