Miranda Levy embarked on a two-week mission to live a 1950s life, without all modern conveniences and short-cuts. Photo / Getty Images
We have come a long way in seven decades, but one writer’s two-week experiment suggests we may be better off going back.
In 1957, Harold MacMillan famously proclaimed “most of our people have never had it so good”, but he clearly hadn’t yet received his new iPhone 16 Pro.
Seven decades on – with a mere touch on a six inch glass screen – I can order my dinner (pizza or sushi this evening?) to arrive at my front door within minutes. I can read a book, watch a film, do a puzzle, play a game. Never again do I need to turn an A to Z upside-down to find my way. I’m able to pay my bills, organise my banking, and even monitor my heart rate through a tiny piece of tech.
There’s no need to worry about my son, 20, who’s studying for a year in Vietnam: I can track his progress by watching a little pulsing blob traverse the streets. No cause to wait anxiously for a blue airmail envelope to arrive: Jacob can ring me for free, without navigating operators or satellite-delays.
Surely, life in the 2020s is so much better than life in the Fifties (until your battery runs out, that is)?
For starters, we have so much more of it. In 1957, men in England lived to an average of 66.5 years and women for 72.7. Between 2020 and 2022, the life expectancy at birth in the UK was estimated to be 78.8 years for males and 82.8 years for females in England.
So hats off and thank you to the people behind antibiotics, vaccines and anti-smoking campaigns, as well as the vast improvements in hygiene, sanitation and the Clean Air Act of July 1956, which addressed the coal-based air pollution that was behind much of the premature death by lung disease.
But despite the above, much about the 1950s lifestyle remains healthier than the one we have today.
Obesity statistics did not exist in the 1950s, but research suggests that we were significantly thinner and more active in those days. According to a 2004 study, a woman’s average waist size was 27.5 inches in 1951 compared with the current 34 (70 to 87cm). Such is the problem in the modern population, that the Government is considering putting people on weight-loss drugs to get them back to work.
“We were consuming more calories in the Fifties, but burning them off more quickly,” says Tam Fry, from the National Obesity Forum. “Now we are eating fewer calories, but doing less exercise. In those days, we ate healthily. Now we have fast foods and convenience foods. Mothers don’t stay at home and do the shopping – people just grab what they can on the way home from the office. It is very different.”
Rationing ended in 1954, but that generation still enjoyed the healthy hangover of restricted food intake. TC Callis is a nutritionist and the author of The Building Blocks of Life: A Nutrition Foundation for Healthcare Professionals.
“People had been encouraged to grow their own fruit and veg during the war, and many people still did for years afterwards,” she says.
“Diet was meat and two veg, with potatoes – rice and pasta were almost unheard of. The vegetables were cabbage, sprouts, cauliflower, swedes - there were very few tomatoes in the 1950s as the weather was too cold here. The only olive oil available was in a small jar from the chemist – to de-wax your ears.”
And while there was processed food such as spam and corned beef, it wasn’t as unhealthy as the ultra-processed fare of today. “These meats were ‘processed by traditional means’,” says Callis. “This means that while salt and oil were used in the processing, they were still healthier than the chemical-packed UPFs of today, and only tended to have a maximum of five ingredients, all of which you could recognise.”
Until 1961, bread was also still made in the traditional way. Then, a laboratory in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, discovered a new means of producing bread, making the average loaf in Britain 40% softer, reducing its cost and more than doubling its life. “The Chorleywood Method used lower-protein flour, hard fats, extra yeast, and additives,” says Callis.”That was the start of food processing, and the rise of obesity.”
My father, Lawrence, who was born in 1942, grew up with his widowed mother Celia on the ground floor of a large house in Hackney, London. “Every day, my mum walked to the shops where the friendly shopkeepers knew us by our names,” he says. “We had no car. There were no credit cards. Mum would pay by cash, which was hoisted in a basket to an office upstairs.”
Celia would make a roast chicken, which lasted four or five days. “Our only luxury was a fridge: I can still remember the gas flame burning at the back,” says Dad.
