Tag Archives: 1950s

Letter Writing – A Lost Art

I always loved writing letters. I wrote that in the past tense because it’s not something which happens much any more. Even I, who have loved writing and receiving letters all my life, now rely almost entirely on text message and email. The exception is greetings cards in which I will often enclose a hand-written message.

As a young child I exchanged regular letters with my grandparents who didn’t live close by and didn’t have phones. After Christmas or my birthday I would write thank you letters to relatives who hade sent presents. The thank you letters could be a bit of a chore when written to relatives I rarely saw! Whilst in secondary school I exchanged letters with a friend who had moved to another town and a primary school friend who went to a boarding school at 11 years old. I always saw my boarding school friend when she came home in the holidays and I’m convinced that our regular writing of letters through her boarding school years is the reason why we are still good friends to this day. We live nowhere near each other now and haven’t done for years but we still get together when we can. The vast number of letters exchanged during term times kept our primary school bond, forged when we were four years old, strong.

In the 60s when I was in secondary school, pen friends were very popular. They were arranged by the school. I imagine they used an agency of some sort. During my years in high school I had two pen friends in America and I loved swapping letters with them and comparing the music and fashions we liked and the ways in which we spent our leisure time. For a couple of years I was pen-pals with a French boy. Looking back, the French ones would probably have been arranged by our French teacher with a view to improving our French skills and their English ones. I was expected to write in French and he in English. Although these pairings, both French and American, were arranged by school the letters were done in our own time and not checked so it felt more like a friendship than an educational task. They were also optional. We were asked if we wanted to be hooked up with a pen friend.

As a young child I wrote on lined paper, soon graduating to unlined paper. The unlined pads always had a sheet of guide lines to put under the page you were writing on. Moving into my teen years I favoured coloured writing paper and matching envelopes – often blue Basildon Bond like the one below.

The pen friend letters were written on special lightweight airmail paper with lightweight envelopes carrying a border of red and blue.

I loved going to a stationery shop and choosing a new set of paper and envelopes. In my early twenties I favoured Churston Deckle in a shade of cream called (I think) ecru and also a brand called Three Candlesticks. Part of the pleasure of writing on quality letter paper was using a fountain pen rather than a biro.

I also had a beautiful red leather writing case bought for me as a gift. Writing cases looked like this inside and had a zip around three sides to stop everything falling out. I still have my grandfather’s which is just like this one.

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

The Old Red Telephone Box

Designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1924, the first red phone box appeared on Britain’s streets two years later. The design went from K1 (Kiosk 1) to K8 (Kiosk 8) and was finally replaced by the KX. The K6, which was designed in 1935, was designed to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of George V. It was consequently sometimes known as the “Jubilee” kiosk. It went into production in 1936. The K6 was the first red telephone kiosk to be extensively used outside London, and many thousands were deployed in virtually every town and city, replacing most of the existing kiosks and establishing thousands of new sites. In 1935 there had been 19,000 public telephones in the UK: by 1940, thanks to the K6, there were 35,000.

Public telephones were an essential part of life until relatively recently when mobile phones arrived on the scene. When I was a child most homes didn’t have a phone in the house. Even if you did, once you were away from home the red phone boxes were plentiful. The photograph below is what the interiors of phone boxes were like when I was growing up. A local call cost 4d – four old pence – and took four penny coins. When your call had been put through you posted your four coins into the slot and pressed button A when it was answered. If it wasn’t answered (no answering system in those days!) you pressed Button B and got your coins back. There was a shelf in the kiosk which held a telephone directory. When I was in my teens and old enough to go out with friends in the evening at a weekend, my dad always made sure I had four penny coins with me in case I needed to call home for a lift or some other reason.

The old 1d (one penny) coin which was enormous compared to today’s coins.

Although their number and use has declined in recent years, many of them have already been repurposed by communities. Through the ‘adoption scheme’, for just £1, more than 5,000 communities have turned our iconic red phone boxes into something that brings value and enjoyment to local people – from libraries, to food banks, and defibrillators.

Some communities have adopted kiosks as libraries or book exchanges.

