The 50s brought in a decade of change
IF your childhood memory of Mondays includes bubble and squeak with cold meat left over from the day before and the families’ whites steaming in a galvanised boiler, you’re probably a baby boomer.
Baby boomers were born in the decade after the Second World War, when some foods were still on ration and older brothers did national service. Parents never quite able to shrug off the mend-and-make-do ways of wartime were appalled if the tiniest morsel on a dinner plate was left uneaten.
They also saved everything. Mothers saved margarine tubs and egg boxes “just in case...” and fathers oiled anything that could be oiled to make it last, while collecting screws, nuts and bolts in tobacco tins because “You never know when they will come in handy”.
Baby boomers had free orange juice in small medicine bottles. They dreaded the phrase “It will do you good” because that meant another spoonful of cod liver oil.
Sometimes though it meant Virol, thick, sticky, malty, gooey stuff that prevented speech for some while, but tasted yummy.
Mums worked like Trojans. Coal fires were laid and lit with a gas poker. Cold beef was minced with a cast iron mincer, hand tightened to the kitchen table’s edge.
Grates and doorsteps were blacked with Zebra. Brasses buffed with Brasso. Washing washed with OMO. And should the sun shine, a curtain made out of deck-chair material was hung across the front door to protect the paint.
Mirrors had to be covered with tea towels if a lightning storm threatened, but nobody knew why.
Entertainment crept in via the wireless. The Goons and Educating Archie, music from Al Martino, Mario Lanza, Eddie Calvert with his golden trumpet and Winifred Atwell with a smile a song and a honky tonk piano.
News too. Thor Heyerdahl crossing the Pacific on the balsa raft Kontiki. Sugar Ray Robinson losing to Randolph Turpin. The Festival of Britain. And crowding round the only TV in the street to watch the coronation in 1953.
Things were afoot in Cheltenham too. For a start, large areas of the town centre were being demolished.
One side of Pittville Street was bulldozed. Half of Winchcombe Street was razed and rebuilt and Albion Street was widened.
The North Place car showrooms of AA Motors were demolished, ironically, to ease traffic congestion.
In the mid1950s Royal Well bus station was developed and the line of prefabricated shelters appeared. The YMCA hut behind the Municipal Offices remained for a few more years, a reminder of the war, when innumerable cups of tea were served to countless service personnel of nationalities galore.
Horse drawn vehicles were still a familiar sight about town in the 50s and 60s. Coal from the Co-op was delivered in this way and the rag and bone man with his piebald pony and incomprehensible street cry was a familiar local character.
He added colour to our streets, while his pony’s contribution was good on your rhubarb. Unless you preferred custard, of course. Milk arrived by horse and cart too, although the Gloucestershire Dairy’s fleet of red and white electric floats operating from the depot in Prestbury Road, or buzzing about the dairy in Imperial Lane (now flats) showed the way forward.
It was at this time that milk machines appeared on the streets. Blue in colour, large in stature, with an illuminated glass panel at the front, these mechanised vendors delivered pintas in waxed paper cartons in return for a sixpenny coin dropped in the slot.
These machines, by the way, were made at Hucclecote by a subsidiary of the Gloster Aircraft Company, a product of post war diversification.
The pictures you see here were taken in Cheltenham in the early 1960s to record parts of the town centre that were destined for the demolition man’s hammer.