Avoid Chilly Churches - Tips from Our Ancestors on Keeping Warm in the Heating Crisis: 3

 

The coldest place that our ancestors were forced to regularly frequent was probably the local church – where sometimes ice laced the font and the earth outside was too hard to allow for burials. Members of the congregation would dress warmly and take rugs, blankets and even dogs to help keep warm during long sermons.

On Saturday November 25th 1865, a correspondent to the Westmorland Gazette and Kendal Advertiser complained: ‘We know that some people have attributed their own severe cold to a chill caught in church. The season has not been a healthy one, and there is no need to aggravate prevalent sickness by any cause so obviously likely to cause shocks to health, and especially to what is called feeble health, as the damp, cold atmosphere which must prevail in a large church without a fire in such a month as this.’

                 St Peter's Church, Elmsett Suffolk, 2010. Wikimedia Commons

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Fear Cold bedrooms - Tips from Our Ancestors on Keeping Warm in the Heating Crisis: 2

The cold was particularly felt in bedrooms where furnishings tended to be less lavish and fires were generally left unlit during the daytime. Our ancestors devised many ways of keeping the temperature up. Co-sleeping with parents and siblings was common; people also slept with animals. Beds were covered with many layers of straw or newspaper. People wore socks and bed caps, rested their feet on foot warmers, and prewarmed their sheets with hot soap stones or bricks and warming pans.  

Victorian newspapers frequently warned of the dangers of cold bedrooms with The Shields Daily Gazette and Shipping Telegraph advising on Saturday November 16th 1895, 'It is safer to sleep in bad air all night with a temperature over 50 (F) than in pure air with a temperature under 40 (F).  The bad air may sicken you, but cannot kill you; the cold air can and does kill very often.'

Wikimedia Commons

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