A 1950s Childhood Read Online Free PDF Page A

substitute for ham but it was mystery meat; the colour, texture and tastedidn’t resemble real ham. It was a type of processed meat, made mostly from pork, but you were never quite sure what Spam was! Could there be a child of the ’50s who actually liked the stuff?
    Other popular sandwich fillings included such diverse things as mashed potatoes, chips, bananas, jam, salad cream, cheese, and of course fish paste, the ingredients of which was another childhood mystery!
Washdays
    The growth in ownership of modern-day household appliances was seriously hindered by the economic impact of the Second World War on Britain’s consumer market. As was the case with most labour-saving devices for the home, we were well behind the United States, where a large majority of homes already had an electric washing machine. In the late 1950s, less than a third of households in Britain had a washing machine, and these were single tub, top-loading machines, with a wringer on top. Most people were still washing by hand, using a scrubbing brush, washboard, and a hand-operated mangle. There were launderettes, but they were few and far between, and they were also expensive to use. In the cities and larger towns, there were laundry shops where people would take their dirty white cotton clothes, towels and bed sheets to be washed by machine. These places were called the ‘bagwash’, because you would put all your dirty stuff inside a heavy-duty cloth bag and then take the bag to the shop, where it would be weighed and tagged with a piece of cloth thatwas indelibly marked with your name or code number. The ‘bagwash’ was usually just an empty shop with a small counter, and a large set of scales that sat on the bare wooden floorboards. After your bag had been tagged, the lady behind the counter would heave it onto a stack of other bags that were piled high against the back wall of the shop, where they would all stay until the laundry van collected them later in the day. Some ‘bagwash’ shops only opened one day a week for dropping off washing, and another day for collecting it. These would be known as the ‘bagwash’ days for the local area. When your mum collected the bagwash it would smell of chemicals and still be damp, just right for mum’s favourite job – ironing. You only took white cotton things to the ‘bagwash’ because everything was bleached and boiled in the laundry – bed mites didn’t stand a chance!
Tradesmen and Services
    It was a time when many people felt at ease to leave the street door on the latch, except at night or if the house was empty, and they would leave a key hanging down behind the letterbox just in case someone did get locked out. Apart from the noise of kids playing, the streets were usually fairly quiet places and so not much went unnoticed. There were the regular well-known deliverymen like the postman, milkman, breadman, coalman, and of course ‘the man from the Pru’. Everyone seemed to have the Prudential Insurance man call each week to collect the small life insurance premiums. Before the age of telesales,when most people didn’t even have a telephone, the door-to-door salesmen were very active. The tallyman would call door-to-door selling goods on the never-never. They were so convincing – ‘you can have all this for just a shilling a week!’ It really is true that some people would hide behind the sofa when he knocked on the door for his money. Many of the inner-city travelling salesmen would ride pushbikes, and some used the earliest mopeds, which were just basic pushbikes with a small motor attached to the top of the front tyre. There was a profusion of brush and cleaning equipment salesmen, and of course the ever popular and very convincing Encyclopaedia Britannica salesmen, offering the whole twenty-four-volume set of encyclopaedias on an easy payment plan. No child could hope to pass the eleven-plus exams without access to their very own set of encyclopaedias.
    Postmen always looked