Tag Archives: 1950s

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.

Happy St David’s Day or Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus

Happy Saint David’s Day on this cold, rainy March 1st! I’ve posted about St David’s Day before so I’ll keep it fairly short. I have worn a daffodil on March 1st all my life and I have worn one proudly today. Here are some of my memories of St David’s Day when I was a child in the 50s and 60s.

There was always a St David’s Day eisteddfod (a Welsh word for a concert with instrumental music, drama, poetry and lots of singing) in our school to celebrate St David’s Day. Pupils would have been practising their performances for weeks. I was terribly shy and lacking in confidence and one year I had been put down on the list to play the piano by a prefect who somehow new that I was having piano lessons. I was terrified but, for some reason, didn’t want to admit to my parents just how much I didn’t want to do it. On the morning of the eisteddfod I feigned illness and my poor believing mum phoned the school to say that I had a terrible sore throat and headache and couldn’t go attend that day. I told my mum and dad later and, of course, they said that if I’d spoken to them about my fears they would have helped to sort it out.

Everyone would be wearing a daffodil on the day or, if the daffs were late, a leek. Imagine the smell in the school hall during the eisteddfod!! I remember that a lot of the boys in school actually preferred wearing a leek to a daffodil and would nibble at them throughout the day.

I have shown this one before . It’s my mum picking daffodils in our garden in the early 1960s.

In our village there was always a St David’s Day party in the village school, which was also used as a village hall. It was on the nearest Saturday to March 1st and consisted of a supper, party games for the children then recitals. People would just go forward in turn, not to a timetable, and either sing, recite a poem or play a musical instrument. The evening finished with everyone singing together and we would go from one song to another.

The standard hot meal on St David’s day is the traditional lamb and root vegetable stew called cawl – pronounced to rhyme with owl. A favourite sweet treat in Wales all the year round, but particularly on St David’s Day, is the Welsh cake. These are similar to scones but thinner and flatter, lightly spiced, containing dried fruit and cooked on a bakestone or griddle pan.

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.

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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.

Happy New Year! Blwyddyn Newydd Dda!

Those of you who have read this blog before will know that I from Wales and will realise that the second greeting is in Welsh.

Thank you to all readers. This humble blog has just topped 250 000 hits worldwide since I started it about five years ago. This covers everything from my signed up followers to the people who stumble on it by accident when searching for something on Google. But I’m happy that it’s being read and maybe even enjoyed by people all over the world.

When I was a child there was often a New Year’s Eve Party in the village school which doubled up as a village hall. The event started late afternoon/ early evening with tea and party games for the children. Then any children who had a song to sing or a poem to recite could stand up and perform to the audience of mums and dads. As young children were taken home the evening morphed into an adult’s party/ concert. There was a lot of singing by everyone and solo performances by some of the better singers in the village. One farmer had a beautiful tenor voice and always finished his singing slot with a wonderful rendition of Jerusalem. My favourite song was one called Oes Gafr Eto? which involves one singer leading each verse and the audience singing the chorus – which gets longer and faster and is huge fun!

We got our first television in 1962. TV viewing was so new and exciting then. We only had one channel for the first few years but that didn’t matter. The whole viewing thing was simply amazing! The years when there wasn’t a village party the whole family would watch the New Year’s Eve edition of a programme called The White Heather Club which was Scottish and was all singing and dancing. The compere was called Andy Stewart and regular guests on the programme were singers Moira Anderson and Kenneth McKellar, a duo called Robin Hall and Jimmy McGregor and a group of dancers dancing traditional Scottish reels and jigs. The men all wore kilts and the women long white dresses with tartan sashes. Looking it up today I see that the programme finished in 1968. To quote Wikipedia ‘It put forward a ‘tartanised’ view of Scotland that was becoming very dated by the late 1960s’. But for a few years, The White Heather Club was a big part of many people’s New Year’s Eve.

Singers Kenneth McKellar and Moira Anderson and the duo Robin Hall and Jimmie McGregor who all regularly sang on the programme The White Heather Club in the 1960s.

On New Year’s Day (which wasn’t made a UK Bank Holiday until 1974) we children loved starting the new diaries we’d been given as Christmas presents. Oh, the joy of all those empty pages, the brand new number on the front and the titbits of information and pictures which were always printed in children’s diaries. After filling in all your personal details at the front you entered all the family birthdays then turned to the back where there were blank pages for notes. Here we made two lists. One list was of the presents we’d received and who had given them so that we could write our all-important thank-you letters before starting back at school. The second list was our New Year Resolutions. I still have several of my old diaries. I’ve shown them on here before so no pictures this time. One of my resolutions lists had the amusing commitment to be nicer to my sister! I love her to bits now but as children we often bickered and annoyed each other.

