I never cut and paste without acknowledgment.
As for knowing someone who lived through it , my whole bleedin' family lived through it, Grandad and dad in the forces my mother evacuated to Blackpool and Bideford plus I actually grew up with what we use to call working class people
I say that because now there is a none working class. I note that Jade Goody's mum as been told she has to get a job.
To be honest I grew up in late fifties and early sixties in Camberwell, Southwark Went out to pubs and thousands of parties for my parent friends and family would pick topics they would talk about but I never once experienced this apparent left-wing militancy that I was later to find out about when I associated with the Socialist Labour league who to be honest through left wing middle class people told me my experience was in my head and really my family and their friends were all raving militants.
As for that link -well there's more revisionist history for you. As I said in the late seventies my new left wing politic was alien to all the working class people my family knew. My father had a really tough upbringing in the elephant and castle one bed for him and his three siblings, my nan and granddad from Nunhead in the twenties and thirties but never once did I hear them spit bile at their lot, they just kind of got on with it.
Actually you've done me a favour with your post as its clarified my thoughts and memories. yes there was a massive move to Labour post war but all the WC peple I knew as a toddler and grew up with never once spout left wing hate.
That bloke at the Labour party who had everyone in tears Well what if he described the life for everyone before capitalism eh?
He could have talked about rickets, scurvy , cholera
hers a list I cut and pasted
anthrax
cholera
diphtheria
dysentery
influenza / sweating sickness
leprosy
malaria
measles / German measles
plague
scarlet fever / puerperal fever
smallpox
syphilis
tuberculosis (TB) / scrofula
typhoid fever
typhus / relapsing fever
Parasites like tape worm roundworm
Here's another cut & paste from here
http://rdparasites.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/richard-iii-of-england-and-worms-that.html
"King Richard III Had Worms
Remains identified as those of Richard III were recently discovered in Leicester, England. This in itself is an impressive piece of archaeology, but it gets more interesting for the parasite enthusiast: soil samples collected from beneath the pelvis of the remains contain eggs characteristic of the large intestinal roundworm: Ascaris lumbricoides, a worm that looks superficially like a large earthworm, and can grow to over a foot long. According to Roberts and Janovy, a female A. lumbricoides can produce 200,000 eggs a day.".
That Labour party stooge talks like it was only under the ' bosses' that people had it bad. Like before the industrial revolution they were all living in lovely quaint stone and thatched cottages living on organic fresh produce, no one was ever ill because of additives and all danced merrily around the may pole even when it wasn't May. They had lovely extended families and traditions and all sat around a rustic wooden table every night and spoke about the toils of the day.