This video (7 mins 21 secs) is about the discovery of vitamin D and its connection with rickets, and how this then turned into discoveries about the connection with calcium and then it starts getting a bit more complicated...
Really interesting thought provoking video. Hard to believe isn’t it that infants were taking such massive amounts of vitamin D at one point.
I’m of the generation that remembers National Dried Milk - half an empty tin made a very good base for a railway tunnel for a model railway - then there was the cod liver oil and orange juice 😝
PS - the presenter doesn’t seem to need to stop to take breath, quite difficult to listen to.
Oh I remember those milk bottles well - they are the reason I don’t drink milk. The crates used to lie outside the caretaker’s office - in the winter the milk used to be frozen and have icy lumps, in the summer it was warm.
I can remember as a Girl Guide or maybe it was Brownies going to help at a day nursery and I was amazed when all the little camp beds came out and the children had a sleep. Can just imagine you lying there pretending to sleep and wishing the time away.
I used to love the milk but I was hard on those who did not like it as they were pretty much forced to drink it. Some kids at the school were hideously poor, never even got fed at home and came to school in dirty clothes - very neglected, so it must have helped them. Better than the soft drink rubbish they guzzle down now.
I wonder if the camp bed sessions made it easy for me to day dream or should I say meditate!
Most of the children in the first school I taught at were pretty poor - when I accepted the job my mother was livid - there were no bragging rights among her friends for saying where I was going to teach. So there was poor but a number of them were exactly as you describe - totally neglected.
It was absolutely heartbreaking. I remember getting them to hang their wet socks over a radiator to dry one winter morning and one child put a pair of socks there that had almost no sole to it. I had never seen anything like it. I qualified in 1970 and I still think of them and wonder what became of them and hope they are happy. Those children most definitely needed their milk - and their free dinners.
I was shocked to discover one of those girls was murdered by her partner many years later - so sad. I hope the others fared better.
Your experiences as a teacher are very moving. My dad always taught in poor schools like that and did his best for all the pupils. He had no interest in a middle class area school posting, he felt he could achieve far more in a special priority area school. It was 11 plus back then and passes were as high from his school as the richer areas and they all left literate and reasonably numerate. He’d help the one who were struggling with individual tuition he was very clear in his instruction, and get the naughty ones out who were creating havoc for his staff as it was basically attention seeking and they got the attention they needed. The naughtiest was put in charge of tomatoes in the school greenhouse he said it worked miracles on them! He was from the working class himself.
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