Words and phrases

Imagine that a time traveller popped up from the 50’s and 60’s who had somehow missed the decades between then and now. Rip Van Winkle – remember that story? Apart from the very obvious changes in buildings, shops, technology, instant communication etc etc, I think there are many words and phrases which would baffle them in conversation. Here is a very small selection.

Family

When I was starting my family in the early eighties, nobody had events called baby showers. I’m not sure when the idea first appeared here in Britain but it’s certainly massive now. When my children had a friend come to play or, when a bit older, had a friend come to stay the night, these were not called play-dates and sleepovers.

Music

Back in the 50’s and 60’s we had classical, jazz, blues, music from films and shows and rock and roll. In the early 60’s we saw the emergence of pop. Now there is a plethora of musical genres. Garage, hip hop, grime, dub, Indie … to name just a few!

Miscellaneous

The world of famous people has changed enormously, largely due to the new ease of communication. Some words which would bewilder a time traveller from the 50’s and 60’s are fashionista, paparazzi, celeb.

In the 1950s we had newspapers and some people had televisions. Now we have podcasts, sound bites, boxed sets, binge watching,

Back when I was a child ‘environment’ was a word we rarely heard and we never used expressions like ‘saving the planet’ or ‘good for the environment’, plant-based, eco friendly, flexitarian etc.

And finally . . .

Mindfulness, exfoliate, click and collect, chip and pin, glamping, fatbergs. And many, many more.

Note. This is my own work, written from my own memories and opinions. Credit to Wikipedia, Google, Google Images used for fact-checking. I make every effort to avoid infringing copyright. However, if anyone objects to my use of any particular image, please contact me and it will be removed.

Finding Things Out – Before The Internet

It crossed my mind recently that any time I want to know something I can reach for my phone, tablet or laptop. It wasn’t always so!

Humans are curious by nature. As infants we ask our parents endless questions. Next comes school and the teachers and the books on the shelves.

Parents

As toddlers, pre-schoolers and very young children, we assumed our parents knew the answer to everything. They could have told us anything and we’d have believed it. In fact, many adults have funny stories about being told daft things for fun – and believing every word.

Teachers

Once in school, children had another oracle to consult – the teacher. Up went the hand and “Please Sir/ Miss, how did……………?” and so on. Of course teachers didn’t know everything, any more then parents did, but very young children didn’t know that.

Atlases, dictionaries, encyclopaedias etc.

Once children became fluent readers, a whole new world opened up. Reference books were on hand in the classroom and most homes had a selection of books. A set of encyclopaedias was a popular thing to have. I know that’s how my grandfather collected his. These were often bought one at a time through a scheme, so I’ve been told. There would also be a Bible, a dictionary and often a world atlas. In many houses there would be a ‘Home Doctor’ book. I still have the two which were in my grandparents’ house. One is from the 1800s and the other from around 1920. They make fascinating reading!

Libraries

Libraries, particularly the reference sections, were a very important source of information. As an adult, and before the days of the Internet, I would make a note of anything I wished to find out more about and then take my list with me when I next had a chance to visit the local library.

Motoring Handbooks

For households with a car, and many didn’t when I was a child, the motoring handbook was a very useful travel guide. In the UK back in the 50s, we had the RAC and the AA. My dad favoured the RAC. With the membership the motorist got breakdown and rescue cover and every year received a new handbook. These held a wealth of information! There were road maps, of course, but also information on any town you were interested in, charts for calculating travelling distances and a full list of all registration letters so you could look up any car you spotted and find out which county it was from. We children had a lot of fun with that in the back of the car on holiday.

The Dawn of the Internet

This is a whole new era and not one I’m covering here. Now we walk around with ALL of the above reference material in our pockets. Children, even very young ones, are adept at looking things up on laptops in school and at home.

Finally, here are three of my own books from my childhood.

These are my own thoughts and memories, I am not attempting to write a history book!

The photographs are my own.

Changes Part 2

I have had so many lovely comments responding to my Changes Since the 50s post. Thank you all! So I’ve decided to post another one. A simple list again, brief, no pictures. I hope it rings some bells.

Cars had no seat belts or reversing lights. They had three gears and you had to pull the choke out in order to start the engine – then remember to push it in again.

Most people smoked (80% of men and 40% of women in the early 1950s) and you could smoke anywhere. In cinemas, on trains and buses, in hospitals, cafes and restaurants.

Peaches, pineapples, salmon and cream came mostly in tins.

Nobody wore helmets when cycling.

Suitcases didn’t have wheels.

