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.

New Year, New Diary.

Happy New Year to anyone reading this!

When I was a child, a new diary always appeared at Christmas. Sometimes I found one in my stocking, other years it might be a present from a friend or relative. It was so exciting starting a new diary!! I loved filling in the details inside the cover and I always enjoyed looking through all the ‘useful’ information in the front. Back then, we had diaries to record daily events as they happened rather than to note things happening in the future. My mum loved writing. She wrote stories (several were published), she really loved writing letters and she wrote a daily journal into old age. On January 1st, once we’d written our thank you letters and New Year’s resolutions, we were encouraged to start filling in our diaries. From time to time as the year progressed, Mum would remind us to write in our diaries. I still have a few of mine and most years my daily entries only lasted the first few months. However, some of my 1960s diaries are full for the whole twelve months.

My 1959 diary was an Enid Blyton one. Even though it was pocket-sized and slim it had roughly 70 pages of ‘useful’ information before the dated pages started. Looking at it now, I see that I didn’t record much in it beyond March but I can clearly remember trying to learn Morse Code, Semaphore, the hand signing alphabet and knots from the pages shown. There were pages, too, on First Aid, history, wildlife, recipes and pocket-money making ideas.

My 1964 diary was titled Lett’s Schoolgirl’s Diary. Also a slim, pocket sized one it still managed to pack in approximately 70 pages of information thought to be useful to schoolgirls. In it there are log tables, conversion charts, lists of French verbs, weights and measures charts, embroidery instructions, photographs of famous people and much more. At the end of each week’s double page there is a snippet of information with a drawing. A small selection of these pages is shown below.

The diary below is from 1963. My sister had a matching one in red. We thought they had great covers! It’s one in which I wrote every day for the whole year, often in some detail. The interesting thing about this one is that the first two months and the first week of March are a detailed first-hand account of what’s now known as the Big Freeze. Because we lived in a remote part of mid Wales it affected us more than it did some other parts of the country. Most of the roads are narrow and twisting and became blocked when it snowed. As well as road problems we had burst pipe and boiler problems in both the village school and the secondary school I’d just started in which was five miles away. There were only three weeks out of those first nine when I was able to attend school for the full five days. I record the rain washing the last of the snow away on the 7th of March.

No credits this time as all the photographs are mine – hence the poor quality!

Mail

Something occurred to me recently. Now that we have moved into the digital age, we are fully conversant with the language which goes with electronic communication. Email is so very different from writing a letter on paper and putting it in a post box. Yet we use the same words – write. post, mail, inbox, etc.

One of my grandfathers was a rural postman in Wales for many, many years. He delivered to remote villages and isolated farmhouse all over his designated patch. He had a little hut several miles from his home where the mail was delivered and where he sorted it. As he was often waiting for a second delivery and it wasn’t worth cycling home and back again, he had a little vegetable garden next to the hut which he could tend whilst waiting. When he retired the GPO calculated how many miles he had cycled in his time with them. They presented him with a special medal and a certificate.

Here are some things I looked up about post in general to inform and entertain us.

Mail/ Post

The meaning “system for the conveyance of letters” is from 1660s. In the 1590s the definitions included the words “vehicle used to convey mails;”. In the 1670s mail/ post was defined as “a dispatch of letters from or to a place.”

mail coaches | Horses, Horse carriage, Postcard

Mail Guard's Frockcoat. Manufacturer: Herbert & Co, London 1875-1882 — Royal Mail issued its first uniform in 1784, for mail coach guards

Summer uniform with double peaked shako. London postman of 1904 (POST 118/2060) — A 1904 photograph of a London postman.

We use the word ‘mail’ for physical communication and now also digital. If you look up a definition of the word you’ll find that it is interchangeable with the word post. Post is the word mainly used in the UK – post-box, post a letter, post man etc – whereas in the US the word used is mail.

Type

We still refer to typing, a word which has been in existence since the invention of typewriters in the 1860s.

