Tag Archives: history

Where did they go? Part 2

Once I started thinking about words, phrases, items and brands which have disappeared from use since the 1950s, I kept remembering more and more!

Some of the sweets and chocolates which have gone are Spangles, Bar Six, Tiffin (my favourite!), Five Boys and Fruit Polos.

               

As for clothes, does anyone remember wearing a Liberty Bodice? It was an extra warm button through vest which most children wore all winter when I was little. As girls rarely wore trousers in those days, winter wear was a warm skirt or pinafore dress in wool or corduroy. Kilts were extremely popular and for the very young they had straps like the one in the photo. Disappeared brands I recall – Cherub and Ladybird clothes. Birthday, Start-Rite and Tuf shoes.                     

The golliwog is an extinct toy now for all the right reasons. However, in the politically incorrect days of my childhood, they were very popular toys. Robertson’s Jam’s golly badges were extremely collectible! To the children of the times a golly was a colourful soft toy and completely innocent. Many of the toy cars my brother, sister and I played with were Dinky Toys. They were made by Mecca I’ve discovered when researching for this post. Now that’s another toy brand which has disappeared!

        

One last food memory – who remembers rissoles, faggots and spam fritters?

Where did they go?

Recently I was reading with some children in school. The book was Michael Morpurgo’s Butterfly Lion (brilliant writer, fantastic book!). Chapter One is called Chilblains and Semolina Pudding. Before doing any reading, I had to explain the two things to the children. I know people do get chilblains and you could, if you wanted to, buy semolina and make a pudding with it. Yet as far as the kids of today are concerned they are unheard of. We were very familiar with both in the 1950s. I suffered from chilblains every winter and semolina pudding was a regular (if rather unpleasant) feature of school dinners. This started me thinking of other things which were part of our lives as we grew up which today’s children have no knowledge of.

I will start with food. Semolina pudding had several relatives in the milk pudding family. I think rice pudding is the only one which has survived into the 21st century in the UK – and even that isn’t very common. The others were macaroni (yes, pasta in a dessert!), ground rice, sago and tapioca (nicknamed frogspawn – the reason for this can be seen in the photo).

 

 

 

                 

 

 

With the advent of ice-cream, mousses and brands like Angel Delight, the traditional dessert blancmange has disappeared from the face of the earth. It was a milk-based, coloured and flavoured dessert thickened with cornflour and set in a mould. It was often served with jelly. For our birthday parties when we were little my mum used to make a rabbit-shaped blancmange and surround it with chopped up green jelly.

         Mum had a rabbit jelly mould like this.

A warm drink in the evening was also largely milk-based and could be cocoa or perhaps Ovaltine or Horlicks. I think they can still be bought but I don’t think many  children drink them or have even heard of them.

Image result for ovaltine                 

Moving on now to school and school uniforms. All school uniform for boys included a school cap which had to be worn every day throughout school if the boy stayed on until 18 years old. Long trousers were not worn by boys until they were thirteen and uniform shorts were worn with long woollen socks.

                     Image result for school duffle bag 1950s                      

Girls wore gymslips until thirteen when they could wear skirts. There were no tights (they hadn’t been invented) so long socks were worn in winter, ankle socks in summer – even if you were a sixth-former! In our school the girls had to wear a beret (known as a tam) and woe betide you if you ever stepped outside school without it on!

                                 1950's Leather School Satchel

The school bag – for boys and girls in secondary school – was a leather satchel. Games and P.E. kit was carried in a duffle bag.Two more expressions unknown to today’s children! The school uniform coat was a gabardine mac or raincoat, usually double-breasted and belted.

Here are some other things today’s youth have not heard of (I’ll cover these in more detail in Part 2):

Meccano,  plimsolls, cycling capes, leather footballs, Dinky toys, Liberty bodices, golliwogs, Spangles, leather footballs and bus conductors. Watch this space!

St David’s Day

St David is the patron saint of Wales and St David’s Day (Dydd Gwyl Dewi Sant in Welsh) is celebrated on 1st of March – hence this being posted today. We say Happy St David’s Day with these words.

