There are those who harp back to a more innocent age, usually somewhere between their 5th and 15th birthdays. Before five it is all a bit of blur, and after 15 the many attractions of being on the threshold of adult life take you off on a roller coaster of grown up fun.
But those ten years were magic for most of us.
For me in the 1950s and early 60’s it a mix of playing on bomb sites, making Airfix models and being allowed out all day in the holidays. Often we would return just for something to eat and sometimes not even that. The milk was still delivered to the door and well into the middle of that decade by horse drawn cart, there was a newspaper in the letter box and boiled sweets were often the best you could expect.
All nostalgic tosh I know. It was also the decade of some very nasty wars including Korea and the many colonial conflicts the old European countries fought before granting independence to bits of their old empires. Polio still killed and maimed many children and thousands across Britain continued to live in sub standard dwellings which should have been demolished before the last world war.
But then you come across a picture which recreates that cosy world. Here are two of the Bailey family at the Didsbury show in 1947. Everything about the picture takes you back to a lost world. The school caps and short trousers, the horse drawn cart and the old spectacles.
Oliver Bailey commented on his picture "Have you forgotten the delights of a pennyworth (old money)of chips in the late forties? Also bear in find that shows like Didsbury brought the country to the city for a single day and there would be the equivalent of a concours d'elegance of horse drawn trade vehicles all immaculately painted and in one year the number of people was so great they broke open the fences to reduce the queuing. In days of rationing they were a flash of colour in a drab world"
Picture; from the collection of Oliver Bailey
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