Many kiosks now serve as defibrillators.

The following three are are pictures of phone boxes not far from me which are used as mini art galleries and museums with exhibitions changed regularly.

A picture of a so-called ‘phone box graveyard’.

The KX which replaced the traditional red kiosk. Even these are few and far between now.

As always, credit to Wikipedia and Google Images. I make every effort to avoid infringing copyright but if anyone objects to the use of any image or info in my posts, contact me and it will be removed.

Before the Internet.

Technology has moved on at an incredible pace in the past few decades. Back in the days before we had the internet there were things which we needed which we don’t need as much any more.

I’ll start with telephone directories. In the days when all phones lived at home and were connected by wires we received a new telephone directory and a new Yellow Pages every year. One winter I did a few weeks work delivering Yellow Pages and I walked miles!

If I wanted to find out about something back in the 50s and 60s my first port of call was my mum and dad’s set of encyclopaedias. After leaving home, when I didn’t have encyclopaedias to hand, I would make a note of what I wanted to find out and call into a library.

Many homes had a Home Doctor book or a First Aid book. I bought one when we were expecting our first baby in 1980. I’m also lucky enough to have two very old home doctor books which came from my grandmother’s house. One I’ve managed to date to the 1920’s and the other one is from the 1800s but I can’t guess closer than that.

I know people who don’t buy books at all any more but read all their fiction online.

I love recipe books and still use them but I also use the internet if I’m looking for something in particular which I don’t think I have a recipe for.

I also always have a book of road maps in my car but when going somewhere new I increasingly use my phone to navigate me there.

When we used to go on family holidays when I was a child, and later with my own family, we would pack a guide book, a road atlas, and perhaps a bird spotter’s guide and a flower identification book. Or books about trains, castles . . . . whatever the family’s interests.

Now we don’t just have the internet available, most of us have it in our pockets on our smartphones.

Here is a random selection of some of the things we can manage without now – when we want to.

Having said all that, I still love books! I have many books of all sorts, still read fiction in paper form, still take a newspaper and love a good browse in my recipe books.

As always, credit to Wikipedia and Google Images. I make every effort to avoid infringing copyright. However, if anyone objects to my use of an image please contact me and it will be removed.

Teatime Treats

When I was a child my mum baked every week. All mums did back in the 1950s and 60s. She used to make sponge cakes, fruit cakes, chocolate cakes, scones, fruit tarts and pies etc. If we had visitors coming it was always in the afternoon for tea. I don’t remember my parents ever having people as dinner guests in the evening. When guests came the thing to do at that time was to serve ‘shop cake’. It was as though home made cake was too ‘everyday’ and that you were making an effort to produce something a bit more special. This was possibly because ‘shop cake’ was more expensive then than home baking. Nowadays everyone really appreciates home baking and if someone is coming here I like to make a cake.

Of course, these are just my memories from the 1950s. Other people who lived through those times but in other areas might have had completely different experiences!

Paper doilies were very popular and were usually only bought for teatime with guests or for birthday cakes.

Mugs were not usual back in the 1950s and tea bags hadn’t even been invented. Cups and saucers and a teapot were the norm.

But for visitors there would be the better set of china brought out or even the set kept for very best. Everyone had a tea set in the dresser or china cupboard which rarely saw the light of day and had usually been given as a wedding present.

The following is what I remember of the shop cakes available back then where I lived. I know these types of cake all still exist but this post is to give a flavour of a what 1950s teatime spread might look like.

Battenberg which I used to call ‘window cake’ when I was small.

Angel cake

Dundee cake

Victoria Sponge. The sponges of the 1950s, home made or bought, would never have had fresh cream in them. There would be jam, butter icing or both. This is because most people didn’t have fridges in the 1950s.

Jam tarts. A box of six usually contained two with red jam (strawberry or raspberry flavour), two with purple jam (blackcurrant of blackberry) and two with yellow jam (apricot jam or lemon curd). The jams were more of a flavoured, coloured gel with no discernible seeds or pips. But I loved them!

Not one of my favourites but a popular teatime treat.

