The 25 Hour News and the 45 Year Blues
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So, our journey back 25, 35 and 40 years arrives at my own personal terminus of 1970 – 45 years ago. This, for me, is the dawn of time or at least the dawn of coherent (albeit still murky) memory. I looked out onto a world in which the past and future formed the present, living in a ‘Coronation Street’ community of back-to-back, two-up/two-down, outside-loo terraces that hadn’t changed since the turn-of-the century, yet simultaneously looking up at the moon and straining to see the astronauts who were steering a buggy over the bumpy lunar surface.
I suppose I belonged to one of the first television generations in that it was always there, even if everything was in monochrome; and watching with mother, ‘Trumpton’ served as an idyllic impression of somewhere over the rainbow, whilst the world inhabited by Mary, Mungo and Midge was a Ladybird landscape that also suggested a desirable design for life. I remember a holiday at Butlin’s in Skegness that summer, with Mungo Jerry scoring the vacation, an odd and distinctive voice amongst many wafting from a MW radio; the strange, high-pitched squeal of Joni Mitchell was another.
It was a time that appears more unreal the further I travel from it – seeing a cow walk up the middle of the street in the middle of the night whilst staying at an auntie’s was weird enough to remain intact as an early recollection thereafter; but my imagination worked overtime too, seeing Daleks in the park that weren’t really there…or were they? If the past is another country, I am in permanent exile. How about you?
Petunia Winegum
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March 21, 2015 at 9:50 am -
That year, my college had its annual ball. Tickets were £10, for which you got a posh meal, wines from the well-stocked cellar (selected by the Chaplain) and could dance to a steel band. Around midnight there was a cabaret performance from an up-and-coming comedy troupe – Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Pretty good value!
During the Long Vacation I spent just under three months in North America living on Greyhound buses, hitch-hiking and calling in on various relations. Four weeks working in a masonic sanatorium paid for all the incidental expenses. On getting to Logan airport for the return journey, we discovered that Nixon had slapped a $5 tax on visitors, and the plane wouldn’t take off until everybody had stumped up. Had I stayed another week, Nixon could have drafted me for the Vietnam War.
Different times!
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March 21, 2015 at 9:58 am -
1970 – The year of my first vote, aged 19. Also the year I got my first car, a 1958 Wolseley 1500 (588CVK), bought from the road-side for £10, then completely rebuilt with help from two similarly car-mad pals: a great learning experience, although I’ve never had to make any body-panels from an old Green Shield Stamp sign at anytime since.
Working as a trainee accountant in a large nationalised organisation, but never finished the training, the prospect of ultimately ending up as an auditor was not quite thrilling enough, despite the mathematical gymnastics of working in pounds, shillings & pence before calculators.
Also working a couple of evenings a week at a petrol-station – no cash pay, but free petrol – that worked out well, inflation-proofed wages !
Still living with parents but dating the future Mrs Mudplugger, amongst others, leisure time involved amateur dramatics and league table-tennis – which now sounds almost boring enough to be an auditor already.Late in the year, I got arrested by Leeds Police, then widely known as being more than a tad corrupt – I was, of course, completely innocent but the experience of their behaviour soured my view of all Mr Plod’s brigade to this day.
At that age, it was a fun year overall – foundation-time when, although you may not realise it at the time, you’re defining yourself and setting paths for the future. On balance, it worked out quite well in the end, so I’ve nothing to hold against 1970.
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March 21, 2015 at 10:11 am -
Curiously, 1970 was the year my dad became a copper…for Leeds Police! He didn’t take to the job, however, and left after a couple of years. I sincerely hope you weren’t his first arrest!
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March 21, 2015 at 11:56 am -
The ones who ‘interrogated’ me were experts, well-versed in the dark arts, so I reckon your dad, as a novice, wouldn’t have ascended (or descended) to those levels quite so quickly. Maybe it was the experience of it from the inside that made him not take to the job – smart bloke.
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March 21, 2015 at 10:33 am -
It’s amazing how the registration number of our early vehicles gets engrained in the mind.
My dad’s first car (second hand) a 1960 Hillman Minx 3341 VF.
My first vehicle a beat-up MiniVan JML 440B.
