When torture came with a plastic rain mac …… memories of the 1950s

My Pakamac was ideal for summer showers. 

 "Lewis’s say … Take a cape, circa 1950s

But they were a cruel invention. Despite being light and flexible enough to be squeezed into a small bag they smelt awful and were a nightmare to wear.

It didn’t take long before the warmth of the body trapped in a sheet of clinging plastic made you sweat and the more you walked the hotter and more uncomfortable you became. Which meant you had a choice, wear it and suffer or take it off, get wet and suffer later when my grandmother discovered that this act of rebellion had got me soaked.

"Light and in four colours"

They were a product of the Plastic Age when heaps of things made of traditional materials were junked in favour of light bright products, from cups, plates, cutlery to the Pakamac.

I had all but forgotten this cheap protection from the rain, but in the collection of the Chorlton artist, Derrick Lea I came across this advert.

I have no idea why he included it in his pictures and paintings but perhaps like me he wasn’t a fan.

Nor I think I am alone.  Anyone born in the middle decades of the last century, who remembers watching Ivanhoe on a tiny black and white TV, and who was allowed to roam free at weekends and holidays with no demand to check in will at some point have endured a variation of the Pakamac.

True they were less cumbersome than those belted gaberdine raincoats, but they were no less a chore to carry and got in the way of climbing trees.

Unless of course you had bought one of those surplus army canvas bags which could store all manner of treasures, from a bottle of lemonade to a half-eaten bread roll.

Mine was army green had once been an ammunition bag and cost just one shilling. They were the “must to have” item in 1958 and at a push would take the mac, if you hadn’t already discarded it in full knowledge that mother would not be best pleased.

And that is it.

Location; wet days in the 1950s

Picture; "Lewis’s say … Take a cape, circa 1950s, courtesy of John and Hazel Lea" 

Space ….. the place to be in 1953

I was too young to remember the first series of Journey into Space.

It was broadcast during the autumn of 1953 into the January of the following year, when I was just four.

And by the time that last series finished in the February of 1957 I would have been watching the telly with mother, leaving dad in the kitchen with the old coal stove, and the wireless to listen alone.

My Wikipedia tells me that “Journey Into Space is a BBC Radio science fiction programme written by BBC producer Charles Chilton. It was the last UK radio programme to attract a bigger evening audience than television. Originally, four series were produced with the fourth a remake of the first......  Chilton later wrote three best-selling novels and several comic strip stories based upon the radio series”.*

I can’t claim to have read any of the books but followed his comic strips in the Eagle Comic, and a full 40 years ago I got a tape of the first series which at times sounded hammy and a bit stilted but took me back to that kitchen, the wireless and Dad.

So that is it, leaving me just share those memories of the 1950s, and the adventures on the Home Service of Captain Andrew “Jet Morgan”, Doctor Daniel “Doc” Matthews, Stephen “Mitch" Mitchell and Lemuel “Lemmy” Barnet. 

With just one extra, and that is a reflection on Pan Books. Long before l started on Penguin and Pelican paperbacks l was an avid reader of Pan. The company offered up a range of novels often with striking or lurid front covers. 

Here l found Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the James Bond classics all of which drew me into reading.  

And that in turn was thanks to mother and an English teacher at Samuel Pepys who picked up loads of second hand paperbacks which were left for us to dip in into.

Leaving me just to include this book on the Roman Invasion by Leonard Cotterell bought my mum in 1961 when l was 11 and still in the collection.

Location; My childhood

Pictures; cover of Journey into Space, circa 1954, and the Great Invasion, 1961

*Journey into Space, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_into_Space

Making history of the future...

“No man can have in his mind a conception of the future for the future is not yet.  But of conceptions of the past, we make a future.”*

I often come back to what Thomas Hobbs said whenever I indulge my interest in science fiction because most of it is rooted in the present no matter how fantastical it might appear which makes the science fiction of the past a wonderful way of looking at the period it was produced.

It starts with the technology.  Look at any science fiction film from the 1950s and while the rockets are there the mechanisms to control them are more often than not switches and dials.

And even when the writer makes that leap of imagination like the hand held communicator it is less a bold flight of fancy and more just a logical next step.

So to with the futurestic transport networks which whizzed people above the streets in slim slender tubes of plastic and glass.

Leave out tubes of plastic and glass and substitute steel and iron viaducts and you have New York’s elevated railway which opened in 1868 using cable power and later steam locomotives transporting New Yorkers on tracks which ran almost three stories above the city streets.

In much the same way the stories often reflect the issues of the day.  In The Shape of Things to Come written in 1933 H.G. Wells projected the horror and destruction of the Great War into a future conflict between two unnamed countries which lasts a decade leading  to a major economic crisis,  global chaos, and the collapse of most governments and a devastating  plague which almost eliminates humanity.