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These are my memories of St David’s Day in Wales in the 1950s and 60s. All towns and most villages held events such as a concert or eisteddfod with music, singing, poetry and dancing – and still do. Our school always held a St David’s Day concert. The national emblems are the daffodil and the leek and we wore one or the other to school on the day. The smell in our school hall was overpowering, especially when those wearing leeks became peckish and started nibbling! I wear a daffodil on every March 1st and have done all my life – even though I live in England now.

The traditional St David’s Day dish is a stew made with lamb, leeks, carrots and potatoes. It is called cawl (pronounced cowl) and communities would often hold a concert with a cawl supper. The little currant-studded griddle cakes known as Welsh cakes (delicious, too!) would usually follow.

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Keeping Warm

Back in the 1950’s I knew nobody who had central heating in their home. In fact, I don’t think I ever heard the expression. We all had open fires which burned coal and logs. Even in school, the classroom was heated by a large coal fire. There was an enormous fire guard around the school fire and on a very wet or snowy day there would be loads of hats and gloves drying out on it. There were less than thirty children in the village school so the guard was big enough to dry all our things out before we went out again.

In our house we had two fires, one in the dining room and one in the lounge. In the evening the whole family would be in the lounge together listening to the radio, later in my childhood watching television. We could get really warm and cosy in front of the fire, especially our fronts! Leaving the circle of heat to use the bathroom, get a drink or go to bed was something to be put off as long as possible. . . . and then done as quickly as possible.

In the very coldest weather we children had a paraffin stove in our bedroom. We were so glad of the warmth we didn’t notice the smell of paraffin.

imageOurs was just like this one.

In the morning there was always ice on the inside of the bedroom windows. The patterns formed were beautiful like this example.

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Later on, in the 60s, when the family lived in a bigger house, we children had a bedroom each and each bedroom had an electric fire. We were allowed to use them when we were getting up and going to bed. We would not have even tried to spend leisure time in our bedrooms in winter as the electrics fires were known to be expensive to run. We had heaters like each one of these.

 

Bedding consisted of

. a top and bottom sheet – all cotton, brushed ‘flannelette’ in winter.

. two or three blankets – these were not soft and cuddly, they were hard and scratchy. As they were purely for warmth and sandwiched between sheet and cover the textures didn’t matter.  They weren’t pretty colours either. Some were beige, others were grey or brown.

. a candlewick bedspread.

. a feather-filled eiderdown.

 

 

Keeping Clean

I was cleaning yesterday and, as I rummaged through my cleaning cupboard, looking through my vast array of sprays, wipes and cloths, it occurred to me that this is yet another way in which life has changed immeasurably since the 1950s. I’m calling this post ‘Keeping Clean’ because I’m looking at household products and toiletries.

I have often mused on the fact that everything is branded nowadays. We don’t just have milk, distributed by our local farm or dairy. We have the choice of branded milks – Cravendale, Arla, Dairy Crest. Water doesn’t only come out of taps, we can choose Evian, Volvic, Buxton, etc etc. In my childhood, dusters, dishcloths and floor cloths were unbranded and bought in a local hardware shop. Dusters were always yellow and square, floor and dish cloths were white cotton and sold in a roll to be cut into handy lengths.In our house, floor cloths were always recycled old vests discarded by the family when too small or worn. Everyone wore vests then, they were always white cotton and made ideal cleaning cloths. We now have a bewildering assortment of wipes and cloths to choose from – J-cloths, many brands of sponge and microfibre cloths, and even branded dusters e.g Swiffer!



Cleaning products tell the same story. In the very olden days, people used generic substances like carbolic soap, beeswax and bicarb. In the 1950s there were brands to choose from but far fewer than now. People had brand loyalty too. My Mum preferred Daz washing powder, other households used Omo or Persil. I remember Mansion Polish, too and Dura-Glit for cleaning brass. There was no fabric conditioner so, although I don’t remember thinking this at all, towels must have been hard and scratchy after being dried out on the line.