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March 21, 2015 at 10:36 am -
CPL593H – as Bryan Ferry once sang. In my case, it would be DVH190S, a chocolate-coloured mark IV Cortina with a vinyl roof.
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March 21, 2015 at 11:41 am -
OF:EG 355 or “jemma the tree frog”
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b116/horta/jemma_baumfrosch1.jpg
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March 22, 2015 at 5:53 am -
Not a very “froggy” colour is Jemma the tree frog…
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March 22, 2015 at 7:49 am -
Well she was green…ish, but other than that I have no idea how her nickname came about. She was a VW Polo Fox not a ‘Frosch’ (German for ‘frog’). She was a present from a mate in the Bundeswehr who had been living in her and we had to remove 3 bin bags full of rubbish, mainly empty pizza cartons and porno mags, out of her before even starting to valet her. The choke handle was a peg and the distributor arm repaired with the tin foil from a chocolate bar ( “Kinder” as it happens- such is memory).
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March 21, 2015 at 10:05 am -
I was in a different country completely.
I was eight, and had had some illness that had kept me from school for two weeks. During that time, my desk had been inspected and it was a shambles put right by John Farmer, a classmate, to whom I had to pay tribute when I returned.
Ever since that day, I’ve tried to be tidy, clean and organised – I ironed my shirts and polished my shoes this morning starting at 0630. But a shared household is only as tidy as its tidest member, and I regret that Mrs 20 is a little untidy. Very untidy, to be honest.
Like you, Anna, it’s very murky, and always has been. Perhaps if children were told to consider what they were seeing in the context of being able to recall it, they’d do better at this. It all seemed (for me at least) about assimilating knowledge. My aunt gave me a book on mathematics which explained the Pythagorean theorem. I still have it.
The family across the road was Danish and although the girls were older than I was I enjoyed joining them in their swimming pool when I had the chance.
I loved Biggles and wanted to go to Britain. That worked out well, then.
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March 21, 2015 at 10:23 am -
1970 was the year my parents left the South-East and moved to a small Scottish town where the 1960s hadn’t happened yet. The place has caught up a lot since, thanks to modern media, but back then it was something of a culture shock. The shops opened on Christmas day, for one thing – no Popish festivities here – and (of rather less concern to me at the time) pubs were an exclusively male domain; females visiting the town were encouraged to stay at the flourishing and strictly alcohol-free Temperance Hotel.
‘Mary Mungo and Midge’, along with ‘The Double Deckers’, was a glimpse into the lost world of tower blocks and urban streets that I remembered from early childhood ; where I had arrived was more like Trumpton with Presbyterians. Oh yes – and with fitba’; on my first day at primary school, I was pinned up against a wall and asked the awkward – and, at the time, incomprehensible – question, ‘Div ye suppoart the Celtic?’ (The answer, it turned out, should have been a resounding ‘NO!’ but, being ignorant of such social niceties, I merely responded by kicking my assailant in the shins, which seemed to do the trick).
For those who don’t know, I should perhaps add that I was a girl – no one was exempt when Blue or Green was more important than a matter of life and death. Only Catholics and ‘foreigners’ joined the Cubs because of the uniform; good Rangers lads joined the Boys’ Brigade instead and marched proudly round the town at the many municipal celebrations – of such little things is Sectarianism made.
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March 21, 2015 at 12:59 pm -
“was more like Trumpton with Presbyterians”
I shall treasure that one! (I have written about my encounters with the Scottish branch of the Tango brigade before here).
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March 21, 2015 at 7:02 pm -
Oh there’s a reminder, I had a Double Deckers annual, but I think that was 1972. Every time I look back at childhood, I marvel at how slowly it seemed to go- growing up seemed to take forever- whereas now the years whistle by.
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March 21, 2015 at 7:09 pm -
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March 21, 2015 at 7:53 pm -
ARGH, stage school kids! Smile, you’re on TV!
The thing I could never figure out was what Sticks was in it for. You had boy leader (Scooper), girl (Billie), token ethnic (Spring), fat kid (Doughnut), nerd (Brains) and cute little girl (Tiger). Who added Sticks, and why? What was his function? “He plays drums”? What?
