What was it like growing up in the 50’s/60’s?

[WhyBeDennyDifferent]

I’m feeling a bit nostalgic about my mum and have been pondering what her childhood was like growing up in the 50s/60s in Northern Ireland.
Would anyone care to share their experiences? Even just daft things like what sort of dinners you had, how far you had to walk to school etc. What was expected of you as a child? How did your parents bring you up?

I’m aware everyone’s experiences will vary, I was just looking for a general idea.

Thank you

Who else can remember their Mum's Co-op number?

Shameless bump for more posts.

These are great!

I remember Sunny Stories Ada. I have a letter I wrote to my aunt when I was 6, thanking her for sending me Sunny Stories. At the time I was evacuated with my mother and baby brother.

I did not know about the Co-op number, but remember saving "Green Shield Stamps" and also the little "Family Allowance" book our mother would take to the post office every week.

When we were unwell the doctor came to the house. The sheets and our night clothes would be changed so as not to be seen in a ‘state’ by the doctor.

My Grandfather had a heart attack and was carried up the stairs to bed and changed into clean pyjamas, despite normally sleeping in his vest. It was ‘not right’ for the doctor to see him almost unconscious on the floor.

I can’t remember why an ambulance wasn’t called instead, I think we had to wait for the doctor to approve that.

I had a Saturday job in the Co-op and had to give out the stamps. Four to a pound. There was a special folding technique for counting them.

I’ve just remembered that in the last year of Primary I used to run the National Savings Stamp scheme along with another girl.

This involved going round all the class rooms, collecting the money and marking the little books, totalling all the money, getting it checked by a teacher then taking the cash to the post office at lunchtime(on our own), buying the stamps and giving them out. A lot of responsibility for two 10/11 year olds.

Born in 1958. Much of this is familiar.
The same meals every week.
Sunday roast.
Monday - cold meat leftover from roast.
Tuesday - more leftover roast minced and in gravy.
Wednesday -Stew and dumplings
Thursday - meat and potato pie
Friday - fish
Saturday -chops
Puddings were fruit pies or tinned fruit and carnation.
Nothing between meals, ever. My dad grew fruit and veg and kept chickens. The fruit was made into pies and crumbles. We never had out of season fruit so strawberries were a treat only for a couple of weeks a year.
We had measles.
My mum used to make my clothes and we got a new dress for Easter.
We used to go off for the day to the woods to build dens and play and no one knew where we were. Or we had huge groups with skipping ropes across the road.
I walked to school alone at 5 which was about a mile away across several roads.
Got our first car when I was about 11.
Teachers used to throw the blackboard rubber at us. My friend got caned across the palm of her hand.
We were poor and we knew it, but so was everyone else. My mother started working when I was 8 and we didn't notice any difference,though no doubt that meant less financial worry for my parents.
I spent hours at the library, still remember the smell of it.

Yes that was a lot of responsibility, what clever children to work out those sums. This reminds me of how when I was 15 I wanted to work in Woolworths. They gave me quite a difficult maths test (basic sums) to do without a calculator!

Similar to you having been given a responsibility at school, when I was eight, I was allowed to make tea with another slightly older girl of about eleven for the teachers' tea break in the morning. It was thrilling and seemed like an honour.

We would first make the tea. The older girl must have lit the gas stove and put the large old style kettle on, then poured the water into the tea pot though. I think she was the eldest in her family and used to doing things like this. We would then set out all the cups, saucers, sugar, milk, biscuits and teapot and carry them on trays to the staff room. Afterwards we were allowed to have a cup of tea and a biscuit ourselves, alone in the tiny kitchen. Bliss.

I remember our Co-op number. Bizarrely, it is the same as my driving licence number!

When I was 11 I was made "School Captain" (as in head girl). One of the responsibilities of the role was to answer the school telephone when it rang (a canter across the hall to the office) and I learnt to say "May I help you?" not "Can I help you?" as being correct! Also the boy School Captain and I both hated this job and would hope the other one would be first there! (I am still in contact with him and we now laugh about our childhood irritants!)

I really do like the idea of the same meals each week - I know it must have got tedious but god I'm fed up of meal planning!

I was in hospital when I was about 4. There were no beds in the children's ward, so I was put into the women's ward. My parents were only allowed to visit at (very strictly observed) visiting hours - and the day of my operation, they were told not to come and visit as my operation clashed with visiting time. However, my operation was delayed. No-one told me about any of this, so I was just left in my bed, wondering why my parents hadn't come to see me

Reading this has jogged more memories.