Ginger cake – which always had a lovely sticky top.

There would often be a plate of biscuits on offer too. We have a vast selection available now but these are two old faithfuls which I remember fondly from my childhood.

Credit to Google Images and Wikipedia. As always, I have endeavored not to infringe copyright. However, if anyone objects to my use of an image, please contact me and I will remove it.

Birthday Party Games

When I was a child birthday parties were small affairs and always held in the birthday child’s home with a handful of their schoolmates invited. We always had a birthday tea and a cake with candles on it and the rest of the time was filled with party games.

It’s interesting that some games we are very familiar with from childhood, appear in similar forms all over the world. Are there reasons why we play them which are are common to all people? A lot of these games have a different appearance due to the culture they’re from, but are constructed in the same fashion.

Blind Man’s Buff

A version of the game was played in Ancient Greece where it was called “copper mosquito.” The game is played by children in Bangladesh where it is known as Kamanchi meaning blind fly. One individual is blind-folded in order to catch or touch one of the others who run around repeating, “The blind flies are hovering fast! Catch whichever you can!” The game was played in the Tudor period, as there are references to its recreation by Henry VIII’s courtiers. It was also a popular parlour game in the Victorian Era. Whilst researching for this post I learned that the name of the game is now considered offensive by some and that the blindfolding of a child can be looked on as dangerous. So maybe it’s disappeared altogether?

Musical Chairs

The origins of the game’s name as “Trip to Jerusalem” is disputed. However, it is known to come from its German name Reise Nach Jerusalem (“The Journey to Jerusalem”). One theory suggests that the name was inspired by The Crusades wherein several heavy losses were incurred.

Pin the Tail on the Donkey

Pin the tail on the donkey is a game played by groups of children. The earliest version listed in a catalogue of American games compiled by the American Game Collectors Association in 1998, is dated 1899, and attributed to Charles Zimmerling. My mum used to draw the outline of a donkey on a piece of paper.

Pass the Parcel

Research tells me this is of British origin unlike Blind Man’s Buff which crops up in many cultures. Back in the 1950s the music was either played on a gramophone or on a piano. The parent operating the stop-start music kept a careful eye on the passing of the parcel to make sure everyone had a turn and to ensure that the birthday child was not the one to open the last layer which contained the prize. Back then it was something small like a chocolate bar.

Musical Statues

It seems that this game appears in various countries and has quite a long history. Some countries know it was Freeze Dance or Frozen Statues. Some homes had a parent who played the piano and some had a gramophone with a parent lifting the stylus – just like Pass the Parcel and Musical Chairs.

Dead Lions/ Sleeping Tigers

A great game for calming children down at the end of a party! I can’t find any history on it so it’s perhaps a relatively new invention.

Spin the Bottle/ Plate

On a personal note, I absolutely hated forfeit games! At some of the bigger parties like village parties there was the dreaded (by me!) spin the plate/ bottle game. If the bottle finished its spin pointing to you or if you spun the plate and didn’t get back to your seat in the circle you had to do a forfeit. This usually involved having to sing a song, recite a poem or do something like hop around the room. My worst nightmare!!

Credit to Google Images and Wikipedia. As always, I have endeavoured not to infringe copyright. However, if anyone objects to my use of an image, please contact me and I will remove it.

Baby Things

Back in the 50s and 60s, prams and pushchairs were big, heavy and cumbersome. Prams didn’t fold up to go on buses or in cars. Pushchairs folded but were still bulky and heavy. The baby started off in a big, usually coach built pram and at a certain age graduated to a pushchair. There were no lightweight buggies. Families with cars bought a small rectangular soft-bodied thing known as a carry-cot which just sat on the back seat with the baby lying in it. There were no seatbelts in cars then and definitely nothing securing the carry-cot. There were no car seats for babies, toddlers and children. They were held in an adult’s arms until old enough to sit up and then just travelled unsecured in the back seat.

A friend was recalling recently that in the early 70s, it was difficult to buy prams because there was a shortage of steel.

The basic design of cots is still much the same but modern ones are much safer.

