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Posted By: pauluk Attitudes to domestic equipment - 06/24/06 12:12 PM
An interesting article from June 1964 about British reticence in adopting new equipment:
https://www.electrical-contractor.net/pc/Attitude1964.jpg
Posted By: SvenNYC Re: Attitudes to domestic equipment - 06/26/06 02:16 PM
I find it hard to believe that in 20th century Great Britain, people in urban/suburban environments were still cooking on hearth fires instead of using cookers connected to town or bottled gas.

That's the kind of thing I expect to see in farm houses.
Posted By: classicsat Re: Attitudes to domestic equipment - 06/26/06 05:28 PM
A couple months ago I saw a series called "No. 57, The History Of A House", about a Regency era terrace house in Bristol UK. It never received elecricity until the 1960s, and that gas (not sure if town or bottled gas), at least for lighting in the 1900s, and I think in the 1930s a gas cooker.
Posted By: Trumpy Re: Attitudes to domestic equipment - 07/06/06 09:13 AM
Good Lord,
Haven't things changed as far as journalism is concerned, since 1964??. [Linked Image]
Blame the house-wife, indeed, you wouldn't get away with that sort of talk these days. [Linked Image]
These days, it's "Men??, who are they??."

[This message has been edited by Trumpy (edited 07-06-2006).]
Posted By: uksparx Re: Attitudes to domestic equipment - 07/08/06 04:12 PM
Well that's a relief to hear! After seeing the ad. for the new Terios on Daihatsu's NZ site, I thought you were still very sexist down there. The Terios being a small 4x4, the ad. says "4WD = For Women Drivers".
Posted By: djk Re: Attitudes to domestic equipment - 08/13/06 12:46 AM
I don't think many of them were cooking on fires. The gas cooker was pretty popular for a very long time.

Automatic washing machines and dryers took an unusually long time to become universal. There were still plenty of non-automatic machines in use in the 1970s!!
Posted By: pauluk Re: Attitudes to domestic equipment - 08/13/06 08:25 AM
Quote
There were still plenty of non-automatic machines in use in the 1970s!!

The "twin tub" machines remained popular here for a very long time.
Posted By: Kenbo Re: Attitudes to domestic equipment - 08/21/06 02:10 PM
My wife was using a twin tub washer untill the early 90s.

She still insists it got the clothes cleaner than an automatic machine and would have one back in an instant.......
Posted By: ricardian Re: Attitudes to domestic equipment - 02/26/10 04:36 PM
Originally Posted by SvenNYC
I find it hard to believe that in 20th century Great Britain, people in urban/suburban environments were still cooking on hearth fires instead of using cookers connected to town or bottled gas.

That's the kind of thing I expect to see in farm houses.

We moved into a brand-new council house in 1953 - I was 10 years old. The tiny kitchen had one gas ring and a gas-fired galvanised tub which was used to heat water for washing clothes. There was a built-in coal-fired range in the living room which consisted of a back-boiler (domestic hot water) and an oven at the side of the coal fire. Electric power sockets were few and far between; one in the main bedroom; none in the other bedroom; a double socket in the living room; and a single socket in the kitchen (we were posh, we had an electric kettle).
I've just (Feb 2010) discovered this forum - fascinating stuff!
Posted By: Alan Belson Re: Attitudes to domestic equipment - 02/27/10 11:31 PM
Welcome to ECN Bruce.

I was bought up in what would now be described as a poor 'working class' home, [ that is, we were permanently broke!] and I never saw anyone cooking over open fires as a boy except tramps [ er...hobos blush] - and boy scouts. We had a range, a blacked-iron coal fired oven with hot plates. Ma polished the living daylights out of it with 'Zebrite', a mixture of graphite and boot polish, so it shone like a mirror. It had to be managed like a steam engine, and could turn our entire 2 up 2 down into a hothouse while baking or boiling. Other days, if the wind was in the wrong direction, it just filled the place with smoke and sulferous smuts! Sukie [the kettle] sat whimpering and whispering on it 24/7 for the interminal rounds of tea partaken by the Brits in those times. Some models even had a tea-boiler with a brass tap to provide everlasting brews of the stuff! We had gas lights and took candles up to bed till the 'leccy was fitted in 1954.
Happy days!
Posted By: Alan Belson Re: Attitudes to domestic equipment - 02/28/10 12:52 AM
Here's the sort of range we had. Not this big of course. Ma was better looking too! Note the twin kettles for a continuous stream of tea!
There's a 'modern' gas ring at right, [emergency tea supply!].

