The older I get, the more I find myself musing about how much things have changed in my lifetime technology-wise; also, how the speed of change seems to be increasing at an exponential rate. In turn, this set me to ruminating about a wide range of topics.
No, I’m sorry, it’s too late for you to run away now — I’m afraid you’re just going to have to pull up a chair, sit down, relax, and let me reflect, ruminate, and cogitate away…

My dad was born in 1915, which was halfway through WWI and five years before the world’s first commercial radio broadcast. My mom was born in 1930, which was nine years before the outbreak of WWII and five years before the first rudimentary radar system was tested in England.
My mom was born in one of the poorest parts of Sheffield in God’s own county of Yorkshire (quite possibly the location of the Garden of Eden) in merry old England. Ladies didn’t typically go out to work in those days, but instead slaved away at home. I was just chatting to my mom about this — Monday was wash day when all the household’s clothes and bedsheets etc. were washed and hung outside to dry. Tuesday was ironing day, where all the washing from the previous day was ironed furiously. Wednesday was a small-quantity bread baking day. Thursday was housecleaning day. And Friday was the big bread baking day that would carry the family through the weekend and on to the following Wednesday.
Of course, there were numerous other tasks to be performed. For example, although everyone was financially challenged in my mother’s neighborhood (every kid in the district received only an orange and a threepenny coin — a.k.a. a “thruppenny bit” — for Christmas), but they had their pride. Thus, on Fridays, the ladies would polish their cast iron stoves and fireplaces with black lead (graphite) to give them a brilliant silver-black finish. Woe betide anyone whose appliances weren’t up to scratch for visitors to see during the weekend.
Also on Fridays, in what I can only imagine as a Monty Python-esque scene, the ladies could be found scouring the leading edges of their outside steps with so-called “donkey stones,” which were formed from a mixture of pulverized stone, cement, and bleach powder. This brisk burnishing left each step with a crisp white edge.

The house my mom grew up in was part of a group of connected homes forming three sides of a square. The center of the square was occupied by long thin vegetable gardens surrounded by a path. A row of outside toilets — one for each house — was located on the fourth side of the square. There was also a narrow alley between two of the houses providing access from the central square to one of the surrounding streets.
The front doors to each of these houses faced the outside world, while the back doors faced into the square. Each house had only two small rooms downstairs — the family room and the “front room” (because it was at the front of the house) — two small bedrooms upstairs, a basement (half full of coal), and a loft.
Everyone entered and exited the house by the back door, which opened directly into the family room. The front door opened directly from the outside sidewalk into the front room. The only time the front door and front room (which contained the best carpet, curtains, and furniture) were used was for weddings, christenings, and funerals. The rest of the time they were off-limits, and my great grandfather, my grandparents, my mom and her brother and sister hung out in the family room.
As I recall, the family room was about 14′ x 12′, which isn’t much space for a family of six. Just to add to the fun and frivolity, the “kitchen sink” and the coal-fired fireplace/stove/range were also located in the family room, so this is where my grandmother did all her cooking.
Bathroom? Don’t make me laugh. There was only one cold water tap feeding the entire house, and this was located over the sink in the family room. Once a week, they hauled a tin bath up from the cellar and filled it with hot water from a tank mounted on the side of the stove. This bath was filled twice. First the kids were bathed, starting with the youngest and working up in age. Next, the now cold and dirty water was thrown out, the bath was refilled, and the adults took their turn, commencing with my great grandfather and working down in age.

My great grandfather was of the Victorian persuasion. He came up from Bristol with a team of men to supervise the introduction of electric trams in Sheffield (we already had horse-drawn trams). Known as “Chief Inspector Shorland,” he was an important man in the area where they lived, to the extent that working men doffed their caps to him when they passed him in the street.
My mother says that when great grandfather returned home from work, sat down, and opened his newspaper, everyone in the house — including my grandparents — “froze in place,” and no one moved or said a word until he closed it again.
Great grandfather refused to have electricity in the house, so — in addition to the flickering of the coal fire in the family room — lighting was provided by gas mantles mounted on the wall. It wasn’t until great grandfather passed away in the middle of WWII that my grandmother had electricity installed.
My grandfather was away at sea in the Royal Navy, so the main reason my grandmother wanted electricity was to power a radio so she would know what was going on. Unfortunately, electricity was a bit of an unknown quantity to people of her generation, so she covered any unused sockets with sticky tape “to stop the electricity leaking out.” Remembering that the only technology with which she was familiar was gas mantles, which could leak if you weren’t careful, this really wasn’t totally outlandish behavior on her part.
Sad to relate, my grandmother caught meningitis when she was about 17 years old, which caused her to lose her hearing (or go “Stone Deaf” as they used to say in those days). She was, however, a blackbelt at lip-reading. Thus, it fell to my mother, who was about eleven or twelve years old, to listen to the radio each day and relay the wartime news to my grandmother.
This might be a good time to note that Yorkshire dialect (also known as Broad Yorkshire, Tyke, Yorkie or Yorkshire English) is an English dialect of Northern England spoken in the county of Yorkshire. Broad Yorkshire can be hard for folks outside the county to understand. Now consider that the people who lived in my mother’s neighborhood spoke Broad Sheffield, which is like Broad Yorkshire on steroids, making it difficult for most non-Sheffielders to wrap their ears around, and almost completely unintelligible to anyone outside the county.
It was whilst listening to the radio that it dawned on my mother that she was never going to get a good job if she continued to speak in a Broad Sheffield dialect, so she determined to teach herself to “talk posh” by practicing talking like the BBC news announcers on the radio (think My Fair Lady with my mom playing the role of Eliza Doolittle and BBC news announcers taking turns as Professor Henry Higgins).
As a result, when she was older, after starting off in a typing pool, my mom worked her way up to being personal assistant to a Knight of the Realm, in which role she travelled the world. When her boss retired, mom started to lecture at a local college teaching shorthand and typing in English, French, and German (she didn’t like to restrict herself unduly), quickly rising to a position of Senior Lecturer, eventually becoming one of only six women Principal Lecturers in the whole of England.
However, I fear we are getting ahead of ourselves in the timeline, because my mom still has to meet my dad, and I still have to grace the world with my presence. So, until my next column, let’s leave this tale in the middle of WWII, envisaging my grandmother, my mother, and her siblings huddled around the coal fire in the evening listening to the radio and waiting to see if more bombs would fall that night.
My step-dad had stories to tell. He passed a few years ago and I wish I had listened more. He started life in horse-and-buggy days, watched the world adopt the automobile and planes, put a man in space and the moon, the rise of computers… How life must have seemed to him? Technology is advancing ever more swiftly and gaining speed as it does so. I’m excited to see what’s on the horizon: 3D printed organs, space travel (again), computers we can fit in our pockets – oh wait, we have that one already!
Hi Sam — I know what you mean about listening more — I wish I’d done so myself — but then I think that I try to tell my son about when I was a kid, and he tries to look like he’s paying attention but I can see his eyes glaze over within seconds of my starting LOL
I have a friend (please insert comment about having friends here) in his 80s. He remembers his father refusing to have a telephone in his house (I guess that was the 1950s). His father was of the opinion that if someone wanted to talk to him, they could get off their butts and come and visit.
Wait a minute, weren’t you the same about cell-phones?
Hi Aubrey, re your having friends, I wouldn’t dream of making a comment — my brother used to have an imaginary friend when he was younger, and it was a great comfort to him LOL
One thing I failed to mention is that when my grandmother was washing the household’s clothes, towels, bed linens, etc. on Mondays, she didn’t have a washing machine — they would haul the tin bath up from the basement, fill it with hot water from the stove/range in the family room, and wash the clothes by hand with detergent and a washboard.
Some related columns I penned a while ago are as follows:
Why Today’s Music is so Awful vs. Yesteryear
https://www.eeweb.com/profile/max-maxfield/articles/why-todays-music-is-so-awful-vs-yesteryear
Tomorrow’s World Has Come and Gone
https://www.eeweb.com/profile/max-maxfield/articles/tomorrows-world-has-come-and-gone
Are We Losing the Secrets of the Masters?
https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1319119
I just took a quick detour to view “Are We Losing the Secrets of the Masters?” People used to post comments to blogs in those days- I don’t remember seeing anywhere near that amount recently. Wasn’t there at time when you got over 100 comments to a single blog?
Ah, the good old days LOL Well, this new “Cool Beans” Blog has only been running for two weeks — hopefully I can entice people to comment here — in the meantime, I hope you will keep on commenting away furiously, old friend.
Ooops!
While I was writing this column, I emailed a couple of questions to my mother. Recently, I’ve added the line “PS Don’t forget to check out my “Cool Beans” blog at http://www.CliveMaxfield.com” to the signature in my emails, and I forgot to take this out.
Of course, the first thing my mother did was read my Best Day Ever! ( https://www.clivemaxfield.com/best-day-ever/ ) column. Thsi was the first time she hear I’d been laid off a couple of weeks ago.
Once again… Ooops!
Fascinating story. And it highlights how far removed I and most of us around these parts are from anything remotely close to genuine hardship. My father has recently been doing a lot of writing about his childhood in the late 30’s and early 40’s in very rural North Dakota. He has a lot of stories that are worlds away from anything I’ve personally experienced. But I can’t really even contemplate the idea of “listening to the radio and waiting to see if more bombs would fall that night.”
The more I talk to my mom about this, the more I realize how terrifying it must have been to been that young with the bombs falling (wait till you read Part 2 in this miniseries)
My paternal grandfather was born in 1888, the age of steam and horses. He witnessed the invention of cars, planes, rockets, radio, telephone, TV, tubes, transistors, ICs, running water, flushing toilets, sanitary sewers, electricity, vaccinations, and antibiotics. He saw humans circle the planet in a space capsule. Of course, he also saw two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam, and the Great Depression. So, bad with the good.
He never finished high school because he had to work to support the family because my great-grandfather was a bit of a cad. However, he managed to put all his siblings through college, including his sisters (unusual at the time), then went on to run an industrial silk screening company quite successfully. He retired wealthy. My father could not speak of him without tearing up, such was the respect he had for his old man. (I think my kids will not be able to speak of me without laughing consumedly. Sigh…)
A lot transpired in my father’s life too. And now mine and my kids. I can only imagine what their world will morph into after I move onto the next plane of existence.
As with you Max, my mother was born in 1930 but in Detroit (so you don’t get them confused). She was among the poorest of the poor and has stories to tell that I, and my kids, just can’t relate to. Thankfully! That alone is amazing progress in 1 or 2 generations.
My mom got a nursing degree and held her nursing license for almost 60 years. She gave it up at 81 when she got cancer. Survived the cancer surgery and chemo and is now a very healthy 89.
My personal opinion is that the people who grew up in the Depression and WW2, especially the women, are a breed unlike any other. Truly amazing people. “The Greatest Generation” is no lie.
Thanks for clarifying that your mom was born in Detroit — that will certainly help me from getting them confused.
I can’t even imagine what it would take to wrap your brain around being born in 1888 and seeing the invention of cars, planes, rockets, radio, telephone, TV, transistors, ICs, etc. But we live in exciting times also — I think the next 20 years are going to be amazing, and who knows what the world will be like when my Countdown Timer reaches 0 in 2057 https://www.clivemaxfield.com/yes-my-countdown-timer-is-alive/
For a taste of Depression-era radio, tune the AM band late at night, preferably in the winter. Listen to both local and distant stations. Use an AM radio with limited treble response, as its narrow bandwidth facilitates hearing weak stations between strong stations.
Re “depression-era radio” — are we talking about the “great depression of 2008”? LOL
Waiting for part two now. this gets me to thinking that I need to get round to posting by life history linked to the soldering irons I have used and abused since 7 years of age. 🙂 😡 😈
I’d love to see this history (plus pictures of the soldering irons)