On C4 right now, will watch again. Turns out to be more interesting than I thought it would be - only one thing, it makes out that as soon as the new gadgets came out, they become commonplace - what a load of bollocks that is.
Cheers - caught the last 2 mins, so I'll flip over to 4+1 and watch it.
Doesn't look as if there is a repeat, recording on Ch4 + 1, missed the first few minutes. Part 1 of 3 in the series.
When my great-grandmother got a twin-tub on HP she got her brother-in-law to add another tap and drain in the kitchen so she didn't have to drag it out and hook it up to the sink. She still had it when she died in 1984. My school girlfriend's parents inthe 1980s didn't have a fridge.
And I've always wondered how valid this "men never went in the kitchen" thing was. Most of my ancestors on my mother's side were fishermen, and if you couldn't cook you starved.
JGH
My father - born around 1900 - washed and dried the lunchtime dishes every single day. He also gave his unopened pay packet to mother every Friday.
My mother never went out to work, but looked after the home and kids. But had full control over the family income and outgoings - father simply got some pocket money.
I think they balanced out running the home pretty well between them - mother certainly never complained. Of course these days when so often both parents go to work (or both not) it's a different matter.
That's what's really needed to operate one efficiently. A floor drain is also a good ideas as inevitably there are drips.
Flats I moved into in 1988 and 1994 came with a twin-tub.
But in a galley, not a kitchen?
Owain
In the 60s Dad's salary, which was roughly the national average income, paid the mortgage on a nice semi in a pleasant area with a reasonably comfortable lifestyle for us (2 cars, washing machine and a TV.). Just the mortgage payments on that house now would be a bit more than the national average income, assuming the same percentage deposit.
Nowadays, in most areas, two incomes are needed just to keep up with the bills, especially if there are children. I noticed a two bedroom flat in Oxford being advertised at the weekend at a rent of about £15,000 per year. £300(ish) per week sounds *so* much less...
Over the last few decades, wages haven't kept up with property prices.
The kitchen is for cleaning engine parts... everyone knows that!
My great-uncle on my father's side was a batchelor for 95 years, made very nice sponge cakes. My grandather (his brother-in-law) was the complete opposite, expected my nanan to do everything. When she had a stroke he got me & my dad to replace the gas cooker with an electric one "because she can't manage the gas any more". Never thought of doing the cooking himself. After my nanan died I think he lived on toast and baked beans until he enrolled on a home cooking course at college ;)
On my mother's side my great-grandmother was widowed with a two-week-old daughter in 1918, and worked full time for the next 40 years, her brothers all knew how to cook, etc. My grandmother and grandfather were both headteachers, and had seven children and the oldest, boys as well as girls, had to cook and keep house and look after the younger children, or they'd go hungry and feel the back of her hand ;)
JGH
It's odd the number of blokes who would happily cook for themselves and learned to sew, clean, mend kit, etc, in the forces, yet were utterly handless when it came to doing it home. Some of that, of course was role-playing, and territory and many women of that generation resented the hubbie's presence in the kitchen. Otoh, the number of males nowadays who know how to sew on a button or mend a tear is vanishingly small. Fs, it's hardly rocket science.
It's a complicated picture. For example, average first time buyer price-income ratios haven't changed that much over the last 30 years (c.7 London, 4 everywhere else). And property prices, taking into account wild swings, have 'only' risen by about inflation since the mid-70s.
But increasingly 'averages' are a cold comfort to many.
Rob
It is different though. Just prior to me buying in 1967 loans were frequently limited to 2.5x a single salary. Under no circumstences would the Building Society take my wife's earnings in to account. In the end I managed to get 3x but it was touch and go, I vividly remember visiting the pay office and trying to get a reluctant pay clerk to included my overtime, because without it I couldn't borrow quite enough. In the end I won and got the £2700 I required. We generally accepted such limitations, but once lending simply became a another market place, prices increased.
Andy C.
In 1987 I still had to hunt around before I could find someone willing to give me a x2.5 mortgage at 100%. And if I hadn't been employed by one of the largest companies in the area I don't think they even would have let me through the door.
-- Halmyre
I think this is one of the extraordinary changes in recent times - first mass production cars start of 20C; in my 1960s junior school class only a handful of children came from car-owning families. Colour TV, video, mobile phones, broadband have gone from being technically exotic to mainstream within a decade or so.
Yes I still don't have a dishwasher.
Brian
Such claims, together with other female-first projections, form a large part of UK TV programmes.
I gave up watching Doctor Who when the penny finally dropped that every week the world, or the universe, or whatever, was going to be saved by the sacrifice of a lowly and underpaid female.
There are no end of TV adverts depicting men in negative ways, as for example suffering pain - I'm thinking of an ad where the man has back pain and his female companion (because she 'carries on' on such circumstances) is highly dismissive. A scientific study on pain and gender responses suggested that men cope with pain far better than women, but of course the feminist agenda must air-brush this from history.
Did anyone enjoy the BBC's Transit of Venus programme? They could hardly have crammed more women into it. There wasn't much content on the transit itself anyway.
Terry Fields
Just fitting a new kitchen. Not fitting a dish washer - wife does not want = one, and from my experience you need none or two, since one is invariably f= ull of clean plates, and then you have to quickly remove all these to do th= e next load. There is a place one "could" go, with plumbing and drainage just behind the= boxing of the soil pipe ... just in case.
Also I think we have just decided not to fit a waste disposal unit under th= e sink. Just under the sink is 4" drainage, so there's no problem with big-= ish stuff going down there. Anything bigger should be composted, recycled e= tc. should it not (I am not particularly eco). This would not be the case i= f the sink drained to a grid outside. I am wondering how I can rig up a "fl= ush" to wash the u-bend right through. There will be a spare socket under the sink ... just in case.
Simon.
My grandmother had a separate washtub machine and spin drier. I never saw the washtub used, and when she moved in her 80's to be nearer mum, she didn't bring the washtub, although the spin drier did come.
At that point, mum was taking and doing much of her washing, but she did sometimes wash her things in the kitchen sink. I once offered to get her a washing machine (she could well have afforded one), and she said "No. What would I do whilst I waited for it to finish?". A priceless comment from another time and generation...
Grandparents had a gas fridge. The gas board converted it to natural gas, but the pilot light was forever going out after that. Grandfather eventually went into the gas board offices, and kicked up a fuss until eventually they agreed to buy them an electric fridge instead.
All the men in my family (back as far as I knew, my grandfather) have been proficient cooks in the kitchen, not cooking as often as their wives, but significantly nevertheless.
Hotpoint still had enough demand for their twin tub to keep manufacturing it into the 1990's at least, and there's still enough demand to keep a number of companies going refurbishing and reselling them.
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