Treatment of the old

Snap, Smike, I also grew up in Salford, but in the 1940's. We were quite posh though, because our house was a former pub and we had a bathroom. I hated the place and was thrilled when we got a council house in Little Hulton when I was 13, even though it meant an hour each way on the bus to get to school (Adelphi House, on the Crescent).
I was back in Salford last year, taking my sister, who still lives in Swinton, to look for a carpet warehouse. It is just as horrible, even though the old warehouses have been converted in loft apartments and there are fish in the Irwell. The Crecent is nice, though, now the houses have been sand-blasted.

You DO NOT live next door to me! He would not have that sense of humour!

I did, I did,--- I looked in the mirror )

bagsyou haven't met the old git next door to me!!!

Well in the 30s I was living in Salford, in an area of rows & rows of houses, with yards, no baths, a stone slopstone outside loo, there was no cars in our area, yes there were bus's & trams, however as far as most people were concerned Car's belonged to film stars.
My dad had a bike, lots walked to work, our nearest phone was about 1/4 mile away, even my primary school did not have a phone until it was taken over by the local education board.
At my Grans in a rural area of cheshire I saw the very first lorry that a garden nursery purchased to get their goods to market, replacing the horse & cart, my grandad voicing the opinion that they would just be a passing fad.
Of course there were hospitals in the 30s, but very different from what we had today, they smelt clean when you went in them, not as some do today, & I very much doubt that you would have ever heard any nurse say " sorry I do not do S**t or Sick not my job" oh yes it was said to my son & me, in regard to my wife, who could not speak for herself, & yes we did complain, & it was eventually cleaned up.
However interesting as all this is, it bears no resemlance to what I originally said, which was.
Hi it always strikes me as being somewhat hypocritical that on Facebook,
lots & lots of people are wringing their hands & wailing about deceased
parents & how much they are now missed.
Perhaps if they had given a little
more care before hand, they might not feel so guilty after the event.
A spin off to that would be perhaps less ill treatment of old people in care, being highlighted every single day.

Well its a thought & it needs saying.
PS my spell checker has packed up sorry(

mm in the school where i have been governor for many years the children and polite and respectful. In all the years I have been going there I have never met rude one. They don't know me from Adam. They often hold doors open. Most of them live on a very deprived council estate.
Good point greatnan about life expectancy. I saw a bank advert in a foreign airport that said something like "More than half the human beings who have ever reached 65 are currently alive" . When 65 was introduced as pension age very few men got to collect it for more than a year or so.
Family patterns have changed and many people no longer live in close proximity to their older relatives.

The young people I know, though they are as rumbustious and noisy as young people usually are, are not disrespectful or uncaring.

I daresay there are some, but they are a small minority, just as the miserable old gits of the older generations are a small minority.

Smike, where on earth were you living in the 1930's, without hospitals or internal combustion engines?
I think it is important to remember that most people had a life expectancy of only about 65 years two generations ago. Now, that has increased to 86 for women in some areas of the UK, and their 'children' may be themselves in their 60's. I have a friend of 72 who cares for her mother and step-father who are both 94.
We also have the 'sandwich' generation who are caring for their parents and also child minding their grandchildren.
I frequently meet with courtesy and helpfulness although the attitude to old people is less formal.

I live in a village in the mountains of South Wales - it was a mining village and although the hills are all green again the community spirit that so obviously existed when many of the men were in the pit still exists. People do help each other and when you meet anyone in the street they all speak to you - even to us who are newcomers. When I have used the bus and travelled home when the buses are busy I have been offered a seat by a young person.
Another lovely thing is the local male voice choir -many of the men are ex-miners - still going strong and their concerts are well supported.

Some of the problem today may well have to do with most of the families needing two people to work - if the parent is infirm or mentally unfit for any reason it may well be impossible for one of them to remain at home as a carer. Education, training and maybe a more positive view of the great job many carers do might help the situation.

Oh dear, you're not going to like my post Smike because I frequently see young people giving up their seats for the elderly on buses and trains/trams here in Manchester, and it certainly is the norm.

I agree that people don't look after their elderly relatives at home as much, although many want to, and in my family we are caring for someone between us to ensure they don't go in a nursing home or hospital. In the past, a lot of neglect and abuse of the elderly was hidden because they were being 'cared for' by relatives at home, too - so I'm not sure that having that as the norm was always the answer, either.

A year or so ago I was on the Tube and then the Dockland Light Railway. For reasons I won't go into, I was carrying a folding seat - shooting stick style - that looks a bit like a tripod walking stick. Lots of people leapt to their feet and offered me a seat which I gratefully accepted although I felt a bit of a fraud because there was nothing at all wrong with me, apart from my silver hair, of course...

No things were not perfect in the 30s either before or after, & I never suggested that they were.
It has to be remembered that life was very primitive,(by the standards of today) just think about what they did not have that we now take for granted.
Wholesome water, flushing toilets, hospitals, internal combustion engines, piped sewage, free education, with out mentioning any apps?
In the early 1900s hanging was prevelant, both my grandmother's as girl's went to a dame school, for which they had to pay 1d old money, no money no school!!,
And yes I can recall using an earth closet right up to about 1940.
There were no benefits in those days, if you had no work, or income then it was parish relief.
However people looked after their own aged relative's, if only because there were no such things as care homes
So yes it was hard & life was cruel seen from todays,standpoint but it has to be remembered no one knew any better then
It is to be expected that things will improve, my point was that people do not look after their relatives as much as they used to.
because if they did then there would be no need for age concern to run a huge campaign, to try to institute a change of attitude in the state looking after the aged.
In closing when can you recall anyone giving up a seat for a elderly person on a train, or a bus, no longer a norm is it?
.