Wearing Clark's sandals in the garden with the toes cut out when my feet grew to squeeze the most possible wear out of them.
Getting next door neighbour over to shoot an adder in the garden with his (probably illegally held) WW2 service revolver.
The first TV programme I remember was Robin Hood starring Richard Green.
My dad getting my little sister's dresses in off the washing line and standing them up in a line down the hall as they were frozen stiff.
My nan's scratchy lace handkerchief that she insisted on rubbing my face with (once making me late for school so I had to stand outside the Head's office for the morning).
The smell of paints and glues at school.
Being slapped on the back of my leg by a teacher for tipping a milk straw into a bin after being told not to
A little boy called "Nosey" Parker who picked his nose all day - no one wanted to sit next to him.
My nan cutting a slice of bread into a chop shape and frying it in breadcrumbs so her DH didn't know she could only afford a chop for him that meal.
My nan also used to cover all cuts of meat in a suet crust to make it stretch. Her pastry was legendary - it could be used a paving slabs!
One last thing - I have mentioned it on here before - my nan used to blag the purple paper oranges were wrapped in at the greengrocers for loo paper!

What a lovely thread!

We would also use the tissue that oranges were wrapped in in the outside loo! And I can remember Granma's Coop number. 40518.

Throughout the 50's we lived with her. Her garden was small but had a dessert apple tree, a cooking apple tree, a plum tree, a damson tree, a gooseberry bush and a blackcurrant bush She would make jams and bottle fruit for the winter, pick blackberries from hedgerows and make crumbles and jam. There would be trays of apples throughout the winter under her bed keeping cool...it was certainly cold enough in her bedroom. People were more self sufficient and allotments in great demand. Once I had a salad with dandelion leaves in it instead of lettuce...it was ok but a bit strong tasting.

If I'd eaten my dinner [tripe and onions was a struggle] I would get one square of 'Five Boys' chocolate. Sometimes on Saturdays Mum would take me out for a Chinese meal in the city centre, that was a real treat. Sunday roast was in turn beef one week, then lamb, then pork. Chicken was too expensive and only for Christmas dinner. We had rabbit one time, I wasn't happy with eating that after seeing it in the kitchen waiting to be cooked. Every breakfast was porridge with a bit of treacle. On Saturdays we had crumpets toasted on a fork over the fire, then whitebait or cod roe on toast.

Mum would make all of her clothes and mine. Dresses, skirts, blouses and knit cardigans and jumpers. Gran would pick up wood for the fire whenever she saw some lying around to supplement the coal deliveries. We weren't well off. In a cupboard there would be bags of string and rubber bands which she had picked up, and wrapping paper from birthdays and Christmas to be re used.

I never felt that I went without though, I was not aware then of how far the money had to stretch. I had all I needed, didn't feel deprived of anything. All kids were in the same boat. All 40 of us [bar one who later went on to be a teacher] passed our 11 plus and went to grammar school. I got caned on my backside once at school but can't remember what for now. I wasn't that bothered by it though.

I was told once not to swig the free school milk from the bottle as there was a health issue going on. I swigged mine from the bottle...and got hepatitis [jaundice]. I was unwell for weeks.

Oh yes! Our next door neighbour had the full range of fruit bushes too. There’s a point at which gooseberries actually become edible if you leave them on the bush long enough.

TooManyMiles

You've practically described my own 1960s childhood. A beautifully evocative post. Thank you.

And I got shivers down the spine at this: Music lessons might come from the BBC radio and the children would have a booklet to follow and learn particular songs over the term.

Sighs at the nostalgia

Washing done in a dolly tub agitated by a posher.
Tinned fruit for pudding had to be accompanied by bread and butter.
Aged 7 in the early fifties I would walk into town to do my mother’s shopping on Saturday, catching a bus home. I spent ages browsing Woolworths. I remember sugar being weighed into deftly folded blue paper bags - ie the bags were formed from flat sheets of what seemed to be a greaseproof paper.
An indoor bathroom, but no wc. That was outside the back door. Chamber pots under the beds for night time use.

Born in 1960. We lived in married quarters or Forces approved rentals until 1975. I only really remember stuff from 1966, the year we came back from Hong Kong. It was cold, and everyone smoked. Food was mostly brown. Fruit was non-existent apart from bananas, which were a weekly treat. Unlike other families though, we had more than one recipe book and DM would spend ages looking for ingredients. DF bought spices mail order for his curries, and got our meat at auction for freezing. School was OK, as I learned how not to attract attention. Sweets...DF was a dentist. We had some dreadful cars, always breaking down. That's something you don't get now, the communal effort to get started on a frosty morning. Coal smoke, mmm.

Ooh I think I remember a sunny story Ada. It was about children decorating a shed I think.

I remember being taken to the London Lido.

My grandma lost two brothers in ww2 and her sister ran away with a GI.

DH's MIL was sent to Wales to evacuate. Fortunately with family but she became bitter about it. My mother's family took a large house in Cornwall and the wives and children went there for the war.

