Lifestyle Revolution Wales in the Sixties

The '60s were the dawn of a new age of electricity and

labour-saving devices which promised a better way of life for all.

The day came and houses were all wired and the switch came on

and lights all came up. What a day!

I had an upright cleaner and then I was grizzling then about carting

the thing up and down stairs, so Cliff bought me another one.

I loved driving.

It opened up the fact that now I could take

the children down the seaside even after school.

This is the story of how greater affluence helped transform home

and family in '60s Wales, beginning a lifestyle revolution.

Wales began the '60s with some of the worst housing in Britain.

This was especially so in the valleys,

where cheap homes had been erected for workers in Victorian times.

Many young couples were forced to rent places that lacked any

basic modern conveniences.

George Evans and his wife Hilary started family life in Merthyr.

We were fortunate to have secured a dwelling

in a cellar in a house in Merthyr.

One room, and we'd two daughters there.

Times were hard.

I was earning £3/17/6 a week

when the average wage was between £15 and £18.

We used to buy stuff on tick.

We used to buy our food on the never-never

and pay at the end of the week but so did a lot of people then.

Joan Hilditch and her husband Eddie

set up home in the Rhymney Valley.

It was a very old house in Rhymney Bridge.

It was rented. It had roofs like that, you know?

Right down to the windows. I loved it, I did.

But there was no...there was no bath there, there was no toilet.

We used to have a place down the loo where you had to bury the stuff.

We used to bath once a week, same as all the other families, once a week.

And we used to have a tin bath.

We'd boil the water up on the fire or on the cooker, fill the bath

and my daughters would bath first,

one after the other.

Then Hilary would bath

and by the time I was going to get in the bath

there was a load of scum around the bath.

and I had to scrape all that off.

Then, as time went on, we got a bit more money saved

and we bought a bungalow bath, which was a tin bath,

only it was longer, and we thought we were in heaven.

We used to tell people, "We got a bungalow bath now!"

"Get away! Yer lucky."

Harsh living conditions had been made bearable by communal values.

A problem shared was a problem solved.

Work, rest and play took place in a collective spirit of respect

amongst people who lived in communities built on struggle.

Miner Tyrone O'Sullivan grew up in a coal-mining family in Merthyr.

The magic of that era was no-one locked their doors,

wherever you went, even if you went out in the evening, even overnight.

So your neighbours could always knock the door

and they would always knock.

That was a wonderful thing, you never entered anyone's home

without either knocking or at least opening the door and shouting,

"Are you there, Dilys?" or "Are you there, Dai?"

I could go to practically anybody in the street and knock the door,

open the door and walk in because that was the trust.

What did we have to pinch, anyway? To be honest with you,

we all had very much the same.

So that's the culture of the valleys, of the communities.

One of the poorest areas in Wales was Tiger Bay, where a mixed-race

community lived in what was once a model housing estate.

But a century after it was built by the Marquess of Bute,

Cardiff City Council set about a major redevelopment.

Residents were promised a better life

after they were rehoused into high-rise blocks.

Writer Neil Sinclair grew up there.

This was the home of seamen from the four quarters of the world

and we lived in hardship but in bliss, harmonious bliss.

There were 26 houses on my street,

most of the doors would be open first thing in the morning,

women would come out and bash the mats against the wall and then

put the mat in the hallway, saying, "Step in, if you will," you know.

Then you're in a tower block and you're in an internal hallway

with no sunlight, no daylight, no reason to stand on the door.

So you started to live a life separate from other

people in the community.

But Wales built few high-rise estates.

Instead, the need for new housing was met by the construction

of sprawling council estates on the outskirts of many towns and cities.

It was an opportunity to build houses that incorporated

all the basics of modern living standards.

For couples with young children in primitive homes,

it was a dream come true.

Barbara Evans and her husband Cliff

secured a house on the Gurnos Estate in Merthyr.

There was three bedrooms and the bathroom and the toilet upstairs

and downstairs there was a huge front room

and the other room was the kitchen and diner.

Oh, well, the boys went wild,

I mean, the engine on rails had all the floor space. Good gracious me,

toys come out everywhere, all the kids in playing, it was wonderful.

We had a council house then, which was lovely and I made

friends with the neighbours down there and we had a dog.

It was nice. My first bathroom, for God's sake!

And hot water, would you believe!

We all used to get in the bath in the night together.

It was brilliant, I loved it.

Children benefitted hugely from the better living conditions.

Annie Haden's family lived on the Portmead estate

on the outskirts of Swansea.

