by Paul Feeney
For main meals there were lots of stews and homemade meat pies, always with loads of potatoes and fresh ‘in season’ vegetables. You were always made to eat everything on your plate – ‘eat your greens up or you won’t grow’. Everyone that could afford it had a traditional roast dinner on Sunday, with roast beef, pork or lamb and roast potatoes, and loads of vegetables and gravy. Chicken was too expensive and usually reserved for Christmas. 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 fish and chips on Fridays. There was always plenty of bread on the table to fill up on and a jug of water to wash it all down.
In summer, there were boring cold meat salads to contend with, only made tolerable by lashings of salad cream. So much adventure playtime was wasted while stuck indoors and pushing a piece of cucumber or cold lettuce around on your plate.
Puddings, sweets or ‘afters’, as they were often called, were usually a luxury reserved for Sundays. Rice pudding, bread and butter pudding, and semolina or tapioca milk puddings – you either loved them or hated them! Homemade spotted dick or apple pie served with Bird’s yellow custard with the skin on top, or if you were really posh you might have pink blancmange. Pineapple chunks with Carnation milk, jelly and ice cream, trifle, and the occasional luxury of a block of Neapolitan ice cream.
A large slab of Lard cooking fat was ever present in the 1950s kitchen. It seemed to be a part of every mum’s essential cooking ingredients. It went into everything – pies, cakes, bread, and biscuits – nothing was spared from a good chunk of Lard. It was even spread on bread as an alternative to butter, but it could never quite compare to the delicious taste of homemade beef or pork dripping, which was formed from the fat and liquid that was left in the pan after mum had cooked a joint of beef or pork. And who can forget the scrumptious taste of fish and chips cooked in beef dripping?
Welsh rarebit! Although often referred to as Welsh rarebit, in most households it was usually just a basic cheese on toast, made with plain cheddar cheese. No fancy Welsh rarebit recipes needed to entice a hungry child to eat it as a teatime or supper snack. On the other hand, there was nothing more likely to cause the sudden loss of appetite than the sight of a curled-up Spam sandwich being pushed in your direction across the table. Spam was a cheap substitute for ham but it was mystery meat; the colour, texture and taste didn’t resemble real ham. It was a type of processed meat, made mostly from pork, but you were never quite sure what Spam was! Could there be a child of the ’50s who actually liked the stuff?
Other popular sandwich fillings included such diverse things as mashed potatoes, chips, bananas, jam, salad cream, cheese, and of course fish paste, the ingredients of which was another childhood mystery!
Washdays
The growth in ownership of modern-day household appliances was seriously hindered by the economic impact of the Second World War on Britain’s consumer market. As was the case with most labour-saving devices for the home, we were well behind the United States, where a large majority of homes already had an electric washing machine. In the late 1950s, less than a third of households in Britain had a washing machine, and these were single tub, top-loading machines, with a wringer on top. Most people were still washing by hand, using a scrubbing brush, washboard, and a hand-operated mangle. There were launderettes, but they were few and far between, and they were also expensive to use. In the cities and larger towns, there were laundry shops where people would take their dirty white cotton clothes, towels and bed sheets to be washed by machine. These places were called the ‘bagwash’, because you would put all your dirty stuff inside a heavy-duty cloth bag and then take the bag to the shop, where it would be weighed and tagged with a piece of cloth that was indelibly marked with your name or code number. The ‘bagwash’ was usually just an empty shop with a small counter, and a large set of scales that sat on the bare wooden floorboards. After your bag had been tagged, the lady behind the counter would heave it onto a stack of other bags that were piled high against the back wall of the shop, where they would all stay until the laundry van collected them later in the day. Some ‘bagwash’ shops only opened one day a week for dropping off washing, and another day for collecting it. These would be known as the ‘bagwash’ days for the local area. When your mum collected the bagwash it would smell of chemicals and still be damp, just right for mum’s favourite job – ironing. You only took white cotton things to the ‘bagwash’ because everything was bleached and boiled in the laundry – bed mites didn’t stand a chance!
