How poor were you?

I'm the youngest of four, and I remember my mum telling me once about how they were hard up when I was born. They visited my dads parents and my nan hid a shovel full of coal in the bottom of my pram (remember those big old prays with the hollow bit under the mattress?). She had to do it on the quiet as apparently my granddad (don't remember him) used to say that if my parents wanted a big family they should provide for them, and not look for handouts from him. Not a nice man according to my mum.

Ii enjoyed annodomini's 3 yorkshire men sketch.
It isn't the financial poverty that stands out in this thread, it's the number of people who had emotional poverty, or neglect in their lives.
I don't mean to diminish any of the stories here by commenting that whilst living conditions generally are so much improved, other aspects of tough childhoods are not. Some of us had parents who drank, or suffered ptsd because we grew up with the backdrop of two world wars. So many children today are living in households where adults are addicted or dependent on drugs and alcohol. The stresses on young families now are different but they're stresses none the less.

Fascinating thread. What a treasure trove of social history.
We certainly weren't poor or at least not nearly as poor as some of the posters. Life in the 50s was not much fun though. Looking back we were a sad stressed household. Were parents depressed? I wonder. Food on the table but no extras. No pocket money. No sweets.
The only shafts of sunlight were visits to grandparents. Like others I lost myself in books. The world of Enid Blyton seemed so wonderful to me.
There are other forms of poverty than the purely material.

I have read the postings with great fascination and I share many of the experiences having grown up in the East End of London in the early 50s. Its rather galling now when people tell us how easy we had everything but its all relative isn't it. I'm glad to know my children didn't have the problems we had with poverty. I didn't starve and I had hardworking parents but certainly no holidays, treats or nice clothes. I remember how much we shared whatever we had with relatives who all lived nearby and the lovely occasions when we all got together a big East End family which has all gone now or those who are left are scattered far and wide. I remember being put to bed with several other cousins in a big bed with coats on and hearing the grown ups chattering and singing usually at Christmas. I try to focus on that rather than all the nasty stuff - I remember childhood solely in black and white no colour at all I find that strange.

Recently, I had a conversation with a young relative and we discussed the idea of the working poor. He regarded himself as being in that category.
He rents a nice, centrally heated property, smokes, runs 2 cars, has the requisite white goods in the home, has a plasma screen TV and the children have more toys than you can imagine. The fridge and freezer are full of good food and all the children have cupboards full of clothes and at least 3 pairs of shoes each.
What, in his view, made them poor, was the fact that they could not afford a holiday.
As previously mentioned, definitions of poverty have changed over time.

This is a fascinating thread, mainly because it illustrates the vast improvement in living conditions in about 60 years or so.

I was working as a social worker in Birmingham in the early 60s and visited some pretty poor properties, but still they were an improvement on some of the accommodation being described here; so the rise in living standards must have been pretty speedy after the war. I did however spend my weekends decorating properties for people in poor accommodation and we would often find it very hard as the plaster would peel from the walls as we put the paint on.

Our first accommodation when we married was a bedsit and that was very small. We were then very poor as we were both still students; my OH had no grant (he had had one to do a science degree, but went on to do medicine after that and he could not get another grant), but I had a grant from the Home Office to do a post-grad and was able to put my OH as a dependent on my grant application - I think that was why he married me! The grant was about £350 a year - I would save £1 for the weekend and it was enough to buy a fair bit of the week's food including a small joint for Sunday!

These memories are so interesting I feel that Gransnet should make a book of them all.

I know we find things to grumble about, but we really are so much better off and the definition of poverty has changed enormously. I think that our GC do not really believe us when we talk about our childhoods.

Anyone remember gas fridges? - we had one with ornate curved legs, like a piece of living room furniture. The pilot light was for ever blowing out when we shut the kitchen door!

By the time I was born in 1946 my parents had suffered terrible loss. Three of their parents had died (they weren't particularly old. mid sixties and very early 70s) and mum and dad had lost a baby girl ten months before I was born. Dad couldn't settle after being in N. Africa during the war. They became increasingly unsettled, moved to a new city and became financially worse and worse off because dad couldn't find work. We ended up being emergency housed in a low rise council block. A very low point was one winter (the winter of 1966/7 when we woke up to find that the inside kitchen wall was a mass of tiny icicles. It was the first time I remember them being scared because although the kitchen wall was pretty it meant that the inside of the flat had a temperature of below freezing! Poor dad died at 56 and I'm sure the war and the aftermath was a contributory factor. Despite all this I was often very happy as a child and enjoyed school. We always had food on the table, and I enjoyed going to Jumble Sales with mum to find clothes. I had sixpence a week pocket money which I spent on sweets and comics. I was often cold but never hungry thank goodness and being hard up as a child has hopefully made me resilient to what life throws at me.

I've remembered our horrible coke fire and how difficult it was to light. We saved up and had a gas fire installed, it cost £20 with fitting. We were so happy the first night we just sat and looked it.

