Episode 1 The 1952 Show

Hello! Look who it is!

It's the old judge from Strictly, Len Goodman, and welcome to my decade, the 1950s.

I'll give it top marks. It's not a seven!

It's a ten from Len,

for change, challenge, possibilities and promise.

Welcome to the 1952 Show. Why 1952?

Well, whizz back 60 years,

and young Elizabeth had just become the new Queen.

And she found the whole country taking their first steps

into a brighter Britain.

So every day this week we'll be hearing what you remember

about some of the most exciting years in our history.

Here's how the telly lines up today.

Short trousers, skipping, conkers, catapults and the cane.

What it was really like to be a nipper in the '50s.

Was '50s marriage all it was cracked up to be?

We reveal the secret ways

disgruntled housewives let off steam.

And the new towns,

built to solve the housing crisis in our bombed-out cities.

The pioneers spill the beans on their early days.

Fabulous stories, wonderful archive

and some great guests on our 1950s sofa.

-And today, it's the fabulous Pam Ayres!

-Hello, Len.

-Hello, Pam.

-I've got to say, you look great.

-Thank you very much.

-Yes, I'm in the pink.

-You are in the pink

and I hope you've got plenty of memories of the '50s?

I've got lots of vivid memories of my childhood, yes, I have.

-Well, keep them to yourself and reveal all presently.

-OK!

So what memories do other people have of their childhood?

We take a look at a day in the life for four '50s kids.

MUSIC: "Memories Are Made Of This"

# Memories are made of this...#

Every childhood is unique.

And what we remember gives us a vivid snapshot of times gone by.

So meet Eastender Barry,

Pat from Newcastle,

country boy Tim,

and Home Counties Julia.

All different backgrounds, all different memories.

Let them take us back 60 years to see what childhood in the '50s

was really like.

My mum used to come in, I think she was coming home from

early morning office cleaning, get me out of bed.

A quick cat's lick as she called it,

like a wipe round the face with a flannel,

get the tide marks off from the night before

and then walk through to school.

Get up, put on our uniforms, which were all very '50s,

all wearing shorts and ties and even school caps and blazers.

I had a little green pleated skirt white socks and sandals,

sort of T-strap sandals.

Obviously, a green cardigan to match and green knickers!

Home breakfast would be porridge, boiled eggs or some sort of cereal.

Just a slice of bread and butter, dip it in the sugar bowl,

what we call a sugar butty.

Not very healthy by today's standards, I know, but things like that.

And usually my father would drive us to school,

dropped off at the school gates and the day began.

And I can remember some of the boys getting

a ruler across the backs of their legs.

I suffered that quite a bit.

Then you had to sign a book, as if it was an honour!

You had to sign a punishment book.

Playtime never came quick enough,

and for those not interested in the ruckus, there was always romance.

# Young love, first love

# Filled with true devotion...#

Girls, who were much the stronger group used to insist

on playing kiss chase.

Oh, yes, we did play kiss chase, yes!

I can remember being the victim of that a couple of times,

cornered in, it was a bike shed!

We just felt that that was really naughty and when they found us

we had to give them a kiss, yes!

At the end of the school day, obviously, the bell rang.

We put our chairs on the desk and we had to stand up and sing...

# Now the day is over night is drawing near. #

And all the kids went mad, yeah, rushing out the door,

not orderly fashion.

Along the street, making plans, for when we were going to meet up after tea.

Right behind where we used to live there used to be a council estate

and all the children used to play in the streets there

but we weren't allowed to mix with them.

I just played at home with my brother.

-PAT:

-We played a lot in the street then

because we didn't have a back garden.

-BARRY:

-The mischievous ones, there was knock down ginger,

everyone played that.

That when you knocked on someone's door and ran away.

When someone got used to it, if you did it too much,

they'd be waiting for you behind the door

and they chase you up the streets. Some of them men was fast runners.

We to be outside as much as possible.

I remember having a friend round and we had a competition to see who could jump highest off a haystack.

