by Feeney, Paul
Penny (1d) (12 pennies = 1 shilling).
Three pence (3d) Usually pronounced ‘thruppence’ or a ‘thruppenny-bit’, and the old silver threepence was called a ‘joey’.
Six pence (6d) Also known as a ‘tanner’ or a ‘kick’.
Shilling (1/-) Also known as a ‘bob’ or a ‘shilling-bit’. (20 shillings = 1 pound).
Two shillings (2/-) Also known as a ‘florin’ or a ‘two-bob-bit’. (10 florins = 1 pound).
Half crown (2/6) Also known as ‘half-a-dollar’ or ‘two-and-a-kick’. (1 half crown = 2 shillings and six old pence).
Crown (5/-) (rarely found in circulation) Sometimes called a ‘dollar’. (1 crown = 5 shillings).
Ten-shilling note (10/-) Also known as a ‘ten-bob-note’, ‘half-a-nicker’ or ‘half-a-bar’.
One pound note (£1) Also known as a ‘quid’, ‘nicker’, or a ‘bar’.
Sweets and Treats
The pick ‘n’ mix counter in Woolworths was always a joy for kids, with all of that variety and no shopkeeper to moan about having to open lots of different jars when you asked for a quarter of a pound of mixed sweets; mind you, there was something special about going into an old dusty sweetshop with high wooden counters jam-packed with boxes of penny-chews and other sweet delights to tease the pennies out of your pocket. Lucky bags, Sherbet dips, Wagon Wheels, blackjacks, fruit salads, liquorice sticks and pipes, gobstoppers, sherbet lemons, Rowntree’s fruit gums and fruit pastilles, Spangles, chocolate coins in gold foil wrappers, sherbet flying saucers, Bubblegum, Fruitellas, Catherine Wheels, Love Hearts, Refreshers, Shrimps, Sherbet Fountains, Walnut Whips and Barrett’s sweet cigarettes with football cards. Behind the counter, the shelves along the wall were chock-a-block with huge jars of sweets that you bought by weight, usually in 2 ounces or quarter pound (4 ounce) measures. There were hundreds of different sweets: pear drops, aniseed balls, Kola Kubes, sweet peanuts, sugar almonds, nut brittle, fruit bonbons, sherbet lemons, milk gums, jelly babies, jelly beans, dolly mixtures, American Hard Gums, Liquorice Allsorts, chocolate honeycomb, marshmallows, and loads more. Remember those small, narrow 2d packets of KP nuts and the Smith’s potato crisps bags with the blue twist wrapper of salt that always found its way to the very bottom of the bag, making you rummage through all of the crisps to find it. In 1962, at long last, Golden Wonder introduced cheese and onion flavoured crisps. How did we manage to exist before there were cheese and onion flavoured crisps?
A 1960 magazine advertisement for the popular mint-flavoured Spangles with the pink stripe.
On hot summer days it was hard to resist the taste of a Lyons’ Mivvi or a Wall’s Split ice cream on a stick, coated with a shell of strawberry-flavoured ice. But, when it was really hot, there was nothing more satisfying than a frozen Jubbly, which was frozen orange juice in an unusual triangular-shaped carton. You would tear one corner of the carton and suck the frozen orange juice like an ice-lolly, but without a lollystick. As you held it in your warm hands, the orange juice would start to melt into the bottom of the carton, which allowed you to turn it up and drink the juice through the hole in the top corner. It took ages to finish a Jubbly, much longer than any of the fancy shaped ice-lolly alternatives, like Zoom, Orbit, Fab and Sea Jet.
It wasn’t just sweets and ices that were popular in sweetshops. Scoubidous were all the rage and the coloured plastic strips needed to make them were displayed on the sweetshop counters. Scoubidous were fun to make and they would keep you occupied for hours. You would plait the plastic strips together to make all sorts of colourful things, like bracelets and animal figures. Some kids made long colourful plaits to hang from their bicycle handlebars, but the easiest and most useful thing that everyone made was a Scoubidou key ring. Outside the sweetshops, the bubble gumball vending machines were always a big temptation for the younger kids. The machines were often chained to the outside wall of sweetshops; sometimes there were two machines, with one containing cheap and nasty plastic toys.
