Cold houses in the past…

It used to be very cold in Winter. Girls didn’t wear trousers so much and I remember my knees being freezing. The only heating was a coal fire in one room and some sort of water heater in the kitchen. That was London, 1950 s and early 60 s. At night we used hot water bottles and piled coats on the bed. No one had cars but I used to run everywhere all the time to keep warm.
Now we don’t have double glazing or anything like that but it doesn’t get really cold here in Australia. Reaches freezing point maybe a couple of times a year. This year has been colder than most and we have had fires on even in December. I think the global warming has passed us by because it used to be much,much hotter around 20 years ago.

I definitely think it's because we are older. The temperature in DS and Dil and the 4 childrens house leaves me and other grandparents freezing to bits, the children running around bare feet and not a lot on!
And when DS was young, not a lot of heating there either - some old and very inefficient CH not turned on high:

And I dont recall being cold as a child in the early 1950's, and when the windows had frost patterns on and no heating in the bedrooms!

Just the coal fire in the living room.

Firstly, I do think we feel the cold more when we are older than we did when we were young. Stereotype pictures/drawings/ phtographs of old people at almost every period, shows older people, especially women swathed in shawls and thick slippers.

I can certainly remember feeling the cold aas a child. The way one automatically braced one self as I walked out of the nice warm kitchen into the freezing cold hall and going upstairs to freezing cold loo upstairs.

I can remember, at one of my aunts, getting into bed fully dressed and undressing while in bed clutching my hotwater bottle and shoving all my clothes to the bottom of the bed so that they would be warm when I put them on in the morning, because the bedroom was so cold.

I remember my sister walking to and from school crying with cold when the winter was bitter because she was so cold even when wearing the full acoutrement of clothes , woolly vest, Liberty bodice, viyella school blouse, school tunic, cardigan and a thick school uniform coat.

Houses had small areas of warmth in deserts of cold.

When we married, in the late 1960s, we bought a new house off plan and that came with cnetral heating as standard, and what bliss it was. I think the house came with 2 inches of insulation and I can rmemeber that within a few weeks of moving in DH added another 2inches of insulation. I think in every house we have owned, one of the first things we have done shortly after buying it is to increase the insulation in the roof.

Oh yes, M0nica, the stereotype caricutures of the elderly are surely an AI mock-up, always an old woman of at least 140, 1950's perm and without her false teeth, wearing about a dozen cardigans and bent over a one-bar electric fire staring forlornly at it's feeble glow and probably recalling the Good Old Days when Prince Albert was alive........

These ads for oldies charities really need to stop fostering these distorted Dickensian images and perceptions of old people (or Senior Citizens if you prefer, but old is old) if they want to carry on raking in enough donations to pay for the Chief Executive's expenses.

I have no heating in my bathroom or any other room except my main living room and there I have a lovely gas fire that warms the room beautifully so I m no different now to when I grew up
I cannot afford to have central heating put in this big 1875 house but it’s the only thing I ve ever owned and I will never leave it till the day I die.
I have adapted but I just look forward to spring arriving

By the way Cabbage I m not 150 and I don’t sit hunched over in 20 cardigans I do have a big thick oodie though

Oh I can well remember being cold in my childhood home. The only warm rooms were the front room which had a coal fire and the kitchen, warmed by a small paraffin heater. Upstairs was absolutely freezing. We had our winter coats laid on top of our eiderdowns for extra warmth and I placed my school uniform under the bedcovers to stop it from getting damp, as the room was so cold. I still feel the cold and have the central heating on all day in winter; a luxury I know, but since my childhood I have a pathological fear of being cold!