As an older person now I don’t relish the passing of the years but I try to think positively and I’ve enjoyed looking back at New Year’s Eves from years ago.

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.

Footwear

The first thing to point out about this post is that we are going back to the pre-Velcro era. Nowadays children don’t have to learn to tie shoe laces or fasten buckles before starting school. It was very different back in the 50s and 60s. Even in the mid 80s, when my children were starting school, Velcro wasn’t yet used on shoes although it had been around since the 60s. Children were expected to know how to tie their laces by the time they started school. It was a rite of passage! As a teacher I get that you couldn’t be tying 30 laces several times a day when your class changed from outdoor to indoor shoes or into PE pumps.

Shoes back then were made of leather. Indoor shoe like slippers and school pumps were fabric and wellies were made of rubber. But your main shoes were always leather and either laced or buckled. Generally, summer shoes and sandals were buckled and winter shoes laced. PE footwear was the standard issue black canvas shoes with an elasticated insert. Most people called them pumps or plimsolls. In South Wales we call them daps. This name arose, according to Nicholette Jones’s book The Plimsoll Sensation, because the coloured horizontal band joining the upper to the sole resembled the Plimsoll line on a ship’s hull, or because, just like the Plimsoll line on a ship, if water got above the line of the rubber sole, the wearer would get wet.

New shoes were bought in the autumn (ready for winter) and the spring (ready for summer). Your new shoes were ‘best’ shoes for the Harvest festival and and Easter Sunday and were then your main shoes for six months.

Our local town (tiny, 2 000 people) had one shoe shop. It sold Clarks shoes. Sometimes we had Start-Rite or Birthday shoes which we bought in a bigger town further away. There was an X-ray machine in our local shoe shop which checked the fit of the shoes once you’d tried them on. It was So exciting to look down and see your foot bones inside your new shoe. They were discontinued by the 60s when it was found that X-ray is hazardous. I have, learned through researching for this post, that these machines were called flouroscopes.

A flouroscope.

I remember a brand of shoe called Tuf which were around in the 60s. They weren’t sold in our small town but when my brother wore them in his early teens we were able to buy them in bigger towns like Swansea and Cardiff. Tuf came with a 6 month guarantee. If they wore out before 6 months you got a new pair free. My brother was very heavy on shoes at the time and it saved my parents a lot of money being able to get him new shoes a two or three times a year at no cost!

Here are a few pictures showing the standard style of buckle shoe which all children wore when they were small. The two children with the rocking horse are me and my brother (sorry Bruv!). It was common practice back in the old days, before most people had cameras, to have a studio portrait taken. The prints could then be sent to relatives. After this picture was taken my dad bought his first camera and there were no more posed studio pictures. I’ve worked it out that this photograph was taken for my third birthday.

Seeing the picture above, and the prices of the shoes, I looked up what the prices shown would be today. £5 in the mid-fifties is the equivalent of £92. If that ad is from the mid 60s the equivalent in today’s money is £64. No wonder we were only bought two pairs of shoes a year!

The ‘daps’ (pumps or plimsolls in other parts of the country) we had in the 50s were pretty much the same as the ones kids wear now.

Wellies – absolutely essential in a wet area like my valley! – were always black. Now kids wellies come in a vast array of colours and designs. Many even have little handles on the side to make them easier to pull on. How I would have loved these when I was a kid!

Credit to Google, Wikipedia and Google Images. As usual, I make every effort to ensure that my facts are correct and that by using the photographs I source I am not infringing copyright. If anyone objects to anything in this post please contact me and it will be removed (including Bruv!).

R.I.P. Queen Elizabeth II

I have been a while without posting on here even though I have several draft posts waiting to be finished – and for me to be inspired.

Since the Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom and 15 Sovereign States, died on Thursday I thought I would put together some of my own thoughts and memories, although I never actually met her.

Whether you are pro- or anti-royal it would be wrong not to have some respect for someone who reached the grand age of 96 and who was still performing some light public duties until a few days before she died – notably greeting our new Prime Minister and inviting her to form a government.

I was born two years before the Coronation. We lived at that time in a small market town called Brecon (population approx 8 000) and I remember my mum telling me how they took me to the coronation celebrations and how I kept my little flag for days and called it my wag. Well, I was less than two years old! Because of this childhood tale I thought for several years when I was little that the Queen had been crowned in Brecon and that I’d been to the actual coronation!

Brecon as it would have looked when I lived there.
Brecon Cathedral. When I was small I believed the coronation had taken place here!

