My picture this week is, I admit, slightly boring. That is, unless you like bonny babies or know who it is. It’s a picture of my first daughter Margaret in her new Pedigree pram at Hey Farm and the date was 1961.
I practice what I preach and of late have been spending a lot of time scanning negatives on to CD so that my three daughters can have a copy of all the family pictures from 1956 to the present day. This snap of Margaret is one of them. So, what is it about this snap that could possibly spark off an article for the Times?
The great thing about pictures is that they trigger the memory. I looked at this and wondered how much that pram cost us. I rang Vera and asked and she knew exactly, it cost twenty three pounds and at the time my wage was eleven pounds a week for seven days driving for Harrison’s of Elslack picking milk up from the farms and delivering bottled milk to depots for West Marton Dairies. I reckon that this is about the equivalent of eight hundred pounds in today’s money.
Just think about that for a minute, eight hundred pounds! You could buy a car for that now. It would be easy to conclude that this is evidence that people are far better off nowadays than we were then. But hang on a minute, there’s something wrong with that. Even though my wage was so low, Vera was able to stay at home and look after the children and we were paying the mortgage on a four bedroom house and seven acres of land. This just wouldn’t be possible now. What’s going on here?
While I was thinking about this I noticed another piece of information. Some financial guru was forecasting that by 2020 house prices on average would be three times what they are now. Add to this the fact that in areas of high house prices essential but low-paid workers like nurses, teachers and bus drivers can’t afford to live near their work and you have a worrying situation. It’s tempting to think that we are lucky in Barlick because we have reasonable property prices but I know at least one couple in the town who are both nursing, paying a mortgage on a terraced house and living in fear of two things; first that one of them might fall ill and second that the wife might become pregnant and have to give up her job.
This raises another problem, the number of potential grandparents who are dying to have grandchildren to cherish but have no prospects of this because their children can’t afford to start a family. The bottom line of all this is that we are living in the most affluent age this country has ever seen and young people find they can’t afford to have children. How does this square up with the eight hundred pound pram?
All I can do is go back to my own experience, I’m not an economist or social scientist. The differences I can see are that in 1961 we didn’t have the pressure to spend on us from modern technology and advertising. We had a house, a gas cooker, fridge, washing machine and some furniture but that was it. We didn’t even have carpets! Also, there were six of us in the house, Vera, Margaret and myself, my mother and father and my brother. So one of the essential differences between then and now is that this same grouping would need three houses, three sets of house contents and all the trappings that are part of modern living. Add to this the fact that the population has risen and you can begin to see why demand is pushing property prices up.
That’s enough facts and analysis, we know there is a problem, what really concerns me is the consequences. The big difference I see, and I suspect that most people of my generation would agree, is that even though our standard of living has improved and many things are cheaper nowadays than they were 40 years ago, the quality of life may have deteriorated along the way. Life was much more simple then, there were less pressures on us and we could afford to buy a house. When I bought Hey Farm in 1959 it cost £2,200, that was roughly 100 Pedigree prams. The top of the range Pedigree pram today costs twenty nine pounds but Hey Farm will be worth slightly more than £2,900!
All right, I accept that this is very simple economics but it does demonstrate the basic problem, in terms of the cost of prams, property has gone up at least 50 times as much. I suspect that you would get roughly the same answer if you used the price of eggs, Mars bars or travel.
So what’s the answer? I have to admit I haven’t got a clue. I sit here and look at my three daughters and six grandchildren and thank God that things worked out the way that they did. I feel so much for young people struggling to start a family and, because I am so lucky, am terribly sad for all the frustrated grandparents out there.
Have I any advice for the youngsters? All I can say is that all those years ago it still looked an impossible task to support a family but we decided to risk it and it worked out all right. I know this isn’t the best basis for planning your life but with hindsight, the cost of not having children in terms of happiness and satisfaction later in life is far greater than the cost of rearing them. This was true then and I’m sure it is true now. It was hard working seven days a week, more often than not for more than eighty hours, but we survived somehow. It may be that some things haven’t changed, the poor people have to work harder than the rich to get even the basics of life. They call it ‘progress’. Depressing isn’t it.
SCG/23 May 2002
1037 words.
Margaret Graham in her new Pedigree pram, Hey Farm, 1961.
