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Original poster

What Was Wrong with the 70s????

228 replies

Menofsteel · 25/10/2020 01:07

I wasn’t born until 1980 but my husband is a 60s child. He’s showed me public information films from the 70s and just introduced me to the original Survivors. I saw the remake with Julie Graham? Why is everything from the 70s so much creepier?!? I’m starting to believe we are a bit softer nowadays Confused.

OP posts:
Acornsgalore · 25/10/2020 20:18

@Frdd

Beige corduroy featured a lot in my life.
I had a pair of wine and navy corduroy "loons"
WitchesSpelleas · 25/10/2020 20:20

Oh, yes, the twin tub. I remember sitting on the kitchen floor when my mum had the twin tub out. Afterwards, the clothes went into a scary, rickety, brittle-plastic electric spin-dryer before going on the line.

We had no freezer in the 70s bar the ice-box in the top of the fridge. My mum would make ice cream using powder - I can still remember the powdery taste. It was about 1982 when we got a freezer - a big chest one that went into the garage. The excitement of shopping at Bejam!

CaptainMyCaptain · 25/10/2020 20:21

@Frdd

Wallpaper 😂😂
Why is that funny? I had to do this too.

The reason why the school text books could be used year after year is that there was no National Curriculum. Until the exam years schools could teach what they wanted.

merrymouse · 25/10/2020 20:21

I lived in a naice part of SW London and definitely wasn’t allowed to play out, partly because of stranger danger, partly because of cars.

Looking back I can think of at least 2 child abuse scandals locally, but the targets were children who were captive in some way (e.g. in care), not picked up off the street.

I think perhaps because my mum worked in a hospital she was hyper vigilant about accidents.

Having said that, I remember the 70s as a lovely time when the sun was always shining. I wasn’t really aware of anything that happened outside my school or family.

FairFridaythe13th · 25/10/2020 20:22

@MrsAvocet - my dad was an engineer and used to show us his slide rule. He used a calculator rarely and only to double check a calculation. He drew his plans on a draftsman table with a t-square - with pencil!! - on giant sheets of paper, and had a company make up his little 3D building plans (that we used as toys). I can’t get my head around the tech they use now!

CaptainMyCaptain · 25/10/2020 20:26

I used a slide rule and log tables for my maths O level in 1971. Never used them again afterwards.

WitchesSpelleas · 25/10/2020 20:27

My dad had a calculator - it was brick-like and had tiny red LED numbers. Being allowed to play with the calculator was a massive treat in those days!

Frdd · 25/10/2020 20:28

id forgotten about the wallpaper that’s all.

CaptainMyCaptain · 25/10/2020 20:30

@Frdd

id forgotten about the wallpaper that’s all.
Fair enough! It was the first homework of the new year.
RedRiverShore · 25/10/2020 20:33

I can remember covering my school books with paper and the log tables but I just had the school log table. When I started work there was a big plug in calculator which was about the size of a printer which the whole office used

FredtheFerret · 25/10/2020 20:33

I'd forgotten covering books in wallpaper! Yes!

MrsAvocet · 25/10/2020 20:33

FairFriday my engineer husband still has his draughtsman's table in the loft, from his 1980's University course and the first few years of his working life. Even though of course he uses sophisticated CAD packages nowadays and will never need to manually draw anything again he can't bring himself to throw it out! There is something lovely about old tools etc that a computer will never fully replace. My children find it hard to understand what life was like before the internet and were absolutely stunned to hear that we didn't have a computer of any kind in the house until the late 90s. Its sad in a way. There may be lots of new skills developing but many old ones are being lost too.

Jellykat · 25/10/2020 20:35

I was born in '63, yes the 70s were tough looking back, but at the time it was all the norm..

Yes to ice on windows and no central heating, yes to playing in the alley all day amongst huge bins, knock down ginger, the rag and bone man, everything washed in the bath, smog thick outside closed windows, power cuts and yes to being a 'latch key kid'.. but boy what brilliant memories!

FairFridaythe13th · 25/10/2020 20:36

Dad never used CAD (after his time) and I see it up close a lot now - even the virtual reality stuff where you can put your hand through walls and move things around. He would have been bloody amazed!