Post box/ Mailbox/ Letter-box/ Inbox

BBC - A History of the World - Object : Baldock's First Letter Box — **Baldock’s First Letter Box**

People didn’t have letterboxes in their houses until about 1849, when the Post Office started encouraging people to have them. Generally the only letter box was in the building known as a letter receiving house, where people posted their letters to be delivered. There were no pillar boxes at the side of roads until 1853. So this may have been the first letter box in Baldock, probably the aperture or letter box in a Letter Receiving House, the communications hub of the area at the time. This was before postage stamps and Baldock’s position at the junction of several major roads made it a focus of coaching activity. The Royal Mail used the coaching system at this time to transport letters.

Britain's oldest red postbox is still in use after 161 YEARS - and still bears Queen Victoria's initials | Daily Mail Online — Britain’s oldest red postbox is still in use after 161 YEARS – and still bears Queen Victoria’s initials | Daily Mail Online Credit: © SWNS.com

Post-box, also mail-box, was defined in 1797 as a “box for mailbags on a coach,”. By 1853 letterbox was defined as “a box placed in some public place for the deposit of letters to be gathered by the postman,” .

Address

In 1712 the word address was defined as “the superscription of a letter, guiding it to its destination” and by 1816 the definition had become “place of residence”. The word began to be used in computer programming from 1948.

Signs and Symbols

Two of Britain’s familiar logos.

This image, often seen on domestic letter-boxes, is a link to the post horn used by the coach guards on the mail coaches in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Below is a selection of the icons connected to electronic mail which all relate to physical objects or processes.

File Icons – Free Vector Download, PNG, SVG, GIF

12,692 BEST Erase Icon IMAGES, STOCK PHOTOS & VECTORS | Adobe Stock

Email Icons Transparent White - Phone Email Address Icon Png, Cliparts & Cartoons - Jing.fm — A summary of the common icons.

To add a touch of 1950s and 60s history to this post, it cost twopence-halfpenny or 2 1/2d (1p in current money) to post a letter in the early 1950s. This rose to threepence or 3d in 1957. There were two deliveries a day to households right up until sixteen years ago. Back in my dad’s childhood, there was still a delivery on Christmas Day. You posted your Christmas cards to arrive on the day, the way we do with birthdays. Their family always had Christmas Day on Boxing Day because the 25th was taken up with my grandfather working all day plus two visits to chapel, morning and evening.

I do my best to ensure I am not infringing copyright in my blog posts but f anyone objects to the use of an image in this post please contact me and I will remove it.

Credits to: etymonline.com xavier.edu bbc.co.uk postalmuseum.org

Wikipedia

Google Images

Bath Night

Now there’s an expression from the ‘olden days’! When I was a child, hot water was a precious commodity. Although we had an indoor toilet and bathroom and an immersion heater for hot water in our house, many of the farms and houses in our village didn’t. My grandparents in North Wales didn’t have indoor plumbing either. In the fifties, they still carried their water in buckets from a public tap 50 metres or so from their house – it had been converted from a village pump to a village tap. Their toilet was in a shed at the end of the garden and involved buckets which needed emptying daily. Even people who had indoor plumbing and hot water in the fifties remembered how life had been, just a short while back, so the use of hot water was very carefully controlled. I also believe that electricity was more expensive back then in relation to income which was an additional factor.

There was always a ‘bath night’. Just once a week, usually on a Sunday so that you would be clean and ready for the week ahead at school. Back in the 20s, 30s and 40s, when our parents were growing up and water had to be carried into the house, hot water had to be heated in pans on the coal fire. The bath was a tin bath which was brought inside and filled with the hot water. Is it any wonder people only bathed once a week?

1964-Tin-Bath

So in the fifties and sixties, even in houses with indoor bathrooms and hot water, people were still really, really careful with hot water and bath night was still strictly once a week.

The bathrooms of those days were not places designed to relax in like the bathrooms of today. No thick, fluffy towels warmed on the radiator, no scented oils, candles. There was no heating in British bathrooms in the fifities so bath night in winter was an ordeal – especially on the way into the bath and on the way out.

