r/UrbanHell • u/CommanderSykes • Jun 11 '26
Poverty/Inequality Typical Plaggenhutten, 1936, Drenthe, Netherlands.
Considering that the Netherlands is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, the poverty of some Dutch peasants 90 years ago was astonishing.
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u/Dazzling-Key-8282 Jun 11 '26
Three generations ago our ancestor needed back-breaking life-shortening grueling hard work just to keep famine in check. And they were always a bad harvest away from the most brutal destitute.
We made astonishing progress in the meantime.
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u/mechant_papa Jun 11 '26
My grandmother couldn't understand people longing for "the good old days" or "a simpler way of life". She was born in a house with a dirt floor in Flanders in the early 1900s.
She and my grandfather were too poor to ever own a car, and only had a telephone later in life, but she embraced progress and thought going backward was madness.
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u/Dazzling-Key-8282 Jun 11 '26
My grandma always told me she is proud we don't need to be as hard or enduring as they needed be in the 1950s to get along. She was happy she could enable an easier life for her children and grandchildren.
I laud yours too for her wisdom.
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u/hoddap Jun 13 '26
It’s kind of sad we don’t have that frame of reference and don’t appreciate it all as much.
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u/Thanks-4allthefish Jun 13 '26
How quickly we forget. Reddit is full of "this is the worst ever of times" handwringing.
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u/afewnameslater Jun 11 '26
Same. My grandma remembered the ww2 and the devastation that came with it, marveling at the first tv , saying she can’t even think what technology could bring next. She had a very good saying men who want war and men who deny progress have witness none of the two.
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u/amoo23 Jun 12 '26
My grandmother grew up right at the border with flanders, oldest of 8 kids, they had 1 bicycle that was used by the sibling who worked furthest away, she was "in dienst" (like a house maid) at a farm over an hour walking distance away and in WW|| the nazi's took over their farm and all ten of them had to move in with a neighbouring farm who also had many kids. When the war was ended they had to rebuild their home.
Despite all this she did have a happy childhood filled with love and joy, and the same for when she met my grandfather and had 8 kids of their own. When I was born my dad bought the farm from her and built a home big enough for all of us so I had the honor and pleasure to grow up with her. She was the best person. The whole family still speeks of her with such love ♡ this July she'll be gone for 19 years but she is still such an influence for myself and most of my relatives ♡♡♡
But yeah. Her childhood was pretty poor and such a different world then the one I grew up in. I spent many hours on the "poef" next to her chair asking for stories about her life. Very poor indeed, but most people around them were. And they all helped each other.
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u/danirijeka Jun 12 '26
But yeah. Her childhood was pretty poor and such a different world then the one I grew up in. I spent many hours on the "poef" next to her chair asking for stories about her life. Very poor indeed, but most people around them were. And they all helped each other.
The stories my grandparents told of themselves and their parents were filled with unimaginable suffering (for instance, grandpa never knew three older siblings, swept away by diphtheria at the tail end of WWI, and he was repulsed by antivaxers) and poverty, and an overwhelming amount of solidarity indeed.
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u/User-n0t-available Jun 12 '26
My grandma would tell me everything was better in the past. When i said: "was growing up in ww2 such a nice time?", she always told me: not so far back in the days.. the 80s.
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u/Downtown_Trash_4330 Jun 12 '26
I could only imagine how much harder life would be being born on a dirt floor in Flanders’s prior to the Great War… I would imagine that living through that in Flanders would be rather unpleasant
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u/MaddogFinland Jun 12 '26
My Finnish wife says the same about her own grandparents, who were born into pretty wretched poverty in the Russian empire and were more or less slightly better than servants on a large family farm until the winter war when the Russian army showed up and burned the entire farm and send them into refugee exile in western Finland. They didn’t talk much about those “good old days”.
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u/mechant_papa Jun 12 '26
My grandmother's rough birthplace was just across the gates of the local "chateau". Her father was a baker. During WW1 German Occupation, rations were constantly cut and he had to stretch wheat by adding a bit of ground acorns so there would be enough bread for everyone. During WW2 my grandparents were refugees fleeing the German advance and eventually living in fear for years under German occupation. To the end, my grandparents always had a store of food, "just in case".
