Sir James Pitman, convinced that the many anomalies of written English were badly hindering the development of reading skills, came up with the initial teaching alphabet, or ITA. This collection of 44 sound symbols, based loosely upon our alphabet but enabling consistent spelling, was used from 1961 in many schools to reassure children that reading and writing was logical and reliable, and that curveballs like “foreign” wouldn’t suddenly disrupt their learning. But educational purists spluttered as sentences like “pwt doun thoes traes!” were chalked up on school blackboards and copied down by five-year olds. The theory was fine: get children feeling more confident about language. But unfortunately, many found the transition from ITA back to proper English incredibly difficult, and nearly all parents found the concept somewhat, er, confuezing.
Keeping Minuscule Triassic Crustaceans as Pets
We usually prefer our pets to be more than a centimetre long. Creatures measuring less than this usually find themselves swatted by a newspaper, or squashed under a shoe. But for a while in the early 1960s, people were strangely bewitched by small, larva-like animals suspended in jam jars full of water.
”Brine shrimp” – which is what they are – was a name that would never work for marketing purposes. So, in a triumph of rebranding, the inventor, Harold von Braunhut, called them Sea-Monkeys, and packaged the tiny eggs (which were in suspended animation, waiting to be diluted) in a gaudy box featuring an anthropomorphic picture of a supposed sea monkey family. The accompanying blurb pushed the boundaries of credibility with such claims as “so full of surprises you can’t stop watching them”, “they obey your commands”, and “they do comical tricks and stunts”. Responding to changes in light or heat don’t really count as stunts (just observe a cactus over a period of a few weeks, for example) but millions grabbed the unmissable chance to grow their own pet. Incredibly, you can still buy Sea-Monkeys online today, but to get those psychological health benefits associated with keeping pets, you’re probably better off sticking with a cat or a dog.
Cramming into Enclosed Spaces Such as Telephone Boxes for Fun
Grown adults foolishly attempted to recreate childhood games of sardines in the late 1950s with the claustrophobic fad of phone-booth stuffing, or telephone-box squash. Sardines worked as a concept because the participants were generally under the age of eight, and thus fairly small; cramming into a cupboard under the stairs while waiting to be found wasn’t a test of physical endurance so much as a battle to stop giggling. Intrepid adult phone-booth stuffers, however, can only have been motivated by the possibility of beating an existing record or, more likely, deriving small amounts of sexual pleasure from being in close proximity to strangers.
The world record apparently stands at 25, set by a group in South Africa where, it is said, the practice first originated in 1959. Strict rules having been established (such as there having to be a telephone within the box, that a call has to be either made or received, that the box can’t be laid on its side and that the door can be left open but each person has to have half their body within the box) the fad spread to Britain, and eventually North America. The Japanese (who, let’s face it, have a competitive advantage through being of slighter build than the average Brit or Yank) failed to join in the craze at the time, but have since made up for it by cramming themselves into Smart Cars in the pursuit of cheap thrills – an even more challenging, some might say pointless endeavour.
Deep-frying Chipped Potatoes in Saucepans Full of Oil When Drunk
There’s probably no more dangerous cooking method than deep fat frying, and never more so than in the days before domestic, temperature-controlled fryers, when people would fill a regular pan with oil, heat it to scorching levels, drop something slightly damp in it and watch their kitchen go up in flames. Chips have long been the staple diet of the British, so it’s unsurprising that the prospect of eating them has tended to outweigh safety concerns. And after a few beers, when both the lure of the chips and the volatility of the cooking procedure are massively amplified, untold carnage can potentially be caused.
The public seemed to be learning their chip pan skills via a terrifying process of trial and error that, sadly, ended up killing many of them. By the 1970s, television adverts had started to drill into us the correct way to handle chip pans – don’t overfill them, keep watching them, and if they do catch fire don’t try to put it out with water, as the ensuing wall of flame will probably prevent you from finishing cooking your dinner that night, or indeed any subsequent night. Four thousand people are still injured by hot cooking oil every year, but at least we’re slightly more aware of the dangers, and technology gives us a bit of assistance in avoiding those third-degree burns.
