Category Archives: history

The ‘Big Freeze’ of 62/ 63

Exactly 60 years ago through from December 1962, into January, February and early March 1963 Britain was in the grip of a record-breaking winter now known as The Big Freeze. It had started in the middle of December and by the end of December was firmly established.

On 29 and 30 December 1962 a blizzard swept across South West England and Wales. Snow drifted to more than 20 feet (6.1 m) deep in places, driven by gale force easterly winds, blocking roads and railways. The snow stranded villagers and brought down power lines. The near-freezing temperatures meant that the snow cover lasted for more than two months in some areas. By the end of the month, there were snow drifts 8 feet (2.4 m) deep in Kent and 15 feet (4.6 m) deep in the west.

The village we lived in is tiny, remote and the roads are single track with high banks and hedges on either side. Whereas the snow ploughs could do some clearing on main roads between small town and villages in the area, nothing could get up the little roads in the villages themselves.

I recently found and old diary of mine from 1963. I’ve always loved writing so the new diary I had been bought for Christmas was used to record the details of my day to day life. Most of it is pretty boring stuff, especially the descriptions of what I had eaten. However, the first six weeks are fascinating as it’s a first hand account of life through the Big Freeze. I remember it really well but what I hadn’t realised until finding the diary was that I didn’t do a full week at school for six weeks! At times, when there had been no new snowfalls, the roads were clear and we could get about again. Then it would snow again.

I was twelve years old and had started in the ‘big school’ the previous September. My new school was five miles from our village and a local coach company used to bus the country kids into the town. What with snowdrifts blocking roads overnight and frozen and burst pipes in school, I was at home more than I was in school until the middle of February. On days when I couldn’t get to my school I had to go back to my old village school with my brother and sister. I wasn’t happy about that!

For nearly three months daily temperatures were around five degrees lower than the seasonal average. Pipes froze. Even the coal in the ground froze. And that meant heating homes became almost impossible. It was the middle of March before the snow on the ground eventually thawed, even though life had been more or less back to normal for a few weeks.

Thousands of animals perished in the cold temperatures Credit: ITV News Wales

A motorist negotiates a tricky icy bend on the road between Denbigh and Pentrefoelas, North Wales. Credit: North Wales Live.

As we know, all children love snow. They also enjoy the unexpected day off school. But by the end of January I was writing in my diary ‘I hope we don’t get any more snow, I’m sick of it.’

A diary entry which made me smile was the one where I wrote that my dad had made us snow shoes out of wire netting! That was typical of my dad. If something was needed he would have a go at making it. Our sledge was made by him and it was beautiful. He loved working with wood and took a pride in a good finish. We three children made really good use of the sledge during the Big Freeze!

The sledge was the same design as this one and my dad attached thin metal to the bottom of the runners for protection and speed.

Credit to Google, Google Images and Wikipedia.

As always I make every effort not to infringe copyright. However, if anyone objects to my use of any imafe, please contact me and it will be removed.

Comic Songs and Variety Shows

After writing about The White Heather Club in my last post I started thinking about other similar shows. It left me wondering what happened to variety shows. The early days of TV were full of them. Now I believe the only one we have left here in Britain is the annual Royal Variety Performance. Yet I hadn’t noticed them disappearing. I’m thinking now that they were probably direct descendants of the Music Hall which thrived in the Victorian era and was pushed out by the arrival of cinema.

Back in the 50s and 60s families all watched TV together. There was only one TV in each house and just one channel at first, later two. The variety shows of my childhood had a main host and a selection of guests including magicians, singers, dancers, ventriloquists, comedians, puppeteers etc etc. Here are some of the shows I remember from British TV in the 50s and 60s..

The Black and White Minstrel Show

This was a family must every week and hugely enjoyable. But it definitely wouldn’t be made now as it featured white people ‘blacked up’.

The White Heather Club

I wrote bout this in my last post. It was a New Year’s Eve ‘must watch’.

The Good Old Days

This show was set up as a Victorian music hall and the acts, the host and the audience were all in period costume. My grandmother absolutely loved it.

