IWM Senior Historian Terry Charman tours IWM London's 1940s House (closed January 2012) and speaks about life in wartime Britain for the typical family.
I inherited my Grandmother's house which was built in 1908. A few amenities I preserved while renovating such as the doors, door knobs, pocket slider doors, walnut wood floors, baseboards, and the wood decorated framing throughout the interior of the house, the built in pantry cabinets, the dual converted electric from gas light fixtures flanking the original Rookwood fireplace, the old medicine cabinets and bathroom tub, and cathedral windows in the attic. These old houses have character worth reviving and have absorbed many souls worth communicating. A civilization can only communicate its spirit by the artistry and architecture left behind.
@@robertcarullo49261940's house's unless purpose built acquired a mix of the homes built before them. My parents moved into 1960 home with 1950 decorating ideas and a mix of Victorian and Art Deco furniture!
In the 40s I lived in an old Victorian (read "Munster") house in Upstate New York. Winters were cold -30F and colder. Water in bedroom drinking glasses would freeze. It had a 20ft X 20ft kitchen, an icebox, a coal stove and water in 5gal bottles. It was the warmest room in the house. Meals were "made from scratch" And, took hours to prepare. The men did the outdoors and"hard" work like shoveling coal into the furnace, but, the women worked longer hours. Late spring, summer, and early fall were nice but, winter was brutish, espesially for a kid walking two miles each way to school. The "good old days" where pneumonia or polio could kill you wern´t so nice.
Having been born in 1974, I've been in homes that weren't much different from this, just with more modern stuff like a fridge or a TV set. Even in my lifetime, people haven't necessarily always redecorated or renovated their homes constantly, and furniture/fixtures were built to last.
I was born in 1969 and I can agree with you Devon. My grandmothers kitchen was exactly like the one shown here. I still miss the beef dripping on bread though.
Devon Berube I was born in 1976 and can recall my great grandmother's home as well as my cousin's grandmother's home being time capsules with exception to a few modern devices.
I am now in the process of selling my late mothers house. The house was purchased in 1964. She died at 95 years old. My parents changed NOTHING in the house since 1964 when they bought it. The only things that were "eventually" upgraded were the oven, frig, dishwasher, and washing machine. They, my parents, were products of the Great Depression and wouldn't spend one penny unless the situation was extremely serious. Thus the house is a time capsule inside
👍 I love the design of the old days many decades before I was born. Now I understand why I love so much vintage design. 😀 I miss the nativity and the simplicity of the good old days before I was born. 💐 🌞 Efrat Israel.🍍
Looks beautiful..my dad was born in 1938 and he tells us at 80yrs. Old how he lived is real neat, but sad..god bless everyone who lived threw this time...i love u daddy..
@@rutter1ify before the onset of large commercial refrigeration units, ice was cut from northern lakes in the winter in big blocks, and packed in sawdust inside double walled, insulated buildings. I don't know how it was done in the warmer climates.
My mom got her first fridge in the mid 80's...we had to walk outside to the outhouse ( a tiny she'd with a hole beneath to drop the urine and feces, and a potty above where you seat) I pushing 40 now, but I remember been so poor and luckily we had potable water, but we took showers outside with a hose(cold water) My house now is pretty comfy and I wouldn't go back in time ,for the life of me , all in all this nostalgia some people have is because they never experience living under those conditions... Love the antiques but love modern world more.
Well the washer was not born yet . and people always washed clothes by hand. and when the first washer came out like all things people started to buy them and advance with time same with the icebox to the fridge.
Try looking for Back in Time for Dinner, a BBC documentary about what British consumed in each decade started from the 40s. It's a great documentary series.
The kitchen featured is a "museum" of sorts now, and back in the day most of these items shown would have been put away and not out like they are in the picture. Soap and water and some elbow greaser is all it really takes to get anything normal clean. We are so inundated with too many products today that just are not necessary. My parents were born in the 1920's and 30's and they had nice homes to live in , yes there was rationing, and they worked with it. If you find old cook books you will see many recipes of the 30s and 40s using what was available. Those who could grow food , or lived on farms did well.
The were more people sick and die with things we've eradicated now too, because of better ways to clean. Although I do agree there is a way to much variaty. We are priviledged to have more choices now.
Beautiful kitchen! The electric sink to wash clothes was better than what my grandmother had. She also washed on Mondays, but heated water outside over a fire. It took all day to wash clothes. She also cooked on a wood cook stove and got water from a well or from the spring. There was no bathroom, rather an outhouse. Heating was with a wood stove in the living room. It heated the living room but not much else. What kept one warm at night were a lot of quilts on the bed. Lights were kerosene lamps. This was in rural America in the 1940's.
