Quote:
Originally Posted by garinda
We actually spoke about some of these issues tonight in the car, on the way home from seeing 'And Did Those Feet', a play set in Bolton in 1923, just after the Great War, and before the General Strike.
There were 600 mills, or associated textile firms in Bolton, equally as numerous as this area
An area where there was jobs for all, in the past.
Fed up with one, you'd start at the next on Monday.
Full employment doesn't hide the fact that the majority of people were too poor to send for a doctor, and many people died, because they couldn't afford medicine.
You may have had a job, but that meant you were paying rent to live in relative poverty. Overcrowding, poor sanitation, no money to put coal on the fire, if you also wanted to put bread on the table.
A job, but no paid leave, or holidays, even unpaid time off.
A job, but with no rights or benefits if you were too old or sick to work, or the bosses just didn't need you. You were given your marching orders, and the next lot started on your old shift.
We might have lived in an area where there were a thousand dark, Satanic mills, and jobs a plenty, but lets not get misty eyed about the past.
There were jobs for all, but the lives of the vast majority of people who had those jobs, was hellish. I know because like so many, my family were those workers.
Somethings change for the better, some things for the worse, but change can never be halted.
Some change is definitely for the better, because having 'Shaking Palsy', as it was then known, eighty years ago I'd have been up in Queen's Park Workhouse.
Time will tell if any one politican will have an impact on the job market in Hyndburn.
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Will disagree with you on a couple of points , if people were living in such misery and explotation in the "bad old days" how do you explain the rise of the seaside resorts like Blackpool, Morcambe etc. in Lancashire and other similar resorts along the Yorksire coast , these weren't built just for the "Bosses" they were designed and built around the same time the building boom of terraced streets in the Mill towns for the skilled working masses.
Re. the "poverty" of the housing stock at the time , I'm thinking most of the Mill workers who were drawn to work in the cotton towns appreciated the chance to live in a terraced house with an outside lavatory (most probably a tippler type) much better than the one room mud hovels most of the migrating mill workers who came from in Scotland and Ireland ,and looking back took a damn sight more pride in them than they do today,
I'm thinking if you look back through various threads which mention the older Big Houses(Villas/Mansions) where the big bad nasty bosses lived you can see that in Accrington many were in areas adjacent and abutting terraced streets , which seems a bit more democratic to what we see today .
My own opinion is the "rot" started in the days after WW2 , British industry carried on using the same old crap machinery and methods as had been in use from the turn of the century , example ...Germany had to re-build its entire steel industry , what hadn't been bombed was shipped east as reparations to the Russians , so what did the enlightened British politicians do ... they sold the Germans brand new steel plants ,built in antiquated British plants , then wondered why the German industry was more efficient than the British, same thing happened with other industries, post-war politicians cut the throats of the British workers to "create" the social society we see the results of today.