Sunday Night at the London Palladium

Another regular family watch. the photograph show Bruce Forsyth who hosted the programme for several years.

Some of these shows gave rise to comic the songs we knew back then. For example, Andy Stewart, who presented The White Heather Club, released a single called ‘Donald, Where’s Your Troosers?’

Where did the comic songs go? I’m not talking about the ones aimed at children like ‘The Laughing Policeman’, but the ones which were for everyone and which got loads of radio play. Here are some of them which I remember. I appreciate that my readers in other countries might not know these songs but this post might remind them of some they do remember.

The Gas Man Cometh by Flanders and Swann

Flanders and Swann were a British comedy duo.. Lyricist, actor and singer Michael Flanders (1922–1975) and composer and pianist Donald Swann (1923–1994) collaborated in writing and performing comic songs. The one I remember best is The Gas Man Cometh.

My Old Man’s a Dustman by Lonnie Donegan

British skiffle singer, songwriter and musician Lonnie Donegan was referred to as the King of Skiffle and influenced 1960s British pop and rock musicians. My Old Man’s a Dustman was one of his most popular and a big favourite in our hose.

Donald Where’s Your Troosers? by Andy Stewart

As mentioned earlier in the section on the White Heather Club.

Goodness Gracious Me by Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren

As with the Black and White Minstrel Show, this would definitely not be released nowadays as Peter Sellers was impersonating an Indian Doctor – although not in a deprecatory way.

Credit to Google, Google Images and Wikipedia.

As always I make every effort not to infringe copyright. However, if anyone objects to my use of any imafe, please contact me and it will be removed.

Words we don’t hear now.

I have been remiss recently in my blog writing. I have several saved draft posts which I have started and then decided maybe weren’t that good. I began to fear I was running out of ideas. However, this morning I heard the word blancmange on the radio and it sparked something in me! I have done similar posts before so I hope I’m not repeating myself too much.

Blancmange was so common when I was a child! Birthday parties were not complete without jelly and blangmange. For those younger than me who aren’t familiar with the word it was a dessert made from cornflour, milk, sugar, colouring and flavouring. It set like jelly and was most often made from a packet mix in the 50s. We pronounced it ‘blummonge’. Back in the 1950s here in Britain, nobody had freezers so ice cream was not something that was found in the home. Many homes in the early fifties didn’t even have fridges so fresh cream was uncommon. Instead we had jelly, blancmange, custard, or tinned cream – as well as cooked puddings, of course.

My mum had a rabbit mould just like this and for our parties she used to make a brown (chocolate flavoured blancmange) rabbit and put chopped up green jelly around it to look like grass. We thought it was amazing!

A few other food words we don’t hear these days. We didn’t have meatballs or burgers we had rissoles and faggots. When researching these two meat items I read that they were particularly popular in South and Mid-Wales which is why I remember them so well. Rissoles were made of minced meat, breadcrumbs and seasoning and were served hot, whereas faggots were made using meat mixed with offal and were often eaten cold. I hated them! We had a wide range of milk puddings. Most people know of rice pudding but we also had milk puddings made of semolina, ground rice, tapioca and even macaroni!

Macaroni pudding was regularly served up in my school.

Some older people still use this word. Nowadays we call it a radio, back then it always known as ‘the wireless”. Now wireless has a totally different meaning.

In clothing we have lost the words petticoat, bloomers and drawers (usually used to describe old ladies’ long legged knickers), the much disliked liberty bodice, and nylons. My mum wore petticoats all her life and would have felt undressed without one on. They are not worn as much now at all and are more usually called slips or underskirts. Even the word mac is heard less often now.

Many people of my age remember having to wear these in winter. They were worn under the clothes and on top of a vest and most children hated them!

In winter we had warm brushed cotton fabrics which were used for nightwear, bedlinen and even shirts, blouses (another word which has nearly disappeared!) and dresses. I loved the feeling of getting into warm flannelette sheets on a cold night. We also used the term Winceyette which was a type of flannelette.

Cars are very different now although a lot of the terminology remains the same. However, the ‘choke’ was a very important feature on the dashboard and correct use of it was crucial to starting your car. Too little and the car wouldn’t start, too much and you risked flooding the engine.

