Britain in the 60s

[Arran]

Re: Britain in the 60s

Coronation Street is nostalgic and fictitious. Britain successfully embraced the 50p, £1, and £2 coins but the Americans can't get to grips with the $1 coin. They exist but customers overwhelmingly refuse them in their change and shops are reluctant to accept them. The Presidential Series of dollar coins was effectively terminated half way through with the remainder of coins just produced in small numbers for collectors rather than for circulation because the public did not want them as currency.

Maths lessons were fun around the time of decimalisation. Annoying though for kids who had to split brain cells on £sd then no longer needed to use it. Teachers were not always in favour of decimalisation.

Quite a lot of older folk believe that metric measurements and decimal currency have contributed to a decline in maths skills in children. What they don't realise is that the countries where children excel in maths today have had metric measurements and decimal currency for longer than anybody can remember. I think that the decline took place as a result of not updating the maths syllabus following decimalisation.

[Zincubus]

Re: Britain in the 60s

Coronation Street is nostalgic and fictitious. Britain successfully embraced the 50p, £1, and £2 coins but the Americans can't get to grips with the $1 coin. They exist but customers overwhelmingly refuse them in their change and shops are reluctant to accept them. The Presidential Series of dollar coins was effectively terminated half way through with the remainder of coins just produced in small numbers for collectors rather than for circulation because the public did not want them as currency.

Maths lessons were fun around the time of decimalisation. Annoying though for kids who had to split brain cells on £sd then no longer needed to use it. Teachers were not always in favour of decimalisation.

Quite a lot of older folk believe that metric measurements and decimal currency have contributed to a decline in maths skills in children. What they don't realise is that the countries where children excel in maths today have had metric measurements and decimal currency for longer than anybody can remember. I think that the decline took place as a result of not updating the maths syllabus following decimalisation.

We both grew up with Coronation street and still watched it when we got married UNTIL they started telling us the storyline in advance
I actually lived about 50 yards from Len Fairclough's house and walked past it going to school for many years ... now there's a scary thought !



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[George 1978]

Re: Britain in the 60s

Maths lessons were fun around the time of decimalisation. Annoying though for kids who had to split brain cells on £sd then no longer needed to use it. Teachers were not always in favour of decimalisation.

Don't forget of course that metrification was another big thing at the time as well - pounds and ounces v grams and kilograms, although they continued side by side for many years. How many market traders have been prosecuted for using pounds and ounces by Trading Standards - something that wouldn't have happened in the 1970s? Coronation Street dealt with that issue as early as 1961 when Florrie Lindley's Corner Shop was visited by some people from the weights and measures organisation or whatever it was called by the time (I looked this up on the Corriepedia website to find all this out!)

[tex]

Re: Britain in the 60s

Hermans Hermits still going. One of my fave Brit 60s groups.

Peter noone is still alive but no longer part of HH.

[Richard1978]

Re: Britain in the 60s

Peter noone is still alive but no longer part of HH.

My parents saw them a few years ago & my Dad noted that only the drummer as an original member.

[tex]

Re: Britain in the 60s

And they say the 70s was the decade that fashion forgot...

[Arran]

Re: Britain in the 60s

Don't forget of course that metrification was another big thing at the time as well - pounds and ounces v grams and kilograms, although they continued side by side for many years.

Schools went metric gradually. The O Level exams went metric some time in the 1960s and primary schools changed over during the late 1960s through to the 1970s when new books and educational resources were purchased. Remember that there wasn't a national curriculum back then. There were still (official) vestiges of imperial when I was at primary school in the 1990 such as clothing sizes in inches, travelling distances in miles, 1/3 pint milk bottles, a pound of flesh in The Merchant of Venice, and 3 1/2 inch floppy disks.

If there is one imperial measurement that has died in Britain since the 1960s but is still alive in the US it's fahrenheit. Fluid ounces are also fading into obscurity although they are mainstream in the US.

[George 1978]

Re: Britain in the 60s

If there is one imperial measurement that has died in Britain since the 1960s but is still alive in the US it's fahrenheit. Fluid ounces are also fading into obscurity although they are mainstream in the US.

I mentioned this in the Heatwaves and Hot Summers thread that I started earlier on this year - the fact that Fahrenheit is a bit like Michael Fish - i.e. we don't see or hear about either of them on British weather forecasts anymore. Using Fahrenheit makes it sound a lot hotter when used in heatwaves - 80 degrees v 30 degrees in Celsius.

