by Feeney, Paul
Having made best use of the soft toilet tissue and then flushed it all away, you stand for a moment to admire the pink fluffy toilet-seat cover with its matching cut-out rug at the base of the toilet pan. Then, turning your gaze to the uninviting bare bits of linoleum floor, you swiftly hop across to the other pink rug beneath the sink and nestle your bare feet into its deep fluffy pile. Even in summer, the exposed areas of linoleum floors are really cold. The new fluffy set-of-three are welcome additions to the bathroom and they look rather posh too. Mum really is quite a trendsetter.
Turning on the hot tap, as always, the ‘boom’ from the Ascot gas water heater above the sink surprises you as it sparks into life and its chamber fills with flames, creaking away noisily as the whole contraption heats up and expands. While splashing the water around in the sink, you move things about on the shelf next to you to see if there is anything of interest there. There are bottles of Alka-Seltzer, Milk of Magnesia and Eno Fruit Salts, and at the end of the shelf is a collection of women’s make-up, including a packet of false eyelashes, some mascara and a white lipstick, which seems to be all the rage. Nothing very exciting. But look! Mum’s bought some of that new Signal toothpaste with the pink stripes that they’ve been advertising on the telly. You quickly grab hold of the tube and squeeze some of its stripy toothpaste onto your toothbrush. Umm, yes … it’s quite nice, and it must be good for your teeth because, like they said on the television, it has these special pink stripes running all the way through it.
Having finished in the bathroom, you go back to your bedroom to get dressed, leaving the bedroom door ajar so you can hear the downstairs radio and immerse yourself in Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound bellowing the Righteous Brothers’ song, You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling, all round the house.
A lovely sunny day – t-shirt, blue jeans and sneakers will do – now, downstairs for breakfast and then off to the Odeon cinema and Saturday Morning Pictures with all your mates.
Around the House
Whereas the older generation had been satisfied to surround themselves with fairly modest personal belongings, and content to furnish their homes with post-war utility furniture, the young and more affluent homemakers of the sixties were looking to replace all the heavy dark-wooden furniture with more modern streamline styles, like those being sold in the newly opened Habitat stores. The do-it-yourself home improvement fad did not arrive in Britain until the 1970s, but during the 1960s people all over the country found enough enthusiasm to search in under-stair cupboards and garden sheds to find some basic tools so that they could do their small bit towards modernising the inside of their homes to match the clean lines of sixties-style furnishings. The average 1960s DIY project usually involved the use of a large hammer and loads of nails. The entire modernisation project mostly entailed boxing in ornate fireplaces and stair rails, and boarding up interior doors to produce smooth clean-cut surfaces. Today, these crude and amateur DIY practices are frowned upon, and in recent years the popularity of DIY restoration work has resulted in many of these old boxed-in treasures being uncovered to reveal some wonderful fireplaces, staircases and panelled doors. By the mid-sixties, many houses were filled with a mismatch of old and new furnishings, so people were all too quickly disposing of their old-fashioned dark-wood furniture and what they saw as tasteless heirloom clocks, mirrors, pictures and ornaments. You probably watched eagerly from the sidelines as your parents gradually rid the house of all that horrible old granny stuff, and replaced it with new-generation lightweight furniture with sticky-out matchstick legs and modern accessories. Little did you know that in years to come, as an adult, you would spend hours and perhaps days at a time traipsing around antique fairs and shops looking to acquire some of those same ‘old granny’ items that, as a child, you happily encouraged mum and dad to throw out. Yes, you could never have imagined that what you once considered to be horrible, old-fashioned, ugly has-beens would one day be much sought after by collectors, and many of those discarded heirlooms would even be credibly tagged as valuable antiques, for which you would eagerly fork out your hard-earned cash and bring back to fill the rooms and shelves in your twenty-first-century home. All of your old toys and books that were binned, and even that old upright piano that once had pride of place in your parents’ front room, how you wish you had held on to them; if only you had known.