Tradesmen and Services
It was a time when many people felt at ease to leave the street door on the latch, except at night or if the house was empty, and they would leave a key hanging down behind the letterbox just in case someone did get locked out. Apart from the noise of kids playing, the streets were usually fairly quiet places and so not much went unnoticed. There were the regular well-known deliverymen like the postman, milkman, breadman, coalman, and of course ‘the man from the Pru’. Everyone seemed to have the Prudential Insurance man call each week to collect the small life insurance premiums. Before the age of telesales, when most people didn’t even have a telephone, the door-to-door salesmen were very active. The tallyman would call door-to-door selling goods on the never-never. They were so convincing – ‘you can have all this for just a shilling a week!’ It really is true that some people would hide behind the sofa when he knocked on the door for his money. Many of the inner-city travelling salesmen would ride pushbikes, and some used the earliest mopeds, which were just basic pushbikes with a small motor attached to the top of the front tyre. There was a profusion of brush and cleaning equipment salesmen, and of course the ever popular and very convincing Encyclopaedia Britannica salesmen, offering the whole twenty-four-volume set of encyclopaedias on an easy payment plan. No child could hope to pass the eleven-plus exams without access to their very own set of encyclopaedias.
Postmen always looked smart with their top-to-toe uniform, which included a shirt and tie, a lapel badge carrying the postman’s number, and a flat ‘military style’ peaked cap with a badge that featured a post horn and St Edward’s crown. The post would drop through the letterbox at about 7am each day and there would be a second delivery later in the morning.
In 1953, this latest Esse cooker with boiler cost £91 4s 6d. Equivalent to about £1,900 at today’s values based on the retail price index.
The telegram boy, in his navy blue uniform with red piping and pillbox cap, was never a welcome sight in the street. Few people had telephones and the fastest way to get a message to someone was by telegram, but they were expensive to send (about 6d for nine words and a penny for each additional word, including the address) and were only used to send urgent messages of joy, sorrow and success. Although they were traditionally sent to announce or congratulate expected good news, like a marriage or the birth of a child, in everyday life they usually meant bad news, normally a death. The curtains would twitch whenever a telegram boy arrived in the street, and everyone’s pulses would race like mad.
The milkman also wore a uniform, including a collar and tie and a peaked cap. The milk was delivered from either a horse-drawn milk cart or a hand-pulled milk float, also known as a pedestrian-controlled float. Each morning, the milk magically arrived on your doorstep before you had even poked your head out from the bedclothes.
Outlying areas would have groceries and bread delivered, and sometimes the milk would be delivered from an urn into your own jug and measured by the pint or half pint. Quite often these delivery rounds-men would become friends with their customers, downing many a cup of tea en route.
Coal was delivered regularly on horse-drawn drays or trucks. The coalmen were usually large intimidating men with faces and hands blackened by the coal dust. They often wore flat caps and sleev
eless leather jackets. The coalmen would heave the huge hundredweight (cwt) sacks of coal off the flatbed dray and carry them on their backs to the coalbunkers, or tip them through a coalhole in the pavement into the cellar below.
Chimney sweeps were always a source of entertainment for kids. They would usually arrive on a pushbike carrying a few long-handled brushes and an old sheet. The sweep would have a permanent covering of soot all over, even when he had just arrived. All the furniture would be pushed back from the fireplace and covered with sheets before he arrived, but it was always a traumatic experience for house-proud mums. For the kids, it was amusing to watch mum’s face and to hear her gasp as the sweep manoeuvred his brushes up the chimney and a cloud of soot bellowed out from beneath the protective sheet, dispensing a nice covering of black dust around the room. The sweep would always be carefully escorted from the house when he had finished to make sure he didn’t rub up against anything he passed on the way. Then the clean-up would begin! In the 1950s, people were encouraged by the government to use smokeless fuel to help reduce the smog. Some people started to board up their fireplaces and fit new snazzy two-bar electric fires to replace the old coal fire. Some did it to be fashionable, but most did it to get rid of the mess and inconvenience of fetching the coal in from the cold cellar or outside bunker.