I remember a lot of things that have already been mentioned, my siblings and I were born in the sixties and my eldest sibling was 3 when I was born and my parents had just moved into a 3 bed terrace house. There was a coal fire in the front room and if it was really cold in the winter mum would make up a fire in one of the bedrooms, no hot water in the kitchen, a condemned geyser in the downstairs bathroom (no wash hand basin) which was a single skin addition to the house. The windows were sash windows and the top ones slid down when it was windy (and ice formed on the inside during the winter). There was just a butler sink in the kitchen and some shelving, mum did the washing by hand and then put it through the mangle. We didn't have a phone, car or holidays but we did have a black and white TV.

Dad walked out on us when I was 3 and mum had to claim social security, food was basic, there were no treats. Sacks of potatoes were delivered by the greengrocer, coal was delivered once a week, the "coalman" had to carry the sacks of coal through the house to the coalbunker in the garden during the winter and we had to leave the front and back doors open until he had filled up the coalbunker, the bloke was black from head to foot from the coal dust and mum used to have to sweep the carpets after he had gone, the milkman delivered milk 6 days a week, we went to church every Sunday.

When I was three my eldest sibling caught the measles from someone at his school, my older sibling caught it next and then I caught it, I was so poorly i was unconscious and the doctor was called in, he said that I was too ill to be moved and he didn't think I would live, he came to the house every day for 3 weeks until I finally regained consciousness, I couldn't speak properly, see properly or walk properly for a long time afterwards.

Mum taught us all how to read and write before we started school (there were no pre-schools or playschools) and because she was a single parent on benefit we were eligible for free school meals and school uniform grants, we rarely saw our dad, he was supposed to have us every Saturday but he hardly ever turned up, never paid any maintenance and never even bought us anything. Mum used to save green shield stamps and the co-op stamps to get us birthday and Christmas presents.

We played out in the street from a young age because hardly anyone had cars in our street, we have photos that you can see 2or 3 cars in the whole street, we walked almost everywhere.

School was a 20 minute walk away and by the time I was in my last year in infants we walked to and from school on our own, I used to hate waiting outside the adjacent junior school for my siblings because they came out 10 minutes later than the infants, when we got home from school we would get changed out of our uniform and if it wasn't raining we would go out to play. We played marbles in the gutters, cowboy's and Indians, cops and robbers, cricket, football, chase, hide and seek, what's the time Mr wolf, skipping games, hopscotch, there were about 35 kids in our end of the street so there was always kids out playing, parents would periodically come out on their doorsteps to check on the kids and there was a couple of mums who wouldn't let their kids out on their own so they would sit outside of one of their houses chatting while keeping an eye on all the kids that were out playing.

Anyone remember bunty comics? And the paper dolls you used to cut out and put the paper clothes on? Also I loved the boys comics like Victor and beano but wasn't allowed them.
Remember blackboard rubbers and chalk whizzing through the air in class! Being milk monitor and ink monitor. Catapults with ink filled bits of blotting paper.
Morning assembly complete with school band. You never sat in a seat till year 6 in assembly. Lining up on your knees to have your skirt length measured in the 60 s. Berets and sashes and straw hats in summer and always thick wool blazer. Conkers and British bulldog. French skipping saving up elastic bands for it. And the glorious summers of freedom and exploring all day long.
Pie and mash shops with live eels in tank in the windows ( never ate jellied eels.)
Shopping took an age going from shop to shop. Wagon wheels that were huge! Jamboree bags and sherbot lemons. Remember my first pair of tights (nylon) chilblains, open fire with roasted chestnuts, crumpets and toast done on a fork. .......

Oh I do remember Bunty comics (and much more from this thread) and Diana too as mentioned earlier. I had both and one came on a Wednesday and one on a Saturday. I still think of Hermione and her amazing wardrobe.

Another thing I remember is women aspiring to fur coats and fur rooms in big department stores. And Sundays, such quiet Sundays with the Sunday papers.

The other thing I remember are thriving seaside towns. Places like Margate, Southend, Bournemouth where people went on holiday in the UK. And people going on holiday by train too. Sometimes my mother would put me on the train, aged 7 or 8, give the guard a shilling to keep an eye on me, and an hour and forty minutes later my grandma would meet me at Victoria. There were also dining cars with silver service on the trains.

School uniform that was bought to “grow in to”; my big coat lasted from age 8 to 14. Thick brown regulation knockers with pockets. Turning our school skirts over at the waist to make them shorter. Felt hats, because the previous group had backcombed their hair to hide their berets.
For those who liked BBC music programmes - my school was very musical and we used to go to the BBC in London to record the songs. You may have sung along with me. 😊

Knickers not knockers... 😮