The situation is saved by a benevolent dictatorship which in turn after a century of reconstruction is overthrown in a bloodless coup leading eventually to a withering away of the state and a society which has the material means to provide for all enabling the population  to concentrate on bettering itself.

It is a story that brings together so much of the political and social history of the 19th and 20th centuries as does another favourite of mine which is Star Trek.

The orginial  was a television series running in the late 60s it caught for me something of the excitement and optimism of the period.

Now I am the first to admit that  the period was not all good. The bright new decade full of promise has to be set against the Cold War, some pretty nasty conflicts around the world and that nagging thought that the millions spent on the “space race” could have been devoted to solving the issues of world hunger, drought and poverty.

But in its way the continuing story of Star Trek has done something to challenge the darker side of the mid 20th century.

It was set three hundred years into the future and like Well's future  all the material needs of humanity had been met and individuals were free to pursue their interests “in a quest to better themselves.”

So the Starship Enterprise was a vessel of exploration whose five year mission was about “exploring strange new worlds” meeting new races and contributing to the sum total of knowledge.

And in that respect the very fact that the space craft’s were referred to as ships and the crew took on a naval character underlined the theme of exploration.

But like all science fiction Star Trek was as much a comment on the 1960s as it was a vision of the future.

And so the themes of the television series featured racial intolerance, the conflicts between super powers and that still very relevant conundrum of non interference with other peoples and cultures.

All of which could lead to real controversy like the moment Captain Kirk kissed Lieutenant Uhura cited as the first interracial kiss on US television which also led to the episode being withdrawn by networks in the southern states.

But even so the programme never quite broke from the fact that it was a US production and when the Cold War was still very dangerous.

So depsite the Prime Directive of Non Interference there were plenty of times when the principle  was broken.

Often this happened with   the appearance of the other galactic super power in the form of the Klingons which resulted in a necessary battle to save a planet from being conquered by the totalitarian and militaristic Klingon Empire.

And it had all been done before by Dan Dare Pilot of the Future in the Eagle Comic.**

He is someone I have written about already, and in the pages of the Eagle you can see much of Britain’s post war history reproduced.  Space Fleet’s Uniforms are those of the RAF, the United Nations is the sovereign global authority and aliens are by and large friendly.

A few of course pose problems.  The Treens from Venus with their belief in pure science and their ruthless dictator are committed to planetary domination, but they are defeated and beaten fairly and squarely with Dan and his pals always playing the straight bat and never resorting to under hand methods.

It is a world I can still recognise from my childhood and one I can still relate to. So in that respect I guess I continue to live my childhood and a bit of my past as I boldly go where many have gone before me.

Pictures; from the Eagle Comic collection of Andrew Simpson

*Hobbs, Thomas, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politics, 1650

**Dan Dare,
 http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Dan%20Dare

Looking back on a century ............ Alive, Alive Oh! and Other Things That Matter...... one to read

Now here is a book I have enjoyed  reading and have startted all over again.  

It is Alive, Alive Oh! and Other Things That Matter by Diana Athill .*

It covers the years after the Second World War when Ms Athill was in her late 20s and challenges that widely held view that the late 1940s and early 50s were drab.

On the contrary they were an exciting period full of new possibilities but above all a time of peace after six years of a hard war.

And so reflecting on the twin celebrations of VE and VJ Day she writes that these were not just celebrations of victory but more of peace and the chance to get on with lives interrupted by the conflict.

My own parents rarely talked of the war but for them and for others of their generation however necessary they thought the war might have been it put their lives on hold.

Sylvia in Ashton under Lyne once confided that that six years had robbed her of her adolescence.

But the essay is about far more than just the war and ranges over the exciting new ideas in fashion, home design and leisure, culminating with one of the early package tours to Corfu with Club Mediterranean, taking in the brilliant sunlight, the scenery and the smells of fresh herbs and lemons.

All this would be a fascinating enough but she also focuses on the changing political climate which ushered in not only the National Health Service but saw Britain divest itself of many of its former colonies and attempt to redress the inequalities of the past.

These then were “lovely years to live through.”*

And that just leaves me with the dilemma........ do I put it on the Christmas wish list or go out and get it from the local bookshop today?

I could of course wait and listen to the remaining four programmes.

We shall see.

Picture; cover of Alive, Alive Oh! and Other Things That Matter, and VE Day celebrators in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 1945 from the Lloyd Collection

* Alive, Alive Oh! and Other Things That Matter, Diana Athill, Granta £12.99

Down a coal mine in the January of 1952

I have only ever been down a coal mine once.

It was the summer of 1972 and my future father in law who was the Chief Mechanical Engineer at Seaham Colliery made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Although a long way down, out under the North Sea and crawling through old tunnels to the coal face I was unconvinced that this had been a good idea.

But all their family were miners and even if I had chosen teaching as a career I just knew this was one decision that had already been made for me.

I survived and if truth were known rather enjoyed it, which I suspect would not have been the case if this was what I did every working day.