I was brought up in a new, brand-new council estate,

amongst houses being built,

the smell of sawn wood

which is absolutely wonderful. Oh, it's a wonderful smell.

There was such a pulsating feeling of hope. It was tangible.

But in the '60s, many couples decided

they wanted to own their own home.

This was a decade when home ownership began to shape

the modern ideal of married life.

Some men took on a second job to help pay the mortgage.

For George Evans, it was boxing.

Fighting for me was purely about the money, I needed the money.

I needed the money to give my family a better life.

And I won the Welsh Championship, the Welsh Lightweight Championship

but on my mind all the time was money and I decided to turn professional.

Boxing provided us with a better life all round

because it enabled us to have a bigger mortgage to buy

a better house and we decided to move from the squares,

our little two-bedroom cottage,

further down the village to a three-bedroomed property.

Wales soon enjoyed one of the highest rates of home ownership

in Britain, as many a young couple took advantage

of the large quantity of cheap housing available.

But they often had to wait before they could turn

it into the modern home of their dreams.

# The best things in life are free

# But you can keep them for the birds and bees

# Now give me money... #

Broadcaster Roy Noble and his wife Elaine moved to Aberdare.

We decided to buy a house.

Now, we couldn't afford a bathroom suite which was coloured

because it was £25 extra. We couldn't afford central heating

because it was £275 extra. We were at the top of our limit. We couldn't

afford sapele doors which were very fashionable. Along with G Plan

furniture, sapele doors were £7 each extra. Couldn't afford those.

The only furniture we had in the front bedroom was a net curtain.

From the outside it looked the part, from the inside there was nothing in it at all, you see.

Communities often would rally round when a new home was being made.

Barbara Evans worked at Kayser Bondor, manufacturer of ladieswear.

Mrs Regan was my supervisor up in Kayser, and she said to me,

"Barbara, have you bought new curtains?"

"I'm going for them on the weekend".

"Get the material, bring it in and we'll sew 'em for you".

I took all the material in on the Monday morning

and I was going home Monday, half-past three,

all my curtains made.

# Sweetest little baby come and deliver... #

Electricity still remained a novelty in rural west

and north Wales into the '60s.

The cost of extending the national grid into thinly populated

farming communities was seen by many locals as an unnecessary expense.

Lyndon Harris remembers family life on a remote dairy farm

in Carmarthenshire before the age of electricity.

We'd had diesel engines driving portable generators up till then.

You'd be watching television and the picture would start diminishing.

The belt start slipping on the pulley outside!

You'd have to run out quickly to tighten up the belt again

so that you could see the rest of the programme before it disappeared off the screen!

To get the electricity in the first place, of course,

meant that you had to have a sufficient nucleus of farmers

and individuals who would be prepared to sign up, that is,

guarantee a certain amount per year for taking the electricity.

What a job! Good Lord. It was like going round Noah, you know.

Nobody was slightly bit interested.

"No, much too costly, it is. What do we need electricity for?

"Aladdin lamp's all right. Tilley lamp's OK.

"What do we want electricity for?"

But eventually, sufficient numbers were found

and the Electricity Board got to work.

The coming of electricity switched everyone on to a new,

more modern way of life.

The day arrived when the lorries arrived in the field with big poles.

The excitement was terrific, you know, you could see them

boring holes in the field to put these poles up right across the fields.

And the day came and they all linked up, the wires were put up,

houses were all wired and the switch came on and lights all came up.

What a day. Just like VE Day. Marvellous!

The new home, it was a lot different from the small little house, you see,

because there was so much electric points there and things like that.

Well, you didn't have them in the other little house.

See, I mean, there was two here and two there - they were everywhere!

Jolly good. We'll have it.

This was the age of the mod con

and everyone wanted to be a part of it.

PHONE RINGS

Hello? Yes, speaking.

It was the first time we'd had a phone, a telephone,

and it was on a party line you had to share with

someone up the street, and we'd only been in two days

when the phone rang and a voice said, "Alan here." I said, "Alan?"

"Yes, Alan next door."

Now, it had never occurred to me

that a fella living next door would actually phone you.

You'd think he'd just walk around, wouldn't you? I thought a phone was for distances.

We had a natural stone fireplace. We had a dividing wall which only came up to about three feet

between the dining room, well, the dining section and the lounge.

We had a white carpet.

And we had a wonderful red suite

and we'd bought also the curtains because it went with the suite

and it went with the dining room chairs which were high-backed

and on metal supports. They were something else, and a glass table.

And my mother, when she first opened the door into that room,

dining room-cum-lounge, she said, "Oh! it's like an hotel."

