Essential Reading

'I have been a family historian for more than 40 years, and a professional historian for over 30, but as I read it, I was constantly encountering new ways of looking at my family history....Essential reading I would say!' Alan Crosby, WDYTYA Magazine

Tuesday, 4 October 2022

Don't Underestimate Underwear: Tips from Our Ancestors on How to Keep Warm in the Heating Crisis: 8

To the modern eye, Victorian underwear can appear over-fussy and even comical, but in drafty British houses without central heating or double-glazing, there was good reason for ensuring that warm undergarments were donned before other clothing.  

Nuneaton Advertiser 30th November 1872

"The real secret of healthy warmth and freedom is warm, light and close under-clothing. In armour of close fitting merinoes or flannels, from neck to ankles and wrists, worsted stockings and cork soles in sound boots, the man or woman may go, like a knight of old, into the thick of the fight, secure that the slugs and arrows of the wind and sleet will never pierce him."


Women's Drawers, date unknown. Wikimedia Commons.

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Eat Fat: Tips from Our Ancestors for Keeping Warm in the Heating Crisis: 7

Commentators were keen to point out that proper warmth was generated within the body rather than by the addition of extra layers of clothing. For those who could afford it, the best way to feel comfortable in winter was to eat well.

On 7th December 1894 the paper Young Woman advised, 

"We should make a difference in our winter food as compared with our summer food, by taking an adequate amount of fat, starch and sugar amongst the other items of our diet; and, of those things, we must hold that the fat be the most important of all. It is a truism to say that without fat, our nutrition cannot be accomplished.... [You] may take more butter, more milk, and more fat in the shape of butcher's meat, increasing it little by little with perfect safety and with great advantage. ... Generous living then, is the first rule for those who would keep warm in winter, and a necessary part of that generous dietary is fat."


                    Applied physiology - including the effects of alcohol and narcotics (1897) Wikimedia Commons




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#heatingcrisis #heat #winter #history #Britain #England #heatingbills #heatingcosts #utilitybills #ancestors #ancestry #genealogy #familyhistory #keepingwarm #fat #eatfat #Victoriandiet