Rebecca Reads has been reading Round About a Pound a Week by Maude Pember Reeves and I’m hoping that I can get it through my library because it sounds like a fascinating read for anyone interested in social history, you can read her very interesting post on it here.
I think that if you’re born in Glasgow, as I was at the back end of the 1950s, then you grow up with the knowledge that it was the most deprived area in the whole of western Europe, possibly it still is. In the 1960s there were over 3 million people living in the city and the population of the whole of Scotland was 5 million.
Earlier in the century the young people from the Highlands went there for work as did a large part of the population of Ireland, so it just wasn’t possible to cope with the numbers. Even before all that happened the housing stock was very poor with large families having to live in one room. The lucky ones had a sink and running water in it, otherwise they had to share a sink on the communal stair landing and the toilet was outside around the back and shared by who knew how many people. It’s no wonder that disease was rife.
Things didn’t get any better over the years what with the depression and then World War II when so many buildings were bombed. My own great-grandmother was killed by a Nazi bomb and she had been widowed early in life and brought up her 4 wee girls on her own with no help from anyone. In fact she was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic church for refusing to give a priest money for the poor, she wondered who could have been poorer than her. She had already given him money twice that week and his breath smelled of whisky!!
My mother’s friend moved from Ireland to a town outside Glasgow in the 1950s and she was already married with 4 children. She and her family had to share one room with another Irish couple who also had 4 children. By the time that one family got a room all to themselves the women had both had 2 more kids each! How they managed that I don’t know, there certainly couldn’t have been any privacy. Those hovels were pulled down in the late 1960s. Mrs. M eventually had 10 kids which was regarded as a normal sized family, I knew one woman with 17 children.
Thankfully those days are gone and although it’s practically impossible for people to get a council house nowadays, thanks to Maggie Thatcher who allowed most of them to be sold off, people who are unemployed don’t have to worry about rent because it is paid for them, even if they have a private landlord.
Anyway, back to Rebecca’s post. Around about a pound a week was apparently what many families in 1910 were having to survive on, and it equates to £75 today. The money had to cover food, clothing, rent, in fact everything. Some people have commented that unemployment benefit nowadays is only £65 per week but I think that that is being a bit unfair to the poverty stricken people of 1910. Nowadays you would have to add in the cost of your housing as you will get your rent paid. People with children also receive child benefit and a large amount of money each year per child for school uniforms.
In fact if you are a lone parent and you are unemployed nowadays then you are actually better off than many families with working parents. When my children were small it was a big shock to my single parent friend when she realised that although my husband had a good job in a supposedly decently paid profession, her benefits amounted to more than his earnings.
I never thought that I would ever agree with a Tory government but I have to say that I agree with them completely when they say that no family with working parent(s) should be worse off than a family on benefits.