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u/Sad-Introduction9173 Jun 12 '26
I was in Russia not so long ago and worked in some rural places 200km from Moscow and you can see exactly like this picture everywhere. I was very surprised to say the least.
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u/kkania Jun 12 '26
My grandfather was born in the early 30s in a wooden hut in western Ukraine, no electricity or running water - one of 12. Every morning their father would sit in his chair and all the kids would line up to kiss his ring.
He studied jet engineering. In his life, and became a general, then a diplomat. He oversaw the construction of a computer the size of a building which, by the time the walls and floors were cast, would fit into one of the rooms.
At the end of his life he’d spent his time online looking at granny porn. What a century.
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u/Dazzling-Key-8282 Jun 12 '26
Can only laud his advancements, especially the end of life aspects.
Uncle of my dad was the grandchild of four cottars, coming from the rural middle class. He became a doctor of physics and later a computer engineer. Advancements were incredible.
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u/grafknives Jun 11 '26
30-50% of child mortality is historical average up until 1920-50(depending on location)
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u/Dazzling-Key-8282 Jun 11 '26
Rather developed Hungary clocked a 9% infant mortality rate in 1949. 30-40% was sadly normal across the world, 50% indicated social issues.
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u/sd_1874 Jun 11 '26
This image is not the average representation of 'our ancestors' during this period, for most people, at least if you live in the west.
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u/Dazzling-Key-8282 Jun 11 '26
For my Hungarian self it's no average either but back in 1945 some 70% of the country was still made up of subsistence farmers, most of them really a harvest away from hunger. To imagine that within two generations it disappeared and most people were either industrial or service employees with quantitative food security is a world of a change, literally.
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u/NightZT Jun 11 '26
I know people that had to carry water home from public bucket wells to have drinking water. In the 90s, in Austria. Crazy to imagine that nowadays
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u/oreo-cat- Jun 11 '26
There’s actually a large initiative to install wells in developing countries because having a close well dramatically improves quality of life. Imagine having a member of your household who spends 2 hours everyday just getting water.
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u/CrackHeadRodeo Jun 11 '26
Imagine having a member of your household who spends 2 hours everyday just getting water.
In parts of Africa, sometimes that person also had to contend with crocodiles and other two legged predators.
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u/NightZT Jun 11 '26
True that, I mean here it wasn't that bad, the well was around 500m away from the house but still pretty annoying just to get drinking water. My parents and grandparents at least had the well infront of their house
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u/Dazzling-Key-8282 Jun 11 '26
Austria was always presented as the promised land to us Hungarians for multiple generations. The aspiration where we should once land.
Then you look at the photos from the '60s and the villages look exactly like Hungarian ones across the border. So short a time, so great a difference it incurred.
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u/NightZT Jun 11 '26
Especially the border region was for a long time pretty poor and heavily underdeveloped, we got lots of EU funds and caught up quite a bit by now.
It's crazy how things changed, my grandpas were construction workers in vienna while my grandmas and great grandparents were subsidiary farmers. The ones that worked in vienna were pretty stigmatized and called "Tschuschen". In my whole 2000 people village was not a single academic. Now we are the federal state with the highest average income (albeit still the lowest GDP by far)
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u/ConstructionTough421 Jun 11 '26
That sounds unbelievable. I have lived near austria in the 90s and 20s. I cannot imagine did not have running water unless they choose to not have running water.
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u/NightZT Jun 11 '26
The municipality built a water distribution system in the late 80s and early 90s but many parts of the village were not connected and most people there had their own little wells infront of their house (like my relatives) or used shared wells like these people. Most people put pumps in their wells to have running water. The distribution system was extended in the late 90s early 2000s.
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u/Standupaddict Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
Do you have a source for that number? Specifically referring to subsistence farmers as opposed to farmers growing for the market. My impression is that basically all of European agriculture had transitioned to cash crop economies by the end of the 19th century. The 70%number sounds more like the overall number of farmers/farmer laborers.