I remember being cold, my fathers airforce coat on top of my blankets in bed, Lino on the floors, the freezing bathroom and the gas oven on to warm the kitchen. We all huddled round the coal fire in the living room to get dressed and undressed. My widowed grandmother was far worse off, she huddled round a coal fire, no tv then, bed early with a crock hot water bottle, she had to get the coal in herself each day from top of her yard until she died at 96. Never remember her moaning. She never had anyone check if she could manage, if you had no family near it was a hard life. You had children young so when you were old your children were and your grandchildren working and living away, no cars by us until I was 12. Just buses.

I grew up in the 1940’s with a range in the kitchen/ living room which heated that room, the hot water and the oven.
We had a fire in the “front room” at weekends and a tiny fire in one bedroom only if someone was ill.
The windows would be iced up in winter but we just accepted it as everyone we knew lived like us.
I recall we still played out and schools never closed like they do now after one inch of snow.
Now full central heating on about 16 hours a day and I am still bundled up with clothes indoors.

I was brought up in the tropics so my problem as a child was being HOT 🥵! Sleepless nights trying to cool down - no fans and air conditioning hadn’t yet reached our shore, even if we could afford it.
I’m now used to the cold after over 50 years here, but suspect I would like it as much as I do now. I love being bundled up and cosy.

We got dressed in front of the fire in the kitchen/living room.

Looking back, Mum had been up ages before, cleaning the grate out and getting a good fire going so my sister and I wouldn’t be too cold.

She held our clothes in front of the fire to take the chill off.

Our bedroom had a fireplace, only lit if we were laid up with mumps or measles.

And of course the frosted up windows.

Ice on the insides of the windows and getting dressed in double quick time in front of the kitchen range with layer upon layer of clothes.
No central heating, no running hot water and no bathroom. An outside toilet where you hoped you wouldn't have to be for too long as you could see your breath.
Setting off to walk to school no matter how deep the snow.
Writing this down makes me realise how pampered today's children are with warm homes, days off school in bad weather, cosy bathrooms with most things at the touch of a button and chauffeur driven most of the time.

We lived near the Pennines, got snowed in and cut off several times every winter. A coal fire in the front room and a small electric bar fire in mum and dads bedroom where we all got dressed in turn. Ice in the insides of windows and snow drifts up to the outside window sills. But schools stayed open for as long as possible with all the kids herded into the assembly hall where the headteacher would read from a book to all of us or we would get out school books out on our knees do some work. I can remember walking through blizzards that fly at you horizontally and sting your face and eyes with near enough zero visibility holding onto the walls outside the houses on our street to keep my bearings.
It did feel cold 🥶 but I can’t remember us complaining about it. We also would have coats piled upon us at night as extra blankets.

I still get ice inside my windows, pretty though

We had the solid fuel boiler, for hot water, in the breakfast room (off the small kitchen) so that room was always warm. Everywhere else was cold in winter. I well remember ice on the inside of windows.

We had gas fires in the bedrooms but the only time I can ever remember them being lit was occasionally during that very long cold winter of 1963 (?). (that was also when my two hibernating tortoises died 😰)

There were also different tall gas fires in the hall and the bathroom, but again, they were lit only during extreme cold.

My DM went back to work when I was 14, so the first thing I had to do when getting home from school, was to lay a fire for the sitting room - twisting newspapers into those rolled up zigzags.
The main thing she was saving up for was central heating - which was installed a year or so later - next door had it done at the same time. That first winter with CH was bliss!

Especially at the moment, I’m still always so thankful for a lovely warm house!

I too remember well the frost patterns in the bedroom window. Red rings round my calves from my wellies boots , no tights or trousers!! In winter our school boiler ' burst ' I was never sure what that meant , imagined a huge mess in the bowels of the building. This meant no heating - we were not sent home but sent into the cloakroom to put our coats on! Bedroom freezing although we did have hot water bottles , living room warm and cosy. We managed.

When I was a student in the 70s I was invited to stay with a friend's family in the Midlands for the weekend. They had no heating on and I went to be fully clothed with my coat on. Friend's mum brought me a cuppa first thing and knocked on the door. I had to take my coat off and pretend I had just got dressed. We had liver stew ALL weekend for every meal. Mother said she had cooked a big pot of it as a warmer for the cold weather. I hated liver and have never been happier getting back to my student digs and fish and chips.

