Category: 70s

Titch and clackers

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Clackers-clacker-balls-BLUE-Click-Clacks

One of the most dangerous things in a London school playground in the 60s and 70s wasn’t the chance of getting cholera from the school fountain, it was clackers.

How did this get past any research group and actually make it into production?: “You get two, heavy when moving at 100 mph, plastic balls and bang them together”.  The noise was one thing, the potential wrist breaking a mildly bigger problem.

But these “toys” life didn’t last long within playgrounds, although during its reign of terror made the Eton Wall Game look like a cream tea with an elderly aunt.   They were soon banned; not by schools directly, the local hospitals were running out of supplies of plaster of paris.

During these times clackers were not the only life-threatening injury one could get in a playground: a hoop and a stick could, if out of control, crash into ankles and if not treated in time could easily turn to gangrene;  I was a connoisseur of cards inside bubble gum packets and here a paper cut courtesy of Alan Tracy coming out of the Roundhouse was always lurking when flicking said card up against the playground wall; conkers was always potentially dangerous if your opponent had a violent allergy to acetic acid.

I’ve not been in a primary school playground since 1968 but I’m assuming hop scotch is now played on an app; one potato, two potato is deemed offensive in case any participant in the playground’s relatives lived during the 1845 Irish famine and marbles are things you tend to lose now rather than play.

Three and in, anyone?

Ex-directories

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telephone seat

There must be a massive market for old telephone seats?

With the advent of modern phones there are several pieces of unwanted furniture no longer needed; the old-fashioned telephone seat, much loved in the 50s, 60s and 70s, is sadly one – along with locks on the phone, wires and telephone directories.

In London there were the four monster books; when they’d arrive you’d always check your own entry and then see if there were any rude names to ring. I was always disappointed to find there was no Mr Knob living within the London postal district.  They were great door-stops, but not very good if your telephone seat was bit wobbly at one end.

I was never encouraged to sit too long on the telephone seat as my mother told me this was how you got piles. Piles of what I always thought to myself not having been professionally trained in rectology?

But there was something even more dangerous than falling off an unbalanced seat or haemorrhoids: that was the address book – not a simple one you’d add people whom you’d met on holiday and would swap Christmas cards with for a respectable period of time until you realised that Hayling Island was a long way from London and did you really liked them? – the device with the letters down the side, which, when pressed, opened up at a speed like that of a hunting cheetah.  If you had bad eye-sight, like me, you’d need to be close to check the number you were about to ring – consequently there was always the danger of just prior to making a call, you’d re-enacted the most famous bit of the Battle of Hastings.

I often dreamed of being able to rip a London telephone directory in two. I clearly never followed the instruction manual which came with my Bullworker that accurately.

Rings a bell

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telephone

You no longer have to answer phones with your number.   Somehow reciting the words “Balham 0557” still rings (no pun intended) favourably with me and was gutted when, sometime in the 60s, the Balham prefix BAL changed to the very impersonal 673 – where is the magic with that?  At least make it 666 – infinitely more comedic; the telephone exchange number of the Beast!

I had an aunt who had a phone voice; if you rang her she started off as Princess Margaret and if she knew who you were would instantly (subsequently moving several rungs down the ascendancy to the Throne scale) became Margaret Powell (who might have driven a Princess, but certainly wasn’t one).

My family’s first phone was red and was a step up from the yoghurt pots and string we’d owned before; although more expensive, you never got cross lines on a yoghurt pot and there were no party lines either – it was YOUR yoghurt pot – no waiting for the old woman downstairs to come off the phone to the chimney sweep.

Until Trimphones came along phones were quite cumbersome – only slightly smaller than the Colossus built at Bletchley Park.   The receivers were good, however, if you wanted to practice rounders in your lounge.

Phone boxes aren’t as popular as they were, either. No wonder there are loads of ads on TV for printing your own business card, the former major advertisers within phone boxes now (allegedly) use the Internet.  And pressing “Button B to get your money back” was how fruit machine addiction began.

“Putting you through now, caller.”

The postman doesn’t even ring once!

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postcard

Around this time of year, when I was growing up in London in the 60s and 70s, I’d anticipate copious amounts of postcards from friends and relatives arriving showing pictures of a place within the town they were staying where they’d never visit, but locally it was iconic, and/or telling me they wished I was there (which begs the question: why wasn’t I invited in the first place?)

Cards would come from far-reaching places such as Bognor, Bournemouth, Bideford – having been brought up in Balham it seemed that my friends and relatives were incapable of travelling anywhere which didn’t begin with a “B”. (These days people will travel to Belize, Bolivia, Bogota – nice, but do they do a nice cream tea there?)