The cosy comfort that you enjoyed when snuggling up close to an open fire in wintertime was, for many, becoming a thing of the past, with fancy new gas fires and two-bar electric fires being fitted onto the front of newly boxed-in fireplaces, replacing the old solid fuel burning grates. This was the sixties and the main focal point of a room was no longer its fireplace and the gentle hypnotic flames of an open fire. While the newly boxed-in fireplace still provided the main heating in the room, the seating was now strategically positioned so that the whole family could get a good view of the television. New, stylish radiograms and transistor radios were gradually replacing the trusty old wireless valve radio cabinets that used to sit on top of the sideboard, purring soft mesmerising tones right across the room. The radiogram usually took pride of place in the front room, or parlour as they were sometimes called. The front room housed all the best furniture and was usually reserved for special occasions, like Christmas or when you had visitors. In reality, these front or ‘best’ rooms were just dust harbours and a complete waste of space. They hardly ever got used because visitors usually preferred to sit in an everyday back room or the kitchen, both being more lived-in, warm and cosy.
Although electric clocks had been around for many years, the sound of ticking clocks was still prevalent in 1960s homes, with most people choosing to stick with the old faithful wind-up clocks, which were much cheaper. It was quite normal to have clocks all around the house, all sorts of clocks in every room, even in the hallway, and all showing slightly different times. Today, kids would probably find the rhythmic ticking of a bedroom clock an unbearable sound to contend with in the still of the night, but they used to be just part of the furniture and you somehow didn’t even notice them. Mind you, if you were progressive enough to have electric clocks in the 1960s then you would have needed to find spare electrical sockets to plug them in, and that could be a big problem. In many homes there was a shortage of electric wall sockets and the recent arrival of all the new electrical household items frequently overwhelmed the old domestic electrical circuits. Most rooms only had one electric wall socket and these were already overloaded with multiple add-on three-socket adapters in every room. Using these adapters, several electrical items were often plugged into one single wall socket. All those plugs, with their tangled spaghetti of wires hanging down from the wall, going off in all directions round the room to power such things as the television set, record player, portable heater, hairdryer and lamps. People didn’t seem to realise how dangerous it was. Every now and then there would be a frightening flash and an almighty bang when the overloaded electrical circuit would blow fuses in the plugs and in the main fuse box, leaving the house in darkness.
This was the very latest HMV Stereomaster radiogram, and anyone would have been proud to have it pride of place in their living room in 1966.
Fully fitted carpets became fashionable in the 1960s, and gradually more and more of them were being fitted into the average home, but mainly in the living room, with rugs and sheet lino or lino tiles still evident all round the rest of the house. The thought of losing that strip of bare lino round the edge of the old carpet was a sad loss to any child that had experienced the thrill of sliding along it in stockinged feet. Also, some of the new fitted carpets might not have been as comfortable as expected. If you had the misfortune of having a bri-nylon carpet, then you will, no doubt, have experienced a few static electric shocks when running around the carpet in your stockings, particularly if your mum was in the habit of kitting you out in bri-nylon clothes – then the sparks would really begin to fly. Ugh, those horrible nylon shirts, blouses, slips and even knickers. And worst of all,
going to bed in your nylon nightie or pyjamas, and being frightened to move in case you rubbed against the nylon sheets and made sparks – every night was like bonfire night. Then, in the morning, you would be all clammy and the nylon would be clinging to you like wet glue. Horrible!
If you were blessed with anything larger than a galley kitchen, then it was probably regarded as the hub of the home, where everyone congregated. The kitchen table was often used as a multitask workbench, providing a platform for everything from bathing the baby to doing your homework on. By the mid-sixties, the old ‘whistle kettles’, which used to be permanent fixtures on top of the stove, had been replaced by modern electric kettles and the age-old tradition of boiling endless supplies of water to keep a fresh pot of tea on the go was only occasionally interrupted when dad changed a blown fuse in the plug. There was a clear dividing line between what was regarded as a man or woman’s job around the house, and changing fuses was one of dad’s jobs. It was a time when dads did the more ‘manly’ jobs around the house (before the age of the ‘modern man’); things like decorating, gardening and fixing things, basically anything that involved using a hammer, spanner, spade or ladder. Mums were expected to look after the children and do most of the routine domestic chores. They were still tagged as being housewives, even if they went out to work as well. It was traditional for young girls to be taught cooking, baking, knitting and sewing as part of their essential learning, while boys were taught the more industrial skills of woodwork and metalwork. Women boasted that the kitchen was part of their domain and men were discouraged from interfering with anything that went on in there. Unsurprisingly, most men happily followed this rule to the letter.
