21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff)
Page 6
When most of us think of a telephone box, an image of the classic red kiosk will come to mind. The first of these was designed in 1924 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, in response to a competition. The City of London was not keen on the concrete booths that had starting popping up around the country, and wanted something more stylish and, well, London-y. Scott’s design beat two others and became known as K2 (Kiosk 2), quickly replacing the K1, although the box that appeared on the streets was not quite as the designer expected. He had specified a steel construction with silver paint and a blue/green interior, the final kiosk was, as we know now, made of cast iron and painted a bright red.
There were many incarnations of this original design, with the K6 being the one that was used most widely outside of London, and being the version that most readers will remember calling their boyfriends or girlfriends from, or phoning a cab from while pissed, or having a sneaky wee in … while pissed.
Since the late ’80s, and the privatisation of telecommunications, the red phone boxes have been superseded by the rather dull metal and glass structures and also open booths. For a while, companies other than BT started putting boxes up, but they didn’t last long. Now even these more modern versions are on the downturn; between 2005 and 2008 total phone box usage halved. It is probably fair to speculate that it has at least halved again since then.
As it costs £700 a year to maintain a single telephone kiosk, it is understandable that their numbers are dwindling, and it is to the credit of BT that they haven’t scrapped them completely, recognising that they have to cater to the minority of people who still use them and acknowledging their social importance.
But that hasn’t stopped them from decommissioning loads of old boxes and flogging many of them off for private use. Local communities have taken over the running of some kiosks and there are old red phone boxes in use today as libraries, grocery stores, tourist information booths and, in one case, to store a defibrillator.
With two-thirds of all telephone boxes making a loss, it is inevitable that their number will decline further, but over 2,000 have been given listed status so we should still see them around for some time to come.
Dodo Rating:
Rag and Bone Men
You could consider them the first generation of recyclers. Men with a horse and cart would drive around the neighbourhood at slow speed, shouting, ‘Rag and bone!’ or some such cry, in an attempt to lure housewives out of their homes carrying unwanted scrap.
In the early days of the trade they really did collect rags and bones – the bones were sold to make bone china and the rags for paper – but in the latter half of the 20th century they came to collect any scrap metal or other items that they could sell on. They would often pay cash for items, only a few pence here and there, or offered exchanges, such as donkey stones, as they were called, for whitening doorsteps, but many people were happy using them as a way to clear out old junk that the binmen refused to take.
As the century drew to a close, households had become more focused on recycling, and most people had transport to take their scrap to local dumps and refuse centres. As a result, the trade has almost died out. But not quite. There are a few rag and bone men about, mostly still using a horse and cart (the slow progress they make gives people time to gather up items and take them outside).However, I suspect we will have seen the last of them in a few years’ time.
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Cars
Not all cars, obviously. Our roads are full of them, I know that. No, this entry is to mark the passing of the many makes of car that used to be everywhere on our roads, were often hugely popular, but which have ceased production and are gradually vanishing from the streets.
Take, for example, the Ford Sierra. It was one of the top ten most popular cars ever sold in Britain, with over 1.2 million machines on the roads, and ceased production in 1993. Almost anyone over the age of 35 could identify one immediately, but someone under 30 might struggle.
So here we commemorate some of the hugely popular motor vehicles, many of which we will have been driven in when we were younger, that have been parked in the scrapyard of history. See how many of them you can remember, and ask yourself when you last saw one on the open road.
Ford Anglia (1939–1967)
Citroen 2CV (1948–1990)
Morris Minor (1948–1971)
Ford Zephyr (1950–1972)
Triumph Herald (1959–1971)
Ford Cortina (1962–1982)
Hillman Imp (1963–1976)
Vauxhall Viva (1963–1979)
Datsun Sunny (1966–2004)
Ford Escort (1968–2003)
Ford Capri (1969–1986)
Morris Marina (1971–1980)
Ford Granada (1972–1994)
Austin Allegro (1973–1983)
Reliant Robin (1973–2002)
Toyota Starlet (1973–1999)
Vauxhall Cavalier (1975–1995)
Mini Metro (1980–1997)
Ford Sierra (1982–1993)
Austin Maestro (1983–1994)
Austin Montego (1984–1994)
Dodo Rating:
Slam Door Trains
Allow me to set the scene.
My secondary school let pupils out at 3.30pm.
The train station was a three-minute walk away. Two minutes if you ran.
The train left the station at 3.32pm.
The moments after the home bell rang were, as you can probably imagine, utter chaos.
Dozens of scruffy boys, ties flailing in the wind, pegging it down the street in an attempt to catch the early train home. If you missed it, then you had to wait half an hour for the next one. Half an hour to a 12-year-old-boy is a lifetime, especially when he could be at home playing on his Vic 20.
With modern trains, we would have stood no chance. Pushbutton, centrally controlled electronic doors closing 30 seconds before departure would have kept us at bay.
But we didn’t have modern trains back then (this was the early ’80s). Instead, we had the slam door trains, carriages with individual doors, each with a handle you turned to open. The point being that they could be opened at any point during the journey, not just at the station.
