I have been writing about life in England fifty years ago, reflecting on how our lives have changed. Can you help me?
The big change seems to be in communications. In 1973 we were still queuing up to using coin operated telephone boxes in the street, asking the operator for Ambleside 2232. Letters and notes were written by hand. I learnt italic writing, so as to be clear. Manual type-writers used black and red stripped tape. Mistakes were obvious.
I’d love to receive comments (below) on how you remember aspects of growing up in the early 1970s. What did you eat then? Where did you go on holiday? What was it about 1973 that impacted you?
My husband remembers long hair, flared trousers and shirts with massive curved collars. I always longed for an embroidered t-shirt with wide sleeves or a cheese-cloth shirt but loathed the feel of acrylic jumpers and ribbed polo-necks. Stripy ones. The fabric could be so vile, we didn’t feel each other as much as we do now. There was much less hugging.
The food was pretty applauding. My friend Suzanna has just reminded me about the innovation of Italian cooking. Spaghetti was the highlight of our lives; a treat that we might have on Saturdays or for a party when red candles would be pushed into wine bottles and checked paper table cloths could enhance a Bistro image. However prawn cocktail was the pinnacle of popular aspiration, although us children preferred picking of the shells off prawns ourselves.
At parties you’d be offered chunks of cheese and pineapple on cocktail sticks stuck into a half a melon that had been covered in tin foil. I always rather longed for the melon. Homemade beer was regrettably all the rage, along with freezing your own runner beans. The process was quite fun (we enjoyed sucking air out of the freezer bags with a straw) but the beans were stringy and disgusting.
My family thought having to bring-a-bottle to parties was a great idea but we loathed the fact that cigarettes were smoked everywhere you went. Unless you were in the garden where abysmal furniture design spoilt the view.
Colour televisions were only just beginning to invade people’s homes. They were terribly expensive. We had to make do with our crackly black and white screen, watching Blue Peter, Animal Magic and Tony Hart presenting Vision On with cartoons such as Marine Boy until Childrens’ Television ended with The Magic Roundabout just before Daddy came home from the Works in time for the 6 O’Clock News. I then bored myself rigid watching Points West and Nationwide before It’s A Knockout.
We were allowed to stay up to watch Dick Emery , Benny Hill, and ‘Titter ye not’, Frankie Howerd along with dramas such as The Onedin Line. There was one sit com starring Wendy Craig entitled Not in front of the Children, which of course we all wanted to watch. What influence did this have on our young minds?
Mummy worked for HTV West presenting an afternoon programme called Women Only with Jan Jeeming. She also read the letters on Any Answers?, which was produced by BBC Radio Bristol by Carole Stone. I was so impressed – amazed – to meet a female radio producer. Carole was one of the few who worked her way up from being a BBC secretary to producing Any Questions.
Our holidays were spent camping in Wales. Packing for this took two weeks. We used drag an orange dome tent out of the airing cupboard and slept on fold-up sun-loungers from the garden.
Sailing was all about Mirror dinghies, which you could buy in kit form and make out of plywood in the diningroom. We couldn’t afford one, but in the late 1970’s Dad bought a fibre-glass Topper, which was the height of cool. He called it Earwig.
We had our photos developed at the chemist or sent them off to Tripleprint, so we could share the small version with others. Although they were bought by Bonusprint in 1979, I was a loyal customer until well into the 1990s and remain plagued by small photos I can’t quite bring myself to chuck away. We stuck them in scrapbooks made of green and blue paper. Here is a page of mine from the making of Swallows and Amazons.
My family were very keen on taking home movies. Dad usually took slides when we went on holiday, which were viewed along with the supper-8 footage at Christmas time when he pushed the furniture back, took down a painting and projected our memories onto the wall.
What have I forgotten? Do post your own recollections, especially of sailing and camping in the early seventies, in the comments below.
Dick Emery ~ walking social history
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Sophie Neville 
Hi Sophie – My 11th birthday was in 1973, which I think is one reason I still enjoy the film S&A so much; being of the same generation of the cast makes me feel a twinge of nostalgia whenever I’m watching it, for some reason.
1973 was a big year for me – the start of “big school” – and I vividly remember so much of that time. We were always keen on holidays in our family and I remember wonderful trips to the Scottish Highlands, the Cotswolds, Cornwall, the south coast (always staying in small and slightly primitive caravans)… They were big adventures for us as we lived in Durham and travelling long distances in a Vauxhall Viva with plastic seats was an endeavour not to be taken lightly. I hadn’t yet experienced “abroad”. That was to happen a year later when we went to Brittany for the first time and what an amazing, exotic holiday we had. These were the days of pre-globalisation, when everything in the shops was different to home, telecommunications were at best dodgy, and it really did feel like stepping into a 1960s French textbook.
Our family favourites on TV included The Waltons (which was still quite new then – we now have most of it on DVD!), Alias Smith and Jones, The High Chaparall, and (my personal favourite) Colditz. My friends and I also loved Blue Peter, Magpie (which we preferred as it was a bit less polished!), Dad’s Army, and Scooby Doo. We didn’t have colour TV – they were still too expensive, but I had a friend who did. Often I’d go to his house to play Subbuteo football or cricket, or battle it out with our Airfix Napoleonic soldiers, but of course the main reason I went was to watch his colour telly. Scooby Doo was the first programme I watched in colour!
