For almost 20 years the building formerly known as The Post Office Tower was the tallest building not only in London but in the entire UK. It was officially opened by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1965 and symbolised an era when our country briefly believed its future really would be forged in “the white heat of the technological revolution”. It was also famous for its revolving restaurant, and I was surprised to learn from Wikipedia this was run by the holiday camp tycoon Billy Butlin:
“The Post Office Tower was opened to the public on 16 May 1966 by Tony Benn and Billy Butlin. As well as the communications equipment there was a rotating restaurant on the 34th floor: the “Top of the Tower” operated by Butlins. It made one revolution every 22 minutes. A Provisional IRA bomb exploded in the roof of the men’s toilets on 31 October 1971. The restaurant was closed to the public for security reasons in 1980 and public access to the building ceased in 1981.”
Back in the days when TV was young – say around 1960 – the good news was that on Saturdays the BBC started broadcasting earlier – around lunchtime.
And the bad news ? The programme they transmitted was the interminable, incomprehensible Grandstand. At age 10 I knew nothing and cared less about sport. An afternoon of horse racing in blurry black and white folllowed by endless match results and league tables was paralysingly dull.
And yet – since it was thge only thing on – I used to watch it: as the old song says, there was fuck-all else to do. The theme music brings all this grisly tedium back in an instant.
It’s called “News Scoop”, was composed by Len Stevens and used by the BBC from the show’s launch in 1958 until the early seventies.
Pic taken with Instagram
Looking South on Cornwall Road, London SE1 8TW from outside Konditor & Cook‘s Waterloo bakery.
Pic taken with Instagram
Under the railway bridge at Waterloo East looking North up Cornwall Street. Foreground: Konditor and Cook bakery.
Pic taken with Instagram
Spotted another Morris 1000 – this time a saloon parked on Whittlesey Street – an original Victorian London terrace that survived the wartime bombing of nearby Waterloo Station intact.
in the 1950s Mum and Dad took the News Chronicle as our daily paper, which included a column for kids written by Big Chief I-Spy. For a while my big brother was a keen member of the I-Spy tribe, with its secret codes, badges and signals.
It was a well thought out proposition: you could just buy the books, direct from the News Chronicle in Bouverie Street, and have the satisfaction of filling them out as you spotted each item. But you could get additional status, a badge and an I-Spy kit by actually joining the club. See Wikipedia article.
The titles of the series on the backs of the books (click image above to zoom) give a fascinating glimpse into the lives and concerns of kids in the fities, and the places they would be most likely to visit and things they would be most likely to do. Number one: the seaside – followed by a farm visit, history, a train journey, dogs, countryside, at the zoo, in the street, on the road, London, horses and ponies… The Army came in at No. 17, People In Uniform at 29.
There’s a nice online collection of I-Spy memorabilia available from Paul & Karen Rennie, whose website and shop specialise in British art & design of the 20th Century.
“Well in those days the internet was in black and white. It was only on for three hours a day. We used to get dressed up in our Sunday best to log on to it. We’d log on to LetsBuyIt.com and order a gas mask and a pound of tripe. Then when we’d finished with the computer we’d switch it off and we’d all stand up and sing the National Anthem.”
How about the entertainment, how did you amuse yourselves?
“Oh we used to gather round the piano and sing Peter André songs. While we were singing, we’d be showing off our pecs - my dad had a lovely six pack. Cheeseburgers were a penny then.”Hugh Cecil on the Armando Ianucci TV Show
Sometimes travelling in distance can be a bit like travelling in time. Found myself revisiting the scene of some of my earliest childhood memories this weekend… For a full set of pix see the slideshow on Flickr
In the early fifties Huntingdon was still a small county town, chartered by King John in 1205 and with Oliver Cromwell among its former MPs. It was the small, sleepy hub of a small, sleepy county – there were so few people with telephones that my grandmother’s number was Huntingdon 351. The whole population was something like five or six thousand and this 1951 snapshot shows The Causeway completely empty of cars.