You answered the telephone with a greeting, your exchange and your number e.g. “Hello, Somewhereton 456”.

All children had ‘hobbies’.

Everyone wore vests, winter and summer.

The word vegetarian was rarely heard. Likewise vegan.

Most people did the football pools weekly.

You used encyclopaedias to look things up. A home set if you had one, in the library if not.

Changes since the 1950s – aka I’m back after a long gap!

First of all, apologies to regular readers (if I still have any!) for the long silence. I’ve had a very busy summer plus it gets harder to think of topics I haven’t already covered. So I thought I’d return with a simple list of things which have changed since I was a child in the 1950s. Just a list, no waffle, no pictures. Readers of a similar vintage to me will recognise them. Memories from other countries will be different. I can only speak for rural Britain which is all I knew.

We’d never heard of or seen duvets. Beds had a bottom sheet, top sheet, a few blankets, a counterpane (a word you never hear now) and in winter an eiderdown.

We didn’t have mugs, just cups and saucers.

TV programmes started in the evening apart from an hour in the middle of the day when there were programmes for pre-school children. Not everyone had a TV.

Nobody had washing machines, tumble dryers, microwaves or freezers. Many people didn’t even have fridges, phones or cars.

Gay meant happy, jolly, carefree. Mobile only meant able to move, not a phone. Remote only meant far away, not a TV control.

Most men wore hats outside and took them off indoors. Women usually wore hat and gloves to go out shopping, visiting or to church. They had winter gloves and summer gloves.

When you were unwell, even if it was just a cold, you stayed in bed. The doctor would visit and your mum would buy you Lucozade.

Toilet paper was hard and crunchy like baking parchment or greaseproof paper. There were no tissues. Everyone carried cotton handkerchiefs (hankies) which were washed on a Monday (wash day) and ironed on Tuesday.

Dustbins were metal and everything went in. There was no recycling apart from glass jars and bottles, many of which were worth a few pence when returned.

There were no charity shops but communities held jumble sales.

Children’s birthday parties involved presents, party games, sandwiches, jelly, birthday cake – and guests were not given a party bag to take home.

I could go on, but that will do for now. Hope you’ve enjoyed it and recognised some things!

Jobs We Never Heard of Back Then.

When I was a child the job choices were far more limited than they are for today’s youth. If your family were farmers, ran a shop, a pub or other business you were destined to move into that after school. If there wasn’t a family business for you, you either worked for one of the local businesses or industries or you ventured further afield. So, in my primary school days, our career aspirations were based on what we had experienced so far, which was either connected to the family’s income, or to the working people we had come across in our lives. I can remember being eight or nine and thinking that boys were so lucky because they could be train drivers, doctors or firemen. Showing a gender issue at that time which has changed somewhat over the years – but very slowly.

The following is from: McMaster, Jane. “Business and Jobs in the 1950s” careertrend.com, https://careertrend.com/info-8214885-business-jobs-1950s.html. 18 September 2020.

‘Business and jobs in the 1950s differed significantly from what we see today. Comparatively, family shops thrived, men were the primary breadwinners and diversity in the workforce was lacking.Men had jobs similar to those of today, without the computer and technology field, which wasn’t nearly what it is today. Jobs were mainly industrial or agricultural, with many men working in blue-collar jobs as mechanics, plumbers, bus drivers, warehouse workers and road construction workers. Some worked in office jobs as executives and middle management. If women did work, they were secretaries, teachers, nurses, stewardesses and shorthand typists. Small businesses were also abundant, including family run shops such as newsagents, sweet shops, shoe repair shops, chemist shops (we didn’t call them pharmacies then) and food markets. People shopped locally back then, and the small stores thrived.’

GIBBS TOOTHPASTE HAPPY FAMILIES VINTAGE PLAYING CARD GAME SET OF 36 CARDS 1940s Happy Families Card Game, Family Card Games, Set Card Game, Playing Card Games, Vintage Playing Cards, Happy Family, World War Two, 1940s, Nostalgia The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker, c1925 #14990881

I loved the game Happy Families – but I’ve never actually met a candlestick maker.

I sometimes muse on the fact that many of my peers’ children are in careers which didn’t even exist back in the 50s and 60s. Some of this is to do with new technology, some to do with renaming of existing roles. Some, however, are so new we could never have imagined them several decades ago. Imagine meeting an adult in the 50s who said ‘I’m a Web Designer.’ ‘I’m in HR.’ ‘I’m in Logistics.’ ‘I’m a food innovator.’ or ‘I work in IT.’