In the world of toiletries, too, there were fewer brands. We always had Gibbs SR toothpaste and Lux soap, some preferred Imperial Leather, Pears, Colgate or, from the early 60s, Signal. What did the SR in Gibbs SR stand for, by the way? Dry skin was moisturised with Nivea or Ponds. There was no such thing as hair conditioner then and getting a comb or a brush through wet hair after washing was a nightmare, especially long or curly hair.

Sweets, Chocolates and Biscuits.

All children love sweet things. The fact that we didn’t have them all the time (mum was fussy about our teeth, money wasn’t plentiful, we didn’t live near any shops) made them even more of an attraction. When Nana came to live with us, she started giving us 6d each on a Saturday morning. We would either walk the mile to the village shop to buy sweets or, if Dad was working on Saturday morning, we would go in the car with him to the town and spend it there.

As well as the packets and bars, some of which are shown here, there were the large glass jars with loose sweets in which were weighed out in 4oz portions into a paper bag. If you bought 2oz, the paper bag was triangular. Some loose sweets I remember
– aniseed balls, barley sugar, Everton Mints and pineapple chunks.


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I remember there often being a sugar mouse poking out of the top of my Christmas stocking.

The biscuits I remember being offered most often when out for tea are – Nice biscuits, those horrid pink wafer ones, custard creams, Bourbon and ginger nuts. Cadbury’s chocolate fingers were strictly for birthday parties!

What we Ate.

I touched on this aspect of 1950s life in my first post – The Blog Begins. This post shares some more thoughts on food in Post War Britain.

We had a much smaller range of food available to us in the fifties. Living in a backwater, we were probably a bit behind everyone else. I was 17 when I first ate a red pepper. I first came across pizza on a visit to London as a student. Cheese choices were all native – Carphilly, Cheddar, Cheshire, Red Leicester. The first exotic cheese I knew was Danish Blue.  Normal, everyday cheeses such as Brie, Camembert, Ementhal, Mozarella were yet to be discovered in Britain!

Meals in recipe books and on menus didn’t have foreign names like Stroganoff, Risotto, Tagliatelle or Bolognese. Neither did they have convoluted titles like Pan-Seared Bass with Chargrilled Vegetables and a Caramelised Onion Marmalade. Or Hand-Cut, Triple-Cooked, Seasoned Potato Chips. Chips were just chips. We had meat and two veg (roast beef dinner, roast pork dinner), one pot meals (beef casserole, lamb stew), cold meals (ham salad, corned beef salad – how often do you hear of corned beef these days?) or chip meals (egg and chips, ham and chips, fish and chips). The meals which had names were reassuringly down to earth and self-explanatory – Toad in the Hole, Hot Pot, Macaroni Cheese (the only pasta we knew, but the word pasta was unknown to us at that time).

A 1950s nutriotionist’s thoughts on an ideal family menu for a week.

A 1950s Christmas menu.

 

Recipes didn’t have colour, or any, photographs. Most didn’t even have drawings like these – just text.

 Some ‘creative’ ideas for serving Spam in the 1950s.

The other old favourite was the snack on toast – beans on toast, scrambled egg on toast, poached egg on toast, cheese on toast, sardines on toast, spaghetti on toast (tinned spaghetti, of course.)

We also ate more offal than people do now; items like liver, kidney, tripe, brawn and sweetbreads.

Food was preserved by canning, salting, pickling, bottling, drying. With the advent of freezing came the arrival of delights (to we children, anyway!) such as fish fingers. Home freezers were uncommon until the very late 60s/ early 70s so fish fingers, frozen peas and Arctic Roll (mmmmm, loved it!) were bought and eaten on the same day.

 

              

 

Fruit any more exotic than apples or bananas were bought in tins. Tinned pineapple and peaches were eaten all year round and tinned pears, strawberries and mandarin oranges when the real thing was out of season. We ate fresh peas in summer when my dad grew them but tinned or dried the rest of the year.

   This was issued during rationing – which carried on after the war until 1953.

In Sickness and in Health. 

People have always caught colds, measles, flu, have broken bones, grown old and had babies. So how were the 50s and 60s different?