Night John boy , no seriously I know times were hard and do appreciate that we have things much more easily to day ,but it made me think of the waltons even though they were much earlier
My great grandmother bought a new 1930s house for £250.00 and lived there till 1999 when she died, the house was a time capsule apart from electronics, the kitchen was original along with an outside toilet and garage, I walk past the house sometimes and it's completely modern, shame in a way.
I once saw in a booklet for American servicemen stationed in England during the war a warning about eating in a British home. They were told not to eat too much during a dinner because what they ate was probably all they had for the week. Incidentally I think some soldier generally hit it off good if they brought over some foodstuffs to the families they were stationed with while in England. Apparently spam was also used a lot in the U.K. because they started calling it Spamland.
schizoidboy spam is still popular around the world because of ww2. It is most popular in places with the highest military presence during the war. Hawaii and the south pacific for example
@@tolfan4438 yep asian countries love it. Ive seen it a lot in korea specifically they seem to be under the impression americans have it and love it when its usually of the opposote opinion those who have had it either associate ot with the war and lesser times and dislike it immensely or have had actual good quality meats on a regular basis and then are given substandard pork mush and dont consider it meat but more dog food style.
My first home (1988 and in East Anglia) had no fridge. I was told to keep my cold stuff in the coolest cupboard and I did. But my house was not very warm. My washer was in the kitchen and during the winter I hung up my wash in the kitchen and over all the radiators.
How we loved this 1940s house! So happy to see it again. Look at the depth and detail in even one room! So sad that it went and the replacement display is quite shallow and sterile in comparison to this wonderful piece of living history.
I’m sad this wasn’t longer and I’m kind of cross you didn’t detail the food shown. I couldn’t identify all the ration allotments from the picture and would have liked to have known more detail like if that was for a family or a single person and how much of each item etc. Please do an expanded video.
As a kid (in California), I remember asking my grandma (from London) how they survived without a fridge. She said to remember it was always cold or cool there and that England is at the same latitude as just south of Alaska.
I remember my mother when visiting her sometimes after age 18 during the early 1980's seeing that she was having to bake bread every morning while at the same time she was trying to figure out how to make it as a school bus driver of a 66 passenger bus with standard transmission on it while at the time being a professional driver of any kind at all in many places around the world was reserved for only men. To keep the bread dough warm enough to rise she would put the huge bread pan with a lid to bed with the covers drawn over top of it to save energy at the same time in an always kept cool in the winter home too.
I think that even today half the people in the world not fortunate enough to have a kitchen like the one you are showing. Britain must remain proud of itself. In fact Britain has taught the world the meaning of the word kitchen.
Ha , I see the wash board ! WE had several wash boards , no wash machine those days or refrigerator or air conditioner no TV! We did have radio and upright piano !
oh I love the past,the 1960-70😍. I never buy any new furnitures,my furnitures are all from the 90's,80's,70's and way way back. If they break I have them repaired. My kitchentable is from '78, from my childhood home. I like to think that my furnitures have a history,I would never ever buy something new...I leave that for other people.
Canadian kid - actually, we didnt 😊 We may have used the same heat source, ie a boiler, but dishes were washed in the sink or a washing up bowl in the sink. The laundry at that time may have been done in the washing machine, the sink, a copper, as a separate and specially built open boiler was called, or, if you were washing and eiderdown, even the bath! But never in a single machine. I can't imagine how that could work. Hope that helps. Of course, if you know of any such machine I'd be fascinated to know of it, but the normal way of washing laundry and china etc was separate
Thanks the USA had similar rations, but if you lived in the country like my grandparents did u could have a garden and save some seed for the next year. She told me neighbors shared
The family had weird bread at some point. This contradicts. The sweeper my great gram had in the 70’s 80’s. Also a vacuum but the sweeper didn’t make a terrible sound. Sensible. Didn’t have to plug it in.
I remember the wartime experience, despite being a kid. Post War analysts say, we as a nation, were at our fitest, because of the lack of sugery things, and far less fats. As shown here, people were far more physically active too.
Yes, and back then families sat down at dinner table and ate together, back then was what family was all about, unlike today no gives a shit about anything except their dam cell phones...
Carole S Pale feather---I agree about all eating together. You can have an expensive kitchen, but I would rather be in this cozy one with the family I loved and a dinner cooked with love.
Actually most families I know eat dinner together now and I’ve never had a family dinner where phones were at the table. And back then, I’m sure people would have liked to eat dinner with their families but many couldn’t because the men were away or dead.