Plasticine was the only sort of modelling clay we had as children. It still exists, I’ve found out, but has now been largely replaced by a wide range of modelling materials for children including the most well known – Play Doh. Plasticine had a very distinctive smell which came back to me vividly as I started writing this paragraph.

Plasticine was a brand name but is now used as a general term for modelling clay. As children we always just called it clay.

As always, credit to Google Images and Wikipedia. I take care to ensure I don’t infringe copyright when selecting pictures. However, if anyone objects to the use of any image in this post please contact me and I will remove it.

Monday – Washing Day

When I was growing up Monday was always the day when the household’s washing was done. This was right across the country, not just where I lived, so I decided to look into the reasons for Monday being the chosen day.

Monday as washday is a very old tradition, based on pure practicality. Before there were automatic washing machines, doing laundry was an all-day task. Then drying and ironing might take most of the week (depending on the climate) and the whole thing had to be out of the way by Sunday, the official day of rest.

The precursor of the electric washing machine – a single tub which boiled water for washing laundry, especially large items such as bed sheets. My mum had a pair of wooden tongs exactly like that for fishing water out of boiling hot water,

After being washed in the sink, a boiler like the above, or the bath, clothes were wrung out using a free-standing mangle or wringer like this which was often outside.

My mum’s very first washing machine was like this. It combined the two items above but as it was electric you didn’t have to turn a heavy handle on a mangle. It was wheeled into position in front of the kitchen sink then filled with a hose from the tap. After being heated and swirled around for a while the wringer was turned on and the clothes fed through (watching your fingers as it wouldn’t stop if they got caught) and they went into a sink of clean water for rinsing. Then the wringer was swung around 90 degrees and the washed, rinsed clothes were fed through and landed on the draining board ready for being pegged out. We thought it was SO modern and sophisticated!

Most households had these airers positioned above an open fire or range. The clothes were aired here after drying on the line outside.

This stuff was added to a whites wash to make them extra white. I also remember my grandmother using one on me when I was stung by a wasp!

The wooden clothes horse for airing clothes before they were ironed and put away. Ours was exactly like this one with the same white fabric hinges. We also used it for making dens. On rainy days wet washing could be dried from wet on one of these in a shed or outhouse. or in the house if there wasn’t an outhouse – making for a very steamy house!

The washing powders I remember are Daz (which my mum favoured), Tide, Surf and OMO. Whilst researching for this post I learned that OMO stands for Old Mother Owl! I also remember my grandmother using a bar of carbolic soap to wash clothes.

Credit to Google, Google Images and Wikipedia.

As always I make every effort not to infringe copyright. However, if anyone objects to my use of any imafe, please contact me and it will be removed.

Water

Yes, this post is about drinking water – or rather, not drinking it.

Now.

Nowadays, we are all aware of the need to stay hydrated and the health hazards hidden in sweetened, flavoured soft drinks. We are now used to seeing people walking around holding bottles of water. It was not always so. My parents and grandparents would be surprised and probably horrified at the way bottled water is sold absolutely everywhere now.

Then.

When I was a child I don’t remember drinking much water at all, or seeing adults drinking it. If you asked for a drink of plain tap water in a café or restaurant you would be refused. It is now against the law for premises serving alcohol to refuse a customer tap water. I have never been refused plain water in any café, pub, bar or restaurant in many years now.

In the 60s and 70s, once people started travelling further afield, we saw bottled water on sale in shops on holiday abroad. We always assumed it was because their tap water wasn’t safe to drink. Ours in Britain was then, and is now, perfectly safe but buying bottled water here is now the norm.

As children in the 1950s we drank milk, squash or tea. Yes, we were all started quite early on with weak milky tea – usually with sugar in it. My sister is three years younger than me and I can remember drinking the National Health orange juice which was available for pregnant mothers and children aged one to five. It was meant for my sister at the time I remember but my brother and I used to be given the occasional drink of it. It was delicious! Very, very different from the standard orange squash. I’ve researched it for this post and it had an extremely large content of real orange juice – and sugar – and the instructions were that it be served diluted – and sweetened if necessary! It was issued by the government because many people in post-war Britain were deficient in essential nutrients.