The revival of ‘women’s lib’ did not succeed in removing the shackles of domesticity from most mums’ lives, but looking after the home was no longer as labour intensive and hard work as it had been for previous generations. The benefits of having electrically powered domestic appliances, like washing machines, fridges, freezers, sewing machines and vacuum cleaners, meant that women were no longer slaves to the home. Having fridges and freezers meant that they could now go shopping once a week rather than every day for fresh food, as they had before. Many households now had use of a car and people could get about more easily, making ‘nipping to the shops’ a much simpler task than previously, and there were no severe parking restrictions as there are now – you could actually park outside a shop without the risk of being fined by a council official or by Dodgy & Co. wheel clampers. People found that they had more free time to enjoy life. It wasn’t all work, work and more work, like it had been in the past.
The old-style scullery kitchens of yesteryear, with shelf and under-sink storage and food pantries, were gradually being replaced by fitted kitchens. Nothing as grand as is available today, but kitchens were being smartened up as never before, and space was being created to accommodate all of the new kitchen gadgets that were now becoming commonplace; things like electric toasters, pedal bins, food mixers, wall-mounted can openers, coffee percolators, lightweight scales, electric carving knives and, if your mum and dad were really ‘with it’, then they would have needed somewhere to display that fancy new fondue set. Unfortunately, microwave ovens and dishwashers didn’t find their way into British kitchens until the seventies and eighties. The traditional kitchen equipment, by now regarded as laborious and old fashioned, was consigned to the scrapheap, and granny’s cumbersome old mangle and washboard were dumped outside the back door to await the rag-and-bone man’s next visit. All of those famous old brand names, previously so visible around the kitchen, like Omo, Vim, Ajax, Brillo, Windolene, Ibcol, Brasso and Robin Starch, were now hidden away behind smart new cabinet doors.
Smoking was very popular in the sixties and most adults seemed to smoke cigarettes, cigars or a pipe. It was not unusual to find ashtrays in every room of the house, even in the bedrooms. The main sitting room often had a floor-standing ashtray with a handle on top so that it could be moved round the room. People carried all sorts of differently designed cigarette lighters around with them, but it was also quite common to have a large, fancy table lighter somewhere in the main living room, usually sitting on the coffee table or on the fireplace mantle shelf. All of the soft furnishings must have reeked with the smell of cigarette and pipe smoke, not to mention people’s hair and clothes, but the smell of stale cigarette smoke was always there, everywhere you went, and somehow you didn’t even notice it. In summer, you could open all the windows to refresh the air in the house, but in the cold of winter the best that you could do was to spray the rooms with a can of air freshener. Many a house fire was started by emptying ashtrays into a kitchen bin without noticing a smouldering cigarette hidden among the pile of dog-ends. For most people in the sixties, a house fire was considered to be about the only way that smoking could seriously damage your health or kill you. Smoking was still considered to be ‘cool’ back then, and there were no restrictions on cigarette advertising, nor were there any health warnings on packets. It was very easy for children to buy cigarettes, and many young kids smoked secretly with their mates, starting from as young as 10 years old.
