50s/60s Britain and Now

[TheSignalEngineer]

Looking back to the time of our wedding in 1973 I've commented on the list

5 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

We certainly do live better, don’t we? The following is a list of some of the things we now take for granted but in the 50s/60s/70s were, variously, the province of the well off, the rich and the entitled at various times in those decades:

• Owning a car - NO
• Owning a house - Small flat, big mortgage
• Having a telephone - Yes. Parents first got one in 1967 when I was working away from home.
• Having a fridge - Yes, wedding present from parents
• Having a TV/Colour TV - NO
• Indoor toilet - Yes. I was fortunate in always having lived in a house with indoor toilet. Many of my family didn't have them until the 1970s.
• Flying for pleasure/Foreign Holidays  - No, first foreign holiday 1979 using BR travel facilities to get to Spain. Never flew anywhere until 1990s
• (others?) - No Credit Cards. Bank balance at time of wedding Six pounds, eight shillings. Good job it was payday next week and women getting married could avoid paying much tax by getting wedding date right in those days*

Around that time we had Oil crisis, miners strikes, three day week, power cuts, panic buying of tea, sugar and toilet rolls causing shortages, hyper-inflation....Winter of Discontent, all leading to Margaret Thatcher as PM.

*The tax dodge was a useful one. A woman got a tax allowance at the start of the year as 'Miss X'. On production of a Marriage Certificate at the tax office proving she was no 'Mrs Y' she got a new full year tax allowance and 'Miss x' got a tax rebate. October was the beat month to get married at that time.

[Philou]

Just to come back on what Nearholmer mentioned regarding town centres. My home town of Cardiff, though a city is by no means large but it did have a number of suburban shopping districts, and here are a few that I recall (and I'm sure The Johnster and others will help):

 

Albany Road/Wellfield Road/City Road, Clifton Street/Broadway, Splott Road, Crwys Road/Whitchurch Road, Cowbridge Road East, Cowbridge Road West, Pontcanna, Victoria Park, Birchgrove, Llanishen, Rhiwbina, Llandaff, Llandaff North, Whitchurch, Penarth Road/Corporation Road plus an absolute myriad of 'corner shops' in which you could get anything you want - probably in Alice's Restaurant.

 

I have absolutely no idea what those areas are like now for 'shopping' - I expect most have become estate agents and take-aways. We used to have shops like the Bon Marché, and Woolies in quite a few of the suburbs. Oh and what about real tobacconists. Hopson & Hopson was one known to me where I used to buy my grandfather's Christmas tin of pipe tobacco (4 Square 'purple'). Where have all the pipe smokers gone? It was supposedly the lesser of two evils as the tobacco was slightly less 'trafficked' than cigarette tobacco - still gave my grandfather throat cancer!

 

School dinners? I survived by eating all the rice, sago and tapioca pudding that the others did not like. Up until 1962 school dinners were cooked in central kitchens and transported in and kept in warming cupboards. I just could NOT go lumpy custard with a thick skin - or crème anglaise over here - still will not eat it now. After 1962 when our school was completely rebuilt on a greenfield site, the food was cooked on-site - but it wasn't much better and the portions were smaller.

 

Do you remember 'coughs and sneezes cause diseases', 'six slices a day is the well balanced way' and probably the best known, 'go to work on an egg'? Of course there was also 'My goodness, my Guinness'.

 

Chicken was mentioned earlier - I didn't like it then as it always tasted of fish! That, I found out later, was due to chickens being fed fish-meal. I expect they now eat rendered beef - or something equally unpleasant. Our Sunday roast was occasionally a leg of lamb, I always seemed to have the bit that had a purple coloured stamp 'New Zealand Lamb' on it. I thought we had enough of own blighters running around the Valleys.

 

A little tale to tell - in the 60s, the in-laws had family living in London and they drove but missed the turning coming out of Gloucester and ended up going all the way along the A40 (instead of the A48) and had to come down the Taff Valley via Merthyr. It was dark of course by then, the street lighting pretty poor and car headlights of the day (so to speak) were probably no better than GWR oil-lamps. Their complaint on arriving finally in Cardiff was that 'there were nothing but big dogs roaming the streets' - bless.

