Memories

maltrab

Administrator
Staff member
Hi Folks
I thought I would start a new thread that you can all join in and jog each others memories,I was born in 1950 and some things that spring to mind are

1.I recall when I was 16 working part time in a petrol station and I am pretty sure 4 gallons with 4 shots was about £1.00

2.Mars bars were 4d

3.It was very cheap to go see a movie though I cannot remember how cheap,Saturday mornings were about 6d

4,There was to much TV to go around the 2 TV channels we had
 
OK, different numbers but similar memories.

I was born in 1943.

I smoked Wings at 17 cents a pack, and they were packed like
pencils.

Seems like gasoline was about 20 cents a gallon when I started
to drive my 1952 Dodge Wayfarer coupe.

We had three TV channels: ABC, NBC, and CBS.

Our Dumont TV had a 10-inch screen.

I listened to 78 rpm phonograph records played first on a
wind-up victrola, then on a wood framed Webcor "portable"
phonograph.

I listened to the BBC on an old Hallicrafters short-wave radio.

My trousers (we call 'em pants) had a belt in the back.

There were NO supermarkets, just smallish shops.

Our bicycles were English Racers (3-speed Raleighs
and Rudges) or balloon-tired bombers.
 
In 1976 Telephone line rental was £8.25p a quarter plus VAT which back then was only 8% and at that price it included a paper bill and you had many ways to pay without extra charges,how times change
 
.... some things that spring to mind are

1.I recall when I was 16 working part time in a petrol station and I am pretty sure 4 gallons with 4 shots was about £1.00

...

In the late 1960s I had a Panther motor cycle (made in Cleckheaton) which had a four gallon tank and , Terry, you are absolutely right - £1 to fill her up! (5/- per gallon).

Chips were either 4d or 6d a portion - that is approx 2p in todays decimal currency.

However to set that in context my wages in the early 1960s were £6 a week working in a high class gentleman's tailoring and outfitting establishment. As a school teacher in 1966 though it was quite bit more.

I recall a pint of the "beer" we used to get in those days - Whitbread Tankard or Watneys Red Barrel are two names I remember from my time behind the bar of the King William IV in Ewell - was about 2/- (10p in modern translation!) Real Ale was only a dream as the pressurised stuff was taking a very firm hold.

A packet of five cigarettes was about 11d (near enough 5p) if it was the cheaper Players Weights or W D & H O Wills Woodbines. All untipped - most shops had an advert for a cigarette that stated "Smoke Craven 'A' for your throat's sake".

Happy days.
 
In the late 1960s I had a Panther motor cycle (made in Cleckheaton) which had a four gallon tank and , Terry, you are absolutely right - £1 to fill her up! (5/- per gallon).

Chips were either 4d or 6d a portion - that is approx 2p in todays decimal currency.

However to set that in context my wages in the early 1960s were £6 a week working in a high class gentleman's tailoring and outfitting establishment. As a school teacher in 1966 though it was quite bit more.

I recall a pint of the "beer" we used to get in those days - Whitbread Tankard or Watneys Red Barrel are two names I remember from my time behind the bar of the King William IV in Ewell - was about 2/- (10p in modern translation!) Real Ale was only a dream as the pressurised stuff was taking a very firm hold.

A packet of five cigarettes was about 11d (near enough 5p) if it was the cheaper Players Weights or W D & H O Wills Woodbines. All untipped - most shops had an advert for a cigarette that stated "Smoke Craven 'A' for your throat's sake".

Happy days.

I worked in a filling station briefly but cannot recall prices. No self-service in those days and the pump meter just gave volume pumped, not price. It was a bit tricky I recall if (and it was unusual) anyone asked for a pounds worth.No unleaded but up to three grades of petrol. Not sure we had a diesel pump - only commercial vehicles used diesel and they filled elsewhere.

Can't recall price but fish and chips was a real cheap meal - interesting how the chippie features more in FOTSW then in LOTSW.

I recall so well that late 1950s into 1960, when I was about to got to University THE ambition was to earn £1000 a year (£20 a week). I think I made that when I first left university in 1964.

Surely the point about Red Barrel and Whitbread's tankard, the keg beers, was that pubs seemed to have lost the capability of looking after the barrels of what was, to all intents and purposes, Real Ale. We moved to the keg beers because it gave us consistency - the "bad" pint/barrel became a thing of the past. The keg beers were far less labour intensive.

11d seems a bit steep to my recollection for five Weights or Woodbines. They were the small cigarettes along with Park Drive. I only recall those three selling in packets of five. I seem to think a packet of ten of those was around one shilling and eight pence. I do definitely recall ten of the top end of the range, Players Navy Cut, Senior Service, Capstan Medium of Full Strength, Gold Flake costing one and eleven pence halfpenny for ten and three and elevenpence for twenty.

The height of sophistication was to smoke Sobranie black cigarettes, Consulate Menthol tipped and we were beginning to get the French Gaulloise. I even remember a German brand coming in, Mercedes cigarettes.

Tipped brands were becoming more available - the "unique" point about Craven A was that they were "cork-tipped". And you're never alone with a Strand!

 
I was born in 1954, in one of a row of cottages called the Beehive cottages, due to the Beehive pub that was at the end of the row.

The next house we lived in was also in a row that had the Dog and Partridge pub in the middle, my grandad worked at the brewery a bit further down the road as a cooper, they made the wooden beer barrels for Beverly's Beers, who were quite prominent in many Lancashire mill towns at the time.

