Things the younger generation wouldn’t believe when you were a kid

[johnnychips]

One for us older members (I’m 62). Are there any things that you tell your grandchildren; or students if you are a teacher; or things you can imagine, that they really can’t believe.

My students can’t believe that firstly, I only had one bath a week, and the cleansing agent was Fairy Liquid. Secondly, most people didn’t have a shower in the house. Thirdly, that the hygiene regime was augmented at secondary school when we had to take naked communal showers twice a week.

The other one is that there were only two TV channels, in black and white.

What things happened to you as a kid that young people find astonishing today?

 

[McRhu]

Fairy Liquid? Looxury!

 

[Springs Branch]

A hard one to swallow for today's device-addicted youth:- Many households only had one telephone which was shared by everybody in the house. This was usually tethered by a wire to a wall socket in the hallway / behind the front door, was a solidly-built apparatus with a rotary dial and heavy handset, and often sat on its own dedicated table.

The phone wasn't updated every year or two (no need to) and was issued to you by the authorities when you signed up for the service. Choice of phone model was limited to a cream one, a green one or a black one. It was only to be used for important calls, which had to be kept as brief as possible on account of the cost.

A good fraction of households had no phone at all. If you needed to make a call there was a public payphone in a bright red urinal kiosk, usually only a street or two away. Mrs Miggins next door might occasionally relay important incoming messages (since she had a phone on account of Her Bob being on-call at the steelworks) and could be relied on to help out if you ever needed to ring 999.



If you misbehaved badly at school, the teacher or headmaster was at liberty to beat you with a cane or leather strap (not a frequent occurrence by the 1970s, but happened often enough).

No point whinging to your parents about your 'uman Rights when you got home, because they'd say if the teacher caned you, you probably deserved it and you should behave better next time.

 

[Lost property]

Let's think....ice outside and inside windows, frozen milk in the bottles, gratuitous physical assaults by teachers, both genders, and state sanctioned flagellation plus those who "enjoyed" watching communal showers, bored rigid Sunday's with nowhere open, " H " shaped television aerials...a status symbol of their time...conformity, jeans viewed as decadence, chicken was a luxury item, food choices and cooking..basic for many and stodge on a plate, the school run..non existent...smog, to name but a few

 

[DelayRepay]

I am only in my 40s, but my nephew who's eight does not believe me when I tell him we didn't have the internet when I was a kid.

We went to a museum where they had a display of a 1950s house (linked to the Queen's jubilee). He thought the old rotary telephone was hilarious. My mum said she felt really old seeing all the things she remembered as a little girl being part of a museum display.

 

[birchesgreen]

My nephew couldn't believe it when i told him i was given a copy of the house keys when i was 11 and for the last year at primary school went home (to an empty house) at lunchtime to have my lunch. He didn't get any keys till he was past 18

Missing a TV programme because your parents wanted to watch something on the other side. We did get a video recorder in the early 80s though so my childhood wasn't completely scarred.

 

[GusB]

Missing a TV programme because your parents wanted to watch something on the other side. We did get a video recorder in the early 80s though so my childhood wasn't completely scarred.

I was particularly affected by Wimbledon as a child!

I don't think youngsters would believe that telly channels actually closed down at night, and sometimes during the day, too. Not to mention the national anthem being played after the announcer signed off.

 

[birchesgreen]

I was particularly affected by Wimbledon as a child!

I missed out on pretty much all of the Tom Baker years of Dr Who because it clashed with one of my mum's soap operas

TV not starting till mid-morning, and then it was schools programmes until midday.

 

[duncanp]

Sweet cigarettes (ie. sweets that were made to look like cigarettes)

Pounds, shillings and pence

Queues in the bank on a Friday afternoon to cash a cheque for the weekend, as there were few cashpoint machines until the 1980s. Come to think of it, bank branches and cheques are rapidly becoming a thing of the past nowadays.

 

[birchesgreen]

If you arranged to meet a friend and you was running late there was no way to tell them.

 

[Whistler40145]

Television was three channels, BBC 1, BBC 2 and ITV, no 24 hour service back in the 1970s, midnight was God Save the Queen, followed by Test Card until start of service

 

[Snow1964]

As a child, if I wanted to visit friends from about age 10 you went by bike, no helmets, no knee or elbow pads, and when there just stuck it by side of house, or in back garden, bike was never locked. Parents often had no idea where you were.

At my junior school there was a right of passage as moved from 2nd to third year (years 4 to 5 in modern school speak) in that you graduated from short trousers to proper trousers. Modern kids probably wouldn’t understand concept of having a graze on knee or elbow was a norm.