 

Cheers and hang on in there, we're out of strict confinement here on Monday,

 

Philip

[Reorte]

6 minutes ago, Philou said:

Chicken was mentioned earlier - I didn't like it then as it always tasted of fish!

Makes a change from everything tasting of chicken!

[Nearholmer]

"Owning a house" as a defining characteristic of modern life has to be treated with a bit of caution, since "owner occupation" (mostly by "mortgage tenants" of course) isn't anything like universal. It peaked at just under 70% of households, and has fallen back to somewhere between 60 and 65% since the 2008 financial debacle. At the start of our "period under study" it was c30%, and passed 50% nationally in 1971 (in big cities the percentage of "owner occupation" is lower, in London about 50% currently).

 

Car ownership isn't universal either, again least common in big cities where car ownership is much more expensive (parking space) and less convenient/necessary (better public transport).

 

So maybe Il Dottore's list isn't so much about things "taken for granted" as things "vastly more common".

 

As a side issue, the experiences of those who went through childhood in the early 1950s are likely to have been significantly different from those who went through childhood in the late 1960s, because a lot changed within the two decades ....... a currently 75yo could well be seeing the world through very different lenses from a currently 55yo.

 

 

[96701]

Getting back to furniture, I really got on with my mum's dad. I used to go round to his a couple of days a week for lunch because because he lived quite close to the school what I went to. Anyhow, when he moved house 40 years ago, he didn't have space for his sideboard, so asked me to look after it. 

Here it is today. Nothing special, made by a local timber merchants, Lamberts of Nelson.

 

Nothing special in terms of craftsmanship, but it belonged to a lovely man, so I'm keeping it. I have to wax the drawers occasionally to keep it running smoothly, but other than that, a nice piece of furniture to keep our stuff in.

[J. S. Bach]

8 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

 ...snip... based on what sort of the above you have (e.g. Maserati vs Kia) ...snip...

I will take the Kia, thank you. At least it is easy to fix if necessary,

[Steamport Southport]

Regarding fixing things. This is a true story.

 

My dad is still of the mentality of "make do and mend". No one else was in and the kettle had broke. He'd managed to find a pan to boil water.

 

But then he spent four hours trying to fix the kettle. When my mum came back with my niece, he was in the kitchen with tools and bits of kettle spread out all over the place. My mum walked over to the cupboard and pulled out a brand new kettle and said "If you can't be bothered looking in the cupboard why didn't you walk over to Tesco? They're only a tenner!"

 

 

 

 

Jason

[St Enodoc]

4 hours ago, Philou said:

go to work on an egg

I believe that was dreamed up by Murray Walker, the motor-racing commentator. His day job was in advertising.

[St Enodoc]

3 hours ago, 96701 said:

 

Nice doily.

[iL Dottore]

8 hours ago, Reorte said:

....Sure, I wouldn't disagree at all that there are areas where things have improved immensely, but really everyone needs to acknowledge it's down to the individual about what they find gives life the most meaning and satisfaction.
...And I loathe all sorts of features of the present that many appear indifferent to (and quite a few many like). .....

....One thing I don't like is when people claim "I lived then, you didn't, therefore your opinion is invalid." By that measure I can't claim that I'm glad I wasn't a medieval peasant or Victorian factory worker! And no-one can claim a view on any potential future they're working towards (or against)....

In regards to your first statement I quote, you have certainly underlined something that seems to have - from what I can observe and discern - almost disappeared from today’s society and that is finding meaning and satisfaction in life. The downside to the material plenty that we have, is that quite often the inner self is neglected.
One aspect of modern life which I feel does not contribute one iota to the well-being and the functioning of society is social media, in the form of Tw*tter and F*cebook.  Apart from the fact that much of what appears on these platforms is inane (the fact that I managed to finally put together an old station clock is of interest only to myself and to very few others, if at all, so why do I need to inform the world about that?),  It also promotes disharmony, creates invidiousness (see the posts of all the so-called “influencers“) and has created a perverse sort of subsociety where happiness is down to how many “likes“ or “dislikes“ a poster gets.  And as to the absurdity of having hundreds of online “friends“... Well, that’s a topic for another thread and another day.

I certainly agree with the last quote of yours I posted, in some ways the views of people who  Haven’t looked through these times are particularly useful as they are undoubtably somewhat more objective than our views of what we lived through.

