[201] Introduction

05/12/2014 by Alan 9 Comments

[201] Introduction

Issued in 2014. Revised and updated 10 August 2019.

This is going to be a bit of a challenge, reissuing and renumbering all the posts while keeping the links working.

What’s it all about?

The progress of change is rapid and is rapidly becoming even more rapid. Modern life would be unrecognizable to my grandparents and much of it would surprise my parents. Some of it even surprises me! Such thoughts led me, about twenty years ago, to write down for posterity some of what I remembered about growing up in the fifties and sixties.

I wrote this blog from those notes about five years ago, with a lot of rewriting. In true blog form, it was random and rambling with no sense of order or completeness.

Now, five years later it needs to be updated again. I suspect that some areas will need considerable changes to be understood by the youth of today.

Inevitably, I will come across as a Grumpy Old Man, going on about the ‘Good Old Days’. Perhaps I am. Perhaps they were! It was ever thus. People of my grandparents’ age used to be the same, long before the expression Grumpy Old Men was used. (In those days old people were mostly women. People died a lot earlier, women outlasted men, and men did not often live to my age.)

Sometimes these posts degenerate into lists of things that we did not have long ago, things we managed to live without. But we didn’t miss them because we didn’t know we didn’t have them. In those days the idea of a mobile telephone would have been incomprehensible, even without its camera, text messages, colour screen and countless apps.

I try to be honest and impartial but I can only base things on my somewhat hazy memories, which are not always accurate facts. I don’t pretend to portray an accurate historical description of life, just a view of the context and situation, coloured by my personal experiences. The many changes since then will illustrate the pace of change in the modern world.

I don’t have a perfect memory of dates and facts even for last week. It gets harder for fifty or more years ago! Early data just reflects my experience, perhaps with some hearsay evidence from close relatives, neighbours and school friends. I unashamedly make sweeping generalizations on the assumption that my life was typical of others.

I’m going to reprocess and reissue all the posts in the order in which they were issued originally. I hope that those of my age will agree with me and fondly reminisce. The younger generation can sit back and be incredulously surprised.

First Blog Post

So here is blog number one (That’s [1] reissued as [201]): the random thoughts of a grumpy old man about growing up fifty or sixty years ago and nearly everything that has happened since. Life, the universe and everything!

With no commitment to sensible ordering, sometimes I allow myself to talk about the same topics more than once. As I go through and check I will try to be consistent.

This blog remains anonymous, but some of my readers know who I am. For those who don’t know me, I was born in 1946 and grew up in what was then Essex but is now part of Greater London. I went to a grammar school and then to university so my comments on education will extend into the early sixties. There will be some blogs later about my personal life.

For changes since then, I have some knowledge from other people and I have tried to get relevant data, especially dates, from reliable sources – mostly Wikipedia. I try to keep comments and descriptions unbiased and neutral. Any opinions that creep in are strictly my own.

What was it like in the Fifties and Sixties ?

To put things into perspective, for those who may think that back in the fifties we were only just emerging from the Stone Age, I would like to make it clear that we had begun to be a tiny bit civilized by then! It was past the origins of some ‘modern’ organizations and inventions – in some cases perhaps only just past! We had plumbing and sewage; government; formal education; legal, police and postal services; trains, cars and aeroplanes; electricity and gas for heating and lighting; telephones; photography and cinema; and radio and television. Most of these were in fairly basic forms that would not be recognized today or would be considered relatively primitive.

I won’t give the game away all at once in the first post, but there was a very long list of things we know today that someone in the 50s would not understand or recognize, things yet to be invented, things we can’t live without now – perhaps some we wish we could live without! In those days, we knew nothing of mobile telephones, cling-film, microwave ovens, the Internet, motorways, computers, spray paint, automatic car washes, bubble-wrap, credit cards, the EU and Euros, organ transplants, MP3 players, female vicars, the National Lottery and much, much more. (It is quite notable that on reviewing my notes, I have had to delete from this list a few things that have already come and gone!)

As a taster of what is to come, you might like to guess which one of these was NOT true in the 1950s:

• Crisps were sold in just three flavours – salt-and-vinegar, cheese and smoky bacon.
• Petrol cost just 50p a litre.
• Coffee machines could not yet make latte or cappuccino, they produced just Americano.
• Most shops were only open from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm every Monday to Saturday.
• Television was available on just five channels.

The answer, of course, is that none of them were true. All are anachronisms. Back in the 1950s, things were even more primitive!

• Crisps, (Smiths crisps, the only option) sold only in pubs (and more or less the only food you could buy in pubs) were plain, with a little bag of salt, no flavours.
• Petrol was about 25p a gallon or 6p a litre!
• Coffee, outside the USA, was not popular and was virtually just Nescafe instant coffee. There was a contraption called a percolator, a precursor to cafetieres, that would make coffee in about twenty minutes.
• High Street Shops, which normally closed for an hour and a half at lunchtime, also closed on Saturday afternoon and one other afternoon midweek. Where I lived Wednesday was Early Closing Day, but it was different in other towns.
• Television, if you could get it was just BBC, for a few hours a day, on a nine inch screen, black and white and atrocious quality by today’s standards.

More to come in the next blog, which could be about anything. Wait and see …