Bonfire Night
The nights started to draw in very quickly once the summer holidays were over and everyone was back at school; all of a sudden it was autumn and all the fun of playing outside ground to a halt. All those miserable dark evenings and little to look forward to until Christmas, which was still many weeks away. There was just one event that broke the monotony of being stuck indoors watching television on dark, damp, autumn nights, and that was Bonfire Night on the fifth of November. Many kids started planning for Bonfire Night well in advance; collecting and storing wood and other flammable materials as far back as September. The task of earning money to buy fireworks would start a couple of weeks before the big event, towards the end of October. It basically involved begging for money on street corners in aid of a homemade effigy of Guy Fawkes that you had stuffed with newspapers and dressed in old clothes, with a football for a head and a paper facemask. The begging cry was, ‘Penny for the Guy!’ but you always expected more.
This 1960 advertisement for Standard Fireworks captures a typical schoolboy’s excitement on Bonfire Night.
Restrictions on the sale of fireworks were not as tight as they are today and so kids could buy fireworks and matches fairly easily. But any fireworks that were bought before Guy Fawkes Night had to be used straight away, as most mums wouldn’t allow them to be stored inside the house; not with all those open fires and lit cigarettes. For boys, the objective was to get as many bangs as possible for their money, and so most of their firework money was spent on penny bangers. The fancy fireworks, like Roman candles and rockets, were expensive and could be unreliable and therefore a waste of money, not to mention dangerous. On the night itself, once the last few pieces of timber had been put in place and the ‘Guy’ was suitably fixed on top of the wood mountain, the bonfire was lit. Everyone would stand back to watch as the fire took hold and the bonfire began to blaze, and then all hell broke loose. Bonfire Night always seemed to bring out the evil in boys, who had more fun frightening the girls than watching the colourful displays of exploding rockets in the night sky. Bonfire Night was both exciting and dangerous. You never knew when a penny banger was going to fly past your nose. Girls ducked their heads and screamed in fear as bottles that were supposed to be supporting upright rocket launches fell over and sent rockets whizzing across open ground. While people covered their heads to shelter from the debris of spent rockets falling from the sky, mischievous and menacing boys threw Catherine wheels and jumping crackers along the ground, just for the joy of scaring the life out of everyone. The lead up to Bonfire Night was often more exciting than the night itself. The eye-catching bonfires and firework displays were somewhat overshadowed by the dirty smoke-filled air and the horrible stench of sulphur. Fireworks’ Night was never complete without the familiar sound of fire engine and ambulance bells. It was always a dangerous night to be out and every year a lot of people got injured. Can’t wait for next year!
Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
The Gunpowder, Treason and Plot,
I can think of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Four
GAMES, HOBBIES AND PASTIMES
Lots of new toys and board games were launched in the 1960s and kids had far more things to play with than ever before. There was also the benefit of having television in the home, which many less fortunate 1950s kids had missed out on. There was a choice of two television channels to watch – ITV or BBC – and from 1964, if you had one of the latest 625-line television sets, then you could even pick up the new BBC2 channel. But having three television channels to choose from meant that you were more likely to wear a hole in the carpet, going backwards and forwards from the sofa to the television set to manually change channels. There were none of the technological trappings that are now part of everyday life, but you didn’t feel lacking in any way. On the contrary, you were too busy enjoying the progressive sixties to even consider that there could be much better things to come in
the future. After all, you could now get stereo record players, transistor radios, felt-tip pens, electric blankets, digital clocks, Velcro, Lego, audio cassette and 8-track tape recorders, and Teasmade automatic tea-making machines – and we even had men landing on the moon. It was all very new and exciting stuff, and to top it all there was the great new board game, Mousetrap. Okay, so you didn’t have computers, mobile phones, games consoles, MP3 and video players, digital cameras, Sky TV, CDs and DVDs, and you didn’t even have pocket calculators. Astonishingly, most people managed to get right to the end of the sixties without upgrading to a colour television set. In hindsight, it is amazing to think that everyone managed to live quite happily without any of these things and kids never seemed to have any problem keeping themselves occupied.