When I was a child, you stayed in bed when you were unwell. Whether it was a cold, bronchitis, chicken pox or a stomach upset, being poorly meant staying home from school and staying in bed. The doctor was informed and visited regularly. We were five miles away from the surgery; nevertheless the highlight of a day confined to bed with spots or a temperature was the sight of old Dr Price (who probably wasn’t even old!) walking towards the house from his car. I can still remember how weak and wobbly the legs felt on the day you were first allowed to get up – just for a short while on the first day, of course!
At home mum put Germolene on cuts and grazes. I can still remember the thick, pink cream in the tin and that distinctive smell. However, if you hurt yourself at school they dabbed neat iodine directly onto the wound which was agony!!


We were given cod liver oil or cod liver oil and malt all winter which was supposed to keep colds away. There was kaolin and morphine for stomach upsets, boric acid for eye infections and camomile lotion for all skin complaints from sunburn to measles. A cough was treated with thick, brown cough mixture which always tasted vile. Our favoured brand was Hactos.

Other things I remember being talked about and used by older people such as grandparents are; gentian violet, kaolin poultices, syrup of figs and Epsom salts.

The  one great thing about being in bed poorly in the 1950s was – you were ‘allowed’ to drink Lucozade. In fact, it was practically compulsory! The thing which made it special was you weren’t ‘allowed’ to drink it at any other time. As soon as you were confined to bed with mumps or ‘flu, Lucozade would appear as if by magic. We were a mile walk from the village shop and five miles from the town but Lucozade was purchased for the poorly one – and only the poorly one! The siblings could just look and drool.

What we wore – some more thoughts and images.

First, a disclaimer.  All images used are freely available on the Internet. If, however, I have infringed copyright please inform me and the offending picture will be removed.

  

As can be seen in this photo, girls’ dresses were more or less smaller versions of what their mums wore. 



 

Notice the boy’s inevitable short back and sides with side parting.

  

A girl in my primary school had a rabbit cardigan just like this knitted in red and white.  When it became too small for her, her mum cut the sleeves above the elbow to make it bolero style. 



 

Yes, I had outfits just like this!

Puff sleeves, gingham, seersucker, Broderie Anglaise trim with ribbon threaded through, sashes tied at the back, pockets – some of the things I remember from summer dresses of the day.   



 

A pattern which could be adapted to make a day dress, a party dress, a skirt and top, all with a choice of collar styles. Notice the trousers. They weren’t common and were known as ‘slacks’. They were definitely not worn for school.

What we wore – the 1950s

The reason this post is not called ‘Fashion’ or ‘Clothes’ is because I am covering the other side of the story. When we think of clothing and fashion in the 1950s and 60s we picture Audrey Hepburn, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Mary Quant and pop icons such as The Beatles. All this is well documented and easy to research. Being a child in the 50s and a teenager in the 60s, in an area a long way from the large stores, the clothes I wore tell a very different tale.

In my Primary School days I, and all my friends, wore jumpers and cardigans knitted by our mums and dresses, skirts and pinafore dresses sewn on the home sewing machine – hand operated, of course, electric sewing machines were yet to arrive in our homes.

Because most garments were hand made and washing clothes was a once a week event, usually Monday (there were no washing machines), the same jumper and skirt (in winter) or dress and cardigan(summer) would be worn for several days, if not all week, so we didn’t have a huge selection of clothes.

Boys wore grey flannel shorts winter and summer with wool socks up to the knees. A blazer, v-necked jumper or tank top was worn over a shirt and a tie.

     2637e03f3bbe5225e1ff2ed23a92703d--school-life-school-uniforms

Boys’ hair was cut ‘short back and sides’ with a side parting – no exceptions!

We wore knee-high grey or brown socks in winter, short white socks in summer – no tights or trousers, bare knees all year round!

My hair was exactly like that of the girl in blue. I longed for straight hair with a side parting and a bow, like the girl in pink, or long plaits like my friend Valerie. I was stuck with what was known as a ‘bubble cut’

I will be coming back to this topic as there is plenty to say. I will also be moving on into the 1960s and the clothes of my teenage years.