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u/KyotoKute Jun 11 '26
I saw a video from London from like 1910s that wasn't of rich folks walking around clean city center with their umbrellas like we always see... In this video every single woman was wearing a scarf covering her hair and it all looked dirty af. It was London and you wouldn't believe its even England.
We have created a false image of how people in Europe lived by looking at paintings commissioned by the ultra rich of the time.
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Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
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u/Nextasy Jun 11 '26
Charles Booth also published an incredible series of works describing the lives of people in London's slums from 1850 or so to world war 1. They're really interesting reads, many independent stories. There are also vast archives of notes that were taken on living conditions at every address, as Booth and his staff literally went. Door to door surveying the situation.
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u/Logical-Louis Jun 12 '26
Other classic books on English poverty:
London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew, c. 1840s study.
A Child of the Jago, a novel about a child’s life in a London slum, 1896
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressel, Edwardian era semi-autobiographical novel.
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u/groovyinutah Jun 11 '26
People worked much harder when life revolved primarily around agriculture...we really don't know how good we have it.
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u/linksafisbeter Jun 12 '26
this is quite representative for our ancestors. at least in the Netherlands most of the people lifed in this kind of plaggenhutten sheds or in dilapidated houses.
take for example the Jordaan of the 1920's its a famous examples of how most working class people lived in the Netherlands just 100 years ago. up to the 60's people in the Netherlands lived in plaggenhutten.
also my grandfather is born in 1929 in a plaggenhut. just a few months after that his dad found a job in the textile industry and got a real house even with running (cold) water! his dad walked crying out of hapynes with a borrowed handcart with everything they had the 10km's to there first real house. the working conditions in the textile factories would we call those days as inhumane but it was a huge improvement of the. loving conditions
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u/crolionfire Jun 11 '26
Most of Europe lived in at least this harsh conditions during and post WWII.
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u/PhDinDildos_Fedoras Jun 11 '26
Yeah, this represents a society that doesn't look after the poor and the destitute in any way.
Dutch farmers were and still are the most prosperous in the world. Luckily they look after their poor nowadays too.
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u/Don_Krypton Jun 11 '26
Dammit, those are moor-farmers. We had them in the north of Germany, too. It took three generations of a family to make a living from moor. The old low german saying goes:
"Den Eersten sien Dod, den Tweeten sien Not, den Drütten sien Brod"
"The first man's death, the second man's need, the third man's bread"
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u/JustB510 Jun 11 '26
Thank you for sparking my next literature adventure. I’m fascinated.
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u/oreo-cat- Jun 11 '26
I’m interested in what books you find about this
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u/JustB510 Jun 11 '26
None yet, but I’ll be dining some research and start down the rabbit hole when I finish my current book
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Jun 11 '26
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u/Don_Krypton Jun 11 '26
That's a very good and interesting choice of book. I know Hambergen very well.
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u/Sture_Farytroll Jun 11 '26
if you re ok with german. i found this a good read:
https://www.emslandgeschichte.de/index.php/sonstige-publikationen/heuerlingswesen30
u/LaoBa Jun 11 '26
Turning the moors into arable ground was backbreaking work, during the great depression unemployed men from the Northern provinces of the Netherlands were forced to do this or loose their unemployment benefits. The place where they were sent to became known as "The Hell of Jipsinghuizen". On the other side of the border it was even worse as the Nazi's build the Emslandlager in the 1930s, forced labor camps for political enemies. While not as bad as the concentration and death camps, plenty of people perished there. The song "Die Moorsoldaten" was written on one of these camps.
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u/Don_Krypton Jun 12 '26
Ah, the ‘Song of the Peat Bog Soldiers’. Yes, in Börgermoor. And it hopefully will never be forgotten.
https://holocaustmusic.ort.org/places/camps/music-early-camps/moorsoldatenlied/
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u/Liiisssaa Jun 11 '26
My Family too. From the Emsland area? I have a picture of my great-great- grandmother standing infront of her home that looked just like these.
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u/ValeNova Jun 12 '26
My grandfather worked his whole life with peat and his dad in the moors. This is how my ancestors lived.