How the Typical Office Looked in the 1950s 10 Office Design Trends for 2019 - RI Group

Office interiors 1950s and now.

Employees at work sorting letters at the Royal Mail Mount Pleasant Sorting Office; c 1965 by Henry Grant at Museum of London Inside Grimsby's Royal Mail sorting office during the busy Christmas season - Grimsby Live

Post Office sorting depots 1950s and now,

Picture 2 of 7 Also, in the mid 2000's, Flat Plasma Screens started to replace big lumpy CRT Screens (Cathode Ray Tubes), as shown in the picture from our 2005 site visit to the Connect2Cardiff call centre

1950s switchboard and a call centre of today.

Photographs and information thanks to Google Images, Wikipedia. I make every effort to use filters which ensure I don’t infringe copyright but if anyone objects to the use of an image in this blog please contact me so that I can remove it.

Words No Longer With Us

Many thanks to Liz, a follower of this blog, for suggesting this post after reading the last one on new words.

Gumption – This was a term for common sense. ‘Use your gumption.’ ‘She’s got no gumption.’ were the kind of things heard in conversation. My mum even used to shorten it when exasperated ‘Where’s your gumpsh?’ would be the sort of thing we’d hear her say. You can’t photograph common sense so here’s an ad for a household cleaner which was very popular here in the 50’s and was called – Gumption! I haven’t seen it for donkey’s years. So I had a rummage on the Internet. It’s long gone from here but is still available in Australia. I found a big tub of it for sale on Ebay. It was £4.13 to buy plus £23.06 postage.

Use a little Gumption | Floor cleaner, Albemarle, Good housekeeping

Cheerio – We all know there is a cereal called Cheerios. Cheerio hasn’t completely disappeared as a word but is much less heard than in the 50s. Cheerio! for goodbye was very common back then. Even though it’s not completely dead and is still used, albeit less so, I’ve put it in here because I wanted to tell you how it originated. It was used first in London in the 17th Century and came about because when rich people wanted to hail cab, which was actually a sedan chair, they would call out of a window ‘Chair, Ho!’ The sound of this call became associated with leaving on a journey and evolved into Cheerio!

The Sedan Chair - Historic UK

Drawers – No, not the ones you keep your underwear in. This is your actual underwear. In Victorian times knickers/ pants/ underpants were known as drawers. It was still in use by older people when I was a child and now is probably only ever used humorously – by those who remember what drawers were. I won’t bother with a picture for this one!

Cravat – The word and the item still exist but I can’t remember when I last saw a man wearing one or heard the word spoken. Here is the lovely Michael Caine sporting a jaunty number.

Micheal Cain, dapper in a cravat | Ascot ties, Ascot, Cravat

Natty – My mum used to use this. I never hear it now. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘(of a person or an article of clothing) smart and fashionable.’ If we were out somewhere and saw a gent in a loud or bad taste suit she would quip, quietly, ‘That’s a natty bit of gent’s suiting!’ Her dad, my grandfather, was a tailor so perhaps she got the expression from him.

Trews/ Slacks/ Flannels – All words for trousers, all now somewhat archaic. Slacks were more casual and could be men’s or women’s. Standard grey men’s trousers, usually worn with sports jackets or blazers, were always called flannels. Flannel is a soft woven fabric, of various fineness, originally made from carded wool or worsted yarn, but is now often made from either wool, cotton, or synthetic fibre.

Wireless – Once a noun, now an adjective. We still use the word wireless and it now describes an electronic connection made without wires. When I was a child in the 50s, the radio was never referred to as a radio. It was the wireless.

Gramophone – This was the first term used to describe a machine which played discs. This then morphed into record player and later into deck.

Roger Wilco's World of Time and Space Souvenirs, 1950sunlimited: Dansette, 1960 | Dansette record player, Vintage advertisements, Vintage records

Radiogram – This was a radio and record player (gramophone and wireless) combined and cleverly disguised as a sideboard. Some also had a space for storing records. My mum and dad bought one when I was 8 or 9 and I thought it was amazing!

HP/ Never-Never – From the 1930s, if you wanted to purchase goods but couldn’t afford to buy them outright, there was the option of a hire-purchase agreement also known as the never-never. Credit cards, standing orders and direct debits didn’t exist.

Florin, shilling, sixpence, threepence, farthing, halfpenny, ten bob note, crown, half-crown, guinea etc – these are all words from our old currency. When we decimalised we only kept the pounds and the pennies (pence). When I was very young, and for many years before that, public toilets always had a slot on the door which took one penny. This gave rise to the very British expression ‘spend a penny’ which isn’t heard as much now.