No one sends postcards anymore; instead of “wish you were here” on the back of a card featuring a beach, historical monument or a cartoon of a large-breasted woman berating her diminutive husband with an innuendo like “why can’t your sand castle be that big?” you get a text or an email which says: “arrived safely”, swiftly followed by over a hundred Instagram photos of the baggage retrieval area of some distant airport and bemoaning the fact that why is it so few people speak English in the Belgian Congo?

One of the last postcards I sent was in 1973, around this time of year, wishing that my mum and dad were here and hoping I’d done well in my O-levels.  I hadn’t; the punishment being the next year with two weeks in Benidorm – also beginning with B – like Bubonica Pestis (a little-known Greek island).

Steering committee

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steering wheel

As a Christmas present in 1963 I was given a pretend steering wheel.

This was jointly given to me by my mother, who’d passed her driving test the previous months in fog, snow and hot pants and my father who, after a span of twenty years consisting eleven unsuccessful and one complete freak of driving nature successful driving tests.

I inherited my father’s poor driving ability and really should never have progressed to anything further than a pretend steering wheel made of light plastic, not having any electrical power and only able to affix itself to something with the use of a big rubber sucker.

My steering wheel had many levers. One was the indicator (this is something Volvo drivers won’t understand) and a gear stick; this often came off in my hands, but had an extra use as I’d emulate my dad’s road rage by shaking the detached gear stick at passing (invariably innocent) drivers. In the middle of the wheel sat a hooter, which sadly didn’t play Colonel Bogey’s March when pressed.

I enjoyed making the noises small children think cars make and would couple this by copying my vituperative father. It brought pretend driving to life for me; Dad put the F in Ford.

I failed my first driving test in Sutton. Having to sit next to a complete stranger AND having no plastic steering wheel to manoeuvre were distinct disadvantages; saying “parp, parp, said Noddy” as we did the emergency stop didn’t exactly help my case.

A nod’s as good as a wink to a Ford Cortina

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ford-cortina-1600E

There was a time when Kensington Olympia was the gateway to Devon. All you needed was a nervous driver, a Ford Cortina and a Motorail.

In the summer of 1972 I was taken, by my dad, from our home in Balham to Kensington Olympia – the Motorail terminus. I sat in the back of my uncle’s Ford Cortina as we travelled the 100-yards to board the Motorail.  When we parked and my uncle had applied the handbrake I remember thinking that Devon was not all it had been set up to be and the beach smelled of exhaust fumes; there wasn’t a cream tea in sight, either.  Having never been to Devon before, it looked suspiciously like West London.

I didn’t have to spend the entire time in the Ford Cortina – my only companion, after my uncle had got out of the now stationary car, was the model dog in the back of the car. Not much conversation, although it did seem to agree with everything I said; it certainly nodded a lot!

I realised, after what had seemed an eternity, that Dawlish was the end destination. Luckily the house where I stayed backed onto the railway line, so it felt, for the entire fortnight, that I was still on the Motorail.

I rarely went on holiday with my dad; but he would visit for the odd day. He made a special effort this holiday to come to Devon as he’d heard Dawlish were playing a Chelsea XI in a pre-season friendly.  I subsequently realised my dad was more interested in Marvin Hinton than me.  More Marvellous Marvin than Marvellous Micky.

The Motorail no longer runs, probably because Ford Cortinas are no longer that popular. As are nodding dogs.

Very fuzzy felt

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sub bayern

Lionel Messi has probably never played Subbuteo before as, roughly translated from its original Argentinian, means, I’ve been substituted.

With World Cup fever still gripping (like the last Ice Age) memories of playing Subbuteo in the bedroom of my fourth-floor Balham flat in the 60s and 70s, still puzzles me:   Why did the little men break so easily?  If the pitches in England were as unironed as the Subbuteo playing field felt were you’d never play a single game.  And why was it so hard to get the Red Star Belgrade away kit in any toy shop on Balham High Street? Was the loathing of Marshal Tito so bad in SW17 in the late 60s?

I learned to iron attempting to flatten out my Subbuteo pitch, although a consequence of this is that I can now only iron shirts made out of green felt – and having given up modelling for canned and frozen vegetables, this is now a rarity.

Many Subbuteo games for me were ruined before they even started – I had a mouse who would eat more Subbuteo goal-nets than he did sunflower seeds; my knees, as a kid, clearly had a mind of their own and were obviously anti-football as they would, with unerring accuracy, invariably break several players before kick-off and there was always that inherent looming fear of getting carpet burns on my index finger (which was needed to play the violin badly).