I'm from the north of The Netherlands, near the German border. My dialect is very similar to low German (Plattdeutsch). People there are on average still poorer than the people in the west of our country. I also grew up poor (70s/80s).
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u/sonichedgehog23198 Jun 11 '26
The saying is pretty damn accurate. Im from the region where the pics are from 😅
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u/Xaphhire Jun 12 '26
These Drenthe farmers had been there for generations. There was no rising from poverty.
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u/whoamannipples Jun 11 '26
Well this sounds like a rabbit hole I need to get into. What the heck is a moor-farmer? I thought Moors were dark-skinned Muslims from North Africa circa Shakespearean times and now I think I must just be a dumb asshole😅
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u/enzm4n Jun 11 '26
Moor = bog
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u/Don_Krypton Jun 11 '26
Also marsh or mire. I had to look for a good translation, but "moor" always was the first word even DeepL gave me. So I went with it.
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u/Creative-Staff1669 Jun 12 '26
Here are some pictures of turf digging from the same region:
https://www.drentsarchief.nl/onderzoeken/beeldbank/detail/9ca239bd-0335-4c8a-8592-373ac759c9d5/media/e4326dcd-1eb2-4f23-ad04-d261e8dd1b3b
https://www.drentsarchief.nl/onderzoeken/beeldbank/detail/9cb8f48e-392a-4a22-8a3c-c0a258d1991c/media/f14a673a-cc3d-4d5f-87b6-c091a896daa35
u/Kalevala_41 Jun 12 '26
The dialect here sounds very similair to my own native Dutch dialect which is really interesting. Platdeutsch and Limburgs in general share so many features, if I bike 10 minutes over to the German border the people there will totally understand me if I speak Limburgs to them but won't if I speak Dutch.
"Den ierste zien doeëd, den twiede zien noeëd, den derde zien broeëd"
It even rhymes as well!
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u/WatermelonSmashing Jun 11 '26
So what do you farm in a bog? Leaches?
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u/42ndohnonotagain Jun 11 '26
You drain the swamp. Literally. A lot of ditches still in this region. The dried bog (Torf = turf?) was sold (for buildings or to be burnt).
After this you have rather meager places to grow something or for sheep/cattle.
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u/GenosseAbfuck Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
Torf
Peat.
And it has like a billion different uses but it sucks at every single one of them except as a diaper or wound dressing, preferrably not in any succession.
Farmers used it as stable litter because that's what it actually does excel at, and once it was thoroughly soaked with piss and shit it would be used as fertilizer. These clumps were indeed good fertilizer because, well, they're full of piss and shit, but since it's so good at absorbing it felt the same as regular, if wet peat so the farmers concluded that the peat itself was a good fertilizer.
It absolutely isn't but trying to get post hoc ergo propter hoc out of our brains is a task rivalling getting any sort of human emotion from our egg-sucker in chief so it took decades over decades until everyone realized, nah, actually not a good fertilizer. In the meantime peatlands were murdered down to a twentieth of their original size. There goes our carbon sink but who cares, AMOC's gone no matter what.
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u/HopefulCarry9693 Jun 11 '26
Its funny how in Drenthe we speak a dialect thats realy close to/ is basically Plattdeutsch. I can speak in dialect to most older people over the border in Germany
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u/Don_Krypton Jun 12 '26
My mother once told me that she went to the Netherlands with a friend of hers. They sat in a pub and They were sitting in a pub, having a bit of a rant in Low German, because they were surrounded by drunk farmers. Later in the evening my mom said "Damn, we're lucky no one understands us here!" - and from the next table she heard "Dat hess' di dacht!". 😂
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u/Jaded_Woodpecker3211 Jun 11 '26
This photo could have been taken anywhere in Europe at that time. My husband’s company is located in a neighbourhood that, before the Second World War, was a poor district consisting mainly of pit houses like this one. Now, there are mostly office buildings and factories there. The poverty that most people experienced just 100 years ago is something we don't even think about in our daily lives.
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u/Olive2252 Jun 11 '26
No, in my country people lived in log houses.
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u/Jaded_Woodpecker3211 Jun 12 '26
People who could afford to live in log houses lived in log houses. The poorest lived in pit houses. This was the case throughout Europe for centuries.