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March 21, 2015 at 10:26 am -
” …. my own personal terminus of 1970 – 45 years ago.”
You just missed the Golden Years of pirate radio – Radio Caroline, Radio London etc. [Radio Luxembourg didn’t really count, ‘cos it was ‘legitimate’ & land based.]
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March 21, 2015 at 10:29 am -
I wasn’t certain whether to carry on with this strand once it went beyond my own lifetime – go back another five years and I’m not even a twinkle in the milkman’s eye; but I suppose it would be interesting to hear some of the more…erm…’mature’ commentators’ memories of the 60s.
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March 21, 2015 at 10:44 am -
It was your comment about Mungo Jerry which brought back the memories:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvUQcnfwUUM
Then thinking about the music scene immediately before Radio1 kicked off.
‘In the Summertime’ was a hit during my college days. In those days, there were Unis and below those were Colleges of Technology.
Nowadays it seems nearly all further education has been ‘devalued’ in that even regional and town colleges have been rebadged as a ‘university’. Our local ‘university’ runs courses on plumbing, decorating, hair-dressing. Harvard it is not. I guess the teachers there get an ego-boost by being able to cite ‘University Lecturer’ on their cv.
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March 21, 2015 at 1:33 pm -
March 21, 2015 at 5:21 pm -
Talking of which, the Top Of The Pops performance of In The Summertime has just been ‘found’ (the BBC wiped their tape) in a European archive.
THIS is 1970 in a nutshell – technicolour ‘cage set’ style a-go-go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxf5FYRlbag-
March 23, 2015 at 8:20 am -
Have a drink, have a drive, go out and see what [birds] you can find…
No wonder the BBC deleted it…
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March 21, 2015 at 11:22 am -
http://oi58.tinypic.com/ico8qr.jpg (Bar Staff, if that is too much nakedness then please delete ).
45 years, 2 christian names and 3 surnames ago ( don’t ask,I was born to hang. Always been a bit of an outlaw) this day in 1970 I had just turned 2 and was living in a former estate worker’s house miles even from the nearest village in deepest darkest rural Buckinghamshire. With my Mummy, a student teacher and Daddy, who was working in a cutting edge technological firm on Ultrasound machines, and baby brother- whom I HATED from the get go, poor sod. I always felt he was my parents’ favourite and it was only later as adults he confessed he’d felt exactly the same way about me- ie that I was my parents’ little golden headed boy. I mention that because my relationship, or lack of it, to my brother shaped a lot of my later life.
Can’t claim to remember anything much more than that. Except my mom was the prettiest mom and my Dad was the cleverest, STRONGEST daddy ever.
Apparently my first girlfriend lived at “The Hall”, was the daughter of whatever gentry and she had a complete set of those Galt paint pots…”Marielle” or so I think she was called.
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March 21, 2015 at 11:24 am -
And as you can see from the photo I HAD A RUBBER DUCK! No deprived childhood for this kid.
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March 21, 2015 at 1:41 pm -
I opted out of the token bath or potty shot, though they do exist. Well done for sharing that with us!
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March 21, 2015 at 2:46 pm -
The bath shot was probably taken with my Mom’s ‘box’ Kodak she’d had since her 50s’ childhood. Ugly as fuck, oval Bakelite box (the camera not my mom) but it didn’t half take good, sharp pictures…often better my dad’s SR Halina IMO. I recall, at age 7-9ish, going on a Cub Scout trip to LONDON (for a Norfolk boy, as I was at the time, an almost mythical place) and having to take my mom’s ‘box’ with me and being horribly embarrassed about lugging it around when all the other kids had sleek, colorful 35mm Point N Shoots. Having to test not only light but windspeed and earth rotation before clicking on shoot was also a pain. But my resulting B&W photos were universally judged, well by Akela & Baloo any rate, to have been the best pics taken of the day.
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March 21, 2015 at 11:31 am -
I was still 3 years away from having life imposed on me – but I have long been fascinated by years prior to my birth.
