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Gone but very much missed


iL Dottore
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Following on to the Gone but not much missed thread...

 

Whilst we are stumbling down memory lane, drunk on nostalgia (and ready to be mugged by the Chavs of history), I would suggest we don our rose coloured spectacles (Michael Caine/Harry Palmer style NHS issue, of course) and have a go at listing the things that we miss from the carefree days of our youth...

 

To start off:

 

  • Hot saveloy and pease pudding for a special treat, fresh from the local butcher’s steam table (you did NOT ask what went into a saveloy, but they tasted good)
  • Airfix kits in bags and which cost less than half-a-crown (you could muck one up without too many regrets, unlike the Airfix kits that came in boxes and were beyond pocket money reach)
  • Plastic glue in a tube (MekPak? we had no steeenking MekPak, Amigo, real men use tube cement)
  • The original NON politically correct versions of Dandy and the Beano, and of course the Eagle
  • Broken biscuits from the local grocer and only pennorth’s per pound (chocolate bourbons bits - the best)
  • Proper exhibits in the Science Museum in Kensington (unlike today's dumbed-down "relevant" exhibits)
  • Double Rovers for 2/6d (valid after 9am and all day Saturday) Used to explore the Underground and to get to the Musuems in London
  • Listening to Round The Horne after Sunday Lunch (I actually went to a taping of Round The Horne - great fun, although I didn't [then] get any of their double-entendres at the tender age of 9 - no matter how "kool" I thought I was)
  • Skool Custard and steamed puddings (not only tasty but fattening, sugary and stodgy but probably also illegal by today’s standards [interestingly there was one boy in our class who didn’t eat steamed puddings at all and in winter he was quite the entrepreneur, flogging off his portions of stodge and custard to the highest bidder. he's probably a billionaire by now])
  • Juke Box Jury
  • The Telegoons before (after?) Dr Who on Saturday afternoons

Over to you....

 

F

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Plastic glue in a tube (MekPak? we had no steeenking MekPak, Amigo, real men use tube cement)

 

Still available over here, at least.

 

Broken biscuits from the local grocer and only pennorth’s per pound (chocolate bourbons bits - the best)

 

Not quite the same, but the local (well, in Toronto) cookie bakery has a shop where they sell seconds at a discount.

 

Cadbury's 4-flavour chocolate bars disappeared a few years ago, as did Peak Freans Coffee Cream biscuits.

 

Adrian

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Nestle penny chocolates from the machine at the station.

Skullers ginger beer (South Africa)

Tickey (3d) icecream + tickey coke making up a coke float

Individual cigarettes sold for 1d each.(not for me. I used to buy them for my Dad)

Hornby Dublo (3 rail days) electric operated semaphore signals

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In my part of Lincolnshire we did not get bags of broken biscuits, but we did get bags of broken crisps. There was a Smiths crisp factory in Lincoln and I presume they originated there. They cost 1d a bag in the early 1960s and were a bargain for us kids, as long as you didnt mind a bag full of tiny bits of crisp with no salt. The salt in the normal crisps were still in those little blue twisted paper packets.

 

On the subject of multi flavoured chocolate bars, Frys used to make one very similar to their Chocolate Cream, but with coloured fuit flavoured cream filling. I dont know whether they were poor sellers and were quickly discontinued, but I remember getting one in a selection box at Christmas and loving it.

 

My Dad always listened to Round the Horne after Sunday lunch, but as I also didnt get the jokes at my primary school age I used to wait for Jimmy Clitheroe whose show was on afterwards (I think). I remember the disappointment when I saw him on telly and realised he was an adult pretending to be a kid.

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World of Sport with Dickie Davis, especially the Wrestling.

 

Oh yes! Giant Haystacks, Kendo Nagasaki, Tally ho Kaye, Mick McManus, handbag wielding grannies ringside!

 

Aztec Bars.

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Il Dottore wrote

Broken biscuits from the local grocer and only pennorth’s per pound (chocolate bourbons bits - the best)

 

Still available - at least in the land of the Northern Haggis at around a pound per box of about 3 lbs - from Farmfoods Frozen Food shops, either boxes of plain or creams (including Bourbons), and I think "Chocolate biscuits"

 

:yahoo:

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Train watching in the 1950s and the aroma of a railway station.

Peace and quiet on the roads on Sundays with no shops open.

The plonk of a cricket ball on bat and clapping drifitng down on the breeze on summer Sarudays afternoons.

The whine and ringing of gears of an old tram.