There were no disposable nappies. There still weren’t any when my children were born in the early 80s. Nappies were white towelling squares which were folded and pinned with special big safety pins called, appropriately enough, nappy pins. To add a waterproof outer layer a pair of thin rubber pants were pulled on over the nappy. These nappies needed to be boiled to keep them hygienic and white! When you consider that most households didn’t have washing machines or tumble driers the amount of work involved was enormous. I can remember pink and blue nappy pins ones like the ones in the photograph.

Many baby toys and toys for children were made of tin. There was no plastic. I remember my brother as a toddler cutting his leg on a toy made from tin. Also, the paints used on tin toys and on wooden cots were lead based and therefore toxic.

Very young children often wore reins like this when out with the family. I remember very clearly seeing children with walking reins on. They were leather and often pastel coloured with a picture on the front like these in the photograph. They were backed with a white fleecy fabric for comfort.

Baby bottles were made of glass and the teats were made of rubber.

Credit to Google Images and Wikipedia. As always, I have endeavored not to infringe copyright. However, if anyone objects to my use of an image, please contact me and I will remove it.

Ornaments

Throughout history, people have decorated their homes with non-functional artefacts. Even prehistoric people carved and painted decorative objects which were often used as symbols or to tell stories.

Sculpted from mammoth ivory and found in a a cave in Germany this 40,000-year-old image is 31 centimetres tall. It has the head of a cave lion with a partly human body. 

But tastes change, as do the available materials and techniques. This is a very brief run-through of some of the ornamental items I recall from my childhood.

In the 1950s, when I was very young, many of the houses of older relatives were very old-fashioned compared to fifties styles. Many of the things in my grandmother’s home would have looked quite in keeping in Victorian times.

I remember seeing these domes in houses. They sometimes had small stuffed animals or dried butterflies in them as well as the dried flowers.

It wasn’t uncommon then to see a stuffed animal or bird on the sideboard of an elderly relative.

Many older people in my childhood had these pairs of china dogs on their mantlepieces or in the hearth.

When I was a child I remember these china flower ornaments being very popular with our mums. They were the kind of thing you bought her for her birthday or Christmas.

My mum had one very like this. The tutu was real net stiffened with something like starch or glue. I washed it once when I was helping Mum with the spring-cleaning – and her tutu went soft and fell off!

My mum had one exactly like this one!

Wade ornaments were also popular here in the fifties. In the Spring we used to pick primroses and float them in the water in the ‘log’.

In the sixties I remember Wedgewood items being an item you would buy a mum, grandmother or an aunt.

I then remember crystal or cut glass becoming a ‘thing’ in the 60’s. There were glasses and decanters but also ornamental dishes, trays and even bells.

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 image, please contact me and it will be removed.

Pets

I was talking with some friends the other day and the subject of budgies came up. We all remembered so many households where there was a pet budgie. It always fascinated me that if you wanted the budgie to be quiet you put the cover over the cage and it immediately thought it was night and went to sleep. Most of the ones I knew seemed to be called Joey. I don’t know anyone with a budgie now. This got me thinking about how the change in pet-keeping since the 1950s and 60s.

Budgies – or Budgerigars, to give them their full name

I haven’t seen a budgie for many years now but when I was a child they were very popular pets. I often used to see them in the homes of elderly relatives we used to visit. I’m sure there were other names but I used to know a lot of budgies called Joey. They were either blue or green. People used to train them to say a few words. I wondered whether I don’t see them now because it’s illegal to keep them so I looked this up and found that it’s not against the law to keep a budgie as a pet. The decline in numbers is simply changing fashions in pets.

Tortoises

I never had a tortoise but they were very popular pets in the 50s. Children in storybooks and comics often had pet tortoises. I remember reading about owners painting their initials on the shell in case the tortoise ever escaped.

Goldfish

It was very common to see goldfish in bowls when I was a child. One common practice, which is still legal here and shouldn’t be, was the winning of goldfish at fairs. This was still happening when my children were small in the 1980s but is far less common now. The ‘lucky’ child was given a small plastic water-filled bag with a goldfish swimming in it. If it was going back to a household which didn’t already have fish there would have been no tank or bowl and no fish food so the chances are the poor fish would be dead by the next day.