We would progressively climb higher and higher until eventually

someone stuck his teeth through his kneecap and it all came to an end.

Yes, we called the bomb sites debris.

Let's go and play on the big debris or the little debris.

Every debris had a name.

The water tank debris, because that filled up with water.

But, as I say, we had a lot of fun on the bomb sites.

It could be quite dangerous at times but luckily enough,

most of us survived it all.

When we were playing,

we quite often used to play with skipping ropes and hopscotch.

We even played in cardboard boxes.

It's a bit of a cliche, but we did.

Cardboard boxes could be racing cars, fire engines,

anything the imagination wanted.

I didn't really spend a lot of time in the bedroom

because today children don't mind being sent to their bedroom

because they got everything there, TVs, computers,

but we spent most of the time in the street rather than our bedrooms.

# You're full of sugar you're full of spice

# You're kind of naughty But you're naughty and nice. #

But after all the fun and games, it was indoors for something to eat.

As far as I remember for supper, it was all good wholesome stuff.

Spam and chips!

Banana sandwiches.

Egg and chips.

Meat and two veg.

Jam and bread and cakes.

Sausage and mash.

When we came home from school, because we'd had lunch,

it was literally bread and jam.

And this is really funny, if I was really hungry, which I was

most of the time, I used to go and eat the dog biscuits in the larder.

They were the little tiny Bonio biscuits.

We use to have a Labrador called Rufus

and I used to go and eat the biscuits. Isn't that terrible?

You'd get fish and chips for about a shilling.

We used to put the salt and vinegar on,

and we used to loosen the lid right to the last thread so the next

person would come in and put the salt on their chips,

cos the lid would come off and they've got half a pound of salt

all over their fish and chips!

That was quite a common occurrence, that was.

A terrible thing when I think back!

# Hopalong Cassidy here we come! #

And if you were lucky enough, you got to sit in front of the gogglebox.

Television was only a couple of hours a day

and that was always a must.

There were the Woodentops, there was Andy Pandy.

Bill and Ben.

"Loblob, Little Weed" and the Little Weed used to go, "Weed!"

Hopalong Cassidy.

Loads of cowboys, yeah. Loads of cowboys.

And there was Muffin The Mule. "Here comes Muffin, Muffin the mule."

And on Saturday nights it was Dixon Of Dock Green.

And the Billy Cotton Band Show.

'Wakey wakey!'

So it was no education at all, it was purely fun.

And then it was supper time, bath and bed. It was fairly routine.

Mum always used to say, have you wiped that tide mark off?

Because we were only bathing once a week and we dodged the flannel.

It was bath and good stripy winceyette pyjamas

with a drawstring.

I think we used to sometimes have a story read to us.

# Magic moments...#

I remember my childhood as being a very peaceful, settled,

safe childhood.

I don't think at the time I realised how lucky

we were to have the childhood we had. It certainly was a lovely time.

Back in the '50s, I think children were, on the whole,

a lot happier in those days.

When you're little,

all you are really interested in is that you feel safe and that

you are fed and warm and I can remember being all of those things.

-BARRY:

-Maybe children today do have as much fun, I don't know.

But I think no one had as much fun as we did in those days.

Always something to do.

They were great days, really great days.

# Filled with love... #

-What a marvellous little film.

-A gorgeous film.

I like the salt cellar, brilliant!

And we have one of its stars, Barry! Let me ask you this, Barry.

What would be your overall impression

of growing up as a kid in the '50s?

Well, I suppose the main thing would be the freedom we had.

Not like today, there is too much traffic.

We went out in the mornings and never came back till late at night.

Our mums didn't have to worry about us.

We used to play on the Underground.

We used to bunk into the Underground and go off to Epping

or anywhere on the Underground.

Yes, we've all done that. A Red Rover on the buses.

-I didn't, I didn't go on the Underground.

-Well, there weren't too many of them down in Somerset!

You could dig a long way but you wouldn't come to the Underground.

-Now, you were a country girl.

-I was a country girl.

I grew up in the village of Stafford in the Vale, Len,

which was then in Berkshire.

