Memories from my youth (mainly in London) .....
The
'Rag and Bone' man with his horse and cart. If you gave him enough old rags, he would give you 3d (or sometimes a goldfish). If the horse left droppings in the road, the men in the neighbourhood would race each other to get out there with a sack and a shovel, to make fertiliser for the garden.
Radio Luxembourg on 208 metres, medium wave. You could only receive this after dark, and in those days it was the only way to hear the latest records (before the pirate ships came along). The 'DJs' in those days included Pete Murray, Keith Fordice, Alan Freeman, David Jacobs, Jimmy Saville, Dave Cash, Noel Edmonds and Tommy Vance. The problem with Radio Luxembourg was that the signal used to fade in and out, so you would only hear half the record. Some shows which later appeared on ITV first started on Radio Luxembourg - like 'Take Your Pick' with Michael Miles, and 'Double Your Money' with Hughie Green.
The novelty of
riding in a car. My dad never owned a car, so I rarely got to ride in one. Sometimes the man who my mother worked part-time for used to give us a lift home, but this wasn't very often.
Ice cream for Sunday dessert - and the arguments over who was going to the shop to get it (we had no fridge). The ice cream came in a cardboard carton, which the shopkeeper would thickly wrap in old newspapers, so it would survive the 5 minute journey home.
Our first TV in 1952, which exploded ! My dad wanted to watch the Cup Final on the TV, but when he got to the shop, they had sold out of 'tested sets'. In those days, TVs were so unreliable that the shops used to 'bench test' TVs for 24 hours before selling them. Because of the demand due to the football, they had run out of these and my dad (whom I take after for lack of patience) was so keen to have one that he agreed to take an untested TV. He spent the Saturday morning fiddling with it, and then my dad, my sister and I watched the football on the TV, while my mother went out shopping. At about 4:30PM my mother returned and said "Is that TV still on ? You've had it on for three hours now, you should switch it off and give it a rest !". My father duly obliged - he got up from his chair (no remotes in those days), and had just turned around to go back to his chair when there was a loud bang, and the room was showered with shards of glass. My dad wasn't hurt because he had his back to the TV, and I was about 8 feet away and wasn't hurt, but my sister (who was sitting quite close, but off to one side) got several cuts in her legs, and she still bears the scars to this day. I was so scared that I wouldn't go back into the room while the TV was still in there. I later went on to become a TV engineer !
Coronation Day. My dad was involved with the local community, and when the coronation was announced, no-one wanted to organise it, so my dad volunteered, but only if the party was held indoors. Lots of people didn't like the idea of an indoor celebration in June, but my dad was adamant, and since no-one else wanted to organise it, he got his way. Well, the 3rd June 1953 was one of the coldest and wettest June days in decades, and many people had their street parties ruined because of the weather. My dad was the hero of the hour
Computers - my first brush with a real computer was in 1974, when my wife and I moved to Harlow, Essex, and I got a job in an electronics factory setting up and testing 'VDUs' which we would now call computer screens. To test the screens, we needed a computer, and we had a small one which had to be started every morning by running punched paper tapes through a reader, and the first tape in the sequence was called a 'bootstrap', from where we get the term 'booting up' a PC.