Toiletries were basic and the choice was limited.

vintage-lifebuoy-toilet-soap-original_360_00e06dc4be75bb4920be084937656172 Wrights coal tar Imp Leather

Some basic soaps from the 50s.

loofah forsters_natural_sea_sponge_ Pumice Stone Mouse 5060528741590 | eBay

Apart from the ubiquitous flannel, the only washing equipment found in 50s bathrooms were the loofah, the sponge and the pumice stone. Also a back brush and nail brush. What is interesting about the three items shown above is that none of them are man-made. The loofah and the sponge were living organisms and the pumice stone (why was it always mouse-shaped?) is a volcanic rock. The back brush and nail brush were always made of wood with natural bristles.

Bath cubes

radox bubble bath

Toiletries were minimal. A bar of soap and a shampoo. Mums and Grandmas liked a bit of ‘scent’ in their bath water so there were things called bath cubes which were dissolved into the water. Bath cubes were one of the things you bought your mum or your granny as a present. Bubble baths became associated with luxury and glamour so bubble bath started to become popular as a bath additive and Hollywood stars were often shown relaxing in a bubble bath. Then came bubble bath for children and I well remember the arrival of Matey. The idea was that this fun-looking bottle had a liquid in it which made bubbles but also washed you clean! Radox was widely advertised in the 60s on TV as an additive which helped with aches and pains. I believe it was Epsom Salts or similar with a bit of added perfume. Epsom salts and some other salts and minerals are still hailed as being beneficial to the body when used externally such as in a hot bath

Below is a selection of toiletries and the washing aids available today. Just a few, there are hundreds, if not thousands!

oil gh-shampoo-for-dry-hair-1549639786

body scrubber scrubbers

My Book

This is not in the same vein as my usual posts. Even as a child I loved to write. Writing was one of my first loves. Any sort of writing gives me pleasure whether it’s stories, poems, letters or lists. I also love pens, pencils and notebooks. Even though I now write everything on a laptop.

Once I finished full time education, I found that I was not asked to write as I had been in school and university. At work, report writing is about it. So I wrote less and less. Sometimes I would get an idea and start to write. A story sometimes, or the opening chapter of a book. I would always end up ripping it up. Now I would press delete.

Since retiring from full time employment a few years ago, I have been able to devote more time to writing. This bog is the perfect outlet for me as I enjoy sharing my memories of my childhood. I have been richly rewarded by all the readers who visit it, the followers I have and the lovely comments I get.

Meanwhile, I started writing stories – and not deleting them! I wrote and wrote an wrote. I loved doing it. One day I decided to take the plunge and make them available for people to read. I’m in my sixties and decided that I’m to old to go down the agents/ publishers/ rejections route so I went with Amazon Kindle self-publishing and the result is a small collection of short stories in paperback and Kindle format.

I’m very happy to be in print. I’ve had some lovely feedback. Now I’m taking another plunge and telling the readers of my blog about it. Do take a look. There is no obligation to buy or to read it!

Peace: and other stories https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1797640305/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_iioOCbKCXTNN3

If the link doesn’t work, look on Amazon and type in Peace and other Stories.

Pens and Pencils

When I started school there were pencils which we learned to write with and pens which we were allowed to write with when we were a bit older, maybe seven or eight. Not much has changed. Except for the pens and, to a lesser extent, the pencils.

The only pens provided in my Primary School were the wooden handled dipping pens.

dip pen_webimage

china inkwells

desks with inkwell holes

The ink for the pens was held in little china inkwells which fitted into holes in the desks. Each morning the ink monitors would make up a big jug of ink using ink powder and water, fill a trayful of inkwells, then place an inkwell into each desk hole. The standard issue school ink was a shade called blue-black. I hated the dullness of that colour and longed to write with a bright blue ink. Although the top year in our primary school (eleven year olds) were allowed to use their own pens, the headteacher loathed ball-points (biros) calling them ‘new-fangled rubbish’ and banned us from using them. If you were lucky enough to have your own fountain pen, and I got one for my eleventh birthday which saw me all the way through high school, you could use that in school. I would fill mine from a bottle of Quink at home so that I didn’t have to use school blue-black ink. Parker pens were the most desirable but most of us had the more affordable Platignum pens. There were no other types of pen apart from Dipping pens, fountain pens and biros. Fibre tips, toller ball, fine felt-tips, fibre tips all had yet to be invented or at least to become mainstream. I remember when Tempo pens arrived on the scene when I was a student (and still a fountain pen user) and I loved them! To this day I am still not a fan of writing in biro, preferring ink pens or pencil.

