The best Mothers’ Day gift that you could buy
The Sunday Post has launched a fantastic new book of 1250 household tips from the rather clever housewives of the 1950s
The Sunday Post has published a new book of old wisdom.
For decades, your favourite Sunday paper ran a “Pass It On” column, week in, week out.
Housewives, and some men, would write in with clever, innovative and frankly brilliant tips for cooking, cleaning, mending, ironing, saving money and . . . well just about everything you could think of that good and decent people did.
We have collected these tips from the 1950s, the era of the superhousewife, and collated more than 1200 of them into themed chapters.
The tips are nothing short of brilliant – do you know why you should always paint clothes props but never paint stepladders? Do you know the best time to clean your oven, the surest way to clean your glasses or how to get water spots out of polished wood?
Hundreds of the tips are still useful today. The others, whose time may have passed, invoke a powerful feeling of nostalgia.
The Sunday Post gave a halfguinea or a pair of towels for the week’s best tip. However, the prize was only part of the reward.
In those house-proud times, the woman who had a tip printed was regarded as a housewife of distinction. A woman who was thrifty, clever and kept her home spick and span.
These were the days when families would compete to do the best job when it was their turn to clean the close. There could be no saving the reputation of a slovenly wife who left the stairs clarty.
For those who reached the hallowed ground of a tip printed in The Sunday Post, a heavenly light shone for ever on their housewifely prowess. The cutting might be produced to impress friends and relatives. Others would tell their friends they lived next door to a woman who’d had a tip published as it was a general sign of living in a good neighbourhood.
Men sent in tips too, of course, but the majority were from women – even the ones intended to give advice to the man o’ the hoose!
The legend in The Sunday Post office (although never proved) was that when the Queen Mother was in residence in Scotland she read The Sunday Post (of course) and her favourite part was the Pass It On tips. She would regale the rest of the family and staff with the homely and clever advice.
Proof that the Pass It On column was so full of handy tips that anyone, from Balmoral to the Gorbals, would find it useful.
The tips are, after all, gleaned from experts who had to satisfy the most difficult-to-please judges of all, their own family.
In the pages of this book, you can hear these women talk. If you close your eyes you can see them, rank after rank, year after year, an army of capable, hardworking, resourceful women.
They have their sleeves rolled up, an apron on, there will be a pot of mince simmering on the stove behind them and a just-scrubbed table by their hand.
They are you, or your mother, grandmother, aunt, or the woman across the street who told you off for misbehaving. They were the backbone of society, the centre of their family unit, the one you turned to when trouble arose.
And The Sunday Post is determined to ensure their fame lives on. We have included the full names and addresses of all the contributors, just as they were printed in the 1950s.
We think they deserve full credit and hope you will recognise someone you know – your mother, grandmother, aunt or neighbour. If your relative’s name is in the pages
of this book then you should be very proud of them.
Indeed, if you wanted to tell us their story, we’d be delighted to hear from you.
These people were workingclass heroes. They kept a “good clean hoose” and used their myriad skills to do everything your childhood was made of.
They’d feed you the best soup you’ve ever tasted, they took up the hems on your hand-medowns and scrubbed behind your ears with all the painful, loving vigour they could muster.
They knitted your cardigans, bandaged your bleeding knees, made all that wonderful jam and polished all those cold lino floors.
Their genius deserves to be recognised and celebrated.
This book does that . . . and at the same time passes on well over a thousand nuggets of wisdom you’ll find are still extremely useful.
It’s like having your wise granny’s advice at your shoulder as you live your life today.
Buy your mum the book for Mothers’ Day and prepare to have 1250 conversations that start with: “Oh, I remember that...”