I’m only 58, so we are talking 1970s at school

 

[Galvanize]

Being unable to use the landline phone while connected to dial-up internet!

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Being unable to use the landline phone while connected to dial-up internet!

A landline phone? What's that?

 

[Bayum]

London Olympics.
The relative stability of our monarch - their parent and potentially their grandparent’s have only known one monarch most of their life.
That a book, film or image with a black individual cannot be elsewhere other than Africa.
That we didn’t have access to certain food/technology. Some of my students’ parents are younger than me so even from their parents it’s a challenge for them to imagine what was available in prior generations.
Lack of next day delivery from Amazon etc.
7, 8, 9 year olds are an interesting bunch.

 

[DelayRepay]

A landline phone? What's that?

This reminds me of giving someone 'three rings'. E.g. if we were going to see my grandad, my mum would give him 'three rings' before we set off so he knew when to expect us. This was just dialling his number, letting it ring three times then hanging up. Obviously you had to agree what three rings meant in advance!

Was this just something my family did because we were too tight to pay for phone calls?

I also remember desperately waiting for 6pm because I wanted to phone someone. My dad wouldn't let us use the phone before 6pm unless it was an emergency, as peak rate calls were too expensive for a tight Yorkshireman

 

[DynamicSpirit]

This reminds me of giving someone 'three rings'. E.g. if we were going to see my grandad, my mum would give him 'three rings' before we set off so he knew when to expect us. This was just dialling his number, letting it ring three times then hanging up. Obviously you had to agree what three rings meant in advance!

Was this just something my family did because we were too tight to pay for phone calls?

I'm pretty sure I recall my family doing something similar. Not as a regular thing but occasionally - for things like, letting someone know you'd arrived home safely. It may have been two rings rather than three, but the principle was the same.

I also remember desperately waiting for 6pm because I wanted to phone someone. My dad wouldn't let us use the phone before 6pm unless it was an emergency, as peak rate calls were too expensive for a tight Yorkshireman

Related to this was, for any students: The communal kitchen having a a payphone in it, for which there would often be a queue, particularly as the 6pm end-of-peak-rate came. And then the knowledge that you needed to keep the phone call short - not only because of the cost, but also in order to be considerate to the people queuing behind you to use the phone.

 

[DelW]

This reminds me of giving someone 'three rings'. E.g. if we were going to see my grandad, my mum would give him 'three rings' before we set off so he knew when to expect us. This was just dialling his number, letting it ring three times then hanging up. Obviously you had to agree what three rings meant in advance!

Was this just something my family did because we were too tight to pay for phone calls?

For me, it was a way of avoiding payphone costs. If I'd been visiting my parents then driving back to where I was living (which didn't have a phone), when I got there I'd pop into a call box, dial their number, let it ring three times then put the handset back down. They knew I was back safely and it didn't cost me anything.

 

[341o2]

Most people received their pension and other benefits in cash at the Post Office, like banks on a Friday, Thursday was pension payday for many. You had a book with dockets that you signed each time you went to collect your money.
Most transactions were in cash, and no barcodes. The person at the till had to manually enter the cost of each item, all the cash register would then do was to give a total amount and the cashier had to work out how much change to give manually.

When you married, usually your bride was either a virgin or a widow. the facts of life weren't openly discussed, I was given a booklet explaining it. Marriage was expected to be "until death do us part"

 

[Mcr Warrior]

A hard one to swallow for today's device-addicted youth:- Many households only had one telephone which was shared by everybody in the house.

Anyone on here have to make do with a so-called "party line", where a random nearby household also shared the phone line, so that if you needed to make a call, there was every chance the line was already in use?!

London Olympics.

That was only ten years ago!

 

[Galvanize]

A landline phone? What's that?

Expanding on that…my Grandparents were quite old fashioned with their phone answering.

Both would answer the phone quoting the Phone Number (minus the Area Code)…that’s something that just died out with the generations!

 

[RJH]

New mains-powered electrical appliances being supplied without a plug sticks in my mind, probably because it was my job as a kid to fit a plug to electrical goods my parents bought.

 

[DelayRepay]

Expanding on that…my Grandparents were quite old fashioned with their phone answering.

Both would answer the phone quoting the Phone Number (minus the Area Code)…that’s something that just died out with the generations!

My parents always did that too.

I guess the youngsters will give me a blank look if I say 4291 at this point!

 

[nw1]

One for us older members (I’m 62). Are there any things that you tell your grandchildren; or students if you are a teacher; or things you can imagine, that they really can’t believe.