parker quink

There isn’t as much to say about pencils. There is a vast array of colours and styles available now but the fundamental design hasn’t changed. I do remember we children being very excited in school when the teacher acquired a desk mounted pencil sharpener. What a joy to use! We all wanted to be pencil monitor and have the job of sharpening the class’ pencils first thing in the morning. These gadgets still exist, I have seen them in some classrooms in schools I worked in. The design hasn’t changed.

images download download (1)

Then we come to colouring pencils or ‘crayons’. Again, the basic design remains unchanged. One well known brand I remember well is Lakeland. I loved the tins they came in with a Lakeland scene on the lid. Even the smallest tins of their crayons had the scenic image on the tin.

lakeland vintage-1960s-lakeland-pencil-crayon-tin-with

I didn’t know then but the reason they were called Lakeland was because they were manufactured in the Lake District. The Derwent pencil company began in 1832 in Keswick, Cumbria and remained well known for producing the finest pencils in the world. There is even a pencil museum in Keswick.

220px-keswick_pencil_museum_(geograph_5455667) Keswick’s Pencil Museum.

As always, images are courtesy of Google Images and Wikipedia. If anyone objects to my use of any picture please contact me so that I can remove it.

Letter Writing

First of all, I would like to thank everyone who has ever read this blog: regular followers, fellow bloggers and occasional visitors. Today my total number of views, across 70 countries in the world, has just topped 10,000 which makes me very happy! This is small fry compared with some of the established bloggers out there but I’m just someone who likes writing and has some memories I enjoy sharing.

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I have always loved writing letters. I love receiving them too. Letter writing is now more or less disappearing. How often do we get mail arriving with a handwritten envelope unless it’s a birthday or Christmas? Of course, we can still enjoy communicating with people. I still take pleasure in sending and receiving emails and text messages to all my contacts. A new personal email showing up in my Inbox is almost as exciting as hearing an expected letter drop through the letter-box. Almost – but not quite.

These are some of the things I enjoyed about sending and receiving letters.

First of all it was the very fact that you were communicating on a personal level with someone you cared about who was not living nearby. When I was a teenager I had pen friends, arranged by my school, in other countries. I also exchanged letters with grandparents. My paternal grandfather and I used to write letters in Welsh to each other. Welsh was my second language and his first language and I used to like improving my written Welsh by writing to him. He had always loved writing letters too. I have an old leather writing case which was his when he was alive. I also have my red leather writing case which my parents bought me one Christmas. I adored it! I exchanged letters with a few school friends who had moved away and with a very close friend who went away to boarding school. We are still good friends and I’m sure our term-time letter writing ensured that our primary school friendship survived our teenage years in separate schools.

Secondly, I took great pleasure in the materials involved. I loved my fountain pen and was particular about the make and shade of ink I bought – when I was a teenager I preferred Parker’s Quink in blue and as I grew older I favoured blue-black.

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The paper was just as important. I absolutely loved spending some pocket money on a new writing pad and matching envelopes. I could never afford the very best but I didn’t like buying cheap and flimsy either.

images leather-writing-case

As I had pen-friends (two in America and one in France) I also had to buy the extra-lightweight airmail paper and the envelopes with the red and blue stripes around the edge.

Two more things which have changed. When we addressed envelopes then we wrote the name and address on a slant like this

images (2)

and then at some point it became

KraftEnvelope_sm

We didn’t have any postcodes when I was a child. Although there had been some postcodes in existence before, the codes as we know them were introduced in 1967 and released in stages until 1974. It was some time before they were used as automatically as we use them now.

Disclaimer: As always, photos are mostly courtesy of Google Images. If anyone objects to my use of a particular photo or believes it infringes copyright, please contact me and I will remove it.

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

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

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