Back to the 50's

[Bilbraborn 1,594]

I think the truth is this. Most youngsters today are independent and well mannered, but that is boring and not newsworthy. Only the young idiots seem to make the news. Most the teenagers I know are well behaved and focused on good careers or whatever, including my two grand-daughters. Pity they all need to keep prodding away at mobile phones all trhe time.

[Guest]

Bilbra: # obedient parents me thinks!!

[Guest]

Robbie: i mix mine with cider,it's pulled too quick in Nottm . Leave 4"off the top-get barman to top up 5 mins later. Love the old drinks remember Luncheon Ale??

[Robbie 39]

You are losing very valuable drinking time if you are going to wait 5 minutes on every pint. I better stick to bitter.

I do remember Luncheon Ale in the bottle...yuk.

[Guest]

7.20 getting ready for a smithwicks session 360 a pint!! Thats the Euro for you!!

[tony1 118]

Liver & Onions ? I would give my right arm for a plate of that. Sadly Mrs Catfan is veggie & refuses to have anything to do with it !

I'm sure there is a precedent for divorce in there, somewhere.

[banjo48 928]

In the 50's I grew up on dads chickens, fresh eggs, home grown veggies and fresh rabbit ! home grown of course. Blue buttons and mushrooms in season, again dad had his special local spots.

Love liver and onions or bacon mmnnn! really cheap here in oz as only the poms eat it, I can get couple of kilo for $2 (pound)

Don't much care for kidney though unless it's minced up in a steak and kidney pie or pudding. Bread and dripping I've mentioned before, always do my own when we have leg of pork joint. Making my mouth water just talking about these past delicacies.

[Commo 1,292]

That programme was quite a laugh, the problem with the rotten food they were eating was due to the fact that the wife had no idea how to cook, none of the family had even seen a tin opener, and as for giving the kids cold liver and cauliflower!! There was a packet of Bisto in the larder but there was no attempt to make any gravy, and that wasn't dripping, it looked like sump oil!

With very little money, folk were able to produce good tasty food because they had been taught by their parents and grandparents; I never had to suffer the type of rubbish that the programme tried to portray was the norm!

[Blondie 1,392]

I was a fifties kid - I hated liver and onions, used to puke at the smell of it cooking and most other meats....Years later I married a butcher and meat seemd to taste different, much better, now I love all meat meals, especially liver, couldn't imagine being a total veggie, we do get more herbs and spices though, cooking back then was plain...............we eat lots of it and are in good shape, my hubby is almost 71, is really fit and active, still working, doesn't take any medication, never sees a doctor.........My grandmother and mother were great cooks, could make a meal out of almost nothing, well, they had too...........Those days back then, were'nt all bad......

[Robbie 39]

#34 Blondie,

It sounds if liver is the elixir of life, I always wondered what Liver Tablets where used for, never dreamed it was for internal youth!

[PeverilPeril 3,281]

The family in the program were better off than us. They had hot water and a proper kitchen and pantry. We had no hot water, a scullery and an outside loo. No TV until 1956 and parents never had a car. No telephone until 1964.

We had good meals though. Don't know how mam did it!

It didn't show the kids having to fetch the coal in and make a fire either....

Young/middle aged producers could not possibly capture the reality of post war living.

[Ayupmeducks 1,730]

I didn't have a telephone until about 1982!!! Reason I wouldn't have one was I'd be too easy to contact by my work place, they'd do the rounds of the electricians with phones before a Foreman would do the "foot rounds". I was always last on the list beacuse of that.

I broke down and had a phone when I lived in Oz, because my live in G/F pestered me, or I'd have still been phone free for a few more years.

I was a young kid when sugar rationing finally ended, about the same time Crunchies hit the market. My Mam was Crunchie mad, so once sugar was off rationing, she'd drag me around all the corner shops loacally looking for Crunchies...

[Cliff Ton 10,465]

The family in the program were better off than us. They had hot water and a proper kitchen and pantry. We had no hot water, a scullery and an outside loo. No TV until 1956 and parents never had a car. No telephone until 1964.

Easy to forget it's relatively recently that things like that became automatic in most homes.

My grandad lived at a house in Radford (where he'd been for over 40 years) until 1977, and when he left it still had no bathroom or inside toilet, and never had a TV or a phone or washing machine.

[MargieH 7,600]

We bought our first house in Leicester in 1965 (£3000 including all the contents as the couple were emigrating) I was so worried to owe that much money, I remember! It wasn't an old house ...think it was built in 1948 - but it had an outside toilet and a coal shed just outside the back door. Within a couple of years, we, had a WC put in the bathroom although it was a bit of a squash. The old lady who lived next door kept her outside WC until the day she died. She said she thought it was disgusting having a toilet inside the house!!

For all you cricket fans, the man we bought the house from was Stanley Jayasingh, quite a well-known cricketer at that time I believe. The house was not too far from Grace Road cricket ground, and also overlooked Leicester City's training ground. The man next door used to sit on his WC/coal house roof to watch the footballers training.

I've still got a few things that we 'inherited' from that first house 50 years ago, like a tin opener and teaspoons and a Melamine milk jug- probably other stuff as well if I thought a bit more about it.

I know that this was in the mid sixties and not the fifties but we had very little spare money as I was a full time stay-at-home mum by this time. My husband gave me £4 a week for housekeeping and I made a shopping list every week of things we needed. Nearly every week I didn't have enough money to buy everything on the list so certain things had to go on the list for the next week, where the same thing happened again. I appreciate that many people were much worse off than we were, but today, when I hear of people throwing away good food that's only just past its sell by date, buying new things when the older things are still fine, and then saying that times are hard, I do feel a teeny weeny bit annoyed! I know........ I'm turning into a grumpy old woman!!