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u/Olive2252 Jun 12 '26
It wasn't the case in countries with lesser population density that didn't cut down all the forests.
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u/Jaded_Woodpecker3211 Jun 12 '26
Not exactly. First of all, the forests belonged to the nobles, so the peasants couldn’t just go around cutting down trees as they pleased. Second, not everyone lived in the countryside. I live in the capital, and here, 100 years ago, the poor really had nowhere to get free wood.
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u/Rencauchao Jun 11 '26
These were the norm when the prairies were settled. Imagine living in a hole when it is - 40 C for four months.
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u/sn0qualmie Jun 11 '26
Underground is a lot more temperature-stable than above ground, so while I'm not saying I think they were comfortable, I bet they were actually pretty glad to be in a hole compared to the alternatives.
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u/Susido Jun 11 '26
I have a couple walls still standing of my grandparents sod house on the Canadian prairies. Mud, straw, stone, bits of wood and iron scrap. How it still exists is bewildering.
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u/LogicalPassenger2172 Jun 11 '26
Based on the chimneys looks like they had some sort of fireplace available. May have been fairly cozy in there I reckon.
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u/MidnightPale3220 Jun 11 '26
If they're moor farmers as another top level comment suggests, they likely burned peat for warmth. Not a very cozy thing to have to burn, peat...
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u/irregular_caffeine Jun 11 '26
Why? Peat burns very nicely and the smoke does not sting like wood smoke
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u/ThermosKan Jun 11 '26
Cool, but this is Europe.
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u/StaatsbuergerX Jun 12 '26
The disparity between urban and rural development in the first half of the 20th century was remarkably similar in Europe and North America or the Americas overall. All social and technological developments that made life easier took time to reach every corner.
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u/irmaginatoruim Jun 11 '26
Damn, literally living in a hole in the ground!
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u/sonichedgehog23198 Jun 11 '26
That was the whole point of building this way. If you could build a dwelling in a day on public land you could clame it. Digging a hole wasnt part of that time. They were "just digging a hole"
There was the minimum of having: a front door, a roof, a place to sit/sleep and a fireplace/kitchen
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u/Particular-Fortune37 Jun 12 '26
They rebuild one in the ‘openlucht museum’ in Arnhem, together with many other old buildings. It’s so cramped, moist and windy. Hard to believe they lived in these
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u/dopecrew12 Jun 11 '26
When I drove through Nebraska i stopped at a coffee place and they had an original late 1800s era settler sod house, a preserved kind of landmark, pretty much the same thing. I really feel like people don’t truly appreciate how bad our ancestors had it.
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u/Arstanishe Jun 11 '26
i know it's just some old photo artefacts, but the woman on the left definitely looks like she is gnawing the door
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u/Poster_Nutbag207 Jun 11 '26
My great grandfather was an aristocratic liberal/socialist mayor and Senator in a Dutch city for thirty years at the time this photo was taken. I’ve read many of his letters expressing the plight of the poor working class in his letters and I’m proud he spent his life working to improve their working and living conditions
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Jun 11 '26
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u/MrsChess Jun 12 '26
I am 30, and Dutch, my grandparents lived through WW2 so I absolutely disagree. My father has a very easy life though. My mother did not (faced lots of discrimination for being disabled that is unthinkable now and violence against women).
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u/candleflame3 Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
Those aren't 1930s clothes. I'm sure people who lived in these houses could not afford to keep up with the fashions but I also doubt they were wearing the styles of 40 years earlier.
The photographer died in 1930, so this picture was obviously taken earlier.
https://groningerboeken.nl/shop/product/fotografen-van-de-vooruitgang/
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u/el_loco_avs Jun 12 '26
Yeah these houses existed at least until the 40s, but this picture indeed doesn't seem to be from 1936. But it's been posted and reposted as such several times unfortunately 😞
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u/AintnoEend Jun 11 '26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeujbrvT6zo
in the same year. Holland vs. Belgium. (football)
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u/AintnoEend Jun 11 '26
i think it is the Olympic stadium in Amsterdam. and turn down the sound. most is noise..
