Britain in the 60s

[George 1978]

Re: Britain in the 60s

I think it was shame as prices would be a lot lower than they would be now - decimalisation and inflation seemed to go hand in hand I assume.

Can you imagine pre-decimal prices being quoted now? Instead of a daily newspaper being 65p for example, a daily newspaper would be 13 shillings - now that is an expensive newspaper!

[staffslad]

Re: Britain in the 60s

I would say that is about right. It was a shame to lose unique coins like the threepenny bit. I seem to remember the tanner lasting longer, though not as long as the shilling etc.

I can't remember where it came from, but upon decimalisation we had a piece of plastic with the old coin values printed on it and if you turned it slightly the decimal equivalents would appear.

[George 1978]

Re: Britain in the 60s

As far as i can remember the conversion went somthing like this...

Half penny (hape'ny)= 1/2 new pence (now defunct)
Penny= 1 new pence
threepence (threepenny bit)=1& 1/2 new pence
Sixpence (tanner)= 2&1/2 new pence
Shilling (bob)=5 new pence
Two bob=10 new pence
Half crown=12&1/2 pence
Crown=25 pence
Ten bob (note)=50 new pence....And ofcourse £1,£5,£10,£20£50

The fact that 5ps and 10ps had the same value and size as the one and two shilling coins respectively, meant that they were around a lot longer until the early 1990s when the coins shrunk in size.

[George 1978]

Re: Britain in the 60s

Until glam rock caught on many musical acts in 1970-1 would have still had more connection with the late 1960s.

I always think it's a bit ironic how colourful the glam era Top Of The Pops was considering most people were still watching in black & white at the time!

I think that was why they were allowed to look so garish - it was because the majority who was still watching in black and white wouldn't notice, or it was some way of making them do a U turn and go back to black and white.

[Richard1978]

Re: Britain in the 60s

It's interesting looking at television such as Top of the Pops from around 1971-1972 - it feels like the 1960s in colour if you know what I mean - however, the ITV Colour Strike must have felt as if the 1960s had returned briefly. Also, music in the charts from listening to Pick of the Pops - the sound of the songs in the first couple of years of the 1970s still felt 1960s alike until around 1973. I believe that the only difference if one listens to the radio is the fact that it was post-Beatles, and John, Paul, George and Ringo were going their separate ways.

Age wise, a Percy Sugden-alike Second World War veteran would only be in their late 40s or 50s, and it was the Albert Tatlock-alike First World War veterans who were in their 70s - the pensioners of their day. Nowadays, there are people who were now born in the second half of the 20th century who are now pensioners - rather scary that time has moved on like that!

Until glam rock caught on many musical acts in 1970-1 would have still had more connection with the late 1960s.

I always think it's a bit ironic how colourful the glam era Top Of The Pops was considering most people were still watching in black & white at the time!

[tex]

Re: Britain in the 60s

As far as i can remember the conversion went somthing like this...

Half penny (hape'ny)= 1/2 new pence (now defunct)
Penny= 1 new pence
threepence (threepenny bit)=1& 1/2 new pence
Sixpence (tanner)= 2&1/2 new pence
Shilling (bob)=5 new pence
Two bob=10 new pence
Half crown=12&1/2 pence
Crown=25 pence
Ten bob (note)=50 new pence....And ofcourse £1,£5,£10,£20£50

[George 1978]

Re: Britain in the 60s

As I was automatically born into a decimal currency world, it seem strange to see when I was younger, seeing historical things from the 1960s things before I was born with "6d" on them rather than "6p", and wondered what the "d" was - I thought that it was "p" since time began. Then I realised that decimalisation was splitting the pound into percentages, so that 57% was obviously 57p rather than what it was before 15th February 1971.

I saw that Channel 4 documentary Funny Money from 2000, and thought ironically that it was the drug reference that was the reason why Britain went decimal - the fact that pounds, shillings and pence was referred to as LSD (do you see?) Mind you, the Beatles didn't do much for it, did they? Even when I was at Junior school in the late 1980s we learnt about money in Maths and the teacher said that the worksheets were out of date because of the inclusion of the half penny.

I believe that some people probably think that the Industrial Revolution is still going to this very day.

[Arran]

Re: Britain in the 60s

In our minds, we obviously think of the 1960s as the final imperial decade of the 20th century

The final decade of the 20th century when kids at school had to split brain cells learning the £sd currency and grotesque calculations with imperial measurements. £sd caused problems with computers and many British computers had extra circuitry to handle this data structure.

The British Empire still officially exists and we have the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

I have never managed to find an answer to the question: when did the Industrial Revolution end?

[George 1978]

Re: Britain in the 60s

In our minds, we obviously think of the 1960s as the final imperial decade of the 20th century - in other words, the final one that we saw just as much as monochrome as the 1920s, 1930s and so on. The 1970s feels to me as if things are starting to modernise and get ourselves ready for the year 2000 - admittedly, a lot of this was probably already taking place in the later half of the 1960s - programmes like Tomorrow's World and indeed science fiction series like Doctor Who are a fine example as to what the future would be like in 30 years or more.