Rather than having penalties in World Cup games, I’d like to see an introduction of thirty-minutes of Subbuteo with the winner being the person with the most intact figurines remaining at the end of that half an hour.   Or, if it were held in my Balham flat, the fewer mouse turds on the pitch was the deciding factor.

“Steamin’ and a rollin'”

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brighton belle

I don’t think I could have ever have been a train driver as the hat would have messed up my hair (being daubed in soot wasn’t a major attraction either, even for a ten -year-old boy who loathed washing!); however, until it was withdrawn in 1972, watching the Brighton Bellle through the railings on Wandsworth Common – the only thing which ever stopped our games of football there – was a fleeting glimpse of railway magic, where you contemplated becoming one.

Although, running toward the track invariably resulted in our opposition team scoring a goal whilst our entire defence were peering through the rail-side railings wondering if any of us would ever become Casey Jones (the late 50s Californian TV train driver, not the burger shop)?

If you played against the bigger boys on Wandsworth Common there was the inherent danger that your jumper-cum-goalpost might be nicked. So, a few, fleeting moments of pre-Dr Beeching joy, frequently ended in pain (and a subsequent slight chill).

But Wandsworth Common has changed since the time the Brighton Belle would make its daily visit.  As a kid, kicking a football or sending down a leg break, instead of fancy wine bars and Michelin Star restaurants, the poshest shop on Bellevue Road was Budgen’s.  No doubt the current residents there pronounce every consonant too; whereas in my day, the only thing we had in common with the French was in inability to pronounce the letter H at the start of words!

I’m envious of people who witnessed the steam train days as the nearest I ever got to seeing Mallard was feeding one on Wandsworth Common ponds.

A-roving, a-roving

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paste

There was a time when you could travel from Balham (if you lived there) to (almost) the outer limits of the Universe (as long as a London Transport bus went there) for only ten bob.

A Red Rover was a frequent purchase for me and my mates in the late 60s, early 70s; a time when we were young teenagers and had irresponsible parents who’d cast us onto the streets, armed only with ten shillings, a Tupperware cup full of Coke and or milk (depending on how nauseous you wanted to get), a Penguin and a selection of (one) sandwiches made with the pride of the Shippam’s factory.   Travelling from Balham, most of our packed lunches had been consumed by Clapham North.

I had a paternal aunt and two cousins who lived in North Harrow (which, when looking at the bus map at Balham Underground Station, might have been outside the Universe, let alone at its furthest boundary). I decided we should take a selection of ostensibly twenty buses and go and visit my dad’s remote family.  It seemingly took several weeks but, having successfully arrived, starving by this point as we’d mistimed our food intake (which is why none of us joined the Commandoes), we discovered they were out.  No mobile phones those days to say: “Hi, Auntie Betty, we’re coming to visit”, not even a couple of old yoghurt pots to communicate our impending arrival.  So, skint, hungry and tired we ventured back to south London with my friends assuming this extended family didn’t exist.

I go nowhere these days without the aforementioned yoghurt pots (in case of emergencies) and always have a ten-shilling note hidden inside the secret heel of my shoe – the one next to the beaver footprint.

“Is there a doctor in the dry cleaners?”

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emergency

It was watching Emergency – Ward 10 that I decided I was probably not best cut out to be a doctor.  Even in black and white, blood looked pretty gruesome. However, I’m sure the ITV series which ran for a decade between 1957-1967 inspired many people to be asked “what’s the bleeding time?”

In the 60s there was precious little TV choice; even when the third channel, BBC2, was added in 1964.  Although, as a seven-year-old, this seemed to involve watching lots of men with beards sitting around talking about the meaning of life – very late at night; in the 70s, if you couldn’t sleep and turned the TV on you’d be confronted by (probably the same) men wearing tank-tops and shirts with collars nearly touching their elbows pointing at complex charts or doing unspeakable things with pipettes.

However, in south London, with careers officers at school telling you to be a secretary if you were a girl and an armed robber or accountant depending on which type of boys’ school you attended, TV could have possibly given that much-needed career-inspiration? Perhaps All Gas and Gaiters encouraged people to join the church or a Reg Varney-induced moment would have made being a bus driver appealing, although running a motel in the Midlands wouldn’t have been attractive as you’d be forever sorting out the love life of the village idiot.

TV did inspire me and, despite having often seen the actor who played Mr Verity in Balham Sketchley’s, I have enjoyed forty-plus years working in the Home Guard.