I have done some research into this Welfare orange juice and the main purpose of giving it free to babies and infants up to the age of 5 was to add more Vitamin C to their diet. The 50s were the post war period and rationing was still in place so it was a generous gesture.
For anyone interested, here is a link to an article recounting the history of Welfare Orange juice and the colonialism issues which arose from its production. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-british-studies/article/one-british-thing-a-bottle-of-welfare-orange-juice-c-19611971/7A3A07A71E9CFEA0214EC22984C486A7#

My mum was very fussy about our teeth so we were rarely allowed ‘pop’ as it was known and she limited our consumption of sweets. Through lack of knowledge and information at the time she was unaware that the squash we drank, and the National Health juice, were just as sugary. Thankfully, my teeth are still in good order.

This is a brand I remember well. The ad gives no clue as to the ingredients, apart from implying it’s full of real orange juice. The label on the bottle would have been the same. We had no idea in the 1950s that these drinks were full of colourings, flavourings and SUGAR. Now labels and adverts have to be a bit more honest!

Water in the classroom.

The importance of keeping children hydrated for their health and concentration is now well known. The introduction of ‘water in the classroom’ was something I was involved with in the 90s. Some staff in schools were very against it then. Now we can’t imagine things being any other way.

The standard issue school water bottle nowadays.

Credit to Wikipedia, Google and Google Images. If anyone objects to my use of an image please contact me and it will be removed.

On Being Born in the 1950s.

So, readers, I turned 70 last week. I hadn’t been one bit excited about it as I feel the pandemic prevented me from having a normal year when I was 69. As it turned out, two days before my birthday was officially the country’s second easing of lockdown no. 3. It was a great week to have a birthday as I was able to see some family members I hadn’t seen since before March 2020.

My birthday led me to think, as it often does, of the tales my mum used to tell me about the times when I, my brother and sister were born.

At the turn of the century, birth at home was the normal. Within 50 years, the majority of women had hospital births. Maternity hospitals or homes were usually independent from general hospitals. Men were never with their wives through labour and definitely weren’t present for the delivery.

John Bull 1950s UK babies hospitals maternity wards fathers #7077383
The front cover of a 1952 edition of John Bull magazine showing new fathers meeting their offspring for the first time in the nursery – blue cot blankets for the boys, pink for the girls.

Bottle feeding started to become popular in the late 40s and by the time I was born women were actively encourage to choose bottle over breast. Years later when my mum saw her grandchildren being breastfed she bitterly regretted not having been encouraged to do it.

Back in the 1950s women stayed in hospital for a period from eight days to two weeks after giving birth. My mum used to tell of being in the maternity hospital for two weeks after each of us. This was all very well when it was a first baby but when were other children to care for, and the father had to work, it was a problem. I was three and a half when my sister was born. My brother (two years old) and I were driven to our grandparents in a different town to stay for the two weeks my mum was in the hospital.

Once born, babies were looked after in the nursery and only handed to their mothers when it was time to be fed. If your baby was unsettled in between feeds you didn’t know about it. Feeding was strictly timed. The routine for newborns and for the first few months was a feed every four hours, at precisely 10.00 am, 2.00 pm, 6.00 pm, 10.00 pm, 2.00 am, 6.00 am. Night feeds were given by nursing staff in the nursery so that the new mum could get her sleep. I remember my mum telling of nursing staff walking down the central aisle of the maternity ward with a large trolley containing babies, handing them out and announcing “Feeding time, mummies!”

Giving birth in the 1960s: 'All the mothers were terrified of the doctors and matron so we never asked any questions'
A 1950s nursery in a maternity hospital.

Before being discharged, the mothers were taught how to bath their new babies. The system then was to fill the baby bath, test the temperature with your elbow, soap the baby all over, then lower it into the water. The first time my mum did this with me after returning home, she soaped me all over then lowered me towards the water. I wriggled and I was so slippery from the soap that I slipped out of her hands and landed face down in the water. My mum thought she’d killed me and had to shout for my dad to come.