Even on cold and wet days, when you were reluctantly stuck indoors, there was always something to do. Most kids had some sort of hobby to keep them busy and there were lots of board and card games to play. There were plenty of books, magazines and comics to read, and crossword puzzles to do. You made stuff out of beads, cloth and wood, and tried your hand at making objects out of papier mâché. You messed around with Play-Doh and Plasticine and made Airfix and Meccano models. Well, the boys did. That is if they weren’t too busy playing with their electric train set or their much-cherished Scalextric car racing game.
Hidden away somewhere in your bedroom, you will surely have had your very own secret box of treasures where you kept all of your most valued possessions. To anyone else it was a load of junk, but each and every object was special to you: a Beatles’ lapel badge, a broken watch with no strap, a dented metal thimble, a leaky fountain pen, some copper coins, a couple of marbles and a small piece of chalk. There were always a couple of strange, obscure items in there, like a Watneys Red Barrel beer mat or one of your dad’s old cigarette lighters. I suppose it was a load of old rubbish, but everyone liked to collect things: stamps, postcards, marbles, cigarette cards, Dinky toys, coins, badges, gonk and troll dolls. And, of course, you will have collected sack loads of aluminium foil milk bottle tops and sent them off to Blue Peter for them to raise money to buy guide dogs for the blind.
Play-Doh modelling compound was developed and marketed in the US during the late 1950s, but we had to wait until 1964 for it to be sold in Britain’s toy shops. This advertisement appeared in British magazines in November 1964.
Beatles merchandise was plentiful in the 1960s, and this advertisement for an official embroidered sew-on badge appeared in The Beatles Book (monthly edition No 9) in April 1964.
From a young age, girls were taught how to sew and knit, and many were keen to use those skills to make things for themselves. Often starting with something simple like a stuffed animal toy or a new outfit for their doll, then progressing on to the serious stuff of making fashionable clothes for themselves. Even ‘baby boomer’ and fashion icon Twiggy used to make her own clothes when she was a young girl, before she was famous. A lot of girls were eager to learn and develop other skills as well, like embroidery, cooking and baking, and they practised them whenever they could. Children’s bedrooms were just furnished with the basics, they didn’t have their own television or computer and so there was no reason for them to shut themselves away from the rest of the family for hours at a time. Instead, girls spent a great deal of time with their mums, and it was the norm for mothers to teach their daughters all the things that were then regarded as feminine skills, just as their mums had taught them when they were young girls.
The quality and choice of radio and television programmes improved a lot during the sixties and so we did listen to more radio and watch an increasing amount of television, but often while doing something else at the same time. Simple indoor hobbies like stamp collecting and scrap-booking were still popular, but our favourite times were spent outdoors playing games and exploring. Boys armed themselves with their catapults, peashooters, space-guns and water balloons; and girls dressed up in their mum’s frock and high heels, trailing a skipping rope behind them. From homemade kites to wooden go-karts, we had everything we needed to have fun. And then there were all the cost-free street games we played. There were hundreds of them, many handed down through the generations, and we played them all. There were lots of different variations of the same game being played around the country, but they were basically the same. Here are a few to jog the memory and remind you of all those times that you crossed your fingers and shouted ‘fainites!’ But first you need to decide who is going to be ‘it’.