The fantastic gearbox sounds of prewar Leyland buses and 'silent third'.

Pre-selector gearbox Daimlers especially the prewar COG6's.

Clanking of buffers no matter which town or city one was in and the screaming steam train whistle in the night.

Trolleybuses.

The smell of mums perfume as she gave you a hug before going out.

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I am still sulking because our local bakery, the most excellent 'Simmons', replaced the raspberry jam filling of their doughnuts with mixed fruit jam when I was seven years old. Despite getting a letter of protest published in the local paper the moment I was aware of this outrage, they did not revert to the one true filling. Quite destroyed my faith in the right ordering of the world it did. Mastering the art of the confiture transplant has not proved the expected path to fortune either...

 

Mention of school desserts; we were treated to extremely generous portions of puffed wheat cemented together with chocolate slodge. This was one on which opinions were polarised, I was in the adoration camp, and made quite sure to take a place on last sitting for 'seconds' when the grapevine revealed it to be 'on the board'. Never have I managed to completely successfully replicate it...

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Spangles boiled sweets - somehow I don't think their advertising slogan "The sweet way to go gay" would be quite so acceptable now.

 

Hornby Town & Country building kits - a recent loss but still a shame, the range should have been expanded instead of all that Skaledale stuff.

 

West Ham in the top division and winning the FA Cup now and then.

 

Blue Peter with Chris 'n' Val and the BP model railway!

 

Monty Python, The Sweeney and all those 60s TV Westerns that used to enthrall me as a kid.

 

and....Pans People on TOTP!

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Those of you missing the Navy Lark, Goons and Round the Horn will be doubtless pleased to know that they are available on the BBC I-Player radio site.

 

Those, and others were once available on BBC Radio 7, but when BBC Asian Radio was to be cut to save money, all sorts of people objected on all sorts of grounds so Radio 7 got the axe instead, and it has combined with Radio 4 Extra.

 

My favourite there is 'Yes Minister', clever comedy to my simple mind!

 

 

Doug

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I miss:

 

Cadbury's Secret

Newspapers with 'news' in them

The days when being famous or a 'celebrity' meant you had actually done something worthwhile often over the course of many years to eventually be granted that status.

Decent television programs on a Saturday and Sunday night where the only celebrity you saw was the guest professional darts player on the charity game on Bullseye.

You can't beat a bit of Bully... :yahoo:

ITV regions, their idents and proper locally made broadcasting, about the only thing that survives on that corporate plastic monster ITV now is Fred Dineage!

Windows 3.1

Common sense...

Politicians who were not in it for the money they could trouser off the gravy train

Buses that worked (Bristol VR's, Leyland National's, Atlanteans, anything bodied by ECW, well maybe not the B51 coach...) rather than the nasty over engineered plastic we have today that has to be replaced after just three years thanks to overbearing DDA and TfL requirements.

Loco hauled cross country train services that could respond to demand just by adding more coaches, how simple!!

Decent children's telly, Loony Tunes cartoons, Tom & Jerry, all now all but banned by political correctness!!!

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Talking about Nestles chocolate from a machine on a station. Three small boys discovered in 1942 ( no choc. in the shops of course ) that the machine on the down platform at Chalkwell was (a) jammed and (B) still had one bar in it.

 

It wanted a threepenny bit I think I recall, and it took weeks of torturing the machine until it gave up and produced a rather bent bar with a sort of cloudy surface effect. This was divided up into tiny bits and distributed amidst the relatively few kids still living in the area.

 

Mr Ford, my Uncle, was Shedmaster at Plaistow not so long after and told terrible tales of the entire fire falling onto the track as poor quality firebars collapsed. He also was to have been involved in the Secret Evacuation plans

for the entire population of the area if the Germans had in fact invaded.

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British Rail pork pies (Bowyers ?) - The ones that had travelled from Inverness to Penzance & back - twice !!. Actually, British Rail Blue & Grey era - Proper trains - loco hauled - choice of many loco types.

 

Loose coupled goods & mineral trains.

Many signalboxes and manual signalling (bits still left)

Goods / marshalling yards in most towns (virtually extinct)

Loco depots - proper ones.

Fist generation DMU's

Coaches you could stick your head out of.

Good mannered rail enthusiasts

The Woodhead line, Waverley, S&D, and many, many other lines.

 

Wrenn (ex Hornby Dubblo) Reliable, strong, heavy metal locos. Who needs superdetail ?

ECM controllers - where did they go ?

 

That'll do for now.

 

Brit15

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