by Paul Feeney
In between dinner and teatime you would munch on a variety of snacks laid out on the sideboard, from chestnuts to marshmallows. It was the only day in the year that you could really stuff yourself silly. At some point during the afternoon, you would be prised away from your favourite toy to go for a walk out in the fresh air, to ‘help your dinner go down’. On Christmas Day in 1956, you wouldn’t have needed much encouragement to go outside, because it was one of those rare Christmas days when snow fell in most areas of the country and answered every child’s Christmas wish for a white Christmas. There wasn’t much to watch on television during the day, and most families only switched it on for the Queen’s speech at three o’clock (from 1957). There was often a live broadcast from a children’s ward at one of the hospitals, and Billy Smart’s Circus was usually on in the afternoon.
Later in the afternoon, just as you finished chewing on a date, your mum would start to serve afternoon tea. Cold turkey and ham sandwiches, sausage rolls and pickled onions, with lots of sweet things, like mince pies, Victoria sponge cake, fruit jelly and blancmange. After tea, mum would hand around her box of Black Magic chocolates that your dad had bought her, while dad would puff away on one of the half corona cigars that he had received. Apart from game shows, and perhaps a special drama production, the evening’s television highlight was the big variety show that the BBC put on every year, with all the best acts of the day. In the early ’50s it was the BBC’s Television’s Christmas Party, a live variety show that was on for about an hour and a half, and featured artists like Arthur Askey, Max Bygraves, Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd, Bob Monkhouse, Terry Thomas and Norman Wisdom. In the late ’50s there was BBC’s Christmas Night with the Stars, a grander pre-recorded variety and sketch show, featuring artists like Charlie Chester, Billy Cotton, Charlie Drake, Jimmy Edwards, Tony Hancock, Ted Ray and Jack Warner.
Sometimes, families would play board games in the evening, and when there was a family gathering with aunts and uncles and grandparents, the grown-ups would have a singsong around the old upright piano, or play gramophone records and talk. They were all so old! And it was all so boring! Later in the evening, when the novelty of playing with your new toys and games had worn off, you would all play cards together as a family, and you may even have convinced them to let you listen to one of your favourite gramophone records.
All of the day’s excitement and your continual gorging eventually took its toll on you, and you had to admit to being tired enough for bed. Tripping over the pile of gramophone records on the floor next to the record player, you sleepily make your way off to bed, while the grown-ups continue to play cards into the early hours of the morning.
The next day, Boxing Day, was still considered to be a family day when you stayed indoors, had visitors, or went to visit relatives. If you were lucky, you would get a couple of hours to play outside with your friends and try out some of their Christmas presents. Boxing Day was very much like a Sunday; all the shops were shut and there was nothing to do. The only available treat was a trip to the circus, if you had one within travelling distance of where you lived and your parents could afford it. Grown-ups had to go back to work on 27 December so Boxing Day was their last day off for a while (New Year’s Day wasn’t a national public holiday in the ’50s). Boxing day, therefore, was usually a stay-at-home family day.
In Scotland, Christmas was not celebrated to the same extent as it was in the rest of Britain, and up until 1958 Christmas Day was a normal working day. For almost 400 years Christmas was banned in Scotland, where it was seen as a Popish or Catholic festival. Scotland’s main day of celebration was Hogmanay (31 December) and it was celebrated with public holidays from 31 December – 2 January.
Ten
MEMORABLE 1950S EVENTS
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, you move your knees up and curl your arms around them to make more room for the other kids sitting on the floor around you. You are aware that the room is full, but you are oblivious to who is actually sitting beside you because your concentration is fixed on the huge wooden cabinet in the corner of the room, just an arm’s length away from you. Your attention is broken for a moment when a grown-up leans over you and turns one of the knobs on the front of the cabinet – click! The room becomes hushed and you are now aware of a slight humming noise coming from the stretched brown and gold cloth that is set into the bottom half of the cabinet’s fascia. One of the boys starts to get impatient for something to happen, and a grown-up voice from behind tells him to be quiet, ‘Wait a minute, it needs to warm up.’ Soon, a picture starts to appear in the grey twelve-inch glass screen, which is set into the top half of the cabinet. Everyone stares at the silvery-grey moving images that are now clearly visible on the screen, and the excitement in the room begins to mount.
The Queen’s Coronation
On Tuesday 2 June 1953, an estimated 3 million people lined the streets of London to see the procession of their newly crowned queen, Elizabeth II. Most of them spent the night before dossing down on pavements to secure a good vantage point for the morning. By eleven o’clock on that Tuesday morning, the majority of the country’s remaining population had settled down to listen to the commentary on the radio, or to watch the live broadcast on BBC television, or at public venue screenings in cinemas, church halls and hospitals. Most of the television viewers had gathered in groups at neighbours’ houses to watch their queen crowned. All over the country there were rows of empty houses, where whole families had decanted into their neighbours’ crowded living rooms to watch the ceremony on tiny silvery-grey television screens; most screens measured only twelve or fourteen inches, but some were as small as nine inches.