“We never had a washing machine – Mum washed everything in the kitchen sink and dried it with a mangle, though I imagine she started going to a laundrette at some point. We didn’t have central heating, only a coal fire in the kitchen – the house was freezing. The worst thing was the Izal toilet paper in our cold lino-floored bathroom. It was like sandpaper.”
Compare this with my Andrex two-ply, central heating, car, microwave and Deliveroo. To wash my clothes, I merely have to bend from the waist and shove them into a machine and feel grumpy when I have to stand upright to hang them out and – God forbid – iron them.
So when the Telegraph challenged me and my partner Jeremy to live a 1950s life for two weeks, without all modern conveniences and short-cuts, I was simultaneously apprehensive and intrigued. How would we do?
Just going to the shops is a gym workout in itself. I’m fortunate that I live near a busy high street, so this week instead of zipping into Sainsbury’s with my car lazily perched in the carpark, I visit each shop separately with my old-lady trolley and several hefty canvas shopping bags.
I decide to track my step-count, which previously ranged from 4-5000 on a “normal” day, to over 9000 when I exercise or take a walk.
The first thing I notice is that 1950s produce is very heavy. A bag of potatoes weighs a ton, as do cauliflowers, cans of corned beef and spam.
These good old fashioned British staples are so much more cumbersome than our modern fancy sugar snap peas, dried pasta or sushi, a fact that does not escape me as I haul them up the two flights to my mansion-block flat and feel my quadriceps burn with every step.
My step-count goes up by at least 50% every day, to 7500 on a “normal” day, without any extra effort.
Therefore, it doesn’t surprise me when I find an old study by the women’s magazine Prima that revealed that 1950s women burned up three times as many calories as their modern counterparts, largely down to the labour-intensive traditional female (and they were almost always done by females) tasks of washing, ironing, and walking to the shops.
According to the research, women today eat on average 2178 calories a day and can expect their lifestyle to burn off 556. In 1952, however, the average woman ate 1818 calories a day and burned off 1512.
And so for this fortnight, I vow to wash by hand, choosing Monday as “washday” in common with many housewives of the 1950s. While washing machines first appeared in the UK in 1947 – they had two tubs, one for washing and a smaller tub for water extraction or centrifugal rinsing – most households didn’t own one until the late Fifties.
Hence, everything has to be done by hand in the sink (only the bath will do for larger items like sheets). I buy a vintage washboard but find it flimsy and far too small. Do not underestimate the heft of a soaking wet set of sheets. The rainy weather means that everything has to be dried inside – and it’s just as well my children are no longer at home as I need the space in their bedrooms.
Every spot of my flat is covered with large, dripping swathes of fabric, hanging from every spare surface and radiator (I decide to conveniently ignore they didn’t have radiators).
After two weeks of this, I begin to understand why people used to wear their outfits three, or even four times, without negligently throwing them “in the wash” after a solitary outing.
Food in the 1950s: no ready meals, no Pret, no takeaways (apart from the occasional fish and chips), no spices, no mangoes or goji berries. “We never went to a restaurant,” says my dad. You made a Monday to Saturday meal plan – with a roast on Sunday – and you stuck to it, eating the same thing, on every night of the week. Dullsville, or what?
This part of the challenge particularly excites Jeremy, who is a dab hand in the kitchen. There’s an interesting added layer in that Jeremy is American, and he gets no small pleasure by telling me how the US was booming in the Fifties, with giant fridges, cars, suburban palaces and the first McDonalds in 1953, while we were still slogging around with buses and lard. (I have satisfaction in pointing out to Jeremy that the Americans are even fatter than we are, so that head start isn’t so much to crow about).
We look up the recipes in advance: bland fare such as spam fritters, tinned salmon sandwiches, tinned fruit with evaporated milk and ham salad – thin, weedy lettuce leaves with salad cream.
When Jeremy opens a tin of spam, I leave the room. When he fries kippers, I leave the house. But then Jeremy discovers the online Instagram account of Grandad Joe (I know the internet isn’t allowed, but some vital research was necessary).
Grandad Joe is 91, was a military policeman and commentates on his British 1950s cooking with a glorious Brummie accent, often with his daughter looking on.