As well as being instructed to feed to a strict schedule, new mothers were told to put their babies outside in their prams in all weathers to benefit from the fresh air. They were also told that crying was good for their babies and exercised their lungs. When they were outside, the mums couldn’t hear them crying. They would bring them in to be fed and changed at the exact times dictated by the nurses at the hospital and by the district nurses who visited the home afterwards.

Watch A Day in a Baby's Life online - BFI Player
A 1950s coach built pram.

Credit to Google Images, Pinterest and Wikipedia. As always, I make every effort to avoid infringing copyright. If anyone objects to my use of any images, please contact me direct and I will remove it.

Saint David’s Day – Dydd Gwyl Dewi Sant

Today, March 1st is St David’s Day and a very important day in Wales.

Saint David is thought to have been born around 500 AD in Pembrokeshire on the Welsh west coast. David’s reputed mother Non was also a saint, and he was trained as a priest under the tutelage of St Paulinus.

Various miracles are attributed to him, including restoring the sight of his teacher and, most famously, creating an entirely new hill (now the village of Llanddewi Brefi) during an outdoor sermon. The version of this story which we were told in school was that he was preaching to a large crowd, many of whom couldn’t see or hear him properly. A man stepped forward and put his coat on the floor for David to stand on. When he stood on the coat the ground rose up and a small hill was formed.

St David

Saint David became a renowned missionary in Wales and beyond, and is credited with founding monasteries in his homeland, the south-west of England (including Glastonbury) and Brittany.

When I was in Primary School I remember that our village always held a St David’s Day concert. Our little school was used as a village hall for this sort of event. Various people – adults and children – throughout the evening would take turns to sing, recite or play the piano. One local farmer had a beautiful tenor voice and always sang ‘Jerusalem’. There would also be singing where we all sang together, many of the songs in Welsh.

The traditional dish which all families would eat on that day was ‘cawl’ – pronounced cowl – which is a simple but hearty and nutritious stew made with lamb, root vegetables and leeks. Oddly, it’s the smell of it cooking in our kitchen which I can remember more than the taste.

Our version of the traditional spiced fruit loaf is know as Bara Brith which means speckled bread. It is eaten sliced, buttered and with a paned (cup of tea).

When I was in the Secondary School there was always a St David’s Day Eisteddfod in the school hall. Pupils who were known to be able to play and instrument were often pressured into taking part. Others were happy to volunteer. Most children would have a daffodil pinned to their jumpers. Those who hadn’t been able to locate a daffodil would have a leek pinned to them instead, some of them enormous! I can clearly remember the all-pervading smell of leeks as some of the kids got bored in the audience and started nibbling on them.

Cawl.
Welsh cakes are very popular in Wales and are sold in most bakeries and cafes. Cooked on a bakestone or a griddle pan, they are eaten all year round but especially on St David’s Day.

I have lived in England now since 1973. I have worn a daffodil on March 1st every year of my life as I am doing today. Occasionally if I’ve been in my local town shopping on St David’s Day (not this year, thanks to COVID-19) and seen another person wearing a daff we greet each other and have a little chat.

Happy St David’s Day to you all!!

Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus!!

As usual – images courtesy of Google Images, Pinterest, Wikipedia. Anyone objecting to my use of an image can contact me and I will remove it.

First Aid – as it used to be.

I was remembering recently a day when I fell in the playground at school and took a lump out of my knee. I still have the scar. I was taken in to school and a teacher put iodine on the wound (which stung SO much!), pressed a lump of cotton wool onto it and tied a bandage around my knee. I’m pretty sure those three things were the main, if not only, components of the school’s First Aid resources. Here are a couple of examples of First Aid kits from the 50s/ 60s. There was a heavy reliance on cotton wool, bandages and lint – to be used with iodine, no doubt.

Vintage First aid kit and original contents 1950s Wallace image 8
Vintage First aid kit and original contents 1950s Wallace image 0

Another First Aid incident I recall from Primary School is my friend having a nosebleed and the headmaster putting his big bunch of school keys down her back. After recalling this I, of course, felt compelled to look it up. Keys down the back for nosebleeds is very well documented! Although it has never been scientifically tested, some experts believe that there could be some foundation to this old wives’ tale as the cold keys possibly trigger something called the mammalian diving reflex. I do learn some interesting stuff when researching for this blog.

