ECN Forum Forums Photo Discussion Forums Electrical Nostalgia Attitudes to domestic equipment

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!].



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!

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.

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.
It was sent to the scrap metal dealers, although I did try to put a bid in on it.

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!

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.

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*).

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.