5 hours ago, rockershovel said:

Lord Palmerston 1784–1865
British statesman; Prime Minister, 1855–8, 1859–65 ...

...I would say there IS a historic relationship, between Britain and the USA. ...

I have read about Lord Palmerston, but I didn’t know that he had made that statement to the House of Commons. And, as you say, similar sentiments have been voiced by leaders throughout the centuries.

I certainly would agree with you regarding a historic relationship between Britain and the USA, but a “special relationship“? No more than with any other country in the USA finds it expedient to team up with (at least that’s how I read the situation).

4 hours ago, Philou said:

...Where have all the pipe smokers gone? It was supposedly the lesser of two evils as the tobacco was slightly less 'trafficked' than cigarette tobacco - still gave my grandfather throat cancer!...

Indeed, where have all the pipe smokers gone? I Whilst you still see gaggles of cigarette smokers stuck outside buildings in their assigned, small smoking, areas, I don’t think I’ve seen a pipe smoker in action any time in quite a few years.  Certainly, pipe tobacco is less processed than cigarette tobacco, but it is still a risk factor for developing cancer (below the risk factor associated with cigarettes but above the risk factor associated with cigars) as, sadly, happened to Philou’s grandfather.

I wonder why pipesmoking has fallen out of favour (aside from the fact that it is “smoking“ which - as a social habit - has radically changed over the last three decades from something nearly everybody did to something almost nobody does nowadays).  Could it be that pipesmoking, unlike cigarette smoking, is not a quick nicotine fix? Certainly, when I smoked a pipe, the entire ritual of preparing the pipe to be smoked was both satisfying and time-consuming.

3 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

....So maybe Il Dottore's list isn't so much about things "taken for granted" as things "vastly more common"....

Good point.  I think it’s also relevant to consider that for many Items on my list for most people nowadays (perhaps with the exception of home ownership) it is a matter of choice and not unaffordability or unattainability.

3 hours ago, 96701 said:

...Nothing special in terms of craftsmanship,..

I must disagree. That is a nicely constructed and beautifully finished piece of furniture, obviously a product of good craftsmanship. Where I might agree with you would be if you had written “nothing special In terms of design”.

2 hours ago, J. S. Bach said:

I will take the Kia, thank you. At least it is easy to fix if necessary,

Unlike most cars on the road nowadays.
It wasn’t that long ago that, armed with nothing more than a couple of spanners, some screwdrivers and a Halfords book on how to repair and maintain a particular type of car, was all you needed to fix most Car problems.

1 hour ago, Steamport Southport said:

"If you can't be bothered looking in the cupboard why didn't you walk over to Tesco? They're only a tenner!"

One of the more unfortunate byproducts of a high-tech, mass produced, consumer society: it’s far too frequently easier and cheaper to replace than repair. Something I find not only not very good for the environment, but also personally quite frustrating when, having bought a high-quality item that I thought would last, after a few years when a small component of the item fails I can’t do the repairs or find a replacement item for that failed component.

[St Enodoc]

1 hour ago, iL Dottore said:

It wasn’t that long ago that, armed with nothing more than a couple of spanners, some screwdrivers and a Halfords book on how to repair and maintain a particular type of car, was all you needed to fix most Car problems.

Yes but fortunately modern cars are an order of magnitude more reliable than cars of the 50s/60s so the need to fix them has diminished commensurately.

[rockershovel]

KRe various points above..

 

the reason for the decline of pipe smoking is simple. Pipes must be smoked, they take time to light (from a match; you can’t light one from that thing in your car, and if you use a lighter the pipe will taste of lighter fluid) and draw and having been lit, should really be smoked until fully consumed, then emptied and cleaned. You then have a piece of strongly-smelling, ash-encrusted  wood to cart about until it is next required, or put back in its rack. 

 

 

I didn’t say the “special relationship” with the US was necessarily to our benefit. We could arguably spend much less time involving ourselves in their overseas military ventures, although that said, US support for the Falklands War was a quite singular piece of diplomatic interplay which would probably not have been possible for any other nation. They pulled the rug from under us in Suez, but we might have done better to heed Eisenhower’s earnest attempts to dissuade us beforehand; one thing for sure, allying ourselves with the French NEVER ends well. We declined to support the USA in Viet Nam, on the basis that the whole venture could not possibly succeed. 