24th February 2005. What Happened to Milk of Magnesia? | A Date with History

Some of the things I remember my mum having in the bathroom cupboard are: TCP for cuts and grazes (NOT iodine!), calamine lotion for rashes and sunburn , Gentian Violet for mouth ulcers, Milk of Magnesia for indigestion, Marzines for travel sickness, Hactos for coughs, olive oil (small bottle bought in the chemist’s, definitely never for cooking then) for earache and aspirin for aches and pains. The same things were probably in all homes. There were fewer brands to choose from. It’s pretty basic compared with what we have available now but definitely not as primitive as the vinegar and brown paper we know of from the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill. Once again, I felt impelled to look this up. I already knew that vinegar has been used as a disinfectant/ antiseptic for thousands of years but I was surprised to find a lot of evidence of vinegar and brown paper being used together on cuts, bruises, sprains and even nosebleeds. Here is a quote from one of Charles Dickens’ books:

In Nicholas Nickleby,  Dickens describes Squeers recovering from heavy bruising which required “Vinegar and brown paper, vinegar and brown paper, from morning to night. I suppose there was a matter of half a ream of brown paper stuck upon me from first to last.”

Pray For Lilly: With vinegar and brown paper ...

As always, credit to Google Images and Wikipedia. I make every effort to set my search filters so that I don’t infringe copyright. However, if anyone objects to the use of any image in this post, please contact me and I will remove it.

Time Travelling

This is a fun one. Not a virus in sight! Much of it has been covered in earlier blog posts but I’ve put a few ideas together for a quick, hopefully entertaining read.

 

If I, or anyone else who was alive in the 50s and 60s, had been suddenly transported in a time machine to 2020, what would puzzle, amuse, or confuse us?

 

Paying for goods in a store by touching a small rectangle of plastic onto a gadget.

UK: half of all debit card payments now contactless | Mobile ...

Cars being plugged in to charge up instead of filling with liquid fuel.

England home electric car smart charger

People walking their dogs with little bags of dog dirt dangling from their fingers.

The Best Dog Poop Bags | Reviews by Wirecutter

People walking along talking on a phone which doesn’t look a bit like a phone and fits into the palm of a hand.

People pointing the same object at a thing, person or view and photographing it.

person, talking, mountain focus photography, mobile phone, smartphone, taking photo, wireless technology, communication, smart phone, portable information device

People using the above gadget to find the way somewhere, check the time or the weather, look at their bank balance, buy something, etc etc etc.

Choosing from dozens and dozens of different television programmes – without touching the TV.

Brits have 100 names for a TV remote control - what do you call it ...

Sending a written communication to someone in another country and receiving a reply within minutes – without any paper being used.

Add Gmail and Other Email to Windows 10 Mail & Calendar (Updated)

Reading a book or a newspaper which is not made of paper.

Why Amazon is tracking every time you tap your Kindle - The Verge

Being able to buy strawberries, raspberries, lettuce, and many, many more food items in the middle of winter. For readers out of Britain, you will be able to think of equivalent seasonal produce.

Buying books, electrical goods, clothes, holidays, food and much more – without actually speaking to anyone, visiting a store, or using a mail order catalogue.

Tesco - Click & Collect Groceries - Logo Design - Portrait… | Flickr

Homes having several different refuse bins outside on the path or drive – each one with a different function.

Kendall Drive – bins collection | Howard Sykes

 

There are many, many more of these! I could go on and on.

 

 

 

As usual, all photographs are sourced from images available on the Internet. If anybody objects to the use of a photograph please contact me and I will remove it.

 

 

 

Strange Times.

I have started drafting a few different posts recently but have kept abandoning them. The focus of this blog is life in the 1950s and 60s in Britain as seen through the eyes of a child and I try to stay true to this. However, it didn’t feel right not to even mention what we are all living through just now. Prompted by my friend H, I began to cast my mind back over ‘plagues and pestilences’ I remember from when I was growing up. I do like to brighten my posts up with pictures but this topic doesn’t lend itself to nostalgic photographs so there aren’t many.