And my memories are very seasonal, really.

In the winter, when we had snow,

which we were very excited about, you had to cower out of the way

because the country boys used to have snowball fights.

And in the middle of the snowball they would embed a rock,

so if you got one of those in the temple, it was curtains, really.

That is my overwhelming wintry sort of memory.

But in the summer, I can smell the hay because we used to be a pest,

I am sure, and we'd go all round the hay fields when

they had been baled and they were the little bales and you could build

all sorts of fantastic structures, bale houses and dens and that.

The older kids used to go in for a snog. Absolutely, yes!

-We never had that, Barry?

-No!

-What, no snogging at Bethnal Green?

No, we had to do it in the bombed houses.

-That wasn't so fragrant, Barry.

-They were wonderful, wonderful days.

I really enjoyed myself. Now, back to those early '50s.

If you wanted to see the news and you didn't have a television,

cinema newsreels were the thing.

I remember happy days at the pictures.

They put the newsreel between the A and the B movie

and threw in a cartoon for good measure.

How about that for about 9p? Value for money!

All this week we'll be looking at events that made the '50s

and how you remember the first decade fully captured on film.

Let's start with the defining moment of 1952 itself.

The day a princess, who had lost her dad, turned into a queen.

NEWSREEL: It is with the greatest sorrow that we make the following

announcement, that the King passed peacefully away in his sleep.

It made me personally very sad

because I thought he was a great man.

He did his share.

Groups of people from the houses in our road,

in small circles all talking about it all the way up the road.

The announcement of the death was a shock.

It was a feeling 23-year-old Terence Gallagher shared with others

who had heard the news that February morning.

But Terence's interest in the story was not simply personal.

At the time, he was a runner at Movietone,

Britain's largest newsreel company, and he knew this was

the biggest story their cameras had covered in years.

While the coronation was not happen for another year,

the cameras were there to capture the extraordinary moment

the new Queen was proclaimed, two days after her father's death.

'I proclaim that the high and mighty Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary

'is now, by the death of our late sovereign of happy memory,

'become Queen Elizabeth II.'

The scene could have been out of a period movie.

Everyone's in their regalia. It was most impressive.

At the Movietone offices, Terence and the team

were counting down to their biggest challenge,

filming the funeral of the British monarch.

Here was a job that had to be done. It had to be done properly.

It had to be done quickly.

And people, somehow, welcomed the opportunity to do this work.

Rather than risk the crowds the next morning,

Terence stayed at work on the eve of the funeral.

I spent the night in the Movietone theatre

using my raincoat as a pillow.

Got up, it must have been six o'clock, and as I walked,

masses of people, all over the road, walking down the road,

silence, except for the shuffle of feet. It was quite eerie.

My job that day was to ferry the film.

There weren't enough of us

so there were people like Boy Scouts were used.

It was all hands to the pump, as it were.

As fast as the footage got back,

the film processors were turning it into newsreel.

They would then have produced 200 copies.

The first ones coming off going to the London cinemas,

and the rest going on the night train all over the country.

Terence has never seen the remarkable footage

he helped to capture that day, more than 60 years ago.

This is the camera position I was in

as the cortege passes into St James's Street.

Lots of people with handkerchiefs, including men.

Because it was a sorrowful sight, the actual funeral.

Oh, it brought a lump to your throat, as soon as you saw it.

And pride, in fact.

The pride that the British can do this sort of thing.

And I still think it was a terrific job

and I was proud to be part of it. However small.

I tell you what, that is interesting.

Very nice to have an inside view.

Now, I don't know about you,

but I don't remember the death of the King.

-No, I don't.

-But I do remember the Coronation.

-What are your memories of it?

-They are momentous, Len.

It was the first time I ever saw the television, because in the pub

up the road from us, which was called the Cottage of Content,

they had a TV. And so we sat cross-legged on the carpet

and watched this little tiny figure of the Queen and heard the music.

Not only was it the Coronation

but it was the first time we had ever seen the TV so I remember it.

-My mum bought a telly.