It rained on the day, but that certainly didn’t dampen the celebrations. Memories of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation are etched into the minds of every 1950s child. It was the first time ever that a monarch’s coronation had been televised for all to see. It brightened up the lives of ordinary people who were still suffering economic hardship and scarcity in post-war Britain. The queen’s gold ornate coronation coach, and the extravagant ceremony with all the dignitaries in their fine robes and jewels, gave ordinary people a peek into the land of plenty.
In 1953, in a street in central London, a group of young children pose for a picture to be taken just before their ‘Queen’s Coronation’ street party begins.
Children and adults gathered together for a ‘Queen’s Coronation’ street party in south-east London in 1953.
After seeing the wondrous real-life fairy story of royalty on television, the biggest celebrations began, with street parties in every town and village across the land. People brought out tables from their houses and placed them side-by-side to form one long table down the centre of the road. Everyone was enlisted to carry chairs from houses and line them up along each side of the extended table. The table was then dressed from end to end with lots of clean white tablecloths. Street lampposts were decorated, flags hung from upstairs windows and whole streets were decked out in red, white and blue bunting and cardboard cut-out royal crowns. There were all sorts of special coronation items for people to use and wear, like cardboard hats, paper aprons, bibs and napkins. There were loads of sandwiches, cakes and jelly, and everyone was happy and friendly. Most kids wore their best clothes or their school uniform, but some streets had fancy dress parties and the children wore a variety of outfits and strange homemade hats. The queen’s coronation was probably the most memorable 1950s childhood event, apart from the day sweet rationing ended! Oh, and the day you got your first ever television set.
The Festival of Britain
Thursday 3 May 1951 was the official opening day of the festival at the main exhibition venue, which was at London’s South Bank site by the River Thames, near to Waterloo Bridge. The Festival of Britain was spread over a four-month period and included a series of exhibitions held all around the country. It was organised in an attempt to provide the British people with a feeling that the country was recovering from all the destruction
caused to its towns and cities during the Second World War. The exhibitions were intended to lift people’s spirits whilst promoting the very best of British design, science, art and industry. London’s South Bank site, including The Royal Festival Hall, was especially constructed to be the centrepiece of the festival. Other South Bank structures included the Dome of Discovery, a temporary building that was like an early version of the Millennium Dome, and the Skylon, an unusual cigar-shaped aluminium-clad steel tower supported by cables – all designed in a modernist style. The festival also celebrated the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, sometimes referred to as the Crystal Palace Exhibition.
Visitors to the Festival of Britain outside the Dome of Discovery on London’s South Bank in 1951.
Festival of Britain exhibitions were held in all of the main cities around Britain, but the most popular visitor sites were in London, with 8.5 million people visiting the South Bank Exhibition, and 8 million visiting the Festival Pleasure Gardens in Battersea. Most children would have enjoyed something about the festival, even if they were unable to visit any of the exhibition sites, because there were organised street parties all over the country, with bunting and Union Jacks everywhere.
End of Rationing 1953/4
Food, clothing and petrol rationing was introduced at the start of the Second World War, but rationing got even stricter after the war ended, with bread and potatoes being added to the long list of foodstuffs in short supply. Children born in the 1930s and 1940s thought that it was normal to live with rationed amounts of food. The rationing rules were gradually relaxed from the end of the ’40s, but the biggest cause of celebration was when sweet rationing ended in February 1953, closely followed by the end of sugar rationing in September of that same year. Britain saw the final end of all rationing at midnight on 4 July 1954, when restrictions on the sale and purchase of meat and bacon were lifted. It was, by then, nine years since the war had ended, and fourteen years since food rationing had first begun.
The Age of Television
It was the decade that television really started to overtake radio as the most popular form of entertainment in the home. Even as late as 1949, two out of three people in Britain had never seen a television programme. Television ownership really took off early in 1953, with people queuing to get one installed to watch the queen’s coronation. There was a further boost when Independent Television first started broadcasting commercially funded television programmes in September 1955. By 1957, radio audience figures had dropped significantly, with the BBC acknowledging that the nightly audience figures had fallen by one million in the last year alone, with more and more people moving to television viewing. By 1959, the number of British households with a television set had increased to 10 million. The numbers had been increasing at a rate of about one million each year for the previous six years. The 1950s was the age of television and it completely changed our way of life. It brought a wealth of new entertainment to everyone, but mostly to a generation of kids that had previously been starved of so many of life’s luxuries. There were loads of brand new children’s programmes, including some much-cherished and fondly remembered ones like Crackerjack (1955) and Blue Peter (1958).