[BilboroughShirley 1,120]

That programme was quite a laugh, the problem with the rotten food they were eating was due to the fact that the wife had no idea how to cook, none of the family had even seen a tin opener, and as for giving the kids cold liver and cauliflower!! There was a packet of Bisto in the larder but there was no attempt to make any gravy, and that wasn't dripping, it looked like sump oil!

With very little money, folk were able to produce good tasty food because they had been taught by their parents and grandparents; I never had to suffer the type of rubbish that the programme tried to portray was the norm!

Commo, I agree with you totally. That woman had not got a clue. I remember the last part of food rationing, going with my mum to the Co-op on Cockington Road and buying sugar in blue bags and the cheese they used to cut with a wire. My mum was a good cook and we never had food like that shown on the programme. My mum came from Yorkshire and I remember her serving Yorkshire pudding with gravy before we had the main meal. I hated gravy so I had sugar on my Yorkshire pudding. This must have been after rationing ended. I never had school dinners as I always went home. Mum cooked for all of us at lunch time as my dad was home. He worked nights. My mum's friend worked on school dinners and she said that the food they cooked was all good quality but the children did not like it.

I missed the programme last night but having read all the reviews on this site we saw it on iPlayer. My husband fell about with laughing at the bit with the can opener! Our son was just amazed and found it very funny! " Did you have wallpaper like that" he asked! We did not. My dad painted the walls. The lower part of the wall was one colour then the ceiling and the top part was cream and there was a paper border stuck along the joint between the two colours. There was a bit in the corner of the room where the cream part came down to make the shape of battlements. That was evidently the fashion in Bilborough. My mum never had a fridge until about 1968. She said "we buy food to eat not to keep". Our council house had a concrete slab to keep food cool not a marble one! There was an air brick in the pantry wall and I remember when the ants got in and were all over the fruit and jelly. Horrid. We had a meat safe to keep flies off the meat.

[Bilbraborn 1,594]

I'm afraid the set up didn't really suit that type of house. As for that tin opener. What a complete (expletive deleted). I have one of those for when inevitably the modern tin opener falls to bits. The problem those kids had was simple. They live in modern times when everything in the form of entertainment is laid on for them. In the fifties, we had to entertain ourselves, and woe betide if we upset mother while doing it. The way people go on today about austerity? It was worse in the fifties but we had the important things in abundance. Love, self discipline and independence. God help the modern young generation if the world ever goes into total war.

[tony1 118]

In the 50's I grew up on dads chickens, fresh eggs, home grown veggies and fresh rabbit ! home grown of course. Blue buttons and mushrooms in season, again dad had his special local spots.

Love liver and onions or bacon mmnnn! really cheap here in oz as only the poms eat it, I can get couple of kilo for $2 (pound)

Don't much care for kidney though unless it's minced up in a steak and kidney pie or pudding. Bread and dripping I've mentioned before, always do my own when we have leg of pork joint. Making my mouth water just talking about these past delicacies.

I'm with you 99% of that banjo I just could not stand the smell of rabbit, or hare cooking, ever since my dad turned my cousins dead pet into a meal. He and my uncle skinned it in the cellar and when they 'cut it's ring', so to speak, the stench was unbearable and no ventilation.Put me off for life.

[colly0410 1,181]

The Mam is a teacher & has been to uni, you'd have thought she'd have worked out how to use a flipping tin opener. BTW I love pilchards..

[Guest]

Cliff: spot on my Gran lived on Anfield Terrace with no bath or hot water-when she moved behind the moulders she thought she was in heaven!! When we lived on Skynner St. people came to look at our ascot!!

[NewBasfordlad 3,599]

108 Rosetta Road, we had no hot water till Sept 1962 then when I signed my indentures for the gas board, I could get an Ascot over sink water heater for mum at a discount and fit it myself. Mind you I was still wiping my backside on last nights Evening Post. One vivid memory was the smell of the paraffin lamp in the outside loo in a winter to stop it freezing.

[Ayupmeducks 1,730]

We stopped using NEP loo paper sometime in the late 50's when the company Dad worked for was taken over by a big bog roll company. He drove for Parazone. The first bog rolls were the slick ones that schools used...I won't comment on those....LOL Other than we got through a fair few of them.

[Guest]

Was it bronco?

[banjo48 928]

#42 tony1

Still shoot rabbit to eat to this day ! my wife's not keen but give me good rabbit stew any day, just beautiful if cooked slowly in a casserole with nice herbs and spices.

An old farmer I was talking to the other day gave me a recipe for Fricassee of rabbit, cooked in milk, sounded delicious but yet to try it.

My brother and I used to fight as kids who got the back loin strips as they were considered the best meat (and still are).

I read onsome uk shooting forums of chaps there eating squirrels and crows ! think I would draw the line at that.

Mind before I emigrated I also shot wood pidgeon in the uk. but always gave it my mum as it was far too strong for me.

I suppose eating rabbit is no different to South Americans eating guinea pigs ! I love lamb but cringe the thought when I see the new lambs in the fields, but sorry to say I still eat it.

[poohbear 1,360]

But the lamb now can be any age...gets a better price than calling it mutton.

[Compo 10,328]

Also Margie it has to be Comptons Gravy Salt. The problem is we can only get it from Morrison's and as we don't shop there I have to make a special journey to stock up.

They sell it in Tescos too. Look alongside the Bisto section. It's in a small packet thus [That's a 227g Bisto pack alongside it for size comparison]: