Just recently my Twitter feed has seen any number of photographs of the past pretending to show how much better things were in the past.
It is all very well, but the past sucked. You can take historical photos that show how grand things were but like today we didn’t take photos of the bad things; and even if we did, we wouldn’t show them today. At least not in the posts claiming how great the past was.
For example. Bill Brandt amongst other things made images of really grim Durham miners slums – houses with no windows and built so shodily that they were horrendously damp. The great public housing boom of the 1950s and 1960s wasn’t just about repairing the damage of war but also making decent homes for the working class replacing swathes of slums.
And things we take for granted today – central heating, running water, inside lavatories and bathrooms, all of which were rare or non-existent not so long ago. And some places shared outside lavs.
We take health for granted these days. From the visit to the doctor or the visit to A&E which cost nothing, to vaccinations which prevent many of childhood’s terrorists – Polio, Measle, Rubella, Smallpox, Whooping Cough, … the number of folk who remember such an era where school friends would disappear dragged to an early grave by one of those lurgies is getting smaller.
And you don’t see a man coughing his lungs out in those smiling photos of the past; yet they were present. Coal miners with black lung, builders with asbestosis, those who worked with radium and phosphorus losing their jaws. Or crippled by dangerous machinery.
And so on.
You can’t have the good bits of the past without the bad bits. And there were plenty of those – this just touches the surface.