Boatman Boatman, Farmer Farmer (young kids’ version of British Bulldogs): One person was chosen to be ‘it’ and became the boatman. The boatman stood in the middle of a pre-agreed play area and all the other players stood on a line at one edge. The players then chanted, ‘Boatman, Boatman, can we cross the river?’ The boatman replied, ‘You can only cross the river if you are wearing (name of a colour).’ Any player wearing something of that colour then crossed freely to the other side of the play area. The players that were not wearing the required colour had to run to the other side without being caught by the boatman. Any players that were caught then joined the boatman as catchers, and the game was repeated until there was only one uncaught player left and he or she was the winner.
British Bulldogs, Bulldog, Bullies, Red Rover, Runno: Any number of boys and girls would join in to play this, but it was not for the faint-hearted; this game would usually result in a few injuries, particularly when played on a hard surface or if played by mixed age groups. The favoured places to play this were in fields and on bomb ruin sites. To start with, one or two players were selected to be bulldogs and they were made to stand in the middle of the field. There were two safe areas on opposite side edges of the field. All of the non-bulldogs gathered in one of these safe areas. The main objective of the game was for the non-bulldogs to run across the field from one safe area to the other without being caught by the bulldogs. The game started with one of the bulldogs naming a player that was to be the first to attempt the run from one side to the other, and the bulldogs would then attempt to catch the runner. If he or she was caught by a bulldog then the bulldog had to hold onto the failed runner and shout ‘British Bulldog; one, two, three!’ The caught runner then became a bulldog. If he or she did reach the other side without being caught then they were deemed to be in the safe area and could not be caught. Once the runner had either been caught or reached the safe area then all the other non-bulldogs had to immediately attempt to cross the playing area themselves (this was called the ‘rush’ or ‘bullrush’), with the bulldogs trying to catch as many as possible using the same rules as before. Once all the surviving non-bulldogs had reached the ‘safe’ area on the other side of the field, the rush began again to get across the field in the opposite direction, avoiding the bulldogs. The game continued until all the players had become bulldogs, and the winner was the last person to be caught. It was quite difficult to catch someone and hold on to them for enough time to shout ‘British Bulldog; one, two, three!’ It usually needed some tough rugby tackling, which resulted in grubby and torn clothes and countless bruises, cuts and grazes. As with other games, various versions were played around the country with other local names being used to describe it.
Cat’s Cradle: A game for two people, usually girls, to create a series of patterns, including the ‘cat’s cradle’, out of a loop of string wrapped around the fingers and wrists. Individual girls, sometimes with the use of their teeth, created simpler creations, like a ‘cup and saucer’.
Conkers: The game was played by two children, each with a conker threaded onto a piece of string or an old shoelace. One player would let the conker dangle on the full length of the string while the other player swung their conker to hit it. The players took turns to strike each other’s conker until one broke. Sometimes it was the attacking conker that broke. The conkers were given names to identify their worth; a new conker was called a ‘none-er’, and when a ‘none-er’ broke another ‘none-er’ it became a ‘one-er’, th
en a ‘two-er’, ‘three-er’, and so on. The winning conker inherited the previous score of the losing conker as well as gaining the score from that particular game. So if a ‘two-er’ beat a ‘three-er’ then the winning conker became a ‘six-er’. The hardest conkers usually won, but there was a lot of cheating, with players using various methods to aid the hardening of their conkers, including soaking them in vinegar overnight, baking them in the oven for a short time and seasoning them by keeping them for a year before use.
Egg, Egga, Bad Egg (played with a tennis ball): The person who was ‘it’ would give the players a subject like colours or football teams to choose a name from. The players would huddle together to whisper and choose names. One of the players would then call out loud all of the names chosen by the players. The person who was ‘it’ would then throw the ball high into the air or against a wall and shout out one of the names (i.e. blue or Arsenal), and the player that had chosen that name would have to catch or retrieve the ball while the others ran away. Once the person had retrieved the ball, he or she would shout ‘Stop!’ or ‘Egg!’, or something similar, and the players would have to stand still. The person with the ball could then take up to three giant steps towards any of the scattered players, and throw the ball at that person. If the ball hit the target then he or she would become ‘it’ and a new game would begin. If the thrower missed then he or she would be ‘it’.