They will never get rid of miles from road signs or people's speedometers as it is the default measurement of road distances.

A 1/3 of a pint milk bottles makes me think of Infant school - where else would you get them?

[Zincubus]

Re: Britain in the 60s




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[Arran]

Re: Britain in the 60s

You still find fahrenheit on the cover page of the Express.

Americans love fahrenheit but despite all their claims of its virtues over celsius the British have well and truly abandoned it. I suspect that there is more public support for celsius in the US than fahrenheit in the rest of the world put together.

The mile for road distances and pint for beer (only at retail level) are exceptional British measurements that the EU gave permission to use indefinitely. Milk is now sold in litres in Scotland but still in pints in England and Wales. Shops don't seem to sell milk in quantities less than 1 pint (or 500mL in Scotland) apart from UHT capsules for coffee and tea, and I have never seen any 1/3 pint bottles for sale even back in the 1990s. A measure of spirits in a pub was 1/6 gill or 1/5 gill in Scotland until 1985 when it changed to 25mL and pubs had to buy new optics. Some pubs in Scotland and Northern Ireland serve 35mL measures.

The power output of radiators is more commonly quoted in BTU/hr by retailers rather than watts.

[George 1978]

Re: Britain in the 60s

I would have thought that Fahrenheit was more German than American (wasn't it named after a German person of that name?) I am not too keen on adopting American traditions in Britain due to local incompatibility with them (Black Friday anyone?) but I would like to keep both Celsius and Fahrenheit on our temperature scales.

It does feel more record-breaking when Fahrenheit is used (and doesn't feel that cold when it is quoted in winter).

I know that the British Weights and Measures Association have been sounding off, sub-UKIP style for years that supermarkets, dairies, and other food producers have been ripping off consumers by converting pints to litres, and as a result selling less milk or drinks for the same price - 1 pint (568 ml) becomes 500 ml and so on, and canned foods had got the metric treatment as well. Birds Eye downsizing their Petit Pois (garden peas to you) from 680 g (1.5 kg) to 640 g - but the price remained the same. Mind you, as I mostly buy in bulk from the supermarket I would hardly recognise very small things such as that.

[Arran]

Re: Britain in the 60s

Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit was German. The fahrenheit scale is based on the Romer scale where 60 is the boiling point of water and 0 is the freezing point of brine. It is possible that the Romer scale was intended to avoid negative numbers for low temperatures although at the time the value of absolute zero was unknown.

Anders Celsius was Swedish but the celsius scale is actually half British as it is based on the work of Isaac Newton who proposed using the freezing and boiling points of water to create a temperature scale.

Britain adopted fahrenheit as its official measurement of temperature in the late 18th century and refused to adopt celsius (despite a reasonable amount of public support) as a political decision because the French adopted celsius after the Revolution. The US at the time followed Britain.

[Arran]

Re: Britain in the 60s

Around half of the adult population in the 1960s didn't have a bank account. They paid their (usually weekly) wages in cash. It was common for factories to have a wage office where a security van would deliver a large amount of cash from a bank on Friday morning and clerks would spend the rest of the day stuffing notes and coins into envelopes. In the afternoon the factory workers would all queue up outside the wage office and collect their pay packets. The envelopes often had a notch in them where it was possible to count the notes without having to open it.

If a person needed to a cash a cheque but they didn't have a bank account then they would take it to their local pub and the publican would cash it for them.

[Richard1978]

Re: Britain in the 60s

Wage snatches were a common crime for gangs to carry out when they knew a local factory was paying bonuses to their employees.

Later on companies started issuing pay cheques that employees could cash in at banks, possibly even if they didn't have an account.

Girobank was one government scheme to get people to get an account, available at most post offices. Unemployment benefit payments are still called giros by some people even though they probably stopped being paid by cheque a lot time ago.

[Arran]

Re: Britain in the 60s

There was quite a bit of public opposition towards having wages paid in cheques or directly into bank accounts well into the 1980s. Several trade unions also defended the concept of employees being paid in cash although I'm not sure whether it was to protect jobs or uphold popular opinion.

One reason why wages paid in cash were so popular is that you could spend the money instantly. Cheques had the hassle of having to take them to the bank and wait a few days for the payment to clear. Banks were not always open at convenient times and the first cash machine was not installed until 1967 so you often couldn't access your hard earned money until Saturday morning. Large numbers of people who had wages paid in cheques cashed them at the pub on Friday night!

In some towns Friday was late night shopping day because it was pay day.