DHs parents lived in a Victorian double bay window house and only heated the large kitchen with a back boiler that also provided hot water. When I went there for Christmas I was allowed a one bar electric heater in my bedroom but could only have it on when I was in the room. Growing up DH said they only had a fire in the bedroom if they were ill. Apparently they would all come home from school and sit round the table in the kitchen to do their homework. I grew up in a flat where we only had a fire in the lounge but it was never as cold as that house.

BlueBelle

I still get ice inside my windows, pretty though

It was very pretty, patterns drawn by Jack Frost.

I remember being very cold as a child. We didn’t get central heating until I was in my late teens, and then it was only downstairs, as my father thought cold bedrooms were healthy. At school, if we hugged the radiators we were told we’d get chilblains, but I never did.

My mother warmed my clothes by the kitchen boiler. Our cat slept on the boiler in winter - I remember her outraged expression when she jumped onto it in spring, and found it cold.

We moved in the summer from a three story Victorian house in a conservation area so no double glazing at the front!

We are now in a 3 year old house with underfloor heating, no heating on this morning, the main living area is at 17.5, I turned it off at around 8.00pm last night.

Our bedroom however has windows open 24/7 and is like a fridge, just the way we love it!

Of course we were cold growing up, houses without central heating were pretty standard. I still remember our first house, living there throughout my infant and junior school years. It had an open fire in the dining room, I can recall the toasting of crumpets and occasionally slices of thick bread off a long toasting fork. It has also stuck in my mind my brother bringing in a wheelbarrow of conkers through the French doors and emptying them on to the fire where they spat and pinged around the room causing my mother to hit the roof. Although that would have been Autumn, when I suppose the first coal deliveries preempting winter arrived. They were emptied into some outside covered place adjacent to an outdoor loo, which I seem to remember using occasionally if playing outside. In the corner of the dining room we had a tall cardboard box of toys probably a fire hazard So that room was generally pretty warm.

In the front living room, I think there was some sort of an electric fire, but it wouldn't have been on all the time. The rest of the house would have been freezing cold. I guess we were used to it, and wrapped up accordingly because I did spend a lot of time in my bedroom.

I do remember the freezing cold winter of 62/63 having just read about it. My brother and I were in and out of the house into the garden building snowmen, which often caused my father to explode about all the snow we were bringing in on our Wellington boots. I still remember his constant refrain "stay in or go out, but stop coming in and out all the time"

Walking to school trussed up like idiots, scarf tied around our heads, with our respective hats on top, but then we weren't alone, that was pretty de rigueur for the school child on cold winter days. Oh God the frozen milk, how I hated it, can't remember what was worse winter time milk, which we were encouraged to drink with some ridiculous teacher telling us to drink up "the lumps of ice make the milk just like ice cream" no it didn't! or the gone off sour summer time milk. Where was Thatcher the Milk Snatcher when I needed her ?

Crikey I remember being really cold as a child and how horrible it was. Even on Christmas morning when we opened our presents in bed we couldn't stand being so cold and would dive back under the covers!

We had coal fires downstairs but the bathroom was freezing! We would run out in our skimpy towels to get dried by the fire.

Now I have my heating on all the time at a constant temperature. I hate being cold!

Am I the only person here without central heating ?

When in England I lived in RAF married quarters and they were freezing in the winter. We had a coal fire in the lounge and an Ideal boiler in the kitchen run on coke which would be kept going all the time because it heated the water. Mum would hang our school clothes on a wooden clothes airer in front of it overnight and it was bliss to put on warm clothes first thing.
I would get told off for sitting too close to the fire while reading because your legs could end up with horrid mottled scorch marks that took a while to fade.
I hated winters and couldn’t wait for spring.