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Fun Growing Up In The Forties.

rowan

rowan

Born a Brummie
Health & Safety or what ......................?

This is a photograph of me in my pram with my older brother standing behind me & a next door neighbour.......... but look at the 'dangers' around us and the state of the old pram!! Can you imagine todays families putting up with that but it was wartime & my Mother had been widowed for about a year.

This was taken about 1941 when I was less than a year old. I wonder who used the broom to clear up? Bet the boys had a lovely time with all that rubble :adoration:
 

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Re: Fun Growing Up In The Forties

Lovely photo Rowan - health and safety ? don't forget the Luftwaffe had been trying to drop bombs on you in 1940/1941. Looks like anti-blast tape on the window in the photo.
oldmohawk
 
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Re: Re: Fun Growing Up In The Forties

this photo is so real and makes me remember how we used to play , and find out under our own steam what we could play with and not what to play with. Children learn by experience what they are capable of.
 
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Re: Re: Fun Growing Up In The Forties

st.evenlucy said:
this photo is so real and makes me remember how we used to play , and find out under our own steam what we could play with and not what to play with. Children learn by experience what they are capable of.
Click to expand...
I found out at the age of six that you should not touch those nice shiny brass terminals inside electic lamp posts from which the cover had been left off. I think my wellies helped to reduce the shock ....:encouragement:
 
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Re: Fun Growing Up In The Forties

My H & S tip, don't roller skate at the same time as sucking a sherbert dip. Nearly choked to death when I hit a slightly raised paving stone. Viv.
 
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Re: Fun Growing Up In The Forties

Very early in my childhood there was an electric train set.
There was no plug on the lead to the transformer but I remembered my Dad using matchsticks, to hold the wires in the socket.
Having no matchsticks I utilised hairgrips, to access the power.
Apart from the resultant peculiar shaking in my arms, I'm still here !
'elf and safety ?
HA !
 
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Re: Fun Growing Up In The Forties

Remember when you used to be able to (somehow, don't know how) plug the iron or other small appliances into the light bulb socket.

And when my mum managed a bread shop, instead of using a cooker (cos there wasn't one there) to make bacon sandwiches, she used to turn an electric fire on its back, whip out a frying pan and fry the bacon in it on top of the electric fire. She must have sold thousands of those bacon sandwiches. Viv.
 
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Re: Fun Growing Up In The Forties

Goodness Vivienne, I remember that, there were never enough sockets to go around and my mother ironed on the table so the overhead light socket was the nearest to plug the iron in.
Do you remmeber when you bought a light bulb the assistant tested it in a lampholder to see that it worked?

My husband is an electrician and his working life is controlled by endless Health and Safety rules.
 
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Re: Fun Growing Up In The Forties

Great stories!

I remember being on my own in a classroom at Junior school cutting up stuff on an open bladed guillotine.
Nowadays the blade part has to be covered by law but no one worried then!
 
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Re: Fun Growing Up In The Forties

Our Neighbour had a pile of industrial lights in his garage so I decided to borrow one intending to use it in my bedroom. Being about 10 I had no idea how to wire it up so just used one of the cores and connected the strands to both terminals in the plug, of course when I plugged it in the fuse blew. I never told my Mother what I'd done but she wasn't best pleased when the lights didn't work.
 
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Re: Fun Growing Up In The Forties

Nick re your post #10 adaptor. Just as well ironing boards were wooden (not metal) and Mum wore rubber soled slippers then! The upside of these would be no tangling up with the flex from the iron. Such a pain when you iron today. Don't like those bendy thingys that raise the flex off the ironing board. Viv.
 
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Rowan's first photo shows her outside in the pram. Mothers usually put their babies out for an 'airing' if the weather was fine. Doesn't happen these days. You do wonder how healthy it was in reality, with all that pollution, especially before smokeless zones were introduced. Viv.
 
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In the 1940s, when I was a little kid at Highters Heath school, everything was rationed and there were shortages everywhere.
As a result power cuts were common and frequent.
I remember a power cut one winter afternoon when the whole school were sent home - just turned out onto the pitch black streets and left to fend for ourselves.
If that happened nowadays, heads would roll !
 
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Re: Health & Safety!!!!!

In the early 1950s we thought nothing of standing on bus platforms ready to jump off like these two passing Snow Hill Station.
Bus_Platform_Snow_Hill.JPG
 
Re: Fun Growing Up In The Forties

Before I was 10 years old I learnt about gravity. My uncle Bill was a paratrooper so I borrowed a blackout curtain and made myself a parachute. From a tree branch 12ft up I jumped, but it didn't work. I hit the ground with such a thump my knee came up and hit my chin and I lay a bit dazed before staggering home to hide in the garden shed until I felt well enough to go in for tea without awkward questions being asked.
 
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Look at this lot (Kingsthorne Junior School). We used to do this every break and lunchtime and became very adept at swinging around those 'monkey bars' . I loved it But if you fell off, afraid there was no soft landing. As the song goes "dust yourself off and start all over again". Viv.

ImageUploadedByTapatalkHD1392844011.900721.jpg
 
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