Whilst researching for this post I learned that just last year my nearby town, Wakefield, banned fairs from giving goldfish as prizes to children.

Cats and Dogs

I lived in a farming village so most of the families we knew were farmers and they all had cats and dogs. These were working animals. The dogs were sheepdogs and were trained to work with flocks of sheep. Most of the ones I knew on our local farms were called Fly, Moss or Belle. Cats were there largely to keep the mouse population down in the hay barns. These weren’t indoor pampered pets. They lived outside and in the barns and outhouses.

When I was 13 we moved five miles from our village into the small town nearby. Here there were more people with pet dogs who were taken out for regular walks on leads. We acquired a pet dog, a Golden Labrador, when I was 15 and we all absolutely adored her.

Perhaps the range of pets available in the 50s and 60s was greater than I’m remembering. It could be that my experience was different from others from that time because we didn’t have a pet shop anywhere nearby. However, this is how I remember things and I am only speaking from personal experience.

Credit to Wikipedia and Google Images. I endeavor to ensure I am not infringing copyright when using photographs obtained from the Internet. If anyone objects to my use of a photograph, let me know and I will remove it.

Tea

When I was a child, the drink everybody drank was tea. There was hardly any coffee around in the 1950s, not where I lived, anyway. Children drank milk (warmed in winter, cold in summer), orange squash or weak tea with occasionally cocoa, Horlicks or Ovaltine at bedtime. Adults drank tea (most of them took sugar in it, unlike now) and sometimes a warm milky drink at night. People didn’t drink water the way they do now. In cafes and restaurants you were never offered water with your food and many would refuse if you asked for a glass of tap water. We knew nothing about caffeine or about the importance of keeping your body hydrated. This post focuses on just tea, that quintessentially British drink. I really fancied using the word quintessentially, for some reason!

The Tea we Drank.

There were no tea bags then and very few brands to choose from. Tea leaves were the only form the tea came in. I remember Broooke Bond being around and in some grocery shops you could buy loose tea weighed out on scales. Once home, you transferred your loose tea to a tea caddy. Green, decaffeinated, herbal varieties etc. didn’t exist.

The Tea Pots we Used.

Of course, loose tea can’t be made in the cup so we all used teapots. Stainless steel ones didn’t come on the scene until the mid sixties. The everyday family teapot was a sturdy earthenware one, usually dark brown. When anyone came to visit a more decorative china pot would be brought out, often part of a ‘tea set’. A lot of people had a very best set which had usually been given as a wedding present and which never left the glass-fronted china cabinet.

Cups and Saucers

It’s hard to believe now, but nobody drank out of mugs in the 1950s. Every hot drink was drunk out of a cup and saucer. Everyday ones were fairly robust, best ones prettier and more fragile. I have a lovely tea set from the 1920s which was my grandmother’s.

Other Essential Equipment

In addition to the ubiquitous teapot, everyone needed tea strainers to filter out the leaves. As with the pots, there were plain everyday ones and fancier ‘best’ ones. Tea cosies were essential for keeping the tea warm while it brewed in the pot for the standard three minutes. Tea caddies stored the loose tea leaves and there were special little scoops for measuring out the right amount of tea into the pot.

Credit to Google Images and Wikipedia. As always, I have endeavored not to infringe copyright. However, if anyone objects to my use of an image, please contact me and I will remove it.

Primary School Learning in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The school I attended from four years old until eleven was a very small primary school in a remote rural village. The year I left to go to the high school there were 28 pupils in the school which gives you an idea how small it was. Because it was such a rural area, some of the children from outlying farms came from a mile or two away. I was mostly happy in school, I liked the teachers and I worked hard. Many years later, in my early forties I trained for a second career as a primary school teacher. The differences between learning in the 1950s and decades later when I was teaching are many! I thought I’d look at some of the subjects, how they were taught and what we learned. I’m not criticising my teachers. That was just the way it was then and we were not at all disadvantaged by the education we received.