So what happened was this – the faster runners would sprint ahead and make it to the station just as the train was pulling in. They would get on the train in normal fashion but leave the doors open.
The reasonably fit but not particularly sporty boys (which included me) would follow in their wake, making it into the station just as the train was supposed to leave. We’d usually be able to jump on at the open doors just as the guard was shouting at us to close them.
Then came the fun bit.
The weak, infirm, lovers of chocolate bars, lazy, and poorly shod would stagger to the station, out of breath and sweating, just as the train was leaving. The carriages were in motion, the train was on its way, the guard had shut his door and was busy lighting his fag for a quick puff before the next stop.
At this point we opened all the doors at the back of the train, ready for our less-athletic friends, or those with teachers who had not let them leave on time, to make ambitious, courageous, and foolhardy attempts to jump on.
Their legs would be going nine to the dozen, they would sometimes throw their bags ahead of them (a very risky strategy), and then they would make the leap of faith, ready for us to drag them on board. There were some casualties, of course, with people getting left behind and the occasional grazed knee, but it did make the journey home that little bit more exciting.
And the fun didn’t stop there. The doors had slide-down windows and despite the warning not to stick your head out of them, we all pretty much did for most of the journey home. Of course, this meant dodgy half-eaten sandwiches (and often worse) lobbed out of the front windows in the hope of splatting some unsuspecting kid further down.
I have no idea why they no longer run such trains. No idea at all.
Dodo Rating:
Milk Bottle Deliveries
As recently as 20 years ago, most mornings would start with the electric hum of a milk float making slow and steady progress down the street, the clink and clank of bottles as they were carried by the milkman, and the sight of a pure white pint of milk on pretty much every doorstep on every street.
Today you will be hard pressed to find glass milk bottles in front of a house. You will rarely be caught behind a slow-moving float. You probably can’t remember the last time you were woken by the cheerful (but slightly annoying) whiste of your milkman. Or the last note you wrote for him.
The daily milk delivery at the crack of dawn was a national institution. Red top, blue top, silver top, gold top, even the weird long-necked bottle of non-homogenised milk could be found on the doorstep. The classic image of a blue tit pecking away at the foil bottle top was a regular sight back then. As was the array of empties left at the end of the day ready for the milkman to collect, often with a rolled up note sticking out of the top with ‘NO MILK TODAY’ or ‘ONE EXTRA PINT PLEASE’.
The big national dairies such as Unigate and Co-op would advertise on television (see the entry for Humphrey in a few pages’ time) and their milkmen would sell lots more besides milk, but more on that shortly as well. They were all over the country, six days a week (no delivery on Sunday), and were part of the dawn chorus.
But sadly no more. There are still milkmen, and there are still door-to-door deliveries, but nowhere near the numbers there once were. A couple of years ago, during a fit of nostalgia, I signed up for a milk delivery after many years without one. It turned out that the milkman would only deliver every other day, and even then wasn’t 100% reliable. I ended up cancelling after less than a month.
That sort of decline, and the simple fact that milk in cardboard and plastic cartons can be purchased from every corner shop, newsagent, and supermarket, means that the end of the milkman may be only a few years away.
This, when you think about it, is a bit odd. We are constantly being berated as an increasingly lazy nation, we have everything delivered nowadays – books, shopping, vegetable boxes, electronics – and yet the one thing that was traditionally always delivered to our door is something most of us don’t want any more. Quite peculiar.
Dodo Rating:
Fizzy Pop Deliveries
Your milkman didn’t just deliver milk, of course; he could deliver eggs, butter, cheese, bread; and, most exciting of all, fizzy pop.
But we are not talking cans of Coca-Cola or 7up here; oh no, these were own-brand glass bottles of cherryade, orangeade, limeade, and, most special of all, cream soda.
Waking up on a Saturday morning to find a lukewarm bottle of brightly coloured pop on your doorstep was more exciting than you’d imagine. Sometimes the rich kids would have a veritable rainbow of fizziness outside the door, soon to send them into spasms of hyperactivity only cured in those days by a jolly good clout round the ear.
Life was so much simpler then.
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Christmas Boxes
Boxing Day gets its name from the small earthenware boxes that the poor would use in medieval times to save for Christmas treats. They would smash these open and spend the contents on something special in the festive season.
This idea changed somewhat over the years, and became the name for gifts given to tradesmen on or around Christmas time. Households would put aside a few coins or a bottle of booze for the milkman, postman, and other regular callers, and hand them out during Christmas week.
The practice has pretty much died out in recent years. When I handed a bottle of wine to my postman a couple of years ago, he said it was the only gift he had received that year.
So why have we stopped rewarding those who deliver to our doorsteps, come rain or shine? Are we less generous than our parents and grandparents? Are times tougher? Are people less deserving?