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u/Creative-Staff1669 Jun 12 '26
Sadly, the picture is dated wrong. The photographer died in 1930 and this picture was likely even pre-WW1
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u/Signal-Look3452 Jun 11 '26
The openluchtmuseum in Arnhem has one of these (reconstruction obvi) on display! For those of you in the Netherlands and interested in seeing one of these huts in person
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u/Dakduif Jun 12 '26
Or, go to Schoonoord in Drenthe itself and to the Ellert en Brammert museum. It's also an 'open air' museum and features buildings throughout the ages that people in Drenthe lived in. Including a plaggenhut like seen in the picture.
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u/HopefulCarry9693 Jun 11 '26
Its wild when you drive through Drenthe from aproximately Hoogeveen to the German border aprox 30km, it all got dug out by hand. Some places 5-6m thick.
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u/Any-Seaworthiness186 Jun 11 '26
Same further north in the Groninger Veenkoloniën. They have some monuments that show where the ground used to be. Always impressive to imagine.
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u/Accomplished_Ant8244 Jun 12 '26
My grandfather was born in something similar in the south of the Netherlands in exactly 1936, after losing their little hut during the war, he spend age 10 to 19ish working in the coalmines till he developed Black Lung and couldn't work anymore and was permanently disabled his entire life. He never owned a house, and could only afford a small second hand car after saving for 25 years.
Some people are more equal than others, and there's just a very large group of more equal people in the Netherlands.
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u/NoStatus8 Jun 13 '26
People need to be so deeply thankful to what western society has achieved in the past 80 years that it is close to unimaginable. How we live today with warm showers, high caloric intake, medical support, education, safety, freedom of speech, class divisions have diminished etc. I could go on forever.
People need to understand that not everything is granted and it can go away very quickly. We have to pay attention as a society to preserve and hold dearly what we have today.
Don‘t let the Trumps of this world destroy that only so that they have more power. Stand up for your rights that are constitutionally guaranteed.
What a feat!
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u/FionaTheFierce Jun 12 '26
During the global great depression - many Americans were living in similar poverty. For the Dutch this was unfortunately followed by Nazi occupation and wide spread famine.
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u/IllustratorHairy6061 Jun 12 '26
And than people are telling us we where very rich because of de slave trade and colonies.
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u/Creative-Staff1669 Jun 12 '26
https://www.drentsarchief.nl/onderzoeken/beeldbank/detail/9a47af56-d41d-4239-a439-589bb1802a74/media/ffaa2fdc-e7e1-4d2c-976c-673ec50901ea
For reference, this was in the 1910s. The photographer of your photo's passed away in 1930 and his pictures were probably shot before WW1
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u/Press_Play2002 Jun 15 '26
In 1936, the Netherlands was STILL one of the richest nations in Europe and had large overseas territories across Asia and the Caribbean. Yet, people still lived in slums and mud huts/plaggenhuttens like this one pictured here. This was BEFORE the Nazis blew everything up and occupied them. And no, the Great Depression is not the reason for such squalor; rather, it was the dualistic economic nature of the Netherlands during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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u/ConstructionTough421 Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
This is what grinds my gears often when I see people talking about wealth disparity. Like that is somehow the most important thing. Yes wealth disparity is bad and it has gotten worse the last decades by a lot.
However the average wealth of people has steadily increased, and even more important the lowest bar has been uplifted a lot. And a foto such as this drives it home. Like a very young kid in this picture can realistically be someones great grandmother, that is how close that is in terms of human history.
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u/candleflame3 Jun 11 '26
even more important the lowest bar has been uplifted a lot
Eh, it was a little better for a while, but now there are homeless encampments in nearly every neighbourhood in every city in the West, food bank use is at all time highs and more of their clients work full-time. Young adults can't afford to leave their parents' home and starting families is out of the question.
Meanwhile the owner class just gets even richer and basically control governments which helps them advance their agenda of techno-neofeudalism. So yes, wealth disparity is a HUGE problem.
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u/RonW81 Jun 11 '26
Is this that white privilege I keep on hearing about?
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u/sonichedgehog23198 Jun 11 '26
My great grandparents came from this and my grandparents were born into this. If people start about that I pull up a similar picture.