-Oh, she bought a telly.

I had never seen a telly.

-She bought a telly for the Coronation.

-Oh, I say!

And we had the whole street in there.

We had the street party and we got the five bob bit, as we called it,

the ceremonial five shilling piece.

-We didn't have one of those. I feel deprived.

-But I got rid of mine.

I swapped it for some fag cards and then I got whacked for that.

But anyway.

Now, housing was the biggest issue facing the country after the war.

Not only was there dreadful overcrowding,

but we had also had five years of bombing to contend with.

So, come peacetime and the '50s,

Britain had to rebuild itself quite literally from the ground up.

And the solution?

A mix of prefabs, council flats, council houses, council estates!

And even, whole new towns!

To be offered a big four-bedroom house for something like

five shillings a week was fantastic.

We were all young architects, recently qualified,

so everything was new.

It was a very, very exciting time.

And the new towns were providing both houses and jobs

and that was what decided me to go to Stevenage.

Stevenage in Hertfordshire, Britain's first new town.

A bold social experiment sold mainly to Londoners,

whose city had been ravaged by war, plagued with overcrowding

and often without basic amenities.

Then, in 1951, the dream of paying an affordable rent for modern,

spacious houses, all set in beautiful countryside

came true for some, as Stevenage's first neighbourhood was completed.

Percy Weston and his wife, May, were two of Stevenage's pioneers.

I thought, if we want a house,

we have to go where they are being built.

And that's when I wrote to the general manager

and ultimately got an interview.

And I was offered a job in the engineer's wing.

And I was going to get a house into the bargain. So, I accepted.

Percy and May still live in the house they came to in 1951.

It looked enormous, actually, because we had been living

with my mum and dad and we'd had really no privacy,

you know, for newlyweds,

so that was the big thing that we could be alone together.

We literally arrived in the middle of a building site.

As they were finishing their houses one at a time,

they were letting them out.

They weren't completing the whole estate to start with.

And I thought, we have arrived in one of those American

or Australian outback towns, you know.

Like Percy, Maureen Wilderspoon's dad had been drawn to Stevenage

by the promise of work and a fresh start.

We came from a very working-class family,

you know, my father was a carpenter and my mother was a seamstress.

What life could we have had in London,

because we didn't have the money ever to better ourselves.

The only way he saw of getting out, we were a family of four,

was to emigrate to Australia.

And then this job in Stevenage came up building the new houses

and all the builders that came to Stevenage were promised a house.

So they talked about it

and they decided that Stevenage was a little bit closer than Australia!

So they went for Stevenage.

Like many Londoners, Maureen's family had been attracted to the new towns

by the Government PR campaign which, over the years, did the hard sell.

'Apart from the improved design of commonplace sights like bus shelters,

'notice the refreshing absence of traffic congestion.'

It succeeded, with thousands of families attracted by the idea of a bright new future.

Each new town had a master plan for shops, schools, churches,

even theatres to entertain the new residents.

On the drawing board, whole communities were planned,

spanning all classes and all ages.

But coming from a cramped two-bed in Tottenham,

for most ordinary people like Maureen,

the biggest boon was space.

As we walked in to this rather large council house,

my brother was heard to say, "Who's living upstairs?"

Because we had always shared a house and here we were with four bedrooms,

a lounge, dining room, kitchen, garden, everything.

It was just so big, for a six-year-old.

Not much furniture in it, so it looked big.

Houses like this would be made affordable

at roughly under £2 a week rent to the local authority.

But there were teething problems.

Roads and pavements were unfinished, and that's not all.

I'd never had a pair of Wellington boots in my life.

I didn't know what Wellington boots were.

And the first thing we did was buy wellingtons.

We would go out and we would play on building sites.

And you'd come home, covered in brick dust, scraped fingers, mud.

But everything took a long time.

If you went shopping, it took a long time because you had to walk there.

You had to shop and then you had to walk back.

We didn't have a car in those days.

Transport was not the only problem there.

Plans for 60,000 new residents meant tensions were running high with the locals.