History

I have no memory of finding out about any world history in primary school. As a teacher I loved teaching children about Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, The Vikings, World War II and so on. Our history in the 1950s was very Britain centred and consisted of learning about famous people and heroes like Scott of the Antarctic, Florence Nightingale, Nelson etc. There were no opportunities for finding things out for ourselves by looking in history books or encyclopedias. We were told their stories and we copied out passages from text books.

BBC - History - Scott of the Antarctic
Florence Nightingale - Wikipedia
Scott of the Antarctic and Florence Nightingale. Two of the historical figures I remember from primary school lessons.

Maths

I didn’t come across geometry or algebra until high school. Our maths from four to eleven was strictly arithmetic. Times tables were learned off by heart. This was done by the whole class reciting them together first thing every morning. Other tables which were recited were the weights and measures ones such as ‘Twelve inches to a foot, three feet to a yard, one thousand seven hundred and sixty yards to a mile, eight eighty yards to half a mile, four forty yards to a quarter of a mile . . .’ and so on. This was repeated for weight and time. In our final year we had to sit a test called the ‘Eleven-Plus’ to decide on where you went for your secondary education. The maths we did was all geared towards this test. We had to solve written problems, work out fractions and percentages and even learn how to calculate simple and compound interest.

Exercise book
All our school exercise books had these tables on the back cover.

English

My main memories of this subject are of handwriting practice, comprehension exercises, spelling tests, writing ‘compositions’ (stories, we’d say now) and learning very serious, old-fashioned poems off by heart then reciting them. In readiness for the eleven plus we also had to learn proverbs off by heart. ‘All that glitters is not gold’, ‘A stitch in time saves nine’, etc. were learned and we were tested on them.

Music

Like our history lessons, the music we did in school was very traditional and serious. We learned to play the recorder which I loved. The songs we learned and sang – or played on the recorder – were hymns, in both Welsh and English, and songs like ‘Over the Sea to Skye’ and ‘Hearts of Oak’.

Vintage Recorders for sale | eBay
My recorder was exactly like this one. My granddaughter now has it.

Science

The only science-related activity I can recall doing is when, on a fine day in spring and summer, the teachers would sometimes take us all out for what they called a ‘nature ramble’. They pointed out various flowers, trees and birds and we picked flowers and leaves to take back to school. But I mainly remember how lovely it was to be out of school, enjoying the weather and walking along the lanes around the village. There was hardly any traffic around so road safety wasn’t an issue.

Art and Craft

We did sometimes have art sessions but the only medium I remember using was powder paints. I don’t recall any lessons on colour mixing or technique but the painting was fun. I learned about colours at home from those lovely tins of water colours we used to have back then with the names of the colours written under every little square of paint. I loved the wonderful names they had like ultramarine and burnt umber. Oh, the joy of getting a brand new paint tin for Christmas! I also enjoyed the knitting and embroidery lessons in school.

Vintage Paint Set Divers Design 1960s Children's Paint image 5
I never see paint boxes for children now with the names of the colours written under each block – and I have looked!

P.E.

We very rarely did PE although there in a storage area there were a few boxes of coloured bean bags, balls and quoits. We used to look at them longingly! A few years into my time at the school we acquired a new school radio. Once a week one of our two teachers would tune into a BBC programme called Music and Movement. For fifteen minutes we would follow the instructions on the radio and move around the classroom in different ways. Sometimes we were asked to imagine we were different creatures or to stand still and look like a tree. We absolutely loved it!

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image.jpeg
How we would have looked when listening to the BBC’s Music and Movement programme on the school radio.

R.E.

Religious Education consisted of singing hymns first thing in the morning while a teacher played the piano and saying prayers . Being a Welsh school we also learned the story of our patron saint, St David. We all went to church and Sunday School and learned more about the stories in the Bible there. We were completely unaware of any of the other faiths in the world such as Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism etc.

Saint David Biography - Childhood, Life Achievements & Timeline
St David, the patron Saint of Wales.

As always, credit to Wikipedia and Google Images. I make every effort to ensure that I do not infringe copyright but if anyone objects to my use of an image please contact me and I will remove it.