[Linked Image from electrical-photos.com]

And 70 years later, I got the same idea! [Thumbnail, click to enlarge]. I made the kitchen units and counter-tops from Alder. This range has 6 propane gas hobs, 3 electric ovens,[one with a fan], an electric grill, an extractor with lighting and a programmer. Electric kettle at right. We had a Sukie, but I boiled it dry and the spout fell off! crazy
[Linked Image from electrical-photos.com]
Posted By: Texas_Ranger Re: Attitudes to domestic equipment - 03/03/10 07:16 PM
Out at the farm house we still have a wood fired tiled kitchen stove that looks quite similar to this one. It's perfect for getting the place warm quickly in winter!

Lighting it for the first time after summer, particularly when it's not that cold yet requires heating up the chimney, either by lighting paper in the cleanout door or using a blow torch. Otherwise the kitchen becomes unbearable with smoke.
Posted By: Trumpy Re: Attitudes to domestic equipment - 03/10/10 10:31 AM
Alan,
When my grand-parents moved to NZ after the War in 1952, they built a house in Temuka, oddly enough next door to the place that I grew up.
They had an Aga (sp?), oven and 3 "hot-plates" on the top.
It was fired by wood, the manufacturers reckoned it could also be fired by coal, by my dear grand-mother would have nothing of it, after all it would taint the taste of her Yorkshire puddings, no less.

Xmas day here used to be an interesting affair, it would be around 25-30C outside and you would walk into the Dining room/ kitchen and just about drop dead from the heat coming out of the Aga, everyone in the place would be drinking all sorts of things to try and keep the heat back.

One year, Aunt Mabel fell off of her chair on to the Xmas tree, she said it was caused by an earth-quake, but we all knew that it was Uncle Harry's home-brew.

After my grand-father passed away in 1998, the people that bought the place, tore the Aga out and replaced it with a gas hob/oven. mad
It was sent to the scrap metal dealers, although I did try to put a bid in on it.
Posted By: djk Re: Attitudes to domestic equipment - 05/02/10 01:27 AM
Originally Posted by SvenNYC
I find it hard to believe that in 20th century Great Britain, people in urban/suburban environments were still cooking on hearth fires instead of using cookers connected to town or bottled gas.

That's the kind of thing I expect to see in farm houses.


I don't think the author is referring to a fire used for cooking. Most houses did have gas cookers (stoves) in those days.

It was quite normal in houses built before about 1950 to have a fireplace in the kitchen. In my grandmother's house for example, which was built in about 1926, there's a fireplace with a backboiler (heats water) in the kitchen.

The author seemed to be implying that kitchen waste was often burnt in that fire rather than disposed of in the trash.

Waste disposal / garbage disposal units never really took off here at all. Even today, they're pretty unusual, most people just put food waste into the trash.

The author is definitely right about the houses of that era though. Many of them had very small kitchens which were totally impractical for installing appliances. Most of them at this stage would have been ripped out and completely modernised.

You have to remember that construction and home design sort of froze in time from 1939 until well after WWII had ended. So, many of the modern concepts of home design and domestic appliances arrived late and in many ways the UK and Ireland were sort of stuck in the 1930s right into the 1950s.

In Ireland, we started to see practically sized kitchens and utility rooms appearing in suburban houses really only from the 1950s onwards. That's around the same time that central heating started to become a standard feature of new-build homes too.

Both in Ireland and Britain central heating was very much an optional extra in older houses!