It is a memory that had long since been buried with the marriage and Seaham Colliery which along which closed in 1994.

But it resurfaced when I came across one of my old Eagle comics from 1952, which featured “a modern British coal mine.”

The article was one of those wonderful cut away drawings popular since the 1930s.

It could have been a ship, an aircraft, a motor car or in this case a coal mine.

The insides were laid bare and important features numbered and referenced back to an explanatory panel.

They were popular at the time capturing as they did an interest in all things technical.

Now of course they are a useful source of information about how the world worked back in the 1950s and 60s.

Picture; from the Eagle, January 11, 1952 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

From cave to castle and on to a high rise ............ the story of houses and how we used them

I never think you can get enough of the history books written by R.J. Unstead in the 1950s.*

This one comes from Black’s Junior Reference Books** and was published in 1958.

It was not one that I was given as a child but I rather wish I had because in just 80 pages it offers a clear and comprehensive description of houses from earlier times up to the mid 1950s.

It is paced full of interesting information on the style and construction of houses, along with the possessions that could be found in them and much about how people used their homes.

And above all it is the excellent collection of line drawings of everything from castles and cottages to windows, furniture and how the house moved from being a communal place to a more private residence of just one family.

It is also a book I often go back to as a starting point for ideas, and pictures of the everyday domestic objects from a 19th century kitchen range and copper to a Tudor  four poster bed and Roman Hypocaust.

It isn’t that I couldn’t find these elsewhere but there is a pleasure in leafing through the pages and coming across some old favourites.

Not that this is just a sad slide into nostalgia, instead it is a celebration of when history books for young people were informative, fun to read and just jolly good books to have around.

I suspect also they were embraced by teachers and librarians in those post war decades when education and schools were themselves undergoing profound changes.

So once again it’s a thank you to Mr Unstead and I rather think I will go looking for a few more.

Pictures; from A History of Houses, R.J.Unstead, 1958

*LOOKING AT HISTORY, PEOPLE IN HISTORY, TEACHING HISTORY IN JUNIOR SCHOOLS

**DEEP SEA FISHING, TRAVEL BY ROAD, THE STORY OF AIRCRAFT, COAL MINING, THE STORY OF THE THEATRE, TRAVEL BY SEA

Rediscovering a bit of police history half a century ago

Now here is another of those books whose contents has passed into history.

The Eagle Book of Police and Detection, was published in 1960.

At the time I can remember thinking how modern most of what I was reading was but now with the passage of over half a century much of it looks as dated as those rattles carried by Peelers in the 1830s.

All of which offered up a fascinating hour or so of reading from the CID, and fight against crime on the Thames, to new the new technologies and methods of detection which were at the cutting edge of police work in the late 1950s.

Of course I am well aware that this book which was one of the Eagle collection will not be available to many people.

I long ago lost my copy and had to buy this one from Brian the Book on Beech Road in the 1980s and I doubt that many copies still exist.

So for those who will never come across a copy I shall just leave you with this image.

The caption reads “Old and new together in the City of London; a mounted officer of the exacting City Force with a walkie talkie apparatus.  City Force are distinguished by the brass on their helmets and the red stripes on their arm bands.”

For me the term walkie talkie is as familiar as the trolley bus and the telegram but for many they will be as remote as the horse drawn omnibus and the films of Tom Mix.

But then until last month I still had a clockwork mobile from the last century and a preference for the music of Glen Millar, all of which made my 1960 book on the Police a familiar friend.

Pictures; from Eagle Book of Police & Detection, 1960

*Eagle Book of Police & Detection, Richard Harrison, 1960

Sailing with the Phoenicians to the Tin Islands and more ......... A Picture History of Great Discoveries 1954

I am back with another of those history books written for children in the 1950s.

Many of the ones I was given at the time have survived and sit on our book shelves along with others that I have bought over the years.*

What makes A Picture History of Great Discoveries different is that while it was originally published in 1954 it has been reissued along with A Picture History of Britain.**

They were part of a series which also included the history of France and Italy and were striking in their use of colour and dramatic images.

That said I never quite took to these books in the way that I did to those of R.J. Unstead whose pictures were simpler and more realistic.

But the images in both books are of their time and reflect a style of painting which will be all too familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1950s and 60s.

And Great Discoveries is also a book of its time when it was still fashionable to write about voyages of exploration and the discovery of the “New World” with that Eurocentric notion that these were places which having been lost were now rediscovered.

I doubt that the peoples of the Americas, or Africa and the Far East ever quite saw it that way.

Still A Picture History of Great Discoveries remains a fascinating glimpse into how children’s history was written over sixty years ago and by extension how our view of the world and its history was shaped.

Picture; cover of A Picture History of Great Discoveries

*Books Children, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Books%20Children

** A Picture History of Britain, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/a-picture-history-of-britain.html