Joe’s greatest hits include tinned beef hash and all manner of fry-ups in lard. Jeremy’s first outing is to make Joe’s corned beef hash – the secret is apparently starting the potatoes and onions in lard, adding lots of black pepper. I feel snobby and sniffy and unwilling to try. But I deign to take a forkful, and oh this is delicious – if a little salty – especially with a dollop of brown sauce.
The hash lasts us a couple of days. Otherwise, it’s straightforward stuff: lots of cheese sandwiches on white bread, anaemic salads and roast beef with potatoes and cabbage on Sunday, which suffers from not being allowed a red wine, cracked pepper and honey glaze.
We have fish and chips on a Friday, which feels like Christmas.
I ask my father how he filled his leisure time without the internet. “In the basement of our house, we had a homemade table-tennis table made of planks of wood,” he says. “The ball would often fly off in funny directions.”
Otherwise, Dad’s main entertainment was the radio. “I would go up to my room, get into bed, and listen to Journey Into Space, or the Goons,” he says. “It was like a date: I never missed an episode.”
Like many British families, Dad and Grandma only got a television in time for the Coronation in June 1953. “But even after that, we barely used it – there was only BBC One, for a few hours a day,” he says. “I do remember watching the snooker in black and white. But our TV was so small, it had a magnifying glass in front of it to make it look bigger. We also had to walk around the room with the aerial as the reception was so bad.”
I’m not a big telly-watcher, so this part of the experiment was easier for me than the housework and eating parts. Still, it was annoying not to be able to click onto Netflix to watch a show in the idle hours.
I had made the proviso that I’d continue to use email, because doing my job would be impossible otherwise. But apart from this, I vowed to limit my use of my mobile phone (especially that casual Google) as much as possible. I found this really hard.
Until this facility was taken away, I’d never realised how often I looked things up on my phone. How cold is it going to be this evening? What time does that shop open? What has that actress been in before?
During one discussion, Jeremy asked me the origins of Bonfire Night – why, in this country, we still had this weird tradition of setting an effigy of Guy Fawkes alight and letting off fireworks. I only knew the basics, so my fingers raced to my screen and then stopped: in the end, I had to ring my dad on his landline and ask him to look the whole thing up in Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Forced into an analogue life, Jeremy and I made two trips to the cinema. We wandered over to our local pub, where we nodded to the faces that were fast-becoming familiar, eventually engaging them in conversation about the local farmers market and the best pub quiz (where we attended, coming second, feeling clever and winning a bottle of wine, which we drank with the corned beef hash).
Jeremy and I took twilight walks arm-in-arm around the neighbourhood. During this period, I finished two novels, which I took with me on the Tube into central London appointments. I can’t remember the last time I had done this and it gave me an enormous amount of pleasure, taking me away from the noisy, relentless, online world.
By the end of the fortnight, I am craving garlic, chili, olive oil, basil and coriander. I’m desperate to add some mangoes and blueberries to my dull, green fruit bowl, full of apples and pears. I never want to smell an open tin of spam again, for as long as I live.
On the other hand, I haven’t eaten any Love Bars bought on a whim from Pret or ordered any takeaways (apart from the fish and chips) – surely this has to be a good thing for my blood pressure and cholesterol.
When I stand on the scales, I see I have lost over two pounds (1kg) – I have no doubt my weight-loss trajectory would have continued downwards if I’d continued living 1950s-style. My legs and arms absolutely feel stronger from all the carrying and the schlepping, the washing, and the hanging out.
One thing I also notice is that I’m sleeping better: waking up at least once less during the night. This might be related to the loss of screens before bedtime, and the soporific effect of a good book.
Perhaps the nicest thing of all is that I’m appreciative of my surroundings – the local shopkeepers, the neighbours I smile at in passing, the locals in the pub.
It makes me realise how much time and life we waste, wandering around with our heads down, submerged in our phones all the time. Life may have been tougher in the Fifties, but at least our parents were present enough to enjoy it.
Why eight hours a night is the sweet spot for sleep.