I do think that a combination of rationing and lack of money during WWII and after it in both countries had a huge impact on attitudes. People didn't spend money and put up with a lot more hardship in the home than they should have.

That generation, now in their 80s and 90s can be quite strange about seeing quite normal things as "unnecessary luxuries".

Continental Europe definitely picked-up faster, perhaps because there was an effort to reconstruct and pick up the pieces. The UK and Ireland kind of stumbled on after WWII returning to some kind of normality.

The UK and Ireland also had very uneven distributions of wealth until the 60s and 70s when the middle-class revolution started to happen. Working class people in these two islands had very low standards of living and really very few prospects of pulling themselves out of poverty as they'd no access to educational opportunities beyond 2nd level and faced a very rigid class system, particularly in England.

It's quite difficult to appreciate from the rose-tinted view of 2010 just how things were back then. People 'knew their station' and put up with a lot of misery for no good reason really.

Working class houses were most definitely small and basic.

It wasn't really until the late 1960s and even into the 1970s that you could have said that they were approaching normality and beginning to see serious consumerism blooming again.

That era also saw the class system in the UK beginning to crumble and a lot more social and financial mobility emerging.

It was quite a slow process though!
Posted By: Alan Belson Re: Attitudes to domestic equipment - 05/02/10 11:33 PM
When we moved into this ancient house 10 years ago we lived in the 'modernised' end, built c.1835. The kitchen was a conventional mix of french and english 70s-80s styles [ previous owner was English too]. Conventional european cabinets, halogen hob, electric oven, china sink, built in washer/diswasher/microwave, ceramic tiled worktop/counter. Then we started the remodel of the older end of the house, built 1669. It had been converted sometime in the past to a stable for percheron draft horses, but many of the old domestic arrangements remained. Cooking was done over an open fire, using a thing that looks like a suspended saw with big teeth. This allowed a pot to be raised or lowered over the charcoals to control heat, and we still have it for show. There was no chimney inside the house, smoke sticks to a wall once it impinges on it. The 'stack' starts in the loft with a corbelled-out stone built 'hood'. From the roof angle of 51 degrees, I'd say the original roof was thatch. We also discovered a crude 'oven' in the hearth wall- it had been infilled with stonework but was still full of charcoal, and looks like a mini pizza oven, you just lit a barbeque fire in it, heated the stones, brushed out the ash and cooked. We also had a bread oven in the garden, a much larger version of the above type. Sadly the old brick roof arch had collapsed, but there are many still existing locally. These are big, perhaps 10 feet x 15 feet with a roof over, working space inside and a roof over all. The oven is about 5 feet in diameter. Fuelled by bundles of twigs. Unlike today, bread was baked in huge batches and eaten over many weeks, stale as a brick. That is why, even today, the french dunk their bread or toasts in their coffee at breakfast! Every large village had a lavatoire, a large communal covered area with a stream running through it for washing clothes. Soap was a mix of animal fat and lye.

My neighbor's house is older, [mid 1500s] and has a carved granite sink set in a wall, with a shelf for a pitcher. Sadly, it seems that most of the original owners of our little hamlet of 4 houses would have been considered bourgeoisie, and 15 of them in our commune were garotted in the Revolution.
Posted By: Texas_Ranger Re: Attitudes to domestic equipment - 05/03/10 05:37 PM
Quote
Waste disposal / garbage disposal units never really took off here at all. Even today, they're pretty unusual, most people just put food waste into the trash.

In Germany (don't know about Austria) they're flat out illegal - you're not allowed to put food waste into the sewers (unless they have been processed by humans *g*).
Posted By: forqnc Re: Attitudes to domestic equipment - 05/04/10 09:16 PM
Originally Posted by djk


That generation, now in their 80s and 90s can be quite strange about seeing quite normal things as "unnecessary luxuries".


My Grandma (87 years old) Still has a fireplace in her small Kitchen, which warms her Back Boiler for domestic hot water. I can still remember her and Granddad, doing laundry together, in the early eighties using a Wringer before pegging it outside to dry.
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