Many families felt the benefit of the extra money

earnt by working mothers, who took advantage of the demand

for women's skills in the factories.

A new lifestyle was emerging.

When you were working as well, that was extra money, you see.

So there we are, boys had bikes, holidays and all the rest of it.

I can remember they wanted a snooker table. Cliff came home this day

and said to me, "Somebody's selling this snooker table",

"Well, how much do they want for it?" I said. "Oh, £20."

Oh, well, we bought the snooker table.

One of the biggest new employers in Wales was Hoover.

Its labour-saving appliances helped transform family life, reducing much

of the domestic drudgery that had traditionally been the woman's lot.

'Have you heard the news that's going round?

'Hoover, Hoover have gone and found

'the washing machine that means the end, the end of washday!'

Washday? Just forget it.

'Hoover Keymatic is the name.

'It's automated and that's the same as saying never,

'ever will you think again about washday.'

Washday? Just forget it.

Finally we bought our first washing machine

and we were over the moon.

We were inviting people in to see it.

"Come here, Mrs Jones,

"come and see what we've got! Hoover washing machine!"

And, of course, Cliff worked in Hoover so you all bought

from there, didn't you, you know. That was part of the perks of Hoovers again.

And your cleaners came from there.

And I had an upright cleaner

and then I was grizzling then about carting the thing up and downstairs.

So Cliff bought me another one, a Constellation, and that was like

a big ball,

so that was upstairs and the other one downstairs.

'Hoover Constellation. The space-age cleaner at the down-to-earth price.'

George Evans became one of the top Welsh boxers

and was earning good prize money.

But he still had not given up his day job,

such was his passion to give his family the best of everything.

I fought an eliminator for the British Championship.

I was third in the British ratings

and I went out and I determined

that if I win this fight I would fight for the British title.

And I was winning the fight at the end of the seventh round.

And I got up and I went out and I started wading in and, bump!

Clash of heads and my eyelid split,

and as soon as the referee saw my eyelid splitting,

he stopped the fight.

One minute to go of the fight.

And after that fight I come back and I said,

"I've finished, there's no more."

But...

..a month later...

..I was thinking of the money.

And I rang Mac and I said, "Mac, give me a fight!"

And I bought a little Ford Anglia car.

£340...

second-hand.

The convenience and glamour of the car

was now capturing the popular imagination,

fast replacing buses and trains as the preferred means of travel.

With growing prosperity,

mass car ownership would soon revolutionise

the entire transport system

and, with it, the Welsh way of life.

In Wales, of course, the Anglia was a very popular car,

the Ford Anglia with a sloping back roof.

My brother had one and a couple of my friends had them.

And in Wales it was one of the most popular cars going.

It was nippy. It had a nippy engine, economical

and it was reasonably priced.

And the Cortina was the family man car.

For both men and women,

the car promised the freedom of the open road.

Margaret Lloyd brought up her family in Merthyr.

I loved driving.

What I loved about driving was the speed.

It opened up the fact that now

I could take the children down the seaside, even after school.

I could meet them if it was a lovely day, and say,

"Come on, we'll go to Barry for an hour

"or we could come up the Beacons."

I went on holidays once with a Morris Minor.

I had an 18-stone aunt and an 18-stone mother

and the three children in a Morris Minor.

Every time I started, I thought sure it was going to rear up

like a horse, with the weight!

I had to make sure they sat like that, you know,

one in the back, one in the front to balance it out!

But you just went. It was fun, wasn't it?

Everything was an adventure.

Motoring in Wales came of age

with the opening of the Severn Bridge in September 1966.

It seemed the pinnacle of a remarkable decade

when everything got better and better.

Then, on the 21st October,

tragedy struck at Aberfan.

The huge slag heap that towered above the village

became unstable from heavy rain.

Thousands of tonnes of coal slurry slipped into an avalanche

and covered the local school.

116 children and 28 adults were killed within seconds.

Many people desperately tried to mount a rescue,

including broadcaster Owen Money

who was a singer in a pop group, at the time.

I was down there about 20 minutes, half an hour after it all happened.

All the colliery men and boys all came out of the pit.

They were the, sort of, first on the scene.

And then you got the police there and then Joe public.

They came from everywhere.

I remember women, mothers up to their waist in slurry

trying to wade through the slurry to get to where the school is

to see if they can find their children.

I had people there I knew.

People there were killed, like my school teacher was killed in it.

It changed my life a little bit.

Didn't realise how precious life can be.

And for me it was...

it was a learning curve.

There's more to life than rock'n'roll music,

more to life than having a good time.

