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Bedrooms and electricity!

A

Alberta

Super Moderator
Staff member
Steve(my husband and personal electrician) were discussing our childhood,both very different.

I lived from an early age in a semi with a bathroom and hot water,posh eh!
He lived in a terrace in with an outside loo.

We were discussing the fact that bedrooms when we were kids were for sleeping and we rarely went into them in the daytime unless it was to get a change of clothing.
(No tellies,computers,how did we manage?)
Most kids seem to spend their lives in the bedroom.

Steve says that his house didn't have any sockets upstairs so there was only lighting.
When he qualified in the 70s he rewired his Moms house.

This discussion led us to wondering when houses were first built in this country that had electricity as standard.

P.S. and why did houses have front doors when we were never allowed to use them?
 
Electricity

In the 60s I wired for the first time a row of houses behind Selly Oak Hospital that were still gas! The landlord had asked the tenents if they wanted Electricity but they didn't so he waited until they passed away....
The good old days using lead wiring then V.I.R cable before the advent of PVC cables.Two years ago my son bought a house and we removed all the lead wiring still in use!
Those were the days were quality was the name of the game and each Electrician prided himself when fitting the patresses and clipping cables straight, all the drilling so that the switches fitted over the cable tails when placed on the patresses, no room for slack cable or errors! Come back the buckle clip......drilling joists by hand with a wood brace alternating them so that you could pull the cables through two joists at a time, no power tools.
Pete
 
Our back to back in Nechells had one room dowstairs & a belfast sink at the top of the cellar head that passed for a kitchen and two bedrooms upstairs. We had one ceiling light and one socket in the living room, one ceiling light on the cellar head, and one ceiling light in one bedroom only.

If you needed any more power points you had to plug into a 2 pin adapter on the ceiling light. Do you remember those?

pmc1947
 
Were we lived we didnt have a bathroom we had a tiolet outside next to the coalhouse it was a long wooden seat that went the length off of the tiolet building,news paper cut or torn into sqares hanging on a bit of string.We had no hot water when it came to do any washing or a bath the copper boiler was filled it was heated by gas you had to light it there was like a gas ring underneath.Bedrooms were never heated although there were firegrates in the rooms.Front doors were rarely used everybody used the back door,it wasn't locked,we had a black fire grate mom always done the toast by that fire,and cooked in the oven at the side of the fire she got this black lead to bring the fireplace looking really clean and black,then the was the red cardinal for the door step. We didnt have many electric sockets none in the bedrooms or kitchen,when we went to the toilet in the dark we had a parafin lamp.
 
Thats the one brummie nick, I haven't seen one for years. I'm not surprised they are banned now.

pmc1947
 
re bedrooms

pmc1947.Hello phil i was cold in bed last night, have you got a old army coat i can throw on the bed.thank for the piccies of nechells green,did you live there?
 
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Peter

we were posh in our house, we had fur coats on the bed. There was no such thing as political correctness.

Phil.
 
Alberta said:
This discussion led us to wondering when houses were first built in this country that had electricity as standard.
Click to expand...

Late 1920s perhaps? And presumably dependent on the quality of house and whether a supply existed in a particular area or was imminent.

My parents' first house in Erdington, built around 1920 and a Birmingham Corporation house, did not have electricity. It took until 1930 for electricity to reach it, gas having been used for lighting up until then. Cabling had been laid in the area in the preceding months. The cost of electricity was 7.5 old pence per unit = around 18p - an appalling price for the time. No wonder many people used low wattage bulbs - I can still remember the dinginess of some houses.

Their next house, built in 1931 just outside the city boundary, had electricity already installed and sockets upstairs and down. Not many though! Rubber insulation which ponged when it was overloaded and woven material covering the flex which got brittle over time and deteriorated, revealing the rubber underneath which was probably going the same way. No safety trips or anything like that - one wonders what the accident rate was like.

Chris
 
Our house had electricity fitted in 1936. We used to have the first bill but now I only have the envelope it came in. We had gas in some of the rooms as well. The houses down our back had to wait until after the war. I can't remember the exact date, it would have been in the late 40s or very early 50s. We had a fire place in every room including bedrooms but only the one in the living room was lit regularly. The one in the front room on Christmas or special occasions. We never had hot water or an inside lav until we moved in the early 60s. No central heating though; I had been in a house with central heating, a flat or maisonette in the Birchfield area. It seemed incredibly hot to me; heat in every part of the room and all through the house. I thought it was a bit excessive at the time. Not now - we have all the radiators going plus a wood burning stove in the living room and a gas fire in one of the other rooms downstairs but the house is a hundred years older than the back to back I was born in.
 
re old bedrooms

pnc1947.Phill the old cast iron coal fires we had in the bedroom.I have bought one £20.it is complete, so i am going to put it in use again.so no more fur coats,or army coats on my bunk.
 
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re bedrooms and electric

Hello, all my gran lived in a old miners cottage, no electric at all.only gas mantels,we loved going there when we were kids,The candles and parafin.lamps,when we went to bed there was coal fire,we lay there in the dark watching the flames flickering.
 
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Our house was built in l935 and had very few plugs especially upstairs.
My father being involved with electricity in his job and also being a painter and decorator in his spare time pulled up all the floor boards in the two downstairs rooms to run cables through for plugs. My eldest brother had to stay on watch to pull the cables through. I remember it so clearly....what a mess.

We had an electrical box in the hall high up on the wall and it became overloaded and the wall turned brown all around it. Eventually, a circuit board was put in before the house caught on fire!
 
I've just remembered, when I was in my late teens, (the term 'teenager' had just been invented along with 'juvenile delinquent'), I used my bedroom as a study and entertained friends (ahead of my time). I had one of those black metal cylindrical paraffin stoves that ran on Esso Blue to keep warm.
I can't remember if there was an electric plug. I may have used one of those light adapters that fit a bulb and a plug. You can tell we were very safety concious in those days.
 
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