One of my 'heroes' as a child and voracious reader was Just William. I think most of us hanker after that kind of anarchic approach to life, though, perhaps fortunately, we rarely achieve it! I think my youngest grandson is practising to be a William, or possibly already is.

Smike things were not all rosy in the past were they? Things were a lot worse in many many ways.
I have just been reading The Road to Wigan Pier - a firsthand account of the terrible living and working conditions that were common in poor areas in the 1930s. I have moved on to Call the Midwife which is much more hard hitting than the TV series about life in the East End in the 1950s.
If you go back to Dickens, he highlights that hypocritical behaviour was common in the 19th century.
As society changes there are inevitably things that we think are getting worse, but there are many, many things that are better.

Carol - we posted at the same time. I agree with everything you say.

We were sat around my kitchen table talking about children's heroes and role models, just before Christmas. My nearly 12 year old grandson looks to parents, teachers, grandparents etc to be his role models, and he said that his heroes are people like Professor Brian Cox, Stephen Hawking, Chris Packham, J K Rowling and fictitious characters like Harry Potter.

The adults in this discussion remembered famous people who have, in recent times, been criticised for their failure to live up to the hype. When I was young, we were taught about famous explorers and missionaries who were heroic, but now their motives are questioned.

I think we have plenty of heroes that children can look up to these days. Watching annual ceremonies like the Pride of Britain awards, in which heroic acts by ordinary people are commended, shows us that we are still the same today as we were a couple of generations ago.

Some older people do remember the past with rose tints, and forget that the previous generations would have been bemoaning a loss of standards in the young. The ready availability of information and publicity highlights all that is wrong with society now - after all, how many times do we say that newspapers wouldn't sell as well if they just published the good deeds and altruism of neighbours and communities, instead of scandal and conjecture?

In the 1940's I witnessed brutal corporal punishment in my junior school - it is possible to get good behaviour if you terrorise children.
When I was teaching, I saw teachers treating children (especially my remedial classes) with total lack of respect.

The right wing press would have us believe that all young people are 'feral scum' whereas in reality most of them are just trying to work out how to pay tuition fees, get a job or find affordable housing and deal with their emotions.

It is amusing to hear Cameron lecturing the young about excessive drinking - of course, that only applies to 'the lower classes', as the members of the Bullingdon Club are just showing 'high spirits' when they trash restaurants.

Plato was complaining about the young in the 4th Century BC.
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In the 1930s, it would seem (I wasn't there so I'm just going on what you say, smike) that kids were given a lot of rules to obey. Obedience and subservience are not the same thing as respect. Seems to me that every generation complains that the generations after them are not as well-behaved as they were. Yeah, right.

And anyway, if it is true (I don't believe it is) whose fault is that?

Answer: The older generation's, whose responsibility it was to raise the younger ones with good standards.

In the 1930s we were taught to treat our elders with respect, stand up in class when any person or teacher entered the room.
To give up our seats on bus or train, with out prompting.
To say please & thankyou, & that attidude carried over into our teens, & adulthood
When where you offered a seat on a bus ? let alone a train.
Nurses treated the sick, & cleaned it up, they may not have known how to use a computer but they could clean up a patient, & would have been ashamed if a visitor had to do the job,
However we did have typified hero's held up as good examples.
Who can the young really look up to now,?
As for friends if you can have 3 really true friends in your whole life, then you have done very well indeed.
I do fear that so many people get confused between a true friend & an aquaintance, there is a world of difference between the two.
I will now retreat once more into my shell.

After I retired from social work, I used to read the obits column in the local paper with a rueful smile, as so many of the "much loved and missed" individuals were the same ones whom the relatives had told me they they hated and did not want anything to do with!

In general, people don't tend to have thousands of friends of Facebook, and I would struggle to categorise which groups of people who are the ones that have hundreds of Facebook friends and also don't care in real life for their elderly parents, or ensure they visit them in their care homes. I have the same limited view as others, from my own experience of Facebook, and the middle aged people I am friends with tend to have only a dozen or so friends on there.

My children and their friends know how to distinguish real friends from acquaintances, and some of them comment that you can't tick an 'acquaintance' or 'workmate' box to separate friends and relatives from casual acquaintances, but you can separate relatives into aunt, brother, father etc.

I agree is it sad if some people cannot tell real friends apart from casually known people. I remember when I was young, we were never allowed to call anyone but blood relatives 'auntie' or 'uncle' and casual use of such terms was frowned upon.

We do need to give young people credit for being able to express care for their real friends and relatives, and to be able to tell who would constitute a true friend - it's all part of growing up - we had to learn for ourselves, too.

It would be interesting to know more about the sad cases in the press, and which newpapers they were reported in. Some papers sensationalise and exagerate stories, and give the impression that society is breaking down. We see just as many stories about families who have gone to the ends of the earth to help their relatives and get resources that are being denied them by the authorities, and their stories are brought to the press by those very relatives, in order to shame the authorities into getting their act together.

My remarks were not particulary aimed at the very much younger end who use facebook, but more at the middle aged generation, & is based on my own observations taken over my own longish lifetime, to which I have added the frequent stories of ill treatment in care homes , & hospitals.
My point being that if the" children" looked after the interests of their aged parents, by doing no more than visiting more frequently, then there would be far less of the sad case's in the press.
This in itself would lead to a more rounded view of having done one;s best, while they were alive.
As for so called social net working, just how can one have hundreds, nay thousands of friends ? it surely gives children a wrong misguided idea of just what a real friend is all about.

Well, I guess that one wasn't. At least it is a practical reason for not having the coffin in the church and not something silly, which was what I feared.

Are coffins not airtight, then?

Oh Carol how sad and moving.