We had a miserable childhood......when i talk to my chidren they say oh mam tell me aout when you were poor! I am the youngest of 11.....As I am Irish my father spent most of his money in the pub fell in the door abused my mother and often put us out to walk the streets in the cold.my mother was a lady she showed us very little love ,,,she was so beaten down. We lived in a 3 bed council house fire in sitting room ,freezing bedrooms...Always had fuel and heat as she worked in evenings..She died at 53 I was 16 then.as my siblings all were older this did make things easier in the60s as they got jobs. One by one they left and I was alone with my father and his drinking .....I was terrified of him . I met my lovely husband at 17....My father hated him because he knew he would take me away ,.His family became mine...At 58 our life good ....

wobbly I take your point about poor meaning not having food. We always had food, I don't remember ever being hungry. But what made me realise we were poor, was when I went to other children's homes. I grew up mostly in a one-bedroomed flat with the lounge being divided up with a masonite frame (my grandad built it) to make an extra bedroom for my mother, sister and I to share, my brother being in the "proper bedroom". So for me being poor was about accommodation.

Katy and grannyactivist your tales remind me of Angela's Ashes ... you describe poverty of the spirit added to poverty of material things.

As for others, reading played a huge role in my life in terms of escapism.

My mother swore off men after my father left, but wasn't bitter, just a bit broken-hearted. She was a divorcee at 27 and that was her for the rest of her life.

A Tin Bath by the fire,with a airing rail draped with Towels for privacy , outside loo and outside water pump ,exchange and mart being cut into squares and threaded on string for loo paper , no phone , no heating beyond a coal fire,Toast with a proper toasting fork (ooh it was lush) connie Onnie sandwiches and shuggy butties, Lino on the bedroom floors , frost inside the windows , home made clothes , taking washing to my grans as she had a copper with a fire underneath ,and a proper dolly tub, washboard and mangle.
Ooh and cinder tea when we were ill , yuk .

These stories are so fascinating. It seems like another world but I empathise with many other contributors. In some ways I was lucky because my father worked as a signalman for British Railways. We lived in two different railway houses, the first having oil lamps, a fire to cook on, a shared outside tap and also a shared outside chemical toilet. The second seemed luxurious with a cold tap and sink indoors, a cooking range on the fire but still an outside chemical toilet. Both houses had walls running with damp.

For the fire my mother used to gather coal which had fallen from the trains, usually at night. The story goes that one night when heavily pregnant she brought a lump of coal home that she could not lift in daylight it was so huge!

We too had heavy coats on the bed which were issued by the NUR (National Union of Railwaymen). Dad never wore them but I was fascinated by the brass buttons.

I think other people thought we were well off as we went on holiday to my paternal grandparents on the train, about 40 miles away. They lived in (to us) a luxurious council house. We also visited my mother's sisters who lived in Ireland. All the sisters had owned the family home since the death of their parents when they were very young. It had the bonus of being near the seaside!

These 'holidays' were possible as my father had a small number of 'free' tickets each year which included sailing on the Irish ferry.

I remember always being hungry. We never had extras like biscuits or squash but occasionally had a banana for tea! Oh and the ice patterns on the windows. They were beautiful. From about the age of 9 years it was my job to light the fire in the morning. I so remember the cold!!

grannyactivist I too was a voracious reader and I longed for the opportunity to go to boarding school or be an orphan as they always seemed to have such adventures!

I wonder what our children and grandchildren will look back on in years to come.

I've noted before that Katyk and I must have had very similar childhoods and indeed I could have written some identical sentences:

My father was also a violent, abusive, womanising drunkard who worked when he felt like it and regularly beat my mother, but he was English. When I was 5 and my siblings were 7, 6, and 3 my mother left us with my father to live with a man she'd met that day; he turned out to be a violent, drunken Irishman and two years later mum returned with him in tow - he stayed around to father 3 more children and then he left and mum met a Scottish man and had one more baby (8 in all)! (True story, honestly.)
We never had holidays, occasionally had days out with my grandparents - but we were beyond poor. Someone said there were no benefits in those days, but there was means tested National Assistance for the very poor and I remember going to the assessment with my mother and being asked to take off my shoes so the holes in them could be inspected. We were so badly neglected during my mother's 2 year absence that on her return we had malnutrition, impetigo, lice and scabies. We had to go to the local clinic to be de-loused and have a special bath (at the clinic) to kill the scabies, then we were painted with something for the scabies and something else that was purple for the impetigo.

I used to devour books and imagine myself living the lives I read about. Enid Blyton taught me about having adventures and the importance of good manners and other middle class writers taught me what life (in my view then) was supposed to be like for children. It didn't include hiding behind the sofa from the rent man or running to the phone box in my underwear to call the police when mum was being battered again. It didn't mean tearing up bits of lino to stick in the electric meter when mum had gone out for the evening and left us in the dark with no money to feed the meter.

For the sake of fairness I should say that mum was left chronically short of money because her menfolk drank it all and she tried to do her best with what little she had.