 

Figures are hard to come by, but it appears that there are more British migrants to the USA than the whole EU, let alone any single EU country, or any other country except Australia. I do notice, from various family members who have migrated there over time, that the British seem to adopt American customs and nationality quite readily, whereas the results of attempting to persuade the British to adopt European nationality (either in detail, or as a concept) are a matter of record...

Edited May 31, 2020 by rockershovel

[TheQ]

13 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

We certainly do live better, don’t we? The following is a list of some of the things we now take for granted but in the 50s/60s/70s were, variously, the province of the well off, the rich and the entitled at various times in those decades:

• Owning a car  my grand parents / parents never got one,,  I started learning at age 17 bought an old banger a year or so later.  Car maintenance,  mostly done by the garage,  but I have an old landrover,  which can still be fixed by a couple of spanners.
• Owning a house both sets of grandparents  bought their own late, 40s early 50s, my parents at the sell off of council houses in 1981 which they still live in, me 1989 
• Having a telephone grand parents late 60s, my parents  1971, me 1989.
• Having a fridge.  grandparents / parents late 1960s, me 1989
• Having a TV/Colour TV BW parents 1965/66 Colour 1975, Me 1979,
• Indoor toilet , grandparents 1963, parents  and myself always, SWMBO late 1970s
• Flying for pleasure/Foreign Holidays grandparents never,  parents 1980s, me never. 
•  
• (others?)  boating,  I live on the Norfolk broads,  and the average man has always been able to get a small boat if they were able to rebuild an old wreak. But for most it was a commitment they couldn't justify.   It's now a hobby round here like football or cycling.  Families with bigger boats pass them down the generations,  or sail together. I've raced against a 102 years old and 8 year olds in separate boats in the same race. 
• However the big boom was  1950s/ 60s, when kits became cheaply available, membership of clubs became more affordable. Family  Membership of my club is about £ 130 a year, I sailed for years with a fixed cost of less than £ 300, sailing today ( excluding the motorboat) stress   than a season ticket to Norwich city.  Now my fixed costs for my 27ft motor boat are about £1000 a year.  However with choosing to use a boat yard for major work double that. 

 

Oh the last smoking shop I knew of was  in Cromer it finally closed last year,  it became a small newsagents,  but I don't think that's got a future either. 

Edited May 31, 2020 by TheQ

[rockershovel]

Flicking through the “then and now” list

 

.. my mother’s family could all drive, having mostly been based in places where even in the 1930s, it was essential. My grandfather took over a family business which he had had a share in for many years, in London; the retiring uncle (his uncle, that is) had owned the business since 1910 and never driven, much less owned, a car. My grandfather never owned a car in UK. 

 

- my mother, her brother and my grandparents made trips to Canada and Switzerland by train and ship, in the late 1930s. My uncle flew to the Channel Islands in 1936 by Lufthansa. 

 

- the house/shop we lived in in Dalston had an inside toilet, as built, at the back of the house .. you went down three stairs to a landing at the top of the stairs to the basement. This house was built in the 1890s and had no bathroom. My mother’s 1930s house had an inside toilet as built, and our present house (built 1932) had one in a wash-house outside the kitchen door, but inside an external weather door. The present bathroom was fitted in the 1960s. My aunt in Cambridge had an outside toilet in her rented workmen’s terrace house, built in the 1880s and little changed in the 1960s. 

 

- those folding gates to provide off-Road parking were a common feature of private and council houses built from the 1930s onwards, as were drop kerbs. Car ownership might have been restricted, but aspiration was definitely there. My father owned a car in the later 1950s, my mother never owned one. 

 

- we had a tv in the very early 1960s and a fridge in the 1960s. We had a phone in the shop from the 1950s. 

 

 

Edited May 31, 2020 by rockershovel

[Metr0Land]

5 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

I believe that was dreamed up by Murray Walker, the motor-racing commentator. His day job was in advertising.

 

Usually accredited to Fay Weldon

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_to_work_on_an_egg

[stewartingram]

"Go to work on an egg"....