My students can’t believe that firstly, I only had one bath a week, and the cleansing agent was Fairy Liquid. Secondly, most people didn’t have a shower in the house. Thirdly, that the hygiene regime was augmented at secondary school when we had to take naked communal showers twice a week.

The other one is that there were only two TV channels, in black and white.

What things happened to you as a kid that young people find astonishing today?

I'm not that much younger and what you said here sounds pretty remarkable, even though I am by no measure "one of the kids" anymore

 

[DelayRepay]

New mains-powered electrical appliances being supplied without a plug sticks in my mind, probably because it was my job as a kid to fit a plug to electrical goods my parents bought.

Indeed - and I remember being taught in school how to wire a plug, and how to change the fuse! Nowadays I think you're supposed to throw the whole appliance away and buy a new one.

 

[nw1]

How about some railway-related ones:

Some trains had slam-doors.

Cross-Country trains were not overcrowded.

There was a thing called the "peak" when trains were significantly more frequent, and longer, than the off-peak.

My parents always did that too.

I guess the youngsters will give me a blank look if I say 4291 at this point!

Not a youngster anymore, but: we still did that in the 1980s.

 

[Gloster]

Only three radio channels: Home, Light and Third. There were pirate radio, those evil doers playing modern stuff like the Rolling Stones, but even if you could receive the station, you probably didn’t know the frequency. You did know where Radio Luxembourg was, but once you had twiddled the knob to get the cursor in the right place the frequency would wander and the music would disappear behind a wall of screeches. And you might only be able to listen to it after dark.

Music was listened on vinyl records (yes, children, they are an old idea, not the latest fashion), which had to be changed on the record-player at frequent intervals. You had to go to a shop to buy them, although some shops would allow you to sit in a booth to listen to see if you wanted to buy first. You could even borrow records from the public library: you know, that big building that still has a few shelves of old books in among the computers and kids’ games.

Lucky people had tape recorders: machines the size of a small suitcase with two wheels on top and tape that was wound from one wheel to the other. You could buy tapes or record yourself: normally things that started “Have you switched it on?..Well, it’s going round...Are you sure?...Is everybody ready?..Right let’s go...One, two, thr-“.

 

[Busaholic]

Anyone on here have to make do with a so-called "party line", where a random nearby household also shared the phone line, so that if you needed to make a call, there was every chance the line was already in use?!

Yes!! Given hardly any phone calls were made in our house when I was young it wasn't really a problem. I don't think I was allowed to use the phone until well into my secondary school years. I doubt my father ever in his life spent more than ninety seconds on a phone call indulging in 'chat': he was quite impervious to it! It's no wonder really that my teenage years were difficult and unhappy - Adrian Mole led a charmed and fulfilled life compared to me! (Don't worry, I'll supply my own heartstrings.)

 

[Howardh]

In the 60's whan I stayed at my gran's in a terraced house in Bolton, they had an outside loo and a tin bath in the "bathroom" which was used in front of the kitchen fire. If you needed to "go" during the night you had a choice of a potty or commode. The "kitchen" was the back room where it was a living room, dining room, play room etc (with a 12" 50's Bush TV perched on the fridge - both were luxuries) and the main room was never used save for birthdays, Xmas and when the vicar came round.

No telephone, but they had one next door!!

 

[Gloster]

There were emergency messages on the radio (Home or later Radio Four) for people who were out of contact and needed to be found urgently for a family emergency, such as an imminent death. They used to be made once and this would be immediately before the six o’clock news.

“Before the news, here is an emergency SOS message for Mr John William Smith. Would Mr John William Smith of Acacia Avenue, Dartford, currently believed to be touring the Lake District in a blue Triumph Herald, registration number ABC123D, please contact the Memorial Hospital, Orpington, where his mother, Mrs Anne Mary Smith, is dangerously ill. That is the the end of the SOS message.” Alternatively, John William Smith might be described as ‘last heard of in the Reading area four years ago’.

Around 1980 a friend was on a family camping holiday: he was an ardent Nottingham Forest supporter, when that team was at the top. He and his brother missed the football results, so they were allowed to get back in the car at the campsite to listen to the news (No doubt they were told not to run down the battery.) Just before the news there was one of these messages. Suddenly his brother got out and went across to a family sitting opposite and spoke to them: it was the people who the message was aimed at. His brother said it was a bit odd as they gave the description of the type of car and he thought, ‘Like that one opposite’, and then found himself reading the numbers as the announcer read out the registration.