We found a certain hostility in the old town about the newcomers.

They were "Those folk from London. You know what they're like!" That sort of attitude.

Simon Bennett, one of Stevenage's architects, remembers the threats.

Certain people were active.

They said, I'm going to lie down in front of the diggers to stop

the new towns being built. But in point of fact,

they all realised that it was a great success.

But for some, the utopian dream did not last long.

Many Londoners missed their friends and family,

the hustle and bustle of the city.

The new town blues set in and quite a few drifted back to London.

London seemed an awful long way away.

It's 20 minutes on the train now, it was an hour and a half in those days on a steam train.

I suppose for some people, who had always lived in London, old people,

it was too big a change.

For us, it was an exciting adventure.

So, for those who stayed, was it all worthwhile?

On the whole, I think it has been a success.

Architects from all around the world have been to visit

to see what an example it was in the early days.

And I think most of the people here now have not regretted it.

I was very happy to come to Stevenage. I had a great life here.

I have no regrets.

How fantastic it must have been to come out of those overcrowded tenement buildings,

with people upstairs and down,

-and then suddenly you are in your own home.

-Yes.

-The idea that it could be all yours.

-Yes.

What about you, how was domesticity in your house?

Well, in the house where I was born, it was a bit basic.

We had two tin baths on the wall outside, a long one and a short one.

My sister and I would be done first. So you'd be in the bath of cooling water

and you'd make yourself small at one end

and then Mum would pour in a kettle of boiling water at the back

-and you frantically splash it...

-Push it along.

-..so it didn't burn your bottom.

And as every person got out, the silt was diluted

by the addition of another kettle of boiling water.

For me, it was slightly different.

-My nan and grandad had a greengrocers.

-Oh, right.

My nan's job was to boil up the beetroots.

There was this big beetroot boiler which

they put this gas ring underneath.

And as it got tepid,

my nan used to put me in it.

And I'd have a jolly good scrub over by my nan and all this.

-I probably would have a pee in it.

-In the beetroot boiler?

And then out I'd come, and then in would go the beetroot.

Oh no! I shall never eat another beetroot.

-People used to queue up for them. They were delicious.

-Well,

-they had that added extra ingredient.

-Yeah. But you know what I loved about Stevenage,

is those people have never regretted the move

and they are just so happy that they did it and they are there.

-Yeah.

-So, getting a house got easier, making it a home was the next task.

And along came the national obsession called do-it-yourself.

The '50s was the year the Black & Decker and Dulux emulsion.

Proud new householders couldn't get enough of putty, paint and pelmets

to help turn their homes and into the proverbial castle.

# This old house once knew its children

# This old house once knew its wife... #

Ah, DIY. That great Saturday afternoon activity.

Responsible for more domestic rows than who does the washing up.

And where can we lay the blame? The '50s.

That's when DIY became a boom home hobby.

It even had its own TV show, the DIY SOS of the '50s, with Barry Bucknell.

And then square this across with a pencil, on both sides, there and there.

With a bit more cash to spend and loads of new homes just asking to be given the personal touch,

we became a nation of Barry Bucknells.

And one of the best was Terence Dickens.

Terence has DIY in his DNA.

His family have been running DIY stores for four generations

and during the '50s, they opened a third shop in Stockton, Lancashire.

The first day, we only had about one customer.

And then word got around and then the customers started to come

and there was, honestly, no stopping them.

# Ain't gonna need this house no longer... #

We used to do paint...

# Ain't got time to fix the shingles... #

..Curtain rails. We did miles, and I mean miles.

We were one of the biggest sellers of curtain rails in the country.

High employment in the '50s,

coupled with the possibility of paying on the never-never

put some extra cash in the back pocket of the ordinary man,

which benefited Dickens DIY.

The ordinary person would walk in, and say, I'm doing a job,

I'd like to do a job, and I want to do so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so.

So we would offer them the tools that they could use to do that job.

And usually, they would get them, or get them on credit.

And they'd pay two shillings a week - 10p - and they would build up...