I turned up at Cambridge Tech College (that's something else that has gone) one morning in the late 60s,and one of my mates was missing from the class. When he arrived about 20mins later he apologised to the tutor, offering his excuse as "my egg broke"......

 

Stewart

[rockershovel]

The Dragon docking at the ISS being now well under way, here’s the 1960s version - Gemini in 1966

 

[Hroth]

Whatever you do, DON'T LOOK DOWN!

 

[rockershovel]

Given the outcome of the revived “Bachmann Project Engineer” thread, it’s worth remarking on the sheer quantity of rubbish now circulating freely, and the (sometimes) difficulty of identifying it. When I first did contract work on rigs in the 1970s, the system was largely unchanged from the 1950s, if not 1930s and there were well-known procedures for eliminating obsolete enquiries. Most of the time, it was simple: the date on the page. Newspapers were issued daily, trade journals weekly or monthly and anything not in the latest edition, was quickly discarded and unlikely to be of interest to anyone. 

 

Now, once posted these things remain in circulation indefinitely; updating filled vacancies appears to be rarely, if ever carried out. This is further complicated by the development of agencies which scour the web for keywords, post them on job boards and then attempt to make spec applications to the original advertiser, which means prospective candidates receive worthless enquiries from third parties with no effective involvement, for jobs which may well not exist. 

 

Theres also the practice of advertising for unobtainable combinations of skills and experience, as an administrative exercise (sometimes in conjunction with pre-determined internal appointments), or advertising a quite unrealistic rates to support visa applications for ICT candidates. This wasn’t done in the 50s and 60s because of the time and effort involved in the exercise. 

 

I remember being told in the late 70s or early 80s that an advert would typically produce 20-50 applications by post, of which about 2/3 were quickly eliminated. Candidates would not be interviewed unless the decision in principle to appoint, was confirmed. Likely candidates not appointed for some reason, were often filed for future reference. People simply had more important things to do. Now, adverts produce hundreds of applications, which are screened by keyword filters almost instantaneously.  Hundreds of spec applications from job boards flood in, all the time. No attempt is made to store information, and candidates seen from more than one source added to automatic filters. 

 

 

[Hroth]

15 hours ago, 96701 said:

Getting back to furniture, I really got on with my mum's dad. I used to go round to his a couple of days a week for lunch because because he lived quite close to the school what I went to. Anyhow, when he moved house 40 years ago, he didn't have space for his sideboard, so asked me to look after it. 

Here it is today. Nothing special, made by a local timber merchants, Lamberts of Nelson.

 

Nothing special in terms of craftsmanship, but it belonged to a lovely man, so I'm keeping it. I have to wax the drawers occasionally to keep it running smoothly, but other than that, a nice piece of furniture to keep our stuff in.

 

Well made, practically indestructable provided the woodworm keep away, but visually....

 

I like the fruit bowl, and we've got an identical vase!

 

23 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

We certainly do live better, don’t we? The following is a list of some of the things we now take for granted but in the 50s/60s/70s were, variously, the province of the well off, the rich and the entitled at various times in those decades:

• Owning a car: Dad always had a car from the mid-50s at least
• Owning a house: My parents had a house built for them just after they married in the early 50s
• Having a telephone: We had a telephone from the late 50s, I had to be stopped from picking it up and chatting to the operators when I was two or three...
• Having a fridge: 1950s with a "freezer compartment" big enough to keep a Walls Family Brick of icecream in.
• Having a TV/Colour TV: TV from the late 50s, Colour TV early 70s.
• Indoor toilet: Grandparents house had an indoor toilet in the early 20s.  Never lived in a house with an outdoor one!
• Flying for pleasure/Foreign Holidays:  Parents could probably afford all the above because we never went on foreign holidays.
• (others?)  A 36' steel-hulled Narrowboat which we built ourselves from the keel up.

