A packet of cereal, a free offer and Flags of the World ..... selling in the 1950s

What I like about history is the way it comes in all shapes and sizes.

Now I have never been one for Kings, Queens and famous people who after all only shaped the past with the help of a lot of other people, most of whom were too poor, too illiterate or just too plain unlucky to get even a footnote in a history book.

And I rather think it is an approach which is shared by lots of other people who want their slice of history to be about the lives of people like themselves with just a century or too between them and their ancestors.

Not that this is in any way a plea for that romantic tosh which so often passes for  real life as lived in granddad’s time.  Heritage theme parks may seek to create an illusion of life in Victorian Times but when tourism and reality meet, few want the smells, the bed bugs or the noise of someone in the last throws of TB.

And so to the Eagle Society which seems an odd choice in the exploration of ordinary people’s lives, but contained in its quarterly magazine is a rare glimpse into the world of the 1950s.

True, it is mainly from the perspective of pre teenage boys and has a tendency to slip into nostalgia but if you want to get a feel for what it was like during that period of post war austerity moving in to the age of affluence the pages of Eagle Times* are as good a place any.

Often it is the products which become the story, whether it is those plastic kits which when assembled gave you a battleship or fighter aircraft or the primitive film strips viewed through a hand operated projector.

There was nothing over complicated about them but they were what today we might describe as both interactive and a means of developing many different functional skills.

Then there were the adverts, many of which are a fascinating insight into how products were promoted at a time when commercial television was in its infancy.

Three of my favourites featured regularly in the Eagle Comic which ran throughout the 1950s and what draws me back to them is not only the way that the advert worked but also that simple and personal thing that I remember all three, and have to admit that the advertising for all three worked on me.

I can’t say I was ever that keen on bubble gum and only ever really ate the stuff after buying that card series Flags of the World which had the national flag on one side, some interesting facts about the country on the reverse plus useful words and sayings if you ever washed up in France, the USSR or Japan.

But I guess I would have read the Bell Boy strip which featured Billy who always triumphed in the end.  It was fairly crude stuff and I doubt that any one bought the bubble gum on the strength of looking at the story but like all good advertising in the end it is the relentless and persistent messaging which makes the sale.

More interesting then and now for me were those products which gave you something.

In the case of that brand of cereal it varied from the stamp collecting set to the plastic racing cars and the model divers.

Of these I have to confess the last was the most disappointing.

The idea was to add a little baking powder into a hole in the helmet and drop the model into a bowl of water where upon it would shoot to the surface in a cascade of bubbles. Mine however just floated on the surface mocking all my efforts to make it work and reinforcing my German grandmother’s stern rebuke that “what you get for free isn’t worth a lot.”

And the 1950s were the decade of free promotions, whether it is the stamp kit, the boomerang or those plastic flowers which came with a certain brand of soap powder.

Two decades earlier it had been the newspapers which offered giveaways, now it is that seductive offer of two for one which invariably looks good in the supermarket but ends up not being used up by the sell by date.

So give me the free offer, and the more plastic and tacky the better, just as long as it’s not the deep sea diver.

This to me seems all the more attractive since the demise of Kingy** on Barlow Moor Road where every delightful plastic thing could be obtained.

*Eagle Times, published by the Eagle Society  dedicated to the memory of EAGLE - Britain's National
Picture Strip Weekly - the leading Boy's magazine of the 1950s and 1960s. We publish a quarterly journal - the Eagle Times. http://eagle-times.blogspot.co.uk/

**Kingspot, 360 Barlow Moor Road, a treasure trove of all things plastic and shiny, now a Japanese Restaurant

Picture; back & front cover of the Eagle Times, and adverts from Eagle May 30 1959