This is meant to be interesting, informative, positive and somewhat relevant to the current problem.

Anthrax. Maybe a strange choice to start off with. I heard about it when I was really very young. I’m pretty sure I overheard adults discussing it, and I became seriously worried for a while that I and my family were going to catch it and die. As a child I was a natural worrier with an over-active imagination. Not always a good combination. I picked up on the fact that it could be caught from cows and I lived in a farming area. I have looked anthrax up and I realise that it was in the news a fair bit in the 1950s because that was when a vaccine was developed. I and my family were never in any danger of catching it from the local cows as my childish mind believed but it is very, very nasty indeed and has even been used in what used to be known as germ warfare. Gruinard Island, a remote uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland was used by the Ministry of Defence in the 1940s for anthrax experiments. It remained contaminated until its eventual decontamination in the 1980s using formaldehyde and sea water. It was declared safe for humans and animals in 1990 and returned to its rightful owners. It remains uninhabited.

Gruinard Island is located in Ross and Cromarty   The location of Gruinard Island.

Smallpox is a real success story. It was massive, all over the world. When I started looking into it I realised that it deserves 1 000s of words just to itself. Here are some facts courtesy of Wikipedia.

During the 18th century the disease killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans each year, including five reigning monarchs, and was responsible for a third of all blindness.

Between 20 and 60% of all those infected—and over 80% of infected children—died from the disease.

During the 20th century, it is estimated that smallpox was responsible for 300–500 million deaths worldwide.

 

An 1802 cartoon of the early controversy surrounding Edward Jenner‘s vaccination theory, showing how the use of a cowpox-derived smallpox vaccine was causing cattle to emerge from patients.

The link with the 50s and 60s is that I remember a smallpox outbreak here in the UK which sent everyone running to get vaccinated. We went as a family to our GP’s surgery in the nearby town to get vaccinated and it’s the only time I remember being there and seeing people queueing out of the door and along the pavement.

Thanks to vaccination it has now been eradicated from the whole world. How good is that?

Polio was a very familiar word when I was a child. We all knew people who had either died from it or recovered and left disabled to a greater or lesser extent. I remember hearing about the ‘iron lung’ used in the treatment of polio. In the late 1950s my dad lost a good friend to polio who was 32. It was an isolated case and left two little boys without a father. I well recall the first time we all received the oral vaccine against polio. I was in secondary school then and we all had to queue up a class at a time to go into the library and be given a sugar cube to eat. I’ve been looking all this up and the development of the first live oral polio vaccine was in 1962 and was ground-breaking. With mass immunisation, polio became a distant memory. It still exists in the world but is under control. Europe was declared polio free by WHO in 2002.

From 1956-8 there was a pandemic known as Asian flu. I remember little about it. I was five years old in 1956 so, like my daughters are doing now with their small children during Covid-19, parents probably shielded their children from the full facts. Also, we lived in the depths of the Welsh countryside and people didn’t travel so widely then. Researching it now I see how appalling it really was. Here are some statistics, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Estimates of worldwide deaths caused by this pandemic vary widely depending on source; ranging from 1 million to 4 million, with WHO settling on about 2 million.

Hong Kong flu, also known as 1968 flu pandemic, was a category 2 flu pandemic whose outbreak in 1968 and 1969 killed an estimated one million people all over the world.

In comparison to other pandemics, the Hong Kong flu yielded a low death rate, with a case-fatality ratio below 0.5% making it a category 2 disease on the Pandemic Severity Index. I read somewhere that this was because populations had some resistance following the 1958 flu pandemic as the viruses were closely related.

I was more aware of this one as I was a teenager and we had a TV by then so saw national and world news screened every evening. However, I don’t remember anyone panicking where I lived. People my age who were in towns and cities might remember it differently.

It has been fascinating digging into all this and there is so much more I could have covered – measles, rubella, TB to name but a few. I have tried to make it upbeat rather than morbid and I hope I have succeeded.