When we were very young we children really identified with the royal children as they were often shown in the newspapers and magazines at the time. When I was a bit older I remember me and my friends being so excited when the queen had two more babies. I was thirteen when Edward was born and we girls were fascinated by the photographs of the new baby and lapped up all the details – weight, name etc.

My brother and I used to look a bit like these two when we were very young, although we grew up to look entirely different. It was mainly due to similar early 50s clothes and hair – my hair was EXACTLY the same as hers! Back then we used to imagine that if we met them they’d like to play with us.
The Queen with Prince Andrew and baby Prince Edward. One of the pictures my school friends and I would have pored over in 1964.

These are just some of my own recollections from my childhood. I don’t remember a time before the Queen and I felt like commemorating her passing in my own small way.

Credit to Google, Wikipedia and Google Images. As usual, I make every effort to ensure that my facts are correct and that by using the photographs I source I am not infringing copyright. If anyone objects to anything in this post 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.

Pens

I have loved stationery all my life. As a child if I ever had a bit of spending money, such as on holiday, I was always drawn towards the stationery counters in Woolworth’s and W H Smith. Even today, as an adult, I have an abiding love for note books, pens and pencils. In this post I’m going to look at pens and the enormous changes I’ve seen in my lifetime. I’ve covered stationery in general before but this will go into more detail about just pens.

When I started school wooden barreled dipping pens and inkwells were still being used in classrooms. We had ‘ink monitors’ who were chosen by the teacher. A different child was chosen each week. I far preferred being ink monitor to being milk monitor! Each morning blue-black ink was made up from a powder mixed with water. This was then poured into a class set of china inkwells. Each child’s wooden desk had a hole in it which held the inkwell. There was also a groove along the top to stop the pen rolling down the slope of the desk lid. The ink monitor’s job was to put a full inkwell into every hole.

Our pens were not tapered and polished like this one but the picture gives a rough idea.

The pens were the most basic design which you now only see in art cupboards in schools. Each pen consisted of a simple wooden barrel which had a very basic metal nib pushed onto the end. For those of you who didn’t live through this phase of pens the pictures might help to clarify things.

Blotting paper was essential as you couldn’t turn a page over without blotting the writing first or else it would smudge. If you pressed too hard the nib parted and you got a double pen stroke. If your nib snagged on the paper you got dots of ink spotting your book. And was there is no reservoir, you had to dip your pen in the inkwell every few words. And you always ended up with ink stains on your fingers – which didn’t wash of easily!

Ball-point pens (now known as Biros but often referred to as Bics when they were first around) were available in the 1950s/ early 60s but we were absolutely forbidden to use what the headteacher called ‘new-fangled rubbish’. The name Biro is usually credited to a Hungarian-Argentinian inventor László Bíró, whose name inspired a catch-all term for modern ballpoints. As for Bic, Marcel Bich believed in the potential for the ballpoint pen, adapted and improved the ballpoint invented by the Hungarian László Biró, and in December 1950, launched his own ballpoint pen in France under the BIC® brand, a shortened and more memorable version of his own name. To this day I would always rather write with a pencil, fibre-tip, roller-ball or fountain pen than a Biro. Mr Lewis’ legacy!

I didn’t have a fountain pen until I was eleven when I was bought one especially for starting in high school. I used the same one all the way through that school. It was a Platignum and I used to buy Quink (I favoured Royal Blue) ink to fill it with. You put the nib in the ink and squeezed the small rubber tube inside the handle (I can’t find a picture to illustrate this). Later came cartridge pens which made everything a lot easier. A nice pen was a lovely gift to give on a special occasion. There were everyday brands like Platignum and then there was Parker. There were even higher ranking pens than Parker in existence but they didn’t reach small places like ours and were too expensive anyway. Looking up pen history for this post I learned that Platignum wanted to call the brand Platinum but weren’t, at that time, allowed to register a trade name which was also registered as a precious metal.

When I was a student fibre tipped pens appeared on the scene. We had a stationery shop on the campus and I remember buying my first one, a Tempo. I thought it was wonderful. Whilst researching for this post, I learned that the development of fibre tipped pens was based on the brushes which had been used to write with in the East for centuries.

The choice appears endless now. I still love fountain pens best and also like using fibre tips and roller balls. We can add into the mix:

gel pens, marker pens, highlighter pens and, one of the most recent types, the dry-wipe pen which I made great use of when teaching.

As always, I make every effort not to infringe copyright. If, however, anyone objects to my use of a photograph in my blog, please contact me and it will be removed. Credit to Wikipedia, Google Images and Pinterest.