The old sterling currency - pounds, shillings and pence. With examples and explanations. | Childhood memories 70s, Childhood memories, My childhood memories The Pre-Decimal Penny in UK History and Culture | Owlcation

Shooting Brake – These quirky vehicles were popular in the 50s and for some reason were known as shooting brakes. Basically an estate car with a wooden trim, they had a very distinctive look.

BBC - Norfolk - Local Radio - A four-wheeled love affair

Wellington Boot/ Gumboot/ Galoshes – now always just called wellies. At some point in the early 1800s Arthur Wellesley, then Viscount Wellington, asked his shoemaker, Mr George Hoby of St James’s Street, London, to make a boot which was easier to wear with the new, fashionable, tighter-fitting trousers. Hoby removed the tassel and cut the boots lower to make them more comfortable for riding. Meanwhile, in 1856 the Edinburgh-based North British Rubber Company had started to manufacture Britain’s first rubber or ‘gum’ boots. With the name of the duke still retaining a patriotic pull on consumers, these new boots were soon also renamed Wellingtons in Britain. Their popularity did not become widespread until the First World War, when in 1916 the company was commissioned to produce millions of pairs as standard winter kit for ordinary soldiers, to prevent ‘trench foot’, a medical condition caused by prolonged exposure to damp. At the end of the war, soldiers brought them home and introduced these extremely practical items of footwear to farms, gardens and allotments all over the country. A century later, music festivals and fashion catwalks are still benefiting from this wartime legacy.

As always, I need to say that all my images are sourced from the Internet using filters in the hope that I don’t infringe copyright. If anyone objects to the use of any image please contact me immediately and I will remove it.

Credit to Wikipedia, English Heritage, Pinterest, OED, Historic UK

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.

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.

Travel and Phones.

Last week, I arranged to meet my youngest daughter in Huddersfield for a Christmas shopping trip. I was driving about 40 mins from where I live and she was getting the train from her town. She called me the evening before from her landline phone to say that her mobile phone had died and she wouldn’t be contactable on it when we were travelling the next day. How this throws us all now! I told her we would just have to make a foolproof 1950s style plan for the next morning.

This started me thinking about how easy it is now to make arrangements and to adjust them, even at short notice. Back in the 1980s when my three children were small I often travelled to different locations, some quite near, others further away, to meet up with people. My sister and I lived about 90 minutes apart at that time and we had a couple of nice meeting up places mid-way between us. We’d make the plan by phone from our houses beforehand then we would set off to meet up with our excited children in our cars. Nothing ever went wrong for us but now we would all panic at the thought of travelling somewhere to meet someone without the backup of a mobile phone.

Going back even further, to the 1950s, we used to get packed up to go and see our grandparents who lived in north Wales. We had a telephone at home then but my grandparents didn’t and never did, even several decades later. They had a public telephone box in their village so maybe they called us sometimes. I was too young to be taking notice of things like adults planning visits.The plans were presumably made mostly by letter! Yes, the humble hand-written letter and the good old postman – no female posties in those days!

Image result for public telephone box 1950s uk Image result for telephone kiosk 1950s uk

Phone boxes (telephone kiosks as they were called) in the 1950s.

Image result for 1950s uk post box Image result for 1950s postman uk

!950s memories of the postal service.

Image result for 1950s ford prefect uk

Two models of 1950s cars like ones which we had in the 1950s.

Image result for 1950s home telephone

A 1950s phone – not every household had one.

Picture 5 of 5

The modern mobile phone – most wouldn’t leave home without it!

In the ‘old days’, we had maps and guide-books to help us navigate and to locate places of interest and their opening hours. If we needed to contact someone or needed help, we waited until we spotted a phone box and pulled over to make a call. I still have a book of road maps in my car but the modern phone is not just a phone it is also a road atlas, bus, plane and train timetable, guide book to anywhere and everywhere, live weather and travel advice, newspaper, in-car entertainment etc etc.

Notable Firsts in the 1950s and 60s

All decades see changes, inventions, introductions and significant firsts. This post explores some of the things which were new, exciting or important during the 50s and 60s when I was growing up.

The 1950s

Recently, I heard the name Roger Bannister referred to and it brought back a memory from the 1950s of the much-talked-about 4-minute mile.

Image result for roger bannister

More than 60 years ago, back on a cinder track at Oxford University’s Iffley Road Stadium in 1954, Bannister completed four laps in 3:59.4, a record-breaking performance that many believed was not humanly possible. The image of the exhausted Bannister with his eyes closed and mouth agape appeared on the front page of newspapers around the world, a testament to what humankind could achieve.