Singing “Kum Ba Yah” and Actually Meaning it
It’s something of a sad indictment of our modern cynical society that an inoffensive old song such as “Kum Ba Yah” has lost whatever motivational power it had during the folk revival of the 1960s (when it was associated with the Civil Rights Movement) and is now only used to poke fun at the naïvely optimistic. There isn’t actually anything wrong with thinking that the world would be a nicer place if everyone were nice to each other – it’s true, after all – but expressing that sentiment via the medium of a gently strummed song is no longer the done thing, unless you want to be labelled a humourless, sandal-wearing hippy.
The Seekers and Joan Baez, both of whom recorded well-known versions of the song, were undoubtedly sandal-wearing hippies – but that kind of thing was positively encouraged at the time, and the song’s spirit of unity and compassion was fervently embraced. But the simplicity and repetitiveness that made it so easy to learn quickly made it incredibly banal and irritating – especially when people were trying to get you to join in with it. Fans of Aston Villa football club managed to rehabilitate the song by replacing the words with names of players – “Paul McGrath, my lord, Paul McGrath” – but its failure to prevent 2-0 drubbings at the hands of Birmingham City only underlines the impotence of the spiritual folk song.
Thinking that All Colours Looked Absolutely Great in Any Combination
Sixties counterculture was so awash with psychedelic drugs that it’s surprising its participants ever managed to get around to initiating anti-war protests or making backstage arrangements at rock festivals. Depending on how much of the stuff you had ingested, you might get to see bright colours, squares, circles or triangles, rapidly morphing kaleidoscopes or fractals in richly saturated colours with vivid contrasts. But tripping, or the memory of tripping, clearly wasn’t sufficient, as a collective decision was made to wear clothing that reminded everyone of what it was like to be tripping.
The process of tie-dying has a long, noble history dating back hundreds of years through various cultures in South America and Southeast Asia. But the way the hippies did it was more a free colour splurge than any faithful observation of traditional tie-dye practices, and the resulting T-shirts resembled a violent altercation in an artist’s studio. Album cover and poster art also began paying little heed to accepted colour combinations, with the cover of Santana’s Abraxis being something of a preposterous pinnacle of achievement (and if you haven’t seen it, brace yourself.) Of course, as with all counterculture movements, these headache-inducing palettes were eventually adopted by companies trying to sell stuff to young people, at which point said youngsters defiantly started enjoying the colour brown instead (see Preferring Things if they were Brown).
Names that you would no longer consider calling your children
When Elizabethan poet Fulke Greville came up with the name Myra at around the end of the sixteenth century, he’d have been surprised and delighted to see that plenty of baby girls were still being given the name some three hundred years later – and that it even experienced something of a post-war surge in popularity during the twentieth century. But when Myra Hindley and Ian Brady were convicted of the Moors Murders in May 1966, the number of girls being named Myra in Britain took something of an inevitable tumbl
e. We want to give our kids names that have positive associations and have some kind of social value; aligning them with mass murderers fails on both counts. The murderous exploits of Thug Behram in India in the early nineteenth century ensured that few if any proud parents would henceforth be issuing a christening invitation to their “lovely little Thug”, while the fall of the Nazi regime left Germans with something of a problem, as names such as Adolf, Hermann, Heinrich and many others no longer looked as tempting as they had done a decade previously.
Biblical names have always surged in popularity during periods of religious fervour. Puritans happily gave names such as Hephzibah or Ithamar to their offspring in order to demonstrate their knowledge of obscure passages in the Old Testament, but ensuing generations who weren’t quite as God-fearing went for tried and tested options such as John or Mary, while any straggling Ezekiels or Bathshebas got mercilessly teased in the playground. War, regime change and the redrawing of national boundaries also has an effect; prior to the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066, there were plenty of Aelfwines and Aethelbalds knocking about – and even a few Halwendes, despite the name having the profoundly depressing meaning of “lonely”. But it only took three or four generations for naming conventions to completely change, and by 1250 our previous compulsion to name children Eadwig and Leofric had been almost entirely replaced with a fondness for William, Henry and Richard.
