Why were people happier then?

[rov1100]

On a morning show Len Goodman shows how life was in the 1950's. Everyone seems happy and except for the skirmishes of the Mods and Rockers all seemed to enjoy life.

[starone]

The neighbour I referred to has told me that when he first came to Bristol he had a very difficult time. Boarding houses would have notices up saying 'No Blacks, no Irish' and of course they were allowed to do that in those days. He got a job right away though, in Lewis's stores in the warehouse. He has worked all his life (now retired) and paid his way in taxes etc. so not all immigrants take without giving.

[craft1948]

In York, even today, we have very, very few black people. For some reason they never settled here.................the majority of our immigrants arrived from Ireland in the 19th century, including a few of my ancestors.

[EDDIE51]

The 1950s West Indian immigrants went where they were sent. Mainly London and Birmingham to fill the vacancies left by the war dead.
London Transport actually sent recruitment agents out the the West Indies offered men work, payed for their passage and housed them when they got here.

[Quizmonster]

Those who accuse the more elderly people here who believe the fifties were 'better' accuse them of looking at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. What they don't grasp is thay THEY are looking at things through 21st century spectacles. In other words they think, for example, that a woman's life must have been hell if she did not have a car, a washing-machine, a television and so on. However, most women then had not even the remotest concept of owning such things, so their lack was not a bar to happiness.

I saw a TV report on a mud-hut village in some drought- and conflict-ridden hell-hole in Africa the other day. A local woman said that things were 'perfect' there - that was how her word was translated - before all the present problems arose. Clearly, the place was never anything BUT a mud-hut village, but back then she considered it 'perfect'! Why? Because she knew no better. Disease and child mortality must have been dreadful, existence could never have been anything other than hand-to-mouth, but she thought it was 'perfect'.
Happiness largely depends on expectation, it's as simple as that.

[emmie]

Qm, very few people had cars, so there wasn't any problem in that respect for women. My mother had a washing machine in the mid fifties, not the type we have now, but one nevertheless. I don't have rose coloured specs regarding any era, there was good and bad stuff all along.

[boxtops]

craft, I remember that mortgage rate - we'd just bought a house in Birmingham at the time. The long-term resident next door was on a fixed rate and paying £14 a month in 1979 - we were paying the 17% and ours was £170 - a huge amount from our combined salaries in those days.

[EDDIE51]

We got a modern 3 bedroom house on a new estate in 1954.
Modern for the 50s that is. No heating apart from a coal fire , hot water only from a a back boiler or putting the immersion heater on. Single skin brickwork with single glazed windows, in winter it was below freezing inside the house.
We had a bath once a week and us 3 boys took turns to be the first in the water, all 3 had to use the same bathwater as it was so expensive to heat.
We got our school uniforms washed on Saturday dried on Sunday worn on Monday all through the week. The uniform was grey shirts so that the dirt did not show as easily.
But my Mum thought it was great, she had come from a Durham pit town , no running water apart from a cold tap in the scullery and an earth toilet toilet in the back yard. I can remember my grandad coming home from work and having a bath in the tin bath in the kitchen with hot water heated on the gas stove. He was a church warden and one time the vicar came to see him while he was in the bath. I remember the vicar just came and talked to him while he was in the bath as if he was sitting in a chair.

[Quizmonster]

Em, I mentioned cars only as an example of the sort of thing people today take for granted. My own father did not own a car until I myself was a grown man and had long left home!
As for washing-machines - and at the risk of sounding like a Monty Python sketch - even in the fifties, my mother got up at 4.30 am on a Monday, filled the copper in the wash-house with water and lit the fire under it. Once it had boiled, she poured it by the bucketful into a washing-tub with soap in it, where she moved it around with a wooden plunger-device. Then the washing was lifted into a vat of clean water to rinse, then through a mangle to roughly dry it and then onto the washing-line.
Guess what...I never once heard her complain about it or any of the other hardships she endured. Why didn't she? Because all the other housewives around were doing exactly the same things! Not only did she not complain, she was invariably singing and joyful whilst doing it.
As I've already suggested twice on this thread, expectation is paramount in any assessment of happiness. Given that expectations were vastly lower in the fifties than they are now, it seems pretty obvious that people who lived then were 'happier' than they are now. QED

[Marijn]

Yes, I think you've hit the nail on the head, Quizmonster.

[Kromovaracun]

" In other words they think, for example, that a woman's life must have been hell if she did not have a car, a washing-machine, a television and so on."

No, I don't think that's a fair summation at all.

I think it's perfectly accurate to say that a woman's life is worse off - whether she thinks it is or not - if it is extremely hard for her to get a divorce to the degree that she may even risk being institutionalised. Or if she finds herself under immense social pressure to marry young when privately she has no such wish, but does so anyway because she has no confidence of any other options available to her. I also think you can pretty objectively say that a gay man's life is worse off if he faces prosecution - or obscene medical treatments - for the mere fact of his existence than if he doesn't.

It's nothing to do with 'oh, they were so much worse off for not having cars.' People adjust to material circumstances pretty well. But it is simply a fact that the 50s were pretty bad for a lot of people. This is not something that any of the people who have argued it was better have accounted for.