I think a higher percentage of Americans might have had refrigerators by then. I'm not sure but it seems that way (I have a few 1930s magazines advertising them too).
This looks quite luxurious compared with our kitchen when I was a child. No sink, no running water, there was a communal tap in the middle of a square of 7 other houses, water was collected in the morning for the day in 2 metal buckets, the buckets were kept under a table with a bowl on top and was used for cooking and drinks. No carpet sweeper, (no carpet) - the boiler to heat water for the weekly wash was in an outhouse, my older sister used to help my mother with the washing which was done once a week. No pantry in the kitchen, there was a coal house , the coal man used to have to carry the sacks of coal through the kitchen and tip the coal into the coal house - imagine the dust and the cleaning up afterwards with just a broom, brush and dust pan and scrubbing brush. We did have the luxury of an electric cooker and kettle, many didn’t, and we were always well fed.
I imagine folks taking the 22 rifles out to the woods to shoot a rabbit or squirrels for a little meat for dinner... make a stew with potatoes and carrots...and some bread and butter. Hey, that sounds pretty good, I m hungry!
My mother had a set of cookbooks called "Encyclopedia of Cooking" it was by Meta Givens. There were recipes for preparing all sorts of unlikely animals. One chapter dealt with meats that were wild caught, like squirrel, possum, woodchuck, turtle and raccoon. Other meats they included were antelope bear and beaver.People back then did hunt, and often. And their cookbooks gave them step by step how to take a dead animal and get the fur off, and the insides out. ....how to get the buckshot out and the feathers off. I still have the books. They're old and yellow and the hard covers are missing. But there are recipes in there that I use to this day, like Chop Suey. (it calls for pork, and I can get that at the grocery, thank heavens)
really that's what a kitchen looks like ? gee if only I had one .gee if only I had a home . ( house ) to live in i would have a kitchen . ugh im hungry now. 😪must be nice .
This house is about 20-30 years behind a typical middle class American house of the same size built at the same time. By the late 30's in the US it was probably 75/25 refrigerators/ice boxes, but almost everyone would have one or the other. Most people would have a washing machine - the kind with an agitator tub and a powered wringer. And an electric vacuum cleaner, which we never called a "Hoover" even if most of them were Hoovers. Any middle class house built after about 1900 would have centrally heated running hot water and often central heat, which might be convection hot air with a manually stoked coal furnace in 1915 and an electric blower gas furnace by 1930. Almost all those coal furnaces would have been replaced or switched to gas by say 1950, or to heating oil. There are still heating oil run furnaces in many cities, mostly for apartment buildings but also some houses still.
British houses were usually heated by ONE fireplace (Coal/Coke ) in the 'living room'. Only on special occasions was the fire lit in the 'Front room /lounge ' i.e Christmas. Families usually gathered around the fireplace in cold weather, and the '3 piece suite' would be drawn closer to the fire also, so as to create a draft barrior. Quite often our fronts would be over heated and our backs chilled. The fire would go low, and when the coal scuttle became empty, --nobody wanted to volunteer to go and fill it--outside in the cold--- All the upstairs were unheated. If you lived in an old house, say VIctorian/ Edwardian, there would be small fireplaces in the bedrooms, which might be lit if you were ill in bed. The kitchen was a warm place to be, for obvious reasons, but only during cooking. Before the 1960's, few home were insulated, no double glazing, they were very drafty. AND--the winter's were often much colder and more frequently bad, than now, Happy memories--well sometimes.
Oh gosh my kitchen still looks like that !!!! I actually looked in wrens last week as I thought i really need to get with it but it's so complicated the salesman totally spoke double Dutch to me. I thought I could go in and say yes I like that one but I have No idea where water pipes are or gas pipes . I'm hoping my kitchen comes back into fashion. still at least it's clean
Much better period of living, course ratios were used. Can you see people having to live on ratios now with this instant generation and a phone in their ear 24/7. They'd never make it.
+kaship98 Every goddamn comment section has some Bitch whining about how minorities were treated before we were alive. I do not give a fuck! I was looking at an old kitchen. Go to Starbucks with that shit.
Compared to the US of the same time, It looks a lot rougher for a similarly affluent household in the UK. Of course the Great Depression made a lot of households anything but affluent but staying neutral for awhile as the economy picked up helped Americans improve their homes before rationing set in when industries retooled to make items for the war. My father had a traveling job and was able to pick up rare things in stores in various towns he went to, including a kid's bicycle and a tricycle, which by then were quite the find, both because of the metal and the tires.