Rock and Roll
The ’50s saw the arrival of ‘rock and roll’ music in Britain for the first time (1954–6). This new wave of popular culture was introduced to us through teenage films and records from the USA, with American rock and roll artists like Bill Haley and his Comets, and Elvis Presley the ‘King of Rock and Roll’. Britain had never known anything like it. It stirred British teenagers into life and had them jiving in the aisles at their local cinemas. Soon, ordinary British teenagers began to follow suit, buying guitars and forming their own skiffle and rock groups. It was the start of music careers for celebrated British artists like Lonnie Donegan, Adam Faith, Billy Fury, Cliff Richard and Marty Wilde. The rest is history!
All gramophone records were made in large size 78s (78 rpm) format until 1949 when RCA Victor developed the 7-inch 45-rpm single. However, few people owned a record player suitable for playing the new 45s, and so the older 78s continued to be sold alongside the 45s well into the 1950s. In 1958, Audio Fidelity in the USA, and Pye in Britain, issued the first stereo two-channel records, but we had to wait until the 1960s to see them sold in any quantity in Britain because very few people had stereo record players in the 1950s.
Eleven
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO?
Billy Fury. After achieving a handful of hit singles in 1959, Billy went on to have another twenty-three hit singles in the 1960s, but he suffered from heart problems and was forced to become much less active. Despite ongoing trouble with his heart, he continued to work through until his death in 1983. Sadly, on 27 January 1983, he collapsed after returning home from the recording studio, and died the next morning at the age of forty-two.
Bobbies on the Beat. In the 1950s, we were all used to seeing Bobbies walking the beat, but there are far fewer sightings of them nowadays. In the 1960s, in some suburban and rural areas, some were put into police ‘Panda cars’ to replace beat Bobbies, while in other areas the Panda cars worked alongside beat Bobbies. In the 1980s, it became common practice for the police to patrol in pairs, which again reduced the sightings of ‘Bobbies on the beat’ by half, and this figure was trimmed even further by the increased amount of time they had to spend doing paperwork at the police station. But, there is hope for Londoners! In March 2009, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, announced that he would be getting police officers to walk the beat on their own rather than in pairs, to double the number of patrols.
Bus Conductors. The old-style double-decker buses that we were all familiar with required two-person crews to operate them, because the layout of the vehicle separated the driver from the passenger areas. Therefore, a conductor was needed to collect fares and to see passengers on and off the bus. Since the early 1970s, there has been a steady increase in newly designed ‘one-person operation’ buses that allow the driver access to the passenger area, and the ability to perform the tasks previously done by conductors. Conductor operation finally ceased in London in 2005.
Corporal Punishment in Schools. In 1986, physical punishment was abolished in all the UK’s state-run schools, and in 1998 it was outlawed in all independent schools.
Dave King. In the 1960s, this popular ’50s entertainer went to the USA for a short period, after which he returned to England where he found that his style of comedy had fallen out of favour. He later became a television character actor. He died in 2002 following a short illness, at the age of seventy-three.
Diana Dors. She continued to star in films and appear in television dramas, comedies and game shows until shortly before her death in 1984. She died of cancer on 4 May aged fifty-two. Although she left clues to its whereabouts, the mystery of her missing £2 million fortune has never been solved. She is believed to have hidden it away in various bank accounts across Europe before she was taken ill.
A policeman on point duty directing traffic in London’s Ludgate Hill in the early 1950s.
Dickie Valentine. This very popular 1950s singer’s fame diminished in the 1960s, but he continued to perform until he died in a car accident in 1971, at the age of forty-one.
Free School Milk. Abolished for seven- to eleven-year-olds in 1971 by Margaret Thatcher when she became Secretary of State for Education and Science, as part of Prime Minister Edward Heath’s spending cuts.
Gert and Daisy. The popular female comedy duo, and sisters, Elsie and Doris Waters, created these two cockney characters. Elsie and Doris wrote all their own material, and their quick-fire comedy conversations of one-liners and comic songs kept everyone entertained throughout the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, on both radio and gramophone record. In the 1960s, their popularity diminished, and they went into semi-retirement at their home in Sussex. They continued to do the occasional nostalgia shows until Doris fell ill in the 1970s. Doris died in 1978 (aged seventy-four), and Elsie die
d in 1990 (aged ninety-five).
Jimmy Clitheroe. He entertained us for forty years in every medium of show business, but is best known for his long-running radio show The Clitheroe Kid, which featured the diminutive Jimmy playing the part of a cheeky schoolboy. In his personal life he was a very private man, who lived a quiet life with his mother in a semi-detached bungalow in Blackpool. In June 1973, he sadly died from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, on the same day as his mother’s funeral. He was fifty-one.
London Pea-soupers (Smog). Anyone that lived in London during the 1950s will remember the dense fogs that would descend in the form of yellowish smog, caused by cold fog mixing with coal fire emissions. They were called ‘pea-soupers’ because they had the consistency of thick pea soup, and many people died from the effects of breathing the smog. In 1956, the British government introduced the Clean Air Act and created smokeless zones in the capital. This reduced the sulphur dioxide levels to such a degree that London’s intense yellow smogs became a thing of the past.