In modern times we’ve been so eager for our children not to be mistaken for other children and for them to carve out their own unique niche in the world that we’ve rushed to saddle them with names that have no historical tradition, and no previous associations – either positive or negative. Instead, they’re often just a randomly assembled collection of letters that sound notionally exotic, such as Maxigan, Kaylana or Shailyn (for some reason girls seem to come off much worse than boys). More worrying is the burgeoning trend of mistaking a child’s birth certificate for a sitcom script; Frank Zappa may well have kicked this off in 1967 by naming his daughter Moon Unit, but families worldwide have since shown solidarity with him by choosing names such as Benson and Hedges (for twins), Midnight Chardonnay, Number 16 Bus Shelter, and Violence, while celebrities have exacerbated the trend with such harebrained choices as Lark Song, Audio Science and Jermajesty. In 2008, a New Zealand judge had to pronounce upon the case of a child who wished to change its given name of Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii: “The court,” he said, “is profoundly concerned about the very poor judgment which this child’s parents have shown.” Sadly, we can only sit and wait to find out whether children sporting names like that, or indeed Blue Angel or Legend, will emerge into adulthood unscathed. Here’s hoping.
Watching Films Through Light Drizzle in a Chilly Motor Car
In the days long before widescreen home cinema systems with 5.1 surround sound, the ultimate family film-viewing experience involved sitting in a battered Ford Zephyr on a remote patch of waste ground, watching images being projected on a large white wall while your kids bickered on the back seat. This offered you a certain amount of privacy – you didn’t have to listen to anyone else’s kids bickering, for one thing – but wasn’t the most luxurious setting you could hope for; drive-ins may have emphasized how you’d be in “the comfort of your own car”, but that presupposed a great deal about the interior of the average post-war vehicle.
A chap called Richard Hollingshead invented the concept back in the 1930s, and hurriedly rushed through a patent for his scheme. Success was limited, but after the patent was suddenly revoked in 1950 the number of drive-ins across the US suddenly boomed – especially in rural areas where movie theatres were thin on the ground and babysitters hard to come by. But the combined effects of the increasing price of land and the advent of the VCR spelled the end of the drive-in movie – save for the odd nostalgia-fuelled restaging, or some kind of guerrilla art happening. Home viewing was the future, and brought with it the benefit of not having to smuggle freeloading friends to the screening in the boot of one’s car.
Trying to Deploy an Aboriginal Weapon in the Park
The boomerang has only one unique selling point: when you throw it into the air, it’s supposed to return to your outstretched hand. This marketing strategy saw an Australian entrepreneur by the name of Jackie Byham shift five thousand of them during the summer Olympics in Melbourne in 1956, and by the late 1950s it had been successfully exported to the US and UK. Entranced by the idea of a stick with a homing instinct, people rushed to buy one – but then encountered the problems that would probably see it rejected by any enterprising toy company operating today.
Firstly, you need to find a piece of open ground where throwing the thing won’t accidentally maim or injure an innocent passer-by – it was originally a weapon, after all. Secondly, it’s a lonely pursuit; you don’t want someone else to catch it after you’ve thrown it, because that defeats the whole object. Lastly, mastering the art of successfully throwing it is so fraught with problems – wind speed, obstacles, your own pathetic incompetence – that it quickly becomes frustrating. British comic Charlie Drake struck a chord on both sides of the Atlantic with his 1961 hit “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back”, which described an Aborigine who “waved the thing all over the place” but still couldn’t get it to work. Nor could most people. Tellingly, the world distance record for throwing any object – 427.2m – was a boomerang that, crucially, didn’t come back either.