 

 

 

 

[Philou]

On 30/05/2020 at 18:34, iL Dottore said:

We certainly do live better, don’t we? The following is a list of some of the things we now take for granted but in the 50s/60s/70s were, variously, the province of the well off, the rich and the entitled at various times in those decades:

• Owning a car My parents had a car from about 1958 - a case of necessity with 5 kids to lug about!
• Owning a house My parents first house was owned by them, but it was part of my great-grandparents estate and was 'bought' from the estate. The house itself was brand new in 1951 having been rebuilt on the site of the GGP's house that had been 'land-mined'.
• Having a telephone Didn't have one of those at all. I had my first 'phone in 1976.
• Having a fridge They had a gas-fired one from about 1960.
• Having a TV/Colour TV No telly until around 1960 too.
• Indoor toilet As the house was new, it had an indoor toilet upstairs and a half-in, half-outside one downstairs.
• Flying for pleasure/Foreign Holidays Nope, though I was exceedingly privileged to fly (alone) from Cardiff to Paris from the age of 3 to meet up with my French grandparents.
• (others?) Having grandparents abroad again we were privileged to go on holiday. It was though, an exceedingly long journey by car - 24hours - a journey that I can do today in about 14 hours - M25 notwithstanding, and going the longer land route via Dover.

 

Cheers,

 

Philip

 

Edit: Forgot to add that the journey was made longer by there being no motorways nor Severn Bridge until 1966. The journey time was reduced by about 1 1/2 hours.

Edited May 31, 2020 by Philou

[caradoc]

On 30/05/2020 at 17:34, iL Dottore said:

We certainly do live better, don’t we? The following is a list of some of the things we now take for granted but in the 50s/60s/70s were, variously, the province of the well off, the rich and the entitled at various times in those decades:

• Owning a car; We got our first car in around 1970 (and the family never went on holiday by train afterwards)
• Owning a house; My Dad worked for a bank, so cheap mortgage and therefore homeowner !
• Having a telephone; Didn't get one until 1978
• Having a fridge; Always had one
• Having a TV/Colour TV; Always had one (but only ever one at a time, unlike now)
• Indoor toilet; Always had one (but only one, unlike now)
• Flying for pleasure/Foreign Holidays; First for the rest of the family was 1976 to Majorca, but i didn't go; I did an East Midlands Railrover instead !

 

Regarding flying, my first ever flight was around 1983, Cork-Heathrow; we had intended to travel overnight back from Ireland via train to Rosslare, ferry to Fishguard, train to Reading, a journey of many hours, but Irish fishermen were blockading the ports. So we had to fly home instead, which was very expensive, but quick; The journey time was.........an hour !

 

[Philou]

As an add-on to my post above and journeys abroad in those days plus the reliability of cars AND tying it all to railways:

 

My father had only two driving speeds - fast or very fast (comparatively speaking to speeds possible today) and invariably would forget to slow down going over one particular French level crossing that was on a cant and EVERY TIME would take off and land heavily on the suspension and break one of his leaf springs. It didn't stop him going on his way and get to final destination, though the car was looking decidedly ungainly. As we would be away for six weeks, there was always enough time for the RAC to send out another set of springs to be fitted by the local garage.

 

Cheers,

 

Philip

[tomparryharry]

Holidays was up the road to Forest Hill station, and to catch the train off the excursion platform, now long gone. 

 

Car? No, we lived in London The bus stops were 100 yards in either direction.

Telephone? No, not until we moved to wales.

Fridge/television. Yes, we had both.

Owning a house. Our parents had a rather nice council house, and I'd still be living there now if I had my way. Although parents bought a house, it took forever to finish the mortgage, while I managed to do the same in 10 years, and, oh boy, did that create some problems at home.

Back to the car. We're (I'm) turning full circle. Whereas I used to get excited about high-powered cars like the Escort Mexico with the Lotus twin-cam, nowadays, I can't be bothered. Mrs Smith has a runabout for her needs, and once the shed gets completed, that'll be it for me.  You can't get a ladder rack on a Bugatti Veyron!

Telephone? Well, we're all here, aren't we?  I only need to find where 'here' actually is....... 

[Reorte]

On 31/05/2020 at 16:00, rockershovel said:

Now, once posted these things remain in circulation indefinitely; updating filled vacancies appears to be rarely, if ever carried out. This is further complicated by the development of agencies which scour the web for keywords, post them on job boards and then attempt to make spec applications to the original advertiser, which means prospective candidates receive worthless enquiries from third parties with no effective involvement, for jobs which may well not exist.

 

Agencies also not getting the message about when someone's got a job - I know someone who had his own CV sent to him for a job he was advertising...