My great uncle was rector of St Mary’s parish church there and lived in the imposing red brick vicarage from 1938-1970, while Dad, Mum and us two boys settled in nearby Godmanchester, just a mile up the River Ouse. Every Sunday my atheist father required his two sons to attend morning service at St Mary’s. Perhaps out of family loyalty or perhaps – as he claimed – because he wanted us to know what we were rejecting if we opted to follow in his godless footsteps.
In the seventies – long after Uncle Alexander had retired and the rest of the family died or moved away – Huntingdon got swallowed by the neighbouring country of Cambridgeshire. Visiting it today the population has more than quadrupled. A vast concrete flyover has been driven across the nearby watermeadows while the ringroad brutally gouged through the town centre is like a badly-healed razor scar across the face of an old friend.
So Huntingdon may be much bigger but it’s also much diminished compared to the county town of which my grandma was the first woman mayor in 800 years. Back in 1954, that was quite a big deal. Today, wandering past the closed arcades and charmless redevelopments along its high street, it’s hard to imagine anyone nowadays giving a toss one way or the other.
That said, even if it was possible, I wouldn’t go back and live amid the quaint rural racism, sexism and homophobia of 1950s Huntingdon, not for a million quid in old money. The good old days are definitely here and now.
A handcoloured statuette of Garibaldi that my dad treasured all his life. He always said Garibaldi had been his hero as a young man, though I never thought to ask him why. Wikipedia describes the extraordinary life and exploits of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) in considerable detail – and credits him with making possible the unification of Italy – among much else.
But what probably appealed most to Dad was Garibaldi’s anti-clericalism. “He did much,” says Wikipedia, to “circumscribe the temporal power of the Papacy” and Dad hated religion with all the fervour of a repented believer. It was always faintly baffling when he went off on one of his tirades about the irrationality of religious belief. Neither Mum nor any of his children had any particular opinion about it, whereas he himself once planned to take Holy Orders. At Cambridge in his late teens he abruptly lost his faith and almost overnight swithced to the opposite extreme.
Dad’s been dead for 18 months now, and his beloved Garibaldi now lives – dusty and neglected – on a shelf in our front room. Behind him are the children’s encyclopedias he bought for us at eyewatering expense back in 1955. Sometimes it seems like forever since we last saw him, at other time like today I still can’t quite believe he’s gone.
My big brother used to get The Eagle back in the far-off fifties. Dan Dare, Riders Of The Range, Storm Nelson… real Big Boys’ stuff. Me, I had to make do with the duller companion comic for little kids, The Swift.
This was the New Year’s edition from 1958 – read the other 15 pages on Flickr.
If this doesn’t take you back, just for a moment, to postwar Britain then you probably didn’t live there. Writing this blog helps remind me of that vanished world we grew up in – while at the same time making me heartily glad to be in the here and now. I do miss the people – particularly close family like my dad, mum and grandma. But at the same time they impressed themselves so deeply on us all it also feels like they’re only just out of reach. Even though two of them died more than half a lifetime ago. Their diaries, the photographs, the objects and furniture we’ve inherited, their sayings and quirky family names for things are still very much with us.
Used to listen to Still Crazy in the mid seventies late at night in my room on repeat – Paul Simon at his most sublime and melancholy. Thinking about it after actually meeting my old lover on the street last night. Sure enough we talked about some old times and we drank ourselves some beers too. Still crazy ? Probably. But alive – a lot of our other friends from GLF London of 1974 didn’t make it.
To tell you the truth he was there with me when I came a cropper on the street yesterday. Only then did he admit he’d just taken a tumble himself an hour earlier – measured his length down a flight of hotel stairs in Kings Cross. Thankfully he escaped pretty much unscathed. After a fifteen minute lie-down to get over the shock he’d been fine.
Listening to Still Crazy After All These Years three and a half decades later the daft thing is how young we actually all still were. Along with Neil Young, James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell etc Rhymin’ Simon provided a soundtrack for our generation to mourn the passing of our youth even while we still had it. “Time, time, time see what’s become of me” he wrote on Hazy Shade Of Winter at the age of – what – 26 or 27.
What we should have said to ourselves at that age was: this is the youngest you’re ever going to be for the rest of your life – better make the most of it. Bit then of course exactly the same thing applies now.