That is the way it all started off.

In the post-war years,

ingrained deep in people's psyche was the message to get on with things and do it yourself.

So people did. Or at least, they tried to.

A lot of them had no idea but with a little bit of help from such as us,

we could show them where they were going wrong.

And by showing them where they were going wrong, they came back, and back, and back.

And in the end, they would do all the house up.

Suddenly, a wealth of new DIY products were flooding the shelves

ready for the eager home improver to snap up.

'Quicker and better with Black & Decker.'

I can remember when Black & Decker drills came in and they were quite basic.

And that would be in about 1955, 1956, around there.

And they were five pounds nine shillings and sixpence. I remember that.

'Take the Black & Decker,

'add one of the many attachments and put power into your hands.'

People, when they got one of those,

they were like somebody with a new toy.

Amateur craftsmen of all ages flock to Olympia

for the do-it-yourself exhibition in search of ideas.

And by 1956, annual DIY exhibitions were held at Olympia in London

designed to inspire people for even more ambitious DIY projects.

-Pardon me, sir, do you do much for yourself?

-Well, a fair amount.

I see, what kind of things do you build?

Well, I have done some cabinets,

I've put a new sink unit in.

So was Terence pleased with the part he played in the DIY boom of the 1950s?

I'd say it was the era that we created.

We weren't the only ones in the country, but we made an episode of it.

So people could come in, ask questions, get an answer,

and go home and do it all.

Goodbye now.

What about you or your family, any good at do-it-yourself?

The only time Father did any what you might call DIY

was when he decorated the lavatory, which he did with a bucket of green distemper and a stirrup pump.

-You know one of these jobs?

-Oh, yeah. And it squirted out.

-Yeah.

It just squirted it out and after it dried, there were all these dribbles,

Len, all down the walls in this horrible nauseous shade of green.

Well, the only time I really had a go at any DIY was when my son was being born.

We decided to turn one of the bedrooms into his nursery.

And my wife said, "Don't paint it, you'll mess it up." I said, "I won't miss it up."

So I was sort of on a challenge.

So I got clear plastic paper

and covered every conceivable thing that could possibly get splashed.

And we had these louvred door wardrobes, which my wife kept all her clothes in.

And I thought, they are all right, they're behind those louvres. I went in in my underpants and socks...

-This is quite an erotic image.

-It is! In I walked.

-I slipped over.

-Oh, no!

The paint flew over my head, went into these louvred wardrobes,

covered all her clothes in Dulux.

And that is the one and only time I've ever tried to do do-it-yourself.

I thought, that's it. Never again.

-No... Well, you've got other strengths!

-Yes.

But putting up shelves and stuff is not one of them.

-No.

-And I'm glad, in a way. Now, call me nosey,

but I always want to know what makes couples tick,

especially 60 years ago, when we were all a bit reserved

and didn't talk so much about... stuff.

Today, we write blogs about the most intimate things,

but back then, couples were told, "You've made your bed, now lie on it."

But was marriage in the '50s really that simple?

# When I fall in love... #

The '50s weren't all that long ago.

# ..It will be forever... #

She had to do as she was told.

But it was an age of innocence in the relationship between men and women.

He said, "Aren't you happy?" and I said, "Well, no, not very."

But he couldn't understand it. He was baffled.

Jean and Dennis, and Joan, now widowed,

were all young marrieds in the '50s.

Dennis and Jean came from just outside Bristol.

Dennis was a postman, Jean a shop girl.

They had been courting for three years.

Sex was taboo. You didn't talk about it.

Nobody said anything about it.

The first thing I learnt about sex was when I was in the Army.

"Just you be careful, my girl, and you behave yourself!

"Don't you dare bring anything home to this door

"because I don't want to know it!" That was my sex education.

# Do you remember

# The first time that we kissed? #

Joan came from a different background. She'd studied at Oxford,

but the same moral attitudes cut across all classes.

Oh, heavens above!

SHE LAUGHS

Absolute virginity! So, of course, you went into marriage

totally inexperienced, both of you.