The TOTP I’ve seen from 1970 (most are wiped) are wonderfully dynamic affairs
Intangible nostagia – the sights, the sounds and all else that made up the cultureI found this wonderful footage of a journey around my city centre filmed around this time, so put it to some music that encapsulates how I feel about then & now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x03aG-9Aj4M
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March 21, 2015 at 12:07 pm -
A time of great change for me . Not sure I want to go there! Should have been in Ascension Island working for C&W but broke leg in bike accident, couldn’t go (for obvious reasons) and as a direct result got lumbered with my first wife (entirely my own fault I might add!)
Read all about it :
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17757917/Chapter%205.pdf -
March 21, 2015 at 12:13 pm -
Just married, first time, shouldn’t have done it. First home + mortgage; everything second hand and not much of it. Minor 1000 convertible, 8 or 9 years of corrosion on the clock. I remember the fiddly job of servicing the brake master cylinder; had to remove the front suspension torsion bar. And people look fondly now on these rusty relics!
In a reasonable job, had moved from metals into plastics, was looking for something more, which led to a move back to metals in the NW in ’71, from which followed many personal & work opportunities, not all of which I decided well. The only non graduate in that years ‘graduate’ intake by a now long gone international. The start of a life of moving around.
Could I have stayed in my home town forever? I don’t think so, I wasn’t even prepared to stay where I served my apprenticeship more than a few months after reaching 21.
There seemed to be so much going on & so many chances around that time for anyone prepared to move & work. -
March 21, 2015 at 12:37 pm -
I was 12, and it was possibly the most influential period of my life for two reasons:
1) I was a council estate boy, always was, always have been, but I was the first in my entire family to make it (gasp!) to GRAMMAR school. My parents (especially mother) were inordinately proud but that in turn led to my mother becoming inordinately controlling. I was no longer allowed to hang out/play with the council estate kids. The only hours allowed away from home were to be spent at school. No-one ever questioned why I was daily (literally) the first one to arrive and the last to leave. It was the only time I got away from Stalag Luft Mater Familias. It was here I believe my resentment of authority and control was born and festered. (See last week’s post about the subsequent war).
2: Going to Grammar School exposed me to life/lives beyond my imagination. The teachers were great (yeah, occasional bouts of sadistic behaviour included), they instilled a love of language and books and learning. I learned I was good at things I never knew I could be (top of the class for some things, with consequent praise, a thing I never got at home). One of the most important exchanges in my life happened at school with Graeme Lumley:
Him: “Your parents must be awfully rich if you have moved 6 times since you were born.”
Me” “No, we just exchanged or transferred to a different council house.”
Him: “What’s a council house?”
Me: “It’s a house owned by the council. We rent it. Why, where do you live?”
Him: “My parents own their own house.”
Me: “Who owns their own house?”
Him: “Nearly everybody.”So incipient class differences were brought to my attentions along with a nascent sexuality as I was beginning puberty. “Lola” by the Kinks and “Tears of a Clown” by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles were my favourite songs (of course I had no idea of the significance of “Lola”). I lived for the Top 20 every 1 o’clock on Tuesday lunchtimes on the Johnny Walker show.
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March 21, 2015 at 12:41 pm -
Oh! And Radio North Sea International! (Their chart was every Saturday night and I used to listen with my tiny tinny transistor radio pressed against my ear because mother didn’t want to hear it above the tv and I was not allowed to go into any other room. My bedroom was for sleeping – full stop, so the concept of privacy also came as a shock later in life).
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March 21, 2015 at 7:48 pm -
Windsock.
Fully understand the ‘not quite fitting in at grammar school’ bit, even if a bit earlier than your experience.
Failed the interview which would have got me in to Reading School, a good place to come from & I still remember my nervousness & pathetic responses faced with a row of gowned headmasters on that warm summer afternoon. I even remember the question I knew the answer to but couldn’t produce; Roger Bannister’s average speed. I know, I already said pathetic.
So I went to another grammar school, next tier down, and I can recall all the discomfort that one from Whitley Estate could be exposed to.
At least I didn’t get trapped in the local Secondary Mod.-
March 22, 2015 at 12:19 am -
“At least I didn’t get trapped in the local Secondary Mod.”
Oi!Oi! OI! Yer posh git, I wentta secondary mod! If nothing else it taught me how to make a wooden tie rack and that the way to deal with a bully is ‘always with a weapon and from behind’.