When ITV did their New Millennium show to mark the start of the year 2000, they shown some black and white clips from the 1960s about how people back then thought how life was in the year 2000 - Tomorrow's World-style presenters were seen in those clips. The way that I look at it is that United Kingdom looks prominently green from space, and likewise, the 20th century looks prominently black and white because that is how things were for the first two thirds of that time. The 1960s is a bridge between the post-war depression and modernisation in preparation for the year 2000, with the 1970s inheriting that.

It's interesting looking at television such as Top of the Pops from around 1971-1972 - it feels like the 1960s in colour if you know what I mean - however, the ITV Colour Strike must have felt as if the 1960s had returned briefly. Also, music in the charts from listening to Pick of the Pops - the sound of the songs in the first couple of years of the 1970s still felt 1960s alike until around 1973. I believe that the only difference if one listens to the radio is the fact that it was post-Beatles, and John, Paul, George and Ringo were going their separate ways.

Age wise, a Percy Sugden-alike Second World War veteran would only be in their late 40s or 50s, and it was the Albert Tatlock-alike First World War veterans who were in their 70s - the pensioners of their day. Nowadays, there are people who were now born in the second half of the 20th century who are now pensioners - rather scary that time has moved on like that!

[Richard1978]

Re: Britain in the 60s

I remember my Dad saying that while houses was being built at record levels in the 1950s & 60s a lot was not good quality, especially the council built housing intended to replace the Victorian terraces. A lot of the worst had to be pulled down after only 20-30 years.

Even before 1973 things weren't going well for the British economy, especially as the far eastern countries started to build up their industry & couldn't guarantee commonwealth countries would buy British.

[Arran]

Re: Britain in the 60s

And Macmillan said in 1959 that we never had it so good...

From a vantage point of 1959 he was probably right.

One good thing about the 1960s was that there were more jobs and more respectable mid-range jobs that didn't require university degrees. It was a lot easier for a person from a poor or lower class background to attain a comfortable middle class lifestyle than it has been in more recent times. The 1960s was also a time when millions kissed goodbye to their landlord. Large scale house building and council houses eroded private renting which had been the norm for the masses during the previous part of the 20th century.

These factors were partially attributed to Keynesian economics which both Labour and Conservative governments adopted to a degree. After joining the EU, Britain was forced to abandon this style of economics and adopt a more laissez faire approach.

[George 1978]

Re: Britain in the 60s

There is a lot of truth as to what Arran has just said - 1960s episodes of Coronation Street is a fine example of how dirty and unfashionable Manchester was, viewing the episodes on YT - of course, the monochrome nature of the episodes obvious takes away some detail of what life was like to those who I assume actually experiences it back then. I don't think that Scargill (or his predecessors) would have been throwing too many tantrums back then.

In my neck of the woods there were inner-city areas of Nottingham such as St Ann's and the Meadows with pre-1900 Victorian housing and nothing modernised so far in the 20th century - research indicating the outdoor toilets, coal bunkers and the like, and the fact that we would have been closer to the year 2000 than the year 1900. I know that Nottingham's inner-city areas were being regenerated in around 1965, my family lived in one of the houses that was to be pulled down and was given an alternative one around a mile away where they stayed for the next 30 years. Thames did a documentary about it in around 1969 which was repeated in 1992 as part of Channel 4's Gimme Shelter strand. I suppose that Nottingham in those days was regarded as a bit more "northern" in those days as it does nowadays where it feels as if it belongs with the south in the North - South divide. And I assume that it did continue into the 1970s as well.

I did GCSE History at school in the early 1990s and the era was the 20th century that we studied - 30 years prior to that when all this happened seems in hindsight as not too long ago when one thinks of how long the original housing had stayed intact. And Macmillan said in 1959 that we never had it so good...

[Arran]

Re: Britain in the 60s

It’s funny how nostalgia gets attached to a decade. Obviously I wasn’t around in the 60’s but my mother paints a very different picture of life then. She says it might have been swinging in places like London but it definitely wasn’t in our North Eastern town!

It was swinging only in London and a few other trendy towns. Tyneside was still dominated by heavy industry, smoking chimneys, and grimy pubs filled with men wearing flat caps.

Manchester was a dirty and unfashionable industrial city in the 1960s whilst Liverpool had a lot going for it. I suspect that if you factored out the Beatles then Liverpool would be little more than another declining northern city filled with urban decay. The western twin of Hull?! The strange thing is that Manchester is now a trendy city whilst Liverpool struggles in its shadow.

Most urban parts of Scotland were badly declining - and rough - in the 1960s. A trend that intensified in the 1970s.

The 1960s was the beginning of a significant population drift from the north to the south of England.

[tex]

Re: Britain in the 60s

Mmm, not sure about that but i understand the irony, true to say that trade unions were making their voices heard a lot louder in the 70s

[Richard1978]

Re: Britain in the 60s

I remember Bill Bryson mentioning in Note From a Small Island that had communism happened in Britain the lives of most people wouldn't have changed that much before 1970.