There's this virgin man, this virgin woman, jumping into bed...

Well, not even jumping. Falling into bed together and making a mess of it.

But a '50s marriage had other unwritten rules, which were hard to break.

Women had to stop in those days to see to their man.

If I was washing, I'd have to stop.

You didn't do that when they came in.

I mean, that stopped.

And you made them a cup of tea and a sandwich and you were nice and everything.

I think their role was to earn the money

that produced food on the table.

They didn't really expect to do very much in the home. The job came first, always.

In every way, I was the number two wife, I think. The work was the number one wife.

-DENNIS:

-They came home, they sat down.

They expected their tea on the table in front of them.

They read the paper and that was it. They didn't do anything else.

The meals were on the table on time.

-The children were always...

-Clean and tidy.

-..clean and tidy.

The house was always clean and tidy. You had everything ready for him when he came home from work,

and when he got up in the morning, you were there to see to everything. That was the perfect housewife.

I remember him trying to put a nappy on one of the babies

and he'd got the nappy on and it was all over the place

and totally useless. He hadn't got any clue at all.

He did try, I suppose, but he just hadn't got the skills that way.

I was pleased about the birth of my children because I did enjoy all my children very much.

And my job was to run the children, really. But we were living in the middle of nowhere

and I missed adult conversation.

I suppose, emotionally, he wasn't very great.

I knew that for the children it was important that we stayed together,

so I thought, "Well, I suppose that's how it's got to be."

But again, I'm very much aware of how typical that was for women of my generation.

Married women then still felt they were essentially their husbands' property.

Jean encountered her husband's claim on her when popping out to a Women's Institute gathering.

I said, "Oh, can I go?"

"Please yourself."

And he used the attitude.

It was just jealously. He didn't want me to go.

So I said, "I won't go, then."

"Hmph!" he went, like this.

I thought, "Yes, I will go." So I put my coat on and went.

Two days he didn't speak to me, because of that, for going out.

But that was the attitude all the time.

If you wanted to go out, you asked permission to go out.

But that was the normal thing.

To stop feeling so hemmed in,

Jean found more practical ways to get out of the house.

The local farmer up the road used to grow potatoes.

He had fields and fields of potatoes.

When it was picking-potato-time, they'd ask for all the local women to go.

We'd all take the children, all get onto the back of the lorry,

and off we'd go to pick potatoes all day.

Yeah, it was lovely. We used to thoroughly enjoy that.

That was great. £1 a day.

-You didn't really like it, did you?

-I didn't really like it, but it was a necessity.

For housebound Joan there was a more radical, almost subversive answer.

-Here we are, Joan. Here are your letters from the Correspondence Club.

-Thank you very much.

She signed up to contribute to an extraordinary secret magazine

called the Co-operative Correspondence Club.

Now held at the Mass Observation Archive,

the club's letters were written by disgruntled housewives like Joan,

letting off steam about their lot.

Compiled by an editor into a hand-stitched book,

each new edition was circulated among members twice a month.

"Remaining at home with the children day after day,

"seeing very few people,

"I gradually lost my self-confidence and felt it ebbing

"and a devastating shyness descending

"until it would have been an effort to speak to a stray cat."

So this was salvation when this came.

You could actually write down what you were feeling!

And it was so sacred. Nobody was ever allowed to look at it.

So husbands couldn't possibly get anywhere near it.

You kept it hidden in a drawer until you posted it on the next day.

You had to be a mother to join.

But once you were in, you could write about anything on your mind -

the equivalent of a modern-day blog.

" 'Mummy, where's my so and so?

" 'Mummy, Alfie's doing that so I can't get on and dress properly.

" 'Mummy, he's locked the door and I can't get in to clean my teeth.

"Lucky, lucky Daddy, who dresses placidly and half-asleep,

"unconscious of the turmoil around him,

"and unmolested by the throng."

It was companionship of a sort, I think.

The sort of thing that, if you'd known anybody locally,

you'd have gossiped around a cup of coffee with.

Reading this after so