FortunesFave · 25/10/2020 20:36

Oo I've just remembered how on our estate, the older kids who must have been 12 to my 7 or 8 would take a big group of us little ones to the swimming baths about 3 miles away on the bus. One of them would tell you "We're all going swimming on Saturday, bring 20p and a towel"

I think it was 20p to get in and you'd have 2p for a bag of crisps after. Or if we were really rich, we'd pool all the money and buy a few bags of chips to share.

What strikes me now is that our Mums always trusted these older kids to look after us and they always did!

A big gang of about 20 kids getting on the bus together. Nobody told those older kids to take us...they just did. Some days they'd do things for us like make a "zoo" and takes us round it one at a time on a sort of tour...there'd be a jar with caterpillars and a box with a frog in it...and then the older girls who'd knit you things...they must have been about 15 and lived with a churchy Mum so they didn't go out much but they always sat in their garden knitting....they made me a beautiful drawstring bag and some doll's clothes.

FairFridaythe13th · 25/10/2020 20:37

I still have dad old drawing kits from uni - this was just after the war. Absolutely beautiful and destined to go to DS.

nildesparandum · 25/10/2020 20:39

My children were born in 1969 and 1972. I can remember us living through all this.I now shudder to think one of their favourite tv programmes was ''Jim will fix it''.Young children would sit on Saville's knee and get their ''Jim fixed it for me ''medal.

Graphista · 25/10/2020 20:40

@merrymouse among experts "stranger danger" is now widely held to have been the worst and most endangering policy ever!

Because for most csa victims inc myself the "stranger" was in our friends and family, even in our own homes.

They think it's going to take decades to properly undo the damage it's caused.

Acornsgalore · 25/10/2020 20:48

My dad was a civil engineer and I remember him working for hours on Sunday afternoons; pages and pages of hand-written maths calculations spread across the dining room table which would probably take him 10 minutes nowadays, if that.

Graphista · 25/10/2020 20:53

MrsAvocet - bet his kit is worth a fortune! There are people that love collecting this stuff hope it's well stored.

@FortunesFave I was one of the "older kids" in that sort of scenario, but into the early 80's.

As the eldest of 3 siblings and umpteen cousins, plus army life is such that you sort of have a lot of "honorary cousins" in the other kids on the base.

We used to take the "little ones" to the parks, taught them to ride bikes and skateboards, swim, tell time...

Though admittedly we did "use" them in a good natured way too, if we were feeling lazy we'd send them into our houses if we were playing nearby to get us drinks or toys we wanted (everyone was in and out of each other's houses), but we'd do something for them in return, or we'd have "war games" where eg one side of the st was one team and the other the opposing team, in a sort of "capture the flag" type set up and the little ones would be "runners" or "spies"

Being army and mostly away from extended family our neighbours became a surrogate one I suppose.

I'm still friends with many from that time although mostly on sm now as were scattered to the 4 corners of the earth! It's actually been really lovely seeing the "little ones" grow up and have kids of their own. Makes me feel old sometimes too though.

MrsAvocet · 25/10/2020 20:55

I've just seen on Twitter that Frank Bough has died. That brought back childhood memories too. My Dad never missed watching Grandstand on Saturdays. I remember we all had to be very quiet as the football scores started coming through on some kind of printer that came up on the bottom of the screen.

Ginfordinner · 25/10/2020 21:10

Yes to log tables for logs and trigonometry. No calculators for O level maths in 1975. I left school in 1977 and used adding machines with pull down handles. We had to feed all the cheques through a microfiche machine, the British Rail computer was in Darlington, and we used to take it in turns to drop the ticker tape in at King's Cross station to be sent to Darlington to be processed. We used to get a computer printout a few days later.

Doobiedooo · 25/10/2020 21:17

@MrsAvocet omg frank bough! My brother used to wash him, tho our mum didn’t approve...

70s had shit food too.

Doobiedooo · 25/10/2020 21:17

Watch, even

Ginfordinner · 25/10/2020 21:37

70s had shit food too.

I think it depended where you lived, and where your parents were from

I grew up in South London, and my German born, Cordon Bleu qualified mum would buy all sorts of what might have been considered unusual foods from the local delicatessen. We ate things like home made pizza, fresh ravioli, Polish latkes and sausage, a lot of pasta, delicious German cakes, Chinese etc as well as fish and chips and roasts. My mum was a fabulous cook, and she instilled a love of good food in both my sister and myself.