It did change my life, without a shadow of a doubt.

It gave me new values in life.

The tragedy of Aberfan led to profound change

in the coal industry.

Many felt in other ways, too, the Wales of old had to go.

But it was in the home that the biggest changes were taking place.

And one of them was the desire for a smaller family

than in previous generations.

Until the '60s, married life for many women

had been overshadowed by an exhausting ritual of constant,

and often unwanted, pregnancy and childbirth.

Women had no control over their fertility.

Margaret Lloyd was passionate about the need for change.

I'd had three children in two and a half years,

which was quite common, really.

And so I knew what it was to have one child after the other,

not be in control of your life.

Family planning depended on the man.

You know, it was his responsibility, really.

So I was passionate

that women should have this control.

I had another child nine years later.

Joan Hilditch was coping with an unhappy marriage

where she lived in Rhymney.

Well, Eddie didn't like birth control of any form.

He thought it was no feeling with it

and he said a man had to have feeling or he became ill, you see.

After the birth of her first child,

Joan suffered six miscarriages before she fell pregnant again.

I lost six babies, one after the other.

I don't know why.

I don't think they knew why either. but...I did, one after the other.

And then the second child, after she was born,

I couldn't even touch her to start with.

I was frightened to pick her up in case I broke her. You know?

Because she was so fragile, I thought.

Because I'd lost all the others, you see.

Joan was in a prolonged state of postnatal depression.

Yet she felt her husband was dismissive of her plight

and there was little medical understanding of her condition.

I was suffering with postnatal depression.

I was grieving for six children, for God's sake!

And I couldn't cope, I really couldn't cope.

And one day my husband was coming home from work

and I thought, "I'll go round the corner

"and I'll stand there till he goes in the house

"so the children won't be on their own."

And then I went up the mountain then.

Yeah, up to the deep pools up there.

They were very deep.

Goodness knows how deep they were, but they were.

I went into the pool,

and I thought, "That's it now.

"All I've got to do is let myself go, just let myself go

"and that'll be it."

And as I went up to my thighs,

I felt a baby move inside me

and that was my third child.

And there was no way could I kill a child and myself.

I love children far too much.

So back I went

to the life.

Joan's second and third children were born 12 months apart.

But from the mid '60s,

the contraceptive pill offered married women

significant improvement in birth control.

Margaret Lloyd worked at a family planning clinic.

I think I was able to empathise with them

and give women the understanding it is their right

to control their family.

So the pill gave women the control on their lives.

If they were a professional woman,

they knew they could go back to work.

Women working in the factories no longer had to worry

in case they were pregnant.

A continual worry, you know - "Am I pregnant again?

"Oh, my God, I hope not because we've got a house,

"we've got a mortgage." And then the child turns up.

Tyrone and Elaine O'Sullivan married in 1967

and set up home in Merthyr.

Tyrone was part of a new generation of men

who took advantage of the opportunity for family planning.

My mum was one of six children,

my dad was one of five brothers, two sisters.

So they were big families.

And while it was nice, we were a different generation.

We thought we should plan our families

and perhaps have two children.

That was our plan from the very beginning

and I got through using birth control.

But we were determined,

Elaine had a job, I had a job, so that's what we should do.

But Joan Hilditch was not able to use birth control with her husband.

In desperation, after the birth of her fourth child,

she took advantage of the 1969 divorce law

to end her marriage.

As a divorcee, though,

she was not looked on favourably by her local community.

After I was divorced, there was definitely a stigma

with divorced people.

The neighbours weren't very pleased for a start, you know?

They'd been my friends before that, helping me out with the children,

doing... Brilliant, you know, really nice.

All of a sudden, I was this, sort of, scarlet woman.

I mean, I wasn't very good in the home - you know,

putting washers on and wallpaper and everything

so I used to have a lot of offers from husbands around

that if I wanted anything, just let them know and they'd come.

Well, their wives didn't like the idea of that at all!

So I learnt how to do these things myself.

I did. I got different books.

I changed the washer,

I did the...I wallpapered the kitchen,

I did lots of things on my own.

I loved being a single mum, I really, really did.

We were very poor. We didn't have much money whatsoever,

but it didn't matter.

First time in my life I had been free.

I was free.

The prosperity of the '60s revolutionised home and family life.

Better housing and all mod cons benefitted everyone,

especially women, who now began to enjoy greater independence

than ever before.

The '60s saw profound change in Wales,

driven by full employment and unparalleled affluence.

It was the decade when a younger generation

broke free of the old order to create a more open society,

proud of its past, yet striving for a new future.

Wales would never be the same again.

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