Old equipment your grandparents used

[letsgomaths]

Inspired by the "silly things your mother did" thread, what gadgets or items do you remember your grandparents using, that would seem old-fashioned now?

Mine had a twin tub washing machine, and used it for thirty-five years: appliances were made to last in those days!

They never had a cassette player: all music was played on the Bush radiogram, which had auto-change.

My grandmother was a keen photographer, but never had photos printed: she always used slides, to be looked at with a projector and screen, or more informally, a tabletop slide viewer.

Black bakelite telephone with a dial, and cone round the mouthpiece, rented from BT.

I still have a laundry pulley in the kitchen. Works really well for drying things that I dont want to toast in the tumble dryer.

I also have an outside toilet. There is no way I would want to use it this time of year my arse would freeze to the seat. However in the summer it's great for the kids. If they've been playing in the garden they dont have to traipse indoors wet/filthy/sandy to use the toilet. A lot of houses in my area still have an outdoor toilet as well as a wash house and a coal shed. Some have knocked them through to build an extension like my neighbours, however we havent. It's great not having the washing machine/tumble dryer in my kitchen.

We had a laundry pulley, dried everything really quickly. Wish I had one now, but nowhere to put it.

My Gran washed all her laundry by hand, she just had a wee spinner to get rid of the water. How she managed sheets when she was in her 70s I really don't know.

She also had crotched antimacassars on her best sofas.

Thanks @AuntieStella

I remember most thing on here, I've even used some of them! Never heard of a gas poker though, thanks for the explanation. Are they still around to buy these days?

@kennelmaid I've just googled, and it seems you can. Ours was connected to the domestic gas supply, so you need a CORGI fitter, but it looks as if you can get them on LPG and camping gas cylinders too

There is a Sheila Maid company that still sells them - they're brilliant, especially above an Aga.

My Grandfather had a magic lantern and developed things on to slides in glass. He wanted to be an electrical engineer, but his father decided that he was going to be a pharmacist - he qualified in 1906 and I still have his MPS, so I could, in theory, go into a pharmacy and hang it on the wall and start dispensing. However, he could make his own tablets, lipsticks etc.
Until they built a new road in Coppull, his old shop was still a pharmacy - it was at 64 Spendmore Lane, and I have some old adverts with his name on. He was born in 1873 - the generations are long in my family.
My mother used a button hook at school to do up her boots - she wasn't allowed to wear clogs.
My grandmother used a laundry for her washing and all the sheets had the little coloured material stickers on to identify her sheets.
My great aunt had a feather bed that I slept on as a child when I stayed with her - you had to push it back into place in the morning and there was a ewer and basin set on the wash-stand in her spare bedroom.
My mother bought a (very expensive) Kenwood chef in the 1960s and later bought the liquidiser after she calculated that making her own castor sugar would pay for it.
We had a radiogram that played a stack of records except that they didn't all drop down individually.
We had a Ewbank carpet sweeper and one of those cabinets with a drop down shelf that was later replaced with a cupboard that my mother made that went around a corner.
When I was little the toilet on the first floor had a chain that disappeared mysteriously through the 10ft ceiling into the 'tank room' where the cold water tank was - no need for a toilet brush with a 14ft head of water to flush.
The walls of the toilet were covered in laconite up to the dado rail - it was a sort of tile affect but on a hardboard backing.
We had a range when I was little, and this was replaced by a boiler that heated the hot water - an Autocrat in crimson with a top in black. It ran on smokeless fuel and was extremely temperamental, although great to put ginger nuts on the top so that they went all chewy - if you left them too long they burned; It was also used for drying trays of dried fruit for the Christmas cake. The fuel it used was produced by British Gas - then the gas board - and when the quality got very poor the morning room used to fill with sulphurous smoke. It was replaced in 1970 with an oil boiler and we had central heating - but on the ground floor only.
My parents were given a hostess trolley for a wedding present - it plugged in and had 4 pyrex dishes for keeping veg hot. There was a plug and a kettle could be plugged in to boil extra hot water for the hot water jug. It tended to be only used at Christmas and Easter.
The house next door had bells and a beel board in the kitchen - it was 7 bedrooms and detached. Our house was the end of a terrace of 3 and we didn't have bells, but we did have a butler's pantry and 8 fireplaces.
There was an old chimney breast in the kitchen so there must have been a copper at one point. We had a back vesstibule and a built in coal-place - we used to get half a ton of fuel every month and there were boards that slit into place to keep the fuel in just after a delivery.
Next to the coalplace and around the corner was an outside toilet and a bricked up backdoor which originally must have been around the other side of the house. In March you had to be very brave and desperate to go around the back of the house in the face of a gale-force wind and not through the morning room, along the hall and up the stairs.
My df used to polish the silver every Saturday morning and when I was little I used to play washing-up with the canteen they were given - 8 of everything and I used to empty it all out of the canteen and swish it around on the carpet before putting every knife fork and spoon back in their places. The box smelled wonderful, a sort of spicy wood smell.
We had 9 camphor-wood chests in the house and the one on the landing had a curved top, and I used to love sitting on it and using it as a slide;
I can remember my mother using a posser that had been either her dm's or dgm's that she used to wash the net curtains in the bath with a good amount of household ammonia to remove any tar from coal/wood smoke. Hairbrushes had their bristles washed in water with ammonia added to remove any grease that had collected.