It was a horrible childhood in many more ways than I've written about here, but story books saved me. I really believe that. From reading books I knew there was something better than the life I had and I aspired to that better life; the life I'm living now is the life I dreamed of as a child. And more importantly, my children have been given the life I dreamed of. They didn't have lots of material things, but they never went without necessities; their parents were never in debt; they've never seen a parent drunk or fighting and they've made lots of good memories.

We had stew quite a lot but my mother called it 'casserole' because she cooked it in the oven in a Pyrex dish and made a rice pudding at the same time.

Iwas brought up in a council house my father died when I was 4yrs my mum worked
I was the youngest of 6 .we were poor but loved and happy . We played out with kids in neighbourhood some had more than us but it didn't matter . We kept warm because we had to share beds and we put coats on top of blankets and used newspaper for toilet roll . I remember eating lots of stew which I didn't particularly like . We only got sweets when we took bottles back to shop for our neighbours . We walked everywhere
I remember being happy so no complaints from me .

Much the same for me, as for many on here, a poor upbringing with only one parent.
However my Mother was very loving and did her best for us, and there were worse households (dirty ones, for example.)We always had enough to eat (just) and played out in all weathers and walked everywhere.If we ever had pennies for bus fare we walked and spent it on sweeties. Certainly had my share of the ruler at school, usually for being late ( wandering through fields on the way to school and not knowing what time it was.)

Interesting how frequently grandparents helped out

I started life in 1949 in a tiny rented terrace with outside toilet. Just me and my mum as my father had died 5months before my birth. I'm told that my mum couldn't afford the rent and we went to live with my maternal grandmother. When I was just 3 my mum died of TB and my grandmother became my legal guardian. I don't remember her getting benefits other than a widows pension and guardians allowance. I remember coats on beds, oven shelves wrapped in old jumpers put in bed. Grandma carrying a shovel of burning fire upstairs to warm the room before bedtime.
No one on the street had any more than any one else. We had fun.
The garden furniture was a milk crate with a cushion on ? I enjoyed my childhood but I wish things had been different.
I've enjoyed the memories whilst writing this, but it's made me sad (in a nice way).

I would consider poor to mean not having food on the table, I have never been in that situation. Not able to afford what I would have liked, but as ones income rises so does ones expectations so nothing changes.

I'm just watching Slum Britain 50:Years On. The original pictures are from 1968. It is hard to believe.

Not as bad as some on here, but until I was well into my teens there was never any spare money. We had no TV until the early 60s, when I was 11.
When I very first met my dh, one of things we had in common (apart from both being one of four with pretty broke parents) was that the only times we ever had orange squash or chocolate biscuits was at our birthday parties, or at other people's houses!
It was a good start, and here we still are, over 40 years later...

I wasn't looking for sympathy kitty but that's very kind of you. Somehow I survived it

Looking back we were poor but i didn't realise it i guess. We always had plenty to eat , mum was a fantastic cook and as dad worked on a farm we use to go shooting for rabbits and pigeons with the farmers permission of course. We had chickens for eggs and meat, a goat for milk and we grew lots of potatoes and other veggies. We had logs to burn in the big farmhouse kitchen we had but the rest of the house was freezing with ice on the inside of windows. We never went on holiday or had days out. We sometimes got school uniform for Christmas presents with a couple of other bits, selection boxes and some smellies. It was only when i went to senior school that i realised how poor we were when i mixed with lots of other children who use to go aboard for holidays and went swimming and to the cinema etc at the weekends. Our weekends were spent helping in the garden and around the house and farm. I think my early life has made me a frugal person now as i know you can survive with very little as long as you have food, family, friends and at least one warm room!!

And we are supposed to be the 'privileged generation'!

I remember the ice on the inside of the windows. It made lovely ferny patterns. Getting dressed in the morning was a very quick process! No wonder we had to wear liberty bodices over the vest and under the clothes. There was still rationing when I was a young child so sweets were still hard to come by.

The first place DH and I rented after getting married had a damp problem. In the winter, the blankets on the bed were covered in a film of moisture first thing in the morning. I had horrendous aches in my joints. We didn't have central heating until we moved house with 3 young children in 1980. What luxury!

We always had plenty of food to eat and my dad grew all our vegetables in the back of our nanna's huge back garden,we where lucky as my uncle owned the local butchers and my nanna ran the local fish mongers,
We lived in a 3 bed terraced which dad bought when he came out of the Navy after the war just before he met my mum,he paid just under £500.00 for it he was the only one out of his brothers and sisters to ever own property but he worked very hard on the docks and mum worked in the local laundry,grandpa looked after us when nanna ran the shop he walked us to meet mum every night after she finished work.Mum used to sew all our dresses herself and we all had the same pattern and colour which meant my youngest sister (there where 4 of us & my twin brother)always had the same dress for four years as we all grew out of them at different times,we also had to wear big bows that matched the dresses to tie up our ringlets so we did have a happy well fed childhood compared to others.