Those other history books .......

 This is 1952.

How they do it in Paris, 1951

I was just three and my memories of that decade are fragmentary, so like all people across all the centuries I turn to books to find out what my period was like.

To which those of us born in the last century have the luck to call on films, photographs and recordings of those who were encouraged to talk about their lives and the events they experienced.  Those events range from the mundane to the great moments of war ,disasters, and the imperceptible changes of lifestyle and expectations.

So, one of my uncles was born in 1898 and died in 2001 and saw two world wars, the death of the old Queen and the birth of the NHS.  To which can be added the gramophone, the wireless, cinema, TV, and cars, and planes as well as the telephone and the internet.

There is nothing novel in this.  Had you lived through the industrial revolution you would have encountered the transition from manual to steam power, the swift urbanization of many parts of Britain, participated at some point in the extension of Parliamentary democracy, and seen the transition from horse to railways.  

Of course, if you were a woman some of these momentous changes would wait until the beginning of the twentieth century and in respect to equal pay, promotion and even certain jobs that wait would extend into the middle and late decades of that century.

All of which is chronicled in the history books, but sometimes the real history leaps out from other sources, and here I am indebted to Debbie Cameron for posting two of her most recent purchases. One is the “Punch Library of Humour”, and the other is the "News of The World’s Household Guide and Almanac for 1952".

Household guides and Almanacs have been around for a very long time. So, before Mrs Beaton there were guides on household management stretching back into the 18th century and beyond. The development of printing, literacy and the emergence of a rising and aspiring middle class led to monthly publications which marched alongside the almanac.

"A modern sitting room in which brilliant soft colours combine" ... 1952

And in 1951 The News of The World was show casing changing fashions in the home as well as adverts for foreign travel and just what the well-dressed woman would wear to Paris.

Of course, if you wanted to trawl this type of history there were countless magazines, books and from the mid-1950s heaps of lifestyle programmes on the TV.

My grandparents regularly got the Reader’s Digest and while I never read the articles as a boy I would absorb the adverts with their promise of a better life with that new brand of cigarettes, soap powder or fashion accessory.

Even better was the Saturday Evening Post which somehow also appeared in the house with its insight into the America of the 1950s and which brought New York, the mid-west and California into their small two up two down in Derby.

But for now I will eagerly await the next posting from Debbie drawn from the pages of the News of the World’s Household Guide and Almanac for 1952.

Location; 1952

Pictures; from the News of the World’s Household Guide and Almanac for 1952, courtesy of Debbie Cameron