Btw, I'm not that old! DD's only 23, the generations are very long in my family.

My grandmother used to rent her gas cooker from the Gas Board, she had it for so long, that in the end it was given to her. This would have been in the 1950s.

Does anyone else remember wooden draining boards? they were so difficult to keep clean and dry and always smelt slightly.

@eddiemairswife

Not equipment as such, but does anyone remember holding a newspaper up before the newly-lit fire to encourage it not to go out?

Yes!! All part of the ritual of The Fire

My Grandparents

Coal fire - no central heating
Clothes washed in sink and then a Washboard to get water out of clothes before drying on a pulley in the kitchen
Fridge but no freezer
Carpet sweeper - no hoover
They had a party line telephone
Black & white tv
Wireless

My parents got exciting things like

Central heating
Freezer
Twin tub washing machine
Colour tv
Hifi

newtb that's a wonderful description!

Op, you make me feel old. As a kid we had
Twin tub
Black and white TV
Photo slides
White bakelite dial phone (number = 3882)
Parkray fire.
Other than that my grandparents were fairly well to do.

We also had a mincer and a bean slicer.

My mother was too much of a snob to be behind the times. When front loading washing machines appeared, we got one. When microwaves appeared, we got one.
My dad made a toasting fork and we had a chestnut roasting pan.
We had an upright hoover.

My Mum had a copper boiler, a mangol, washboard and used a knob of blue to make whites whiter. She had a Bex Bissell cleaner too. My gran used to rest her kettle on the fire to boil. There was a sort of a flat place at edge of fire she rested it on to boil.

Just remembered we had a safe in back yard for keeping eggs and pots of homemade jam in to keep them cool. My Mum would never put eggs on the fridge.

An enormous mangle! It was very environmentally friendly really. If you were skilled, as she was, some things came out as good as pressed.
Maybe they should make a comeback, they massively reduced drying time.

She had a Eubank too.

@FamilyOfAliens I’ve just inherited my family pull-down. It is a bit older than yours, just wooden no glass. My Nan and grandad bought it to go into their new house in 1932! So it could be lot older. Wow writing it down I just realised it’s nearly 100 yrs old. Everyone else wanted to throw it in the skip. Until the day she left the house 70 years later she still had a freestanding kitchen with a pantry and beautiful lattice lead windows. The new owner ripped everything out and modernised it. In the shed that was still standing strong was pictures that my dear late mum had stuck in there in the 40s. Whilst I was growing up with her my family and I all crammed into any bed space that we could find. We used to use her mother fur coats on top of our blankets to keep us warm. Plus potties under the beds. Gives me creeps now. We would wash our clothes in the bath(after the copper cylindar was taken out) In the summer of 76 my and practically the whole class dug up the bottom of the garden, excavation found lots of interesting artefacts. At the end of the the summer we covered it in. And Nan was so pleased cause it saved her getting in a man to rotovate and charge a fortune. She over wintered it with manure and come spring had the best growing patch in the area. She had a canny mind. .

my grandmother used a soap saver, laundry helper (it goes by various names) it's a metal cage for soap shards that you then swish or place under running water to give bubbles. even in the 1950's i knew it was very old.
i honestly wouldn't mind one now, we use bar soap and i really hate wasting the little left over shards.

My grandmother used to have a gadget to swish shards of soap into a new marble effect bar. I suspect the “savings” made in making a new bare of soap every twenty bars took a while to outweigh the cost of the gadget.

@Ladybird69

That wasn’t our actual kitchen cabinet - just a stock image from Google. Ours was also wooden and it got covered in a thin layer of grease that I used to love running my nail along! What a gross child I was.

We’ve just bought a house built in 1929 and it still had the old bathroom, including the mirror on the wall. I would loved to have kept it but the bath was short and narrow as you can see from the photo and there was (obviously) no shower so it was with great reluctance that we had it all removed.

It may seem a shame when people modernise old houses but we needed to have a bathroom that was practical and suitable for today’s lifestyles. The previous owner had lived in the house for 76 years and she made a book of photos of the house which she gave to us when we completed the sale, so those images are preserved and will be passed down though our family for posterity.

I've remembered another one: plum-coloured bathroom suite, with a bidet. The water did not come out taps, but from under the rim, like a toilet bowl.

@FamilyOfAliens our two cabinets sound identical. I’m going to sound hypercritical now but I’m going to paint it! It’s too dark for my house and my mum didn’t mind. It’s a shame that we can’t keep old fittings but we have grown and our needs change. I also used to live in a conversation area and the board wanted The whole village to remove our outdoor lighting, despite having no street lights to use.