Food and Drink
As with many things in the 1960s, there was an enormous change in children’s attitudes towards food and drink from one end of the decade to the other. In the early sixties, kids generally ate what they were given because their parents were still preaching the 1950s’ ‘be grateful for what you have’ message of austerity, but television advertising was really starting to influence everyone, not least the kids, and parents were finding it increasingly hard to resist the pressures to buy all sorts of foods and drinks that were being heavily advertised. The clever slogans and jingles that they used really did work, and you would nag your mum to buy the products that appeared in the most memorable advertisements, even if those products weren’t meant for kids. You just couldn’t get the jingles out of your head, and they are surely still firmly fixed in your mind today. Everyone remembers them: ‘A million housewives everyday, pick up a can of beans and say, Beanz Meanz Heinz’; ‘Murray Mints, Murray Mints, too good to hurry mints’; ‘Now hands that do dishes can feel soft as your face, with mild green Fairy Liquid’; ‘A Double Diamond works wonders, so drink one today!’; When you fancy a fruity treat … Unzip a Banana!’; ‘Opal Fruits (made to make your mouth water)’; ‘The Milkybar kid is strong and tough, and only the best is good enough – Nestlé’s Milkybar’; ‘You’ll look a little lovelier each day, with fabulous pink Camay’ (with Katie Boyle) and ‘Hovis, the golden heart of a meal’. There were so many familiar brand names that regularly flashed across our television screens, including Birds Eye, Findus and Ross Frozen Food, Cadbury’s Smash, Cheerios cereal, Winalot dog food, Kraft Dairylea cheese, Crosse & Blackwell soups, Huntley & Palmer biscuits, Rose’s lime juice, Wall’s sausages, Chiver’s jellies, HP sauce, Robinson’s barley water (especially during Wimbledon week), the Cadbury’s ‘man in black’ (all because the lady loves Milk Tray) and the Nimble balloon girl (Maggie). It was Esso that ‘put a tiger in your tank’ and it was Tony Hancock and Patricia Hayes that reminded us all that we should ‘Go to work on an egg!’ We were bombarded with brand names like never before – Britvic, Ribena, Horlicks, Bovril – there were so many and we wanted them all.
As the years went by, kids were spending more and more time indoors in the early evening, watching television rather than playing outside. However, the computer age was still a long way off and kids remained very active, playing outside as much as possible. It was considered important to have three square meals a day. Breakfast was usually cereal (Snap, Crackle and Pop – Kellogg’s Rice Krispies were preferred) or porridge or a lightly boiled egg with bread soldiers to dip in it. A full breakfast or ‘fry-up’ was reserved for the weekend, when breakfast became a real meal, with egg, bacon, sausage, tomatoes, baked beans, black pudding and fried bread. We had never heard of cholesterol back then, so everything except the baked beans was fried. Coffee was becoming more and mo
re popular, but tea was still first choice for most people, so there was always a fresh pot of tea available.
Typical of early 1960s advertisements. This one is offering an affordable portable tape recorder and a children’s slide, both on easy terms, c. 1962.
For main meals there were lots of stews and homemade meat pies, always with loads of potatoes and vegetables. Frozen foods were becoming increasingly popular and so not everything was as fresh as in earlier years. You were always made to eat everything on your plate – ‘eat your greens up or you won’t grow’ and ‘eat your carrots or you won’t be able to see in the dark’. Every Sunday you had a traditional roast dinner in the early afternoon, with chicken, roast beef, pork or lamb and roast potatoes with lots of vegetables and gravy. Sunday’s leftovers were served up on Monday and Tuesday in the form of stew, meat pie or cold meat dishes. During the rest of the week, you would have a variety of wholesome dishes for dinner, including liver and bacon, bangers and mash, lamb or pork chops, egg and chips, toad-in-the-hole, bubble and squeak and the traditional fish and chips on Fridays.
We were also starting to acquire a taste for foreign cuisine, due mainly to an increasing amount of foreign travel, which introduced us to dishes like spaghetti bolognese; and there were growing numbers of Indian and Chinese takeaway restaurants, not forgetting the fast nationwide spread of the American chain of Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken, now known as KFC, takeaway food shops. The Wimpy bars’ chain of fast-food restaurants was already well established, and in the 1960s they were the place to go for hamburgers. Sadly, British kids had to wait until 1974 before they could experience their first McDonald’s hamburger. But, through it all, fish and chips remained the nation’s favourite dish.