Hosting a Tupperware Party
If someone asks you over to their house for a social occasion, you’d hope that their invitation wasn’t predicated upon you handing over a wad of cash to the host or hostess of the party before you were allowed to leave. Party plan marketing for products such as Tupperware, however, worked on exactly this principle. Sales drives masquerading as social events didn’t seem to offend women of the 1950s, who grasped the opportunity to socialize and empower themselves simultaneously, and celebrated the power of female friendship to make a few extra bucks. These days, socially over-sensitive nations such as the British no longer much care for the idea of their mates making commission out of persuading them of the merits of a set of plastic bowls – although, strangely, it still seems to work for sex toys.
But Tupperware parties still drive multimillion pound businesses in countries such as Germany, Australia and New Zealand, where people seemingly don’t mind setting aside a couple of hours to attend a living, breathing, real-time advertising campaign – thus disproving the old maxim that you should never mix business with pleasure.
Becoming Skilled at Hula-hooping
The hula-hoop craze also started in Australia, but its origins were slightly more frivolous than that of the boomerang; it simply allowed people to gyrate their hips repetitively in order to keep a hoop revolving around their waist. That’s all there was to it. No deeper levels of cultural meaning; it wasn’t an elaborate courtship ritual or a method of destroying one’s prey. But once you’d learned how to do it, all you could really do was keep doing it in a bizarre test of personal endurance, or, indeed, patience. Nevertheless, when they were first launched in 1958 in the USA, 2.5 million were sold in a mere two months, and for the next eighteen months stores continued to be swamped with people seeking plastic hoops.
The problem that the manufacturers had subsequently was to get people to believe that there was any point in persisting with hula-hooping. Sure, there are marginal health benefits, but the key was to persuade people to try to outdo each other in the hula-hooping stakes, either by doing it for longer than anyone else, or keeping thirty of them going at once, or doing a tasteful hoop-based dance routine to the sound of Herman’s Hermits. So an annual competition was introduced in the USA in the 1960s to try to keep hula-hooping alive; it continued until 1981, by which point it had been made to look a bit static and tame by other leisure pursuits such as skateboarding, abseiling and gunrunning.
Battling Depression with Psychedelic Drugs
Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman discovered the psychedelic effects of LSD in
April 1943, after an experiment that saw him reach a state of acute anxiety, terrified that his body had been possessed by a demon. Rather than quietly dispose of the substance, and based on this evidence that its use might make people think that their bodies had been possessed by demons, Hoffman’s employers, Sandoz Laboratories, instead distributed huge quantities to researchers into psychotherapy during the 1950s.
They were advised to have a go with it themselves, to get a feel for its effects – but the problem with LSD was (and is) that these effects could differ wildly for different people, or even differ wildly for the same person on two different occasions. This made testing the drug under controlled conditions incredibly difficult, and while it was claimed that there were beneficial effects in the treatment of alcoholism and certain kinds of depression, research stopped in the mid 1960s when the US government, fearful of LSD’s fashionability among young people, began to introduce measures to curtail its use. Sandoz stopped producing LSD in 1965, and by 1970 the US government classed it alongside heroin as having “no medicinal value”. This is still disputed by a few medical professionals, but they’re generally ignored, perhaps out of fear that they’re off their heads on psychedelic drugs.
Wearing Miniskirts Because there was no Other Option
Towards the end of the 1950s, the conservative world of contemporary women’s fashion suddenly started to create the odd provocative, risqué look. However, some of us just aren’t suited to provocative looks, and any attempts we might make to try them out aren’t so much risqué as downright risky. Short shorts, which didn’t leave much of one’s bottom to anyone’s imagination, started making an appearance in around 1957, but the choice of whether to wear them or not was still very much up to the individual. The crucial change in the 1960s was down to the colossal popularity of the miniskirt; by 1967 clothes manufacturers seemed to have made a collective decision that it was going to be the only kind of skirt available on the British high street for young women.
The Next Big Thing Page 10