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March 22, 2015 at 7:33 am -
Fair cop Dwarf, but the school in question, I remember it being built, was dire. Now reincarnated as an academy courtesy of the very kind Mr Madjeski. (not sure if the spelling’s right)
I do think I was lucky; the old 11+ system worked for m, in that it raised my expectations. I don’t for one moment suggest it was fair.
And I did woodwork too, got an O level.-
March 22, 2015 at 7:34 am -
me not m
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March 22, 2015 at 11:02 am -
We had metalwork and woodwork at my grammar school. ! ended up with a teapot stand, a broom holder and a trowel. I felt very accomplished.
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March 21, 2015 at 2:46 pm -
I ‘feel’ (that serious, you see) that I have to take issue with the commentary on the 25 hour news. The misreporting of Mr Netanyahoo cannot go unremarked. He did not say that as a Jew he didn’t like paying for anything. He was simply refering to the close and abiding relationship that Israel has with the Scots, especially the SNP in whose puriew such reluctance properly lies.
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March 21, 2015 at 9:58 pm -
You’re forgetting the masters of the parsimony craft, Yorkshiremen – they’re rather like Scotsmen, but ones who have had their natural generosity gene surgically removed at birth.
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March 21, 2015 at 3:03 pm -
In 1970 I was already middle-aged, with memories of childhood in a working-class district of London, and then the war, beginning with evacuation with my school and ending in army service. As children we were taught to feel pride in (shock! horror!) the Empire, and as an adult I helped in its dissolution which, on the whole, I think was accomplished fairly peacefully except for the carnage that accompanied the partition of India. Even so, as a Brit in Karachi a year later, I could walk about the streets without meeting the slightest ill-will from local people. I doubt very much that’s the case now.
Since returning home for good in 1970 I’ve been saddened by the decline in standards of behaviour, including common courtesy. And educational standards. It’s a good story, but surely it can’t be true that two recent graduates, on being asked what they knew about Joan of Arc, each replied that she was Noah’s wife?
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March 21, 2015 at 5:57 pm -
Exactly as Mr Pooter except my memories were in a Cornish seaside town.
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March 23, 2015 at 12:19 pm -
Did you ever get to see The Misfit?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Misfit_%28TV_series%29
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March 21, 2015 at 5:08 pm -
Just getting over separating from my first husband, married as a teenager, big mistake but not unusual then. Quite hard to start dating again but a couple of years later I met my second husband, I was a lot wiser if not a lot older. Must have been as our marriage lasted until his untimely death in 2007. Strangely I am still friends with my ex and I was with both his next wives, he definitely wasn’t cut out for marriage! They all ended in divorce and both dead now, I feel like the sole survivor.! He lives abroad now but comes back a couple of times a year to see the grandkids. About five years ago he nearly died after Cancer surgery and I went to see him with our son in intensive care, the surgeon asked if I was his wife, his face when I said I was one of them was a picture. In a way 1970 – 73 was the saddest and happiest years of my youth.
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March 21, 2015 at 6:59 pm -
1970 is the blur of a four year old for me. I remember losing a spade in the winter snow which might be the winter 69/70. I slightly remember my primary school interview in which I had to put the blocks in the right shaped holes as an aptitude test, and crying on my first day attending. Not a lot else.
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March 22, 2015 at 10:01 am -
1970, I was 19 and got my first car – a black Austin A40 Farina, 10 years old, registration number 8832 KC. Cost £100. Passed my driving test in it and never looked back.
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March 23, 2015 at 12:24 pm -
Not a very good examiner if you passed without using the rear-view mirror – or did I misinterpret that ?
Fascinating car, the A40, the first real hatchback, although no-one knew it at the time.
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March 23, 2015 at 3:46 pm -
Rear-view mirror? What’s one of them then?
You’re right about it being the first hatchback (though not really a “hot-hatch”). Italian designed and very light compared to other cars around the same period.
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March 23, 2015 at 12:15 pm -
I was 18, just returned to the UK from Canada and bought my (second*) motorcycle, a BSA 650 RGS with the clip ons and the whole cafe racer bit. I wonder where JRN400 is now.
*First was a Honda S90.
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