I think the answer is quite different. We get fewer door-to-door callers, and those that do come are not always the same people. Think about it, how many of us still have a milkman delivering to our door? And when it comes to postmen and women, we used to have the same person delivering at about the same time every day. If we wanted to give the postman his Christmas box, we knew we could catch him at 7.15 on Christmas Eve morning (or whatever time he usually delivered). Mum would lie in wait with a pound note or a bottle of plonk, and hand it over with words of Christmas cheer and best wishes for the year ahead. Nowadays my mail can-arrive any time from 7.00 in the morning till 4.00 in the afternoon, and I rarely have the same postman twice.
We no longer have friendly relationships with the people who deliver to our door – milkmen used to be notorious for knocking up bored housewives, but I bet that doesn’t happen all that much any more, either – and, as a result, we don’t feel the need to offer them a gift at Christmas. I think this is a shame, and is a tradition that I would love to see restored.
As would my postman.
Dodo Rating:
ON THE HIGH STREET
Where we shopped, banked, parked, and hung about …
Petrol Pump Attendants
You’d pull up at the petrol station in your Rover 3500, Ford Capri, or perhaps Austin Allegro [insert your own nostalgia-inducing make and model here], and onto the forecourt would waddle a chap in overalls.
‘Fill her up,’ you would cry cheerfully from behind the wheel. And fill her up he would, as well as checking the oil, water, and tyres, while he was at it.
You may find it hard to believe, but this was how everyone got their petrol until the onset of self-service stations in the 1970s. You didn’t even have to get out of the car to pay. The attendant would take your money, pop back to his kiosk, and return with a fistful of change.
That, my friends, was proper customer service.
The idea of the petrol pump attendant actually harks back to a time before the garage forecourt, when fuel would be delivered to the homes of the privileged few who could afford to own a motor vehicle. It seemed natural for that personal service to extend to all customers when cars became more affordable and widely available.
One of the last attendants in the country, Dudley Oliver of Bentley’s Garage in Exmouth, finally hung up his nozzle in 2010, not for lack of business, but rather because the ancient pumps were beginning to fall foul of health and safety laws, and would prove too costly to replace. The garage continues to trade for repairs and, in a nice touch, for free oil, water, and tyre checks, with Mr Oliver, kept on the payroll to valet cars.
So it isn’t all bad news, although for one elderly lady customer it did truly mark the end: ‘I’ve never had to put petrol in my car myself and I’m not going to start now.’
Dodo Rating:
Green Shield Stamps
Before the days of loyalty cards and Nectar points, we had Green Shield Stamps. These were small, about the size of a postage stamp, and dispensed from machines at the tills of many supermarkets, petrol stations, and corner shops. Customers collected them and stuck them into books; completed books could then be traded in for items of differing value from a catalogue, or from one of the many Green Shield Stamp catalogue shops.
You had to collect loads of the buggers to be able to get hold of anything remotely worthwhile, but that didn’t stop the little green things proliferating across the ’60s and ’70s.
You would need to spend a little over £32 to fill one book. That was a lot of money in those days, equivalent to over £350 today. That one book, which would have taken you considerable time to fill, could be exchanged for items such as a mouth organ or a brush and comb set.
More serious collectors, those who stacked up piles of books, could go for rather grander fare. In the 1960s, 33¼ books would get you a Kenwood Chef, an item many kitchens would have been proud to have. Of course, the amount of money you would have to spend to obtain said food mixer was about the price of a small car. Although, to be fair, if you were spending the money on your weekly shop and petrol anyway, it was just a case of being patient and licki
ng lots of stamps.
The company was founded in 1958 by Richard Tompkins, who adapted an idea from the United States to fit the British and Irish markets. It was hugely successful for nearly two decades, and there were many imitators, including S&H Pink Stamps, Yellow Stamps, Blue Star, and Happy Clubs. At one point in the early ’60s there was even a ‘Stamp War’ when Fine Fare supermarkets started offering the Pink Stamps, and Tesco countered by giving away Green Shield Stamps for the first time.
The business came a cropper in the late-’70s, when competition between supermarkets hit new heights, and customers were more interested in cheap produce than collecting stamps. When Tesco pulled out of the scheme in 1977, the writing was on the wall for the little green shield.
The company limped on until 1983, when it stopped issuing stamps altogether. There was an attempt to reinvent the scheme in the late ’80s, but by 1991 the Green Shield Stamp company was no more.
It does live on, however, in some form at least. The Green Shield Stamp catalogue shops were rebranded as Argos in 1973, and continue trading to this day, with people actually paying cash for items that previous generations would get for free after purchasing 2,500 packets of fish fingers over 13 years, or something like that.
And, of course, the concept was brought up to date in recent years by the introduction of loyalty cards, air miles, and Nectar points.
Dodo Rating:
High Street Names
This is a roll call of chains and shops that were once on every high street in the country, but are now no longer with us. How many did you use to shop in?
Abbey National, ABC Cinemas, Alfred Marks, Andy’s Records,
Anglian Building Society, Athena, Bejam, Bradford & Bingley,
Brentford Nylons, C&A, Canon Cinemas, Chelsea Girl,
Concept Man, Courts, Curtess, Deep Pan Pizza Co., DER,
Dewhursts, DH Evans, Dickens & Jones, Dillons, Dixons,