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

There was a shortage of everything when I started school, so the rubber buttons from old liberty bodices were useful for rubbing out pencil.

Hope you don't mind another memory this time about holidays. My nan and granddad took my sister and I to Pontins in Brixham for two weeks every summer from 1962 until 1967. We motored down from Essex before motorways were built and it took at most of the day. Granddad used to whistle all the way, quite tunefully thankfully.
We went self catering and after breakfast my DSis and I went off to kids' club or tandem cycled around the site. We swam, we played and only resurfaced for our dinner in the evening. I used to lose half a stone every holiday (I was a chubby child).
My nan would put on her pearls and we'd go to the ballroom for the evening's entertainment. She would buy cocktail cigarettes and was very glamorous.
There was a weekly talent show. I remember the entertainment officer's nose being put out of joint one year by two young couples who did a marvelous Mammas and Papas impersonation knocking his Napoleon XIV (They are coming to take me away haha) into a cocked hat.
My granddad entered the knobbly knees competition and I feel off a donkey right at the start of the donkey derby race.
My DSis dressed as a "Spoonful of sugar" for the fancy dress competition in a cardboard box covered in white paper. My granddad was very resourceful.
Meanwhile Mum and Dad started to travel abroad and went to Torremolinos in 1963 when it was a one donkey village. We still have the cine films.

fourquennelles I have not thought about that Napoleon song for about fifty years and now DH and I are singing "They're coming to take me away haha......"

Sorry Clawdy

Omg! Liberty bodices! I remember them all right. Hell to do up but they did keep you warm. Hand knitted cardis and balaclavas and muffs to keep your hands warm.

Hi all,

We've had a few nominations for this thread to go into Mumsnet Classics. It's a lovely thread, and as it's been posted in Chat it would be a real shame to lose it.

We'll leave it here in Chat for a while longer then will move it over.

Thank you MNHQ

Thank you MNet.

This might have been an early 70s thing but does anyone remember the sheepskin mitten?

I remember itching a lot. Itchy wool mainly. I remember my grandad spreading his white hanky on the train seat because the fabric was so rough it hurt the backs of my legs. Children are so lucky today. Everything is so soft nowadays.

Sheepskin mittens? Oh yes along with slippers, coats (well hello, Jack Regan) and rugs. We went on our first packages to Spain early to mid-seventies and sheepskin shops were huge Brit magnets

We were always told by our domestic science (!) teacher that train headrests were basically lice exchanges. I still sit at an unnatural angle today

The fabric on the train seats did scratch the backs of your legs. It was some sort of velour but hairier than velvet wasn't it? I can understand why your grandad did that, Raindrop
I cannot remember all the patterns of cloth used exactly, but it would be rather special in terms of being examples of early 20th Century design.

In the late 60s I met an slightly older girl, perhaps an art student, who had made herself a coat out if it. That would have been in some sort of romantic Sargent Pepper's style.

Yes train seats were scratchy and the antimacassars were starched. We had steam trains on our line to London. My father’s white shirts had to be scrubbed to get the soot off and I remember when you blew your nose (or worse!) your snot was sooty. When they changed to diesel my Granny sat on the platform for a couple of hours waiting for a steam train before she realised.

Afternoon all - just letting you know that we're moving this rather lovely thread over to our Mumsnet Classics topic now.

I cannot remember if I saw a steam rather than a diesel train, or if we had sooty snot!

One thing that was very pleasant, I am sure everyone else here on this thread will remember, were the dining cars. If you got tea it would be in a silver plated tea pot on a tray with milk and sugar served separately. A sandwich would not be factory wrapped.

Once a railway dining car man saw me carrying my tray and gave the invaluable advice that if you don't look at it, you won't spill anything. This is true! (The mind and body have an automatic balance system if you don't second guess it by looking.)

Before Beeching's cuts you could get anywhere by rail. Does anyone remember how each country station had its own little house for the station master, and they competed among themselves to have beautiful gardens? Waiting for a train very early in the morning in May was just lovely.

If you lived just a few hours out of London, you could go to the theatre there and out for something to eat, and still be able to come home by train very, very late.

I often had afternoon tea on the train when returning from visiting my fiance. It can't have been too expensive as I was a student at the time.

The uncomfortable train seat fabric was moquette. It's still used but now it's a lot less scratchy.

Love this!

