[user104658]

And there are "starving kids in Africa" who would kill for a deep fried battered potato or a bit of bread soaked in gravy.

Comparing ye-olde-timey poverty to modern poverty in an attempt to make it seem like poor people today "have it easy" is both arrogant, and completely pointless. The social and economic contexts are completely different. You're right in that it "doesn't compare" but only because it flat out can't be compared. It wasn't "as bad as" or "easier" OR "harder" - it was an entirely different situation.

[smudgie]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

And there are "starving kids in Africa" who would kill for a deep fried battered potato or a bit of bread soaked in gravy.

Comparing ye-olde-timey poverty to modern poverty in an attempt to make it seem like poor people today "have it easy" is both arrogant, and completely pointless. The social and economic contexts are completely different. You're right in that it "doesn't compare" but only because it flat out can't be compared. It wasn't "as bad as" or "easier" OR "harder" - it was an entirely different situation.

Our going back in time comparing our lives then to now has nothing to do with arrogance TS, it is no different to your little tale of your hard times
We have all bad them, or at least fear that we will at some point in life.
The gist of the thread has been the difference in poverty in the 40s and modern day, so hearing people's actual experiences in the years in between is more real to me than reading some statistics written down by somebody I don't know a thing about.

[user104658]

Originally Posted by smudgie

Our going back in time comparing our lives then to now has nothing to do with arrogance TS, it is no different to your little tale of your hard times
We have all bad them, or at least fear that we will at some point in life.
The gist of the thread has been the difference in poverty in the 40s and modern day, so hearing people's actual experiences in the years in between is more real to me than reading some statistics written down by somebody I don't know a thing about.

No,what is being said (quite explicitly) is that poverty "in those days" was real poverty and that the idea of poverty today is somehow laughable in comparison. A sort of "they wouldn't know hardship if it smacked them in the face, we knew REAL hard times" sort of thing. It's dismissive, disrespectful, arrogant, and shows a huge misunderstanding of how different the issues faced by people in poverty today are compared to yesteryear. Neither has it easier, it's completely different.

Incase you're going to suggest that's not what was being implied:

Originally Posted by kirklancaster

What is regarded as 'poverty' today is NOWHERE near the REAL poverty of the 40's, 50's, AND 60's.

I KNOW - I lived through part of the 50's in REAL POVERTY.

It wasn't just implied it was stated outright.

[kirklancaster]

[QUOTE=Toy Soldier;8523727]And there are "starving kids in Africa" who would kill for a deep fried battered potato or a bit of bread soaked in gravy.

Yes - and there were "starving kids in Africa" who would kill for a deep fried battered potato or a bit of bread soaked in gravy" back in the 40's and '50's, only far, far more of them, and because we did not have widespread television and the internet, 'Public Perception' and 'Awareness' was extremely LOW, and because Beveridge's 'Welfare State'' was in it's infancy and the poor here had their very own 'fight to survive', the 'Working Classes' ability to 'contribute' aid to "starving kids in Africa" was virtually non-existant.

Over the past 40 years Africa has received $400billion of aid from the developed world and that figure does not include the hundreds of millions of pounds of 'non official' donations given by the public and raised by events such as Band Aid etc.

The "past 40 years" means from the late 1970's onwards, not the 40's, 50's 60's and early 70's - and this is solely due to the reasons outlined above - because 'Public Perceptions' to poverty HAS increasingly greatly improved over the past 40 years.

"Comparing ye-olde-timey poverty to modern poverty in an attempt to make it seem like poor people today "have it easy" is both arrogant, and completely pointless. The social and economic contexts are completely different. You're right in that it "doesn't compare" but only because it flat out can't be compared. It wasn't "as bad as" or "easier" OR "harder" - it was an entirely different situation."

I'll tell you what is 'arrogant' T.S. - 'Arrogant' is when one person denies, or denigrates the GENUINE DIRECT PERSONAL EXPERIENCES of another person without having shared those experiences.

I LIVED through the end of the 50's and through the early 60's and I was not some unintelligent or unread or unaware little kid trapped in a unique 'bubble' of poverty - I was POLITICALLY AWARE from a very early age, and aware of the great SOCIAL INEQUALITY which was prevalent at the time.

MY EXPERIENCE of poverty was not 'peculiar' to my family, because there were countless rows of squalid Victorian crumbling red brick, 'two down three up' terrace houses where families existed in poverty - DESPITE one or BOTH parents working hard for a pittance.

The windows were draughty Victorian sliding sashes where ice clung to the INSIDES during Winter. The interiors were lit by gas mantles, and hot water - such as it was - was provided by a tiny steel box back boiler heated by a coal fire in an open range fire.

And a 'Bathroom'? LOL. A galvanised tin bath half-filled with tepid water (the best that the small coal-fired back boiler could do) placed in the only living room in front of the coal fire, and a piece of old flannel and bar of carbolic soap was the 'Bathroom'. Oh, and we kids HAD to get in the previous kid's bath water.

Coarse old khaki army blankets and even a couple of army greatcoats were used to keep warm in bed - because shared body heat from 2 to a single bed wasn't enough to do the trick.

A coal fired 'Set Pot' - a huge cast iron inverted bell - was used to boil clothes one day and for cooking potato 'stew' in the next. Wet clothes were put through a hand 'mangle' wringer prior to being put out to 'dry' on a washing line strung across the rear access 'road' because we had no back gardens - just a 'coal house' and OUTSIDE toilets, where the 'toilet roll' was cut up squares of old newspapers hung by a nail on the ill-fitting planked door of the loo.

All cooking was done on two cast iron paddles fixed to the fire grate on which one stood pans or the kettle and which then were pushed over the fire.

Baking was done in an oven which was incorporated into the fireplace.

No fuel - no cooking.

There were NO fitted carpets, just 'damp, uneven, Yorkshire slab floors over which 'Peggy Rugs' - home made rugs fashioned from cut up strips of old clothing punched through a piece of old gunny sackloth - were laid.

There was no central heating - just the coal fire which filled the dingy rabbit hutch of a room with toxic smoke every time the wind blew down the chimney.

Mice, cockroaches and 'bed bugs' were prevalent - in the cleanliest of households.

I will never forget the chorus of severely violent coughing at 4.30 am every morning as numerous miners awoke to get ready for their shift at the local 'pit', or how I clutched a mug of tea with no milk and no sugar as I watched from my window at them them cycling down the street under the street gas lamps on their way to work with their metal 'snap tins' of pork dripping sandwiches, or 'potted beef' if they were really 'well off', in their saddle bags.

Mortality rates among the poor 'working class' were much higher then than now - I lost two sisters, one at birth and one in early infancy - and it was never due to heroin overdoses and rarely due to chronic alcoholism. Diseases which killed the poor in their thousands do not do so now.

TV's, Playstations and Designer Fashion clothes and accessories were unknown, as were take-away meals and holidays.

Do not make me laugh by accusing me of arrogance or by maintaining that the poverty we know in the UK today is worse, as bad as, or is 'different' to that which I KNEW in the late '50's and early '60's, because THERE IS NO COMPARISON. What is deemed poverty today would have been sheer 'middle class' bliss back then.