Researching for this post, I realised that I couldn’t possibly remember the actual event as I was not even three years old. This quote from Bannister himself explains just why ‘the four-minute mile’ was such a well known expression when I was a child.

“It became a symbol of attempting a challenge in the physical world of something hitherto thought impossible,” Bannister said as the 50th anniversary of the run approached, according to the AP. “I’d like to see it as a metaphor not only for sport, but for life and seeking challenges.”

Laika was a Soviet space dog who became one of the first animals in space, and the first animal to orbit the Earth. A stray mongrel from the streets of Moscow, she was selected to be the occupant of the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 which was launched into outer space on 3 November 1957. This really used to upset me whenever I heard about it on the news or heard adults talking about it. The thought of a tiny helpless dog being sent up into space seemed so unkind to me. I still don’t like to think about it.

After a week in orbit she was fed poisoned food, “in order to keep her from suffering a slow agony.” When the moment came, Russian scientists reassured the public that Laika had been comfortable, if stressed, for much of her flight, that she had died painlessly, and that she had made invaluable contributions to space science. So sad!

Image result for laika dog

Here is a list of some of the other notable firsts, creations and inventions from the 1950s.

Synchromesh gear changes Invented in the 1920s but not used in cars until the 1950s. Before this invention, changing gear involved a process called double de-clutching where you went into neutral between each gear position.

Car seat belts. These arrived on the scene in the 1950s and were made a legal requirement in 1968.

Hula hoop These were invented in the 1950s and soon became a huge craze. I spent hours and hours hula-hooping. I loved it – and can still do it.

Organ transplant. This must be one of the most important firsts in medical history.

Pacemaker (internal). Another amazing medical breakthrough. Before the 1950s there were pacemakers being used but they were external devices.

Not forgetting – Barbie, Colour TV, Tape recorder, Velcro, the Hydrogen bomb, the Hovercraft, NASA.

The 1960s

And so to the 1960s. After the Soviet space dogs of the 50s (and, it seems there were dozens), the next step was to send a person into space. This time the plan was for him to return alive! I was in Primary school and was ten years old when the first human travelled into space. Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He became the first human to journey into outer space when his Vostok spacecraft completed one orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961. Mr Lewis, the headteacher of my tiny school (approx 30 children ages 4 – 11), decided to buy the school its first TV in time for us to watch the launch live. It must have been a weekday between 9.00 am and 4 pm UK time and during a school term for this to happen. Given that many home didn’t have TVs in 1961 where I lived, you can imagine how exciting this was for us!

Eight years later, in 1968, Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that landed the first two people on the Moon. Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin, both American, landed the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969, and Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the surface of the moon.

Image result for first moonwalk 1969

The Beatles were my first love in pop music. “Love Me Do” was their debut single backed by “P.S. I Love You”. When the single was originally released in the United Kingdom on 5 October 1962, it peaked at number 17.

Image result for the beatles Image result for the beatles love me do vinyl single

My sister and I absolutely adored the Beatles. We knew the heights, eye colour, birthdates, likes and dislikes of all four of them We had Beatles magazines, Beatles jigsaws, Beatles badges and my sister even had a really dreadful Beatles wig. Made of moulded plastic it hurt her and forced her forehead into a frown – but she loved it!

Heart transplant. I remember this being massive news when it happened. On 3 December 1967, Dr Christian Barnard transplanted the heart of accident-victim Denise Darvall into the chest of 54-year-old Louis Washkansky, with Washkansky regaining full consciousness and being able to easily talk with his wife, before dying 18 days later of pneumonia.

Christiaan Barnard 1969.jpg

First supermarkets in Britain. In 1951, ex-US Navy sailor Patrick Galvani, son-in-law of Express Dairies chairman, made a pitch to the board to open a chain of supermarkets across the country. The UK’s first supermarket under the new Premier Supermarkets brand opened in Streatham, South London, taking ten times as much per week as the average British general store of the time.

Image result for premier supermarkets 1950s

Then there were these – Coco Pops, the audio cassette, the laser, the ring pull and Star Trek.

I’m sure readers of a similar age to me can think of many more!

Facts and statistics from my memory and from Wikipedia. Photos all sourced from the Internet. Anyone with any issues regarding my use of any photograph should contact me directly so that I can remove the offending item.

Childhood Memories of growing up in the 1950s and 1960s.

'Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.' Chilli Davis

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