Window cleaners were plentiful, with their stepladder and bucket anchored onto their pushbike. Sometimes window cleaners would carry their stuff in a homemade wooden box (like a sidecar) attached to the side of their bike. Most people didn’t have the money to pay for window cleaning and so they did it themselves. It wasn’t beyond a window cleaner’s cheek to knock and ask for a bucket of clean water, even if he hadn’t cleaned your windows!
The gas and electric meter men would come regularly to empty the meter-boxes of cash. Most people paid for their gas and electric as they went, via ‘shilling in the meter’ boxes, which the meter men padlocked and sealed with wire and wax. The meters were set to overcharge and so you would usually get cash refunded when the meter was read. Fish and chips tonight!
Paperboys were a common sight in the early mornings. Paperboy jobs were highly valued as a source of extra pocket money, but the paper rounds were usually quite big and widespread because most people would buy their newspapers on the way to work. It was unusual to see a girl doing a paper round.
Food ration books issued by the Ministry of Food. Rationing of foodstuffs finally ended in July 1954.
Healthcare
Most homes had a few basic medical supplies on hand to treat the little warriors’ cuts and grazes, fevers or infections. Aspirin, Beecham’s Powders, Veno’s cough mixture (at least a year old), a bottle of smelling salts, a tin of plasters, tincture of iodine antiseptic, and Germolene antiseptic cream with its distinctive hospital smell that reassured you of its remedial powers.
As a young child in the early 1950s, you ate quite healthily with high calcium and iron intakes through eating foods like bread and milk, red meat, greens and potatoes, and you drank very few sugary drinks. You were also very fit with all those exhausting and dangerous games you played, but you still couldn’t escape the childhood illnesses. Chicken Pox, Measles, Whooping Cough, German Measles, Mumps and Tonsillitis; you got them all. In the early 1950s, before immunisation started in 1955, there was a great fear of catching polio. It was a horrible disease that crippled thousands of children and, sadly, killed many. It wasn’t unusual to see children with crutches, leg callipers or corrective shoes after contracting polio. Diphtheria was a big killer prior to the introduction of nationwide immunisation in the 1940s, which resulted in a dramatic fall in the number of reported cases. In 1940, there were 3,283 deaths in the UK, compared with just six deaths from the disease in 1957. Tuberculosis (TB) was also a big concern in Britain up until the BCG vaccination was introduced in 1953; but even then TB didn’t disappear entirely.
Winter always brought the misery of colds and flu, and minor infections like earache were common, as were involuntary nosebleeds and fight-inflicted bloody noses. The walking wounded were to be seen everywhere; a child with his or her arm or leg in plaster, a temporary eye patch, or a leather fingerstall tied around the wrist, were all familiar sights.
If you needed to see the doctor, it seemed easy. You didn’t have to make an appointment; you just turned up at the surgery and waited your turn. Doctors’ waiting rooms were small intimate places, simply furnished with rows of hardback wooden chairs. There was no receptionist to manage the patients and doctors would retrieve patients’ notes from filing cabinets themselves. Apart from the wooden chairs, the only accessory in the waiting room was the bell or buzzer to summon the next patient into the surgery. Doctors did a lot of home visits; if your mum said you were ill in bed, the doctor came out without any fuss. It all seemed very efficient and free of paperwork. In the early 1950s, you definitely didn’t want to hear the doctor say that you needed an injection. They were still using re-usable needles then, and they were so big! The doctor would ask your mum to boil the needle in a saucepan of water for a few minutes to sterilise it. That would add to the trauma, with so much more time for the patient to think about it. The injections made a huge hole in the fleshy part of your tiny arm or backside, and they really hurt.
If you were confined to bed with some dreaded lurgy, then you had to have a bottle of Lucozade and a bunch of grapes next to the bed, even if you didn’t like grapes. The Lucozade was supposed to give you energy and most kids loved it. You had to drink it while you could because it was expensive and was only bought when someone was ill. Although we had free healthcare under the newly created National Health Service (established 1948), from 1952 it cost your mum a shilling to get a doctor’s prescription form filled in at the chemist, and this charge was increased to one shilling per item in 1956.