Shops had freezers, householders did not.
Someone upthread has mentioned how the war featured largely in the lives of us, the post-war generation - it was HUGE (both wars were much spoken of by our parents, grandparents and their peers (I was born in 1954), our comics were full of characters who were battling their way through WW2 still (though not exclusively war stories) and amongst our games were some about Nazis (no-one wanted to be a Nazi) much the same way as one played cowboys and indians and everyone wanted to be a cowboy because they always won. I was quite shocked about 20 years ago when I realised the current young generations had little interest in the war and scant knowledge of the actual events of either war, which were common knowledge to my generation. The wars seemed so big to us that I never thought they would be relegated to semi-forgotten history in my lifetime. On another thread someone has asked if in 1950s/60s everyone was slim. Yes, most were, in my memory, especially in the 1950s. Food was not very exciting and not very plentiful - we had enough but not a surfeit as lots of us were living on a single small wage. If you got a snack between meals it would be a slice of home-made cake but mostly cakes would only be made once a week, if that. Lots of our friends and neighbours emigrated to Canada or Australia during this time because life was a bit grim in the UK and they thought they could perhaps have a better life abroad (plus you could get a passage on a ship, as an emigrant, for £10). It was very common to hear that someone you knew had decided to go to one or the other country. My own family made plans to emigrate to Canada as my father's employers would not raise his very tiny wage and he could no longer support his wife and 3 children on it. After we'd sold all our toys and furniture and had the boat tickets, they realised he really meant it and upped his wages, so we (thankfully) stayed in England. After this, when I was 3, my dad bought a car on a payment plan. It was a great surprise and a novelty in our road - lots of people still did not own cars. He was much in demand to pick up children to ferry them about for Sunday School trips and other outings. We didn't have a telly although most people got them by the 1960s. We read a lot of (mostly library) books and we were closer with our extended family and friends then - it was quite normal for our cousins to come and stay for the weekend or an aunt or uncle to drop in to tea. This stopped being such a normal thing by the end of the 1960s although, as your mother was in NI, it probably continued to be a sociable place. As a previous person mentioned, there was no central heating. Most women gave up work after marriage so I think all my schoolfriends' mothers were SAHM; I can't think of any that were not.

Do you remember many womens' legs were permanently mottled, back and front, from standing too near the gas fire to keep warm.

Also, my daughter went to a radio 1 roadshow in the 70's hosted by Jimmy Saville. We all thought he was lovely because of Jim Will Fix It. When she came home she was disgusted with him because he had made a remark about her breasts and tried to touch them. She was about 12.

At the time we just said what a dirty old man and thought no more about it.

I was born in 1962.

We lived in a house with inside bathroom but stayed with my auntie a lot who still had a brick toilet in a yard. Hated it. Dark and cold and full of cobwebs. We had a Black & White TV with a tuner button on it so it was really hit and miss! My mum had a twin tub washer and she had to soak stuff in it and stir it to let stuff soak. Then, she’d have to haul it into the spinner so, water all over the floor because the machine was unstable and danced around the kitchen! We didn’t have holidays away but we’d go to Wakes for the day or Blackpool just for the day. There are photos of us as toddlers on the beach, huddled against the awful weather in jumpers. My grandad wore a long coat and bowler hat on the beach 😐

No car. Bussed it everywhere. Helped with the tidying up and we did a “big shop’ at Tesco on a Saturday. My mum had Marge Simpson hair, winched up at the hairdressers on a Saturday and it stayed there, all week 😂

And oh yes, we had no central heating but we had a paraffin heater in the hall. I was always dumpumy school coat to close to it and set fire to the hall once!

In the mornings before school, my mum would have Terry Wogan on the “transistor” radio in the kitchen. She’d be making toast with our socks, vests and knickers warming on the top of it. THAT’S how cold it was!

How fascinating! It's incredible how much life has changed. I was born in 1962 and here are my memories:

My mum using a mangle to wring the water out of the washing after it came out of the machine (quite a primitive one, top loading). Clothes were dried on the line in the garden then aired in the Flatley (kind of drying cabinet).

I remember clearly not having a telephone at home and only having black and white TV. We were the last people I knew to have both.

We had a coal fire in the living room and a coalman used to deliver coal in a lorry and put it in the coal bunker we had in the garden. We did have central heating (vents) but my mum never turned it on and I was always freezing in winter!

We weren't allowed to play outside on a Sunday in case the noise annoyed the neighbours. We weren't religious, I guess just old-fashioned.

We had local shops (separate greengrocer, grocers, butchers, ironmongers/hardware, newsagents, bakers) that we mostly used but there was a supermarket in our nearby town.

I vaguely remember the music of the late 1960s, and my older cousins were real hippies and rebels and we thought they were so cool! When I was in secondary school Bay City Rollers were the most popular group. I don't really remember the Beatles but the older sister of some friends had all their records and also groups like Pentangle.

Then it was all glam rock and the like, and I remember being obsessed with Top of the Pops and there was real suspense waiting to see what was 'Number 1' (top selling single of the week).

I have clear memories of the three-day week and oil crisis. We used to have regular power cuts and I remember being reliant on candles at times at home! This is an interesting link on that: www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/1973-the-most-significant-year-of-the-20th-century-9028544.html

Cars were really basic and few models to choose from: we had a Ford Popular, then an Anglia, then a couple of Morris 1100. The Ford Cortina was really popular.

People started going abroad for holidays in the early 1970s I think, but it was very much a rich person's thing and we only ever went in the UK, to Devon and Cornwall, which were not at all trendy then!

Children had a lot of freedom to play outside, and I used to love riding my bike around the country lanes near my house on my own. I'd never let my DD do that now!

That's it for now, will try to think of more...

sorry I crept into the early 1970s there...got carried away!

I clearly remember sheepskin mittens, I was always losing them at school but my mum just bought me new ones!

And people smoking everywhere! Smoking used to be allowed on the top deck of the bus but you could still smell it downstairs obviously and I hated it!