What a difference a century makes
Do you know something? Of course you do. Do you know what I am about to tell you? How could you…
Most of you are too young to realise this, but I’m telling you that when you get to my age it dawns on you that 100 years is not a long time at all. Either ancient or modern history will teach the same lesson; a single century is not a long time!
Let me put it to you this way. When I started school, Ireland only had her independence for 25 years or so and those who fought in that war were still young men – and women, let’s not forget. Despite that fact, my classmates and I looked upon that event the same as we did the Stone Age. Take the Great Famine as another example: when I was born, there could be people alive who had lived through the Famine.
All centuries of time are the same length, but never in the history of the world have things changed as much as over the last 100 years. So, why don’t we go back and take a look at the early 1920s and see how far we have progressed since then – while keeping in mind some stuff we have lost along the way.
A hundred years ago, life expectancy for a man was 47, not much more than half of what it is today. Emigration from Ireland was rife in those days. Shortly before that, it was estimated that a third of the population of Liverpool was Irish. Today there are 40 million Americans who claim to be Irish. Something glossed over in modern Ireland is the fact that the Irish suffered subtle, and sometimes blatant, discrimination in the United States at that time.
Sticking with the early 1920s and passions were still high and nerves raw from the after effects of the Civil War. Combatants were still interned. When Galway won their first all-Ireland hurling title in 1923, it was tasked to them for a generation that they only won it because ‘anyone any good was in jail’. (1980 brought that one to an end!)
That was the decade where the Catholic Church came to assert greater power in civil matters such as censorship and public morality. Women got the vote (the thin end of the wedge, Lads!) and ‘Flappers flaunted short dresses, danced wildly and shattered the social rules for a time. It was the Jazz Age and I would say, ‘a great time to be out’.
Penicillin was discovered. James Joyce’s Ulysses was published and WB Yeats became the first Irish Nobel Prize laureate.
Ireland was an agricultural country at that time. There were a lot of poor families in the country, but by and large people did not go hungry. There was a perception, of course, that those who took the ship to America were heading for a land of full and plenty. So, here is a look at how some things were in America in the ‘roaring twenties’. It was no land of milk and honey.
In 1920, only 14 percent of American homes had a bathtub and only eight percent of houses had a telephone. More than 95 percent of all births took place at home. Maybe that was just as well, because 90 percent of doctors had no college education! The average worker made around $300 a year, but a competent accountant or dentist could earn $2,000 per annum. And here’s one more for the Gorls; 100 years ago, most women washed their hair once a month and used the yolk of an egg for shampoo.
Meanwhile, the British people were enjoying an understandable post-war optimism, but while some experienced prosperity, others faced hardship due to the decline of traditional industries and high unemployment. Britain had lost a million young men in the Great War and women outnumbered men. A sad stat is that hospital occupancies were 35 percent higher than a decade earlier, due to the number of seriously injured soldiers still recuperating. The fact that women had done ‘man’s work’ during the war ensured that in future a woman’s place would not necessarily be in the home; 1921 saw the first female police officer.
The first commercial flights were in operation and the BBC started broadcasting for the first time in 1922. Divorce was no longer taboo in the UK – the 1921 Census shows that 16,600 identified themselves as such. (In 2022 alone there were more than 80,000 divorces in England and Wales.)
It was the era of the golden age of cinema. Seeing a silent movie provided the masses with an affordable escape from the toils of everyday life.
So there you have it: a lot of changes in 100 years. Isn’t it funny how ‘a week is a long time in politics’ and yet a century is just a blip in history?
Don’t Forget
Why is it that nobody listens when history repeats itself?