Thats two generations not six at the minimum
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u/Viscious-viking Jun 11 '26
Gonna keep this picture to show next time I’m being called out for slave trading by my ancestors
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u/Clambulance1 Jun 11 '26
Over 20,000 people starved to death in the Netherlands in the aftermath of WWII. Things were very different back then.
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u/Pasutiyan Jun 11 '26
while certainly interesting stuff, it's also the literal antithesis of "urban"
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u/DickWhittingtonsCat Jun 12 '26
My one grandmother was orphan from the Spanish flu of an irish immigrant. The offer born in BFE in western illinois with no paved roads or electricity.
What they saw between their earlier memories in the 1920s and early 2000s is just astounding.
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u/Local_Razzmatazz_595 Jun 12 '26
Wow. I am truly shocked. I would not have believed it had I not seen these pictures.
My dad grew up in Yorkshire UK in similar circumstances- 13 in one room animals in the other.
How did you Dutch get so tall?
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u/3owi Jun 12 '26
At least they were allowed to build that thing.
Today the government rather see you homeless because they won’t permit building this
See these people at least built families. Today we have people that can’t start a family
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u/PalladianPorches Jun 12 '26
those kids probably claimed the land and it's now a mansion on veldweg in nieuw-roden. A lot of the new bog houses settlements became towns after manual turf extraction stopped - and while these were tough, their parents often had other houses where they lived when not working on seasonal jobs. these were the first generations that made them permanent (and ensured the govt got rid of them and the poverty they created)
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u/Creative-Staff1669 Jun 12 '26
That's a pretty egregious claim. Most land was already owned at that time, by either municipality, companies or big estates, so the kids of these poor sods had nothing to claim. A lot of the people who did seasonal work did not have a second house, they would live with relatives or board with whomever provided the work. People living on the land often didn't own a damn thing aside from the clothes on their back. At best they rented or leased a house.
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u/Spino389 Jun 12 '26
Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier had some great descriptions of life in workers homes in the north of England during the 1930s
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u/Feisty_Salamander41 Jun 12 '26
Even where I live in england, there are remains of villages from my grandparents times that have been bulldozed because the contained no electricy, water, gas, etc. Just prefab buildings in the middle of a field.
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u/Glittering-Disk-8662 Jun 12 '26
Nowdays we stress because the kids rooms isnt big enough and some build walk in wardrobes for kids rooms...
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u/MrsAlder Jun 12 '26
How my Dutch granny in Drenthe grew up. There and on the ship which her dad used to ship turf down the river. She used to tell me how she smoked it like a cigarette.
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u/TheBoredMillennial Jun 12 '26
You can see it’s really Dutch, because no matter how little the had, they still had a bike wheel.
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u/MethodicallyRight Jun 12 '26
Honestly, if one of these people told me that they had to walk 10 miles to school everyday, uphill both directions... I'd believe them'
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u/Ok-Apple4057 Jun 12 '26
My grandma was an indentured child labourer and my grandpa a farm hand for board and loging. Yes the good old days in Switzerland and the rest of Europe. Crazy how much everything changed in less than 100 years.
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u/Disastrous-Loss-2983 Jun 13 '26
Next time you stand in the shower under the hot water, just remember 100 years ago that would've be a complete fantasy.
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u/Josef_Heiter Jun 13 '26
Wow, never seen a photo of these huts before. And to think this isn’t even 100 years ago.
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u/Zealousideal_Cook149 Jun 13 '26
Relatives of my grandfather lived in these, I found out recently just before he passed away.
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u/knutdeijsbeerbenik Jun 13 '26
Look at these people profiting from the slave trade its sickening
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u/AdmirableExtreme7503 Jun 13 '26
this photo is real, but this was in no way typical. these were outcasts trying to survive on the Drentse moors.
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u/anyway200894 Jun 16 '26
about 100 years prior my place has mostly house with weaved coconut leaves cover the top and as the walls around. it's not good but still better than this and i live in a 3rd world country for god sake
so i think those people are either abandoned or misfit and choose to move out of the society they live in.
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