There was also an Esso petrol station across the road from us, i used to spend a bit of time there when i was about ten years old, helping the mechanic by passing his tools to him, that was also around the time that Esso were promoting their petrol with the "Put a tiger in your tank" adverts on TV, for every gallon of petrol you bought, they gave you a Tiger tail, which you were supposed to fasten to your petrol cap, with the bit of string on the end of the tail, anyone else remember?

I don't remember many prices at the time but i do remember Mars bars were about three times the size they are now.
We also used to call in at the "Tuck shop" on the way to school and buy Lucky bags and sweet tobacco, liqourice sticks and toffee ciggarettes.
I can also remember the cards you got with bubble gum i think, the cards were of giant insects attacking people and the military, i think it had something to do with Mars invasion.

Me and my mates also used to buy the old Post office BSA Bantam motorbikes from the local scrapyard for £2, complete with the leg-shields and carrier on the back, all the Post office vehicles were painted red, so we used to remove the leg-shields and use the bikes in the feilds.

I left school in July 1969 and my dad got me a job in the local shoe factory, where he had worked for years, my first wage was £4.10s (four pounds and fifty pence in new money), i got a secondhand Honda 50cc for my 16th birthday, my mum bought it off the postman who lived up the road from us, for £15.

Summers always seemed to be proper summers back then, as did winters with massive snowdrifts for weeks on end, although we still had to walk to chool and work, no matter what the weather.
Anyone remember popping the tar bubbles by the side of the road, when it was so hot that the tar melted?, i used to get a right shouting at for coming home covered in the stuff...but they were happy days!

G ; )
 
:D I remember ( just ) having to carry mothers best jug to the end of the road to collect the milk from a guy who came on a horse and cart with milk in churns . ::)
 
First house we lived in, where I was born, had no electricity. Lights were gas lights with gas mantles which wore out eventually. We had a radio and recharged batteries - liquid like we use for a car - were swapped each week for the run down ones.
 
Hm, this topic is a bit funny for me to write in, I was only born in 1980. My first few winters were probably the last real winters in Germany, only in the last few years they have come back with record low temperatures and massive amounts of snow, even here in the West where it´s usually a bit warmer.
But we have another funny thing here. Probably every German 1980´s child had hundreds of audio tapes at home, cassettes, it seems to be a rather German thing that is more or less unknown out of Germany. There were thousands of audio plays available for children, classical fairy tales, but mostly they were creative series with many episodes, performed by TV actors or other children, depending on the parts. These tapes are cult now, I have still all of mine. They are still being produced, now also on CDs. A few of them are still running and new episodes coming out, like LOTSW we have some that are more than 30 years old now, with the same voice actors they started with, if they were young enough. Quite fascinating! And they have the same effect on my generation like LOTSW has on you all who have watched it for so long, not only for about 3 years like I did.
That´s probably the most striking part about being a German child of that decade ;). Apart from that it´s the usual. One scoop of ice-cream used to be 50 Pf (Pfennig, not pence of course), now it´s more like 50 cent to 1 Euro, that´s twice or four times as much as it used to be.
 
:D I remember ( just ) having to carry mothers best jug to the end of the road to collect the milk from a guy who came on a horse and cart with milk in churns . ::)

Oh yeah, we had the fish guy, the bakery guy, and Bicycle
Annie who sold greeting cards door to door. Also had
a guy in a pickup truck with a grinding wheel in the back.
He would "sharpen" your knives and scissors, etc.
 
;D Regarding the coalman, we had a communal yard that served all 12 houses at the back. Coal was tipped out of the old lorry at the back of your house, woe betide he decided to bring your coal on a washday!!There was a general fuss as the mothers at one end of the yard had to move their washing so he could tip coal at your house. The resulting coal heaps were fun to climb over for a while . I have a "blue"scar on my right knee obtained climbing on a heap when I was 5 or 6 !! Things improved when the NCB started bringing coal in bags. The number of coalhouse backs that had to be rebuilt because the men shot the coal out of the bags hitting the back wall.! :eek:
 
We still get a weekly fish van comes into street and toots horn loudly. A bit of a feature in Fife and elsewhere in Scotland. Van is marked Pittenweem but in general it is only shell fish landed in that old Fife fishing port now. Suspect bulk of flatfish comes down from Peterhead.
 
And what about the coalman

Some of ours were Co-op (and important to remember your divi number): baker three times week, and then there was a butcher twice week in a mobile shop, the Corona man once a week, and a green grocer who came twice week (known as Grocer Jack - but presumably not the same one as in "Excerpt from a Teenage Opera" of 1967). This was because we were in a new town and there were no local corner shops and most people still did not have fridges so regular deliveries were important.
 
In the 50's we only had 2 TV channels,come 1967 and a change of TV and Aerial we had 3 Channels, it was another 15 years before we got a 4th channel,in 1997 Channels 5 started but to most of us it was a waste of time as we could not get it, these days we have hundres of channels but not enough programming to go round,ITV shows that run for 2 hours were about 1hr 43mins once the ad's were removed,now they are about 1hr 28mins,so as far as TV goes it not progress in this digital age,if we could keep the flat screen TV's and go back to 80's prgramming quality then TV would be much more entertaining.
 
When you bought a new car and had a sign in the back "Running in Please Pass"

I remember some wit had "running out - please pass" written on the back of a very elderly pre war car in the 1950s. The introduction of the MOT test for ten year old cars removed a lot from the roads. Until then Austin 7s and such like wer very common,

We had an Austin 10 cabriolet (about 1934 vintage) and underneath the rubber on the running boards the wood was rotten and we were told not to tread on them to get into the car, the roof did not quite fit and there were gaps everywhere, or so it seemed!

 
On t'other night's Top Gear they said a 61 E-type Jag
cost new about 2000 pounds. Not sure what the
conversion rate was then.
 
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