There was also a charge of £1 introduced for dental treatment in 1952. No child of the ’50s will ever forget the dreaded visits to the dentist. It was the stuff of nightmares! That horrible cube of dry wadding that the dentist would shove under your back teeth to keep your mouth open, and the awful smell of the black rubber face-mask that was held over your nose and mouth to administer the anaesthetic gas that would send you to sleep and into a world of hallucinatory nightmarish dreams. Afterwards, you drifted back into consciousness tasting the disgusting mix of bleeding gums and residual gas in your mouth, and the nausea inevitably brought on bouts of uncontrollable vomiting. The horrendous experience didn’t end at the dentist’s door because the soreness, nausea and dizziness could last for several hours. Who could question why a child of the ’50s would often need to be dragged screaming and shouting to the dentist’s chair?
Any child that was hospitalised in the 1950s will remember the Nightingale wards, named after Florence Nightingale, with rows of beds each side of a long room and large tables in the middle where the nurses did their paperwork and held meetings. The nurses were always so clean and smart in their uniforms, with white starched bib-front pinafore dresses and caps, and blue elasticated belts with a crest on the buckle. Most had an upside-down watch pinned to the top of their pinafore for use when they checked patients’ pulses. Was there ever a boy with a slow pulse reading? Most young girls wanted to be a nurse and the boys wanted to marry one! The smell of ether was ever present throughout hospital buildings, but if you were an inpatient you soon got used to it. For young kids, hospitals were lonely places and you could feel abandoned. You were often placed in adult wards and up until 1954, children in hospital were only allowed to see their parents on Saturdays and Sundays, and only for a short time. The hospitals were run very formally, with Matron’s daily inspections sending every nurse into a panic, but you were very well looked after, and the doctors and nurses were wonderful.
Three
THE STREETS AND BOMB RUINS
There you are, out in the street wearing your new Davy Crockett fur hat and a belt with double holsters strapped to your legs, looking down the barrel of a Roy Rogers silver six-shooter
cap-gun, and you have just run out of caps for your Wyatt Earp style long barrel shotgun. Nothing for it but to run home and get your spud-gun and one of mums big baking potatoes for ammunition.
‘Come on, get out of that bed, it’s eight o’clock and you can’t lie there all day!’ Blimey, you can’t even get a lie-in on a Saturday morning! You turn over and curl up again for another minute’s shut-eye while you try to pick up the threads of your broken dream. No, you haven’t really got the latest six-shooter cap-gun with matching holsters, but you’ve seen one in your local Woolworths store and you dream of having it, along with all the other trappings of your big-screen cowboy heroes. You have got a Davy Crockett fur hat that your mum made for you, but sadly, your cowboy adventures are usually played out with guns and rifles made from sticks and lumps of wood that you have whittled into shape with your penknife, and the sound effects are just primitive ‘bang-bangs’ that you shout as you aim your deadly weapon at the escaping bandits.
‘Come on, get out of that bed, it’s a quarter past eight and your mates will be knocking for you soon!’ Yes, I must get up or I’ll be late for Saturday Morning Pictures at the Odeon!
If you lived in, or near to, a town in the 1950s then the highlight of your week was Saturday Morning Pictures at the local cinema. Other than that, weather permitting, most of your spare time would have been spent outside enjoying the thrills and spills of childhood.
Many towns and cities across the country were badly damaged during the Second World War ‘Blitz’ bombing by Nazi Germany, with over a million houses destroyed or damaged in London alone. More than a decade later the evidence was still clear to see, with dilapidated houses and bomb ruins everywhere. These, together with derelict land created through the post-war slum clearance programmes, became the forbidden playgrounds of the post-war baby boomers. The local council housing estates and tenement buildings usually had their own concrete playgrounds or play areas, but these were characterless places, and local kids would usually venture out onto the streets to find adventure and mischief away from prying eyes. The local parks had children’s play areas or ‘swing gardens’, as they were called. These always had a park keeper or warden dressed in full uniform with a peaked cap. The park keepers, who often walked with a limp from an old war injury and were cruelly mimicked by the kids, would officiate in military style and it wouldn’t be long before someone was being thrown out of the park for messing around on the equipment.