Yes, food wasn’t our strongest point as a nation back then, but we were actually more exotic than many of our friends – my dad had served in the army in Malaya during the 1950s and came home with quite an educated palate, so we thought. So we weren’t averse to having a Vesta curry on a Saturday night, which was probably about as nutritious (and salty) as a pot noodle!
I’m a bit of a Boring Dad when talking about the 1970s to my own teenage children, although there are two aspects that still interest them greatly about those days: rock music and football, both of which were much more interesting then than nowadays (their words, not mine!) And my younger daughter loves many of the old films – including, of course, Swallows and Amazons!
Best wishes
Kevin
Airy Neave, who was a prisioner at Colditz came to speak at our school. He was murdered by the IRA – a complete tragedy.
I remember when Airy Neave died because I had read his book (‘They Have Their Exits’). Also, the Record Breaker man was one of the McWhirter brothers.
You have reminded me that their were some very dark times in the 1970s too!
Of course! We used to be fascinated by Blue Peter items on ‘The Future’ and how marvellous it would be. Certainly shopping malls were projected aloing with the prospect of flying everywhere. Now we are in the future, I’m not so sure if it is an improvement on 1973. We do fly more. Cars are more reliable and comfortable now, but then there are more of them. And less buses – certainly in rural England.
And there was the fuel crisis: doing my homework by candlelight, and the 50 mph limit on the roads.
Dad bought an oil lamp, which was exciting. We were given candle making kits for Christmas – you could make trendy striped ones. Until the 1970s you’d only see fat candles in church. The ones we made could stand alone. Gonks were in. I was given a plaster of paris set with rubber molds so I could make them too.
Didn’t we join the Common Market around then? I remember that the fish & chip shop in Exeter offered a range of exotic European foods such as duck & l’orange and spaghetti bolognaise ‘to celebrate the Common Market’.
Cord jeans were the rage, and we used to insert a strip of coloured material above the hem – how cool, we thought….. And floor-length skirts, and kaftans….
Yes! You could add lenghth to your drainpipe cords and make them into bell-bottoms at the same time by inserting triangles of flowery material at the dies and having a cuff along the bottom. I wore dungarees of varous dreadfullness. It was difficult to find a decent dress in the shops, apart from ones at Laura Ashley – but they were quite expensve.
Hello Sophie, just encountered your blog. I was ten years old in 1973 and living in Hanham, near Bristol, so I have fond memories of HTV! I especially remember Alan Taylor and his puppets Tinker and Topper. I received a badge from his programme “Tinkertainment”. I was easily pleased in those days!!! Thanks so much for all the memories, I hope you are well and I wish you a very happy New Year
How good to hear from you, Kevin. I remember Tinker and Topper too!
Have you seen my recent posts on ‘Arthur of the Britians’, made by HTV in 1972? Quite fun.
Watching the Youtube clips brings is all back: https://sophieneville.net/2015/11/30/the-secrets-of-filming-arthur-of-the-britons-in-1972-part-two/
I remember Colditz and Dad’s Army. I also remember Airey Neave and his sad death. My childhood covered the 1950s and ’60s. I started married life in the 1970s so it was a particularly happy decade for me; apart from raging inflation and the 3-day week!
Goodness me, the 1970’s, in all their lurid glory! Yes, I remember our first colour TV, we were watching the Harlem Globe Trotters cartoon when the man came to install it. We were mortified that he wouldn’t wait until it had finished, but he didn’t take long and we saw it in colour for the first time! Such innocent thrills.
I lived then, as I do now, on the Isle of Portland, here in Dorset and life was very simple then, at least it seemed so at that tender age. We had a Spar shop in Easton, the largest ‘village’ on the island. I was always bemused by the fact that my mother would fill a trolley with goods, pay and leave them at the till? They would be delivered to the house later by a small van to save her carrying them home. Very few households had a car, let alone mother have her own car! What service in those days!
We walked everywhere, and I enjoy retracing the steps of my youth to this day, out to Portland Bill where my late brother Des and I would pool our few coins of the new decimal system and buy a bag of chips in the pub off sales. We did have a phone box that still had buttons A and B and could be tested for ship ha’pennys that people would forget. The nearby sweetshop used to accept them for small offerings! We were shocked when the new pay phone appeared and it only took two and ten new pence pieces. No more freebie halfpenny chews! Our friends all lived nearby and we would make the journey around knocking on doors to see if they were coming out. We would explore the cliffs and stone quarries around us, much to our parents annoyance. Coming home covered in white dust, or with our clothes encrusted with salt spray, having been climbing down the cliff paths to see the big waves on a stormy day.
All three of my schools were here on the island, sadly just the infant and primary remain now. I can still see the old entrance I used to use, fenced now as most people drive their children in and out of the school. We walked each day, to and from school.
I look back at some of the photos that survive and we all look so different, long hair and wild fashions. There are a few pictures of our ‘new house,’ the one we moved into, newly built and so open plan and very 1970’s in style. It’s still there, just around the corner from me, but now a shocking fifty three years old!
How wonderful to grow up on the Isle of Purbeck. I found some ship ha’pennys yesterday.
Ha ha, was that a ‘Titty moment’ Sophie? Lovely as the Isle of Purbeck is, I actually grew up on the Isle of Portland, about thirty miles west of Purbeck. We have just enjoyed the most recent series of Springwatch on the BBC from Purbeck, so maybe it was in your ear as you commented! Nice to know you found some old ha’pennys, I don’t think the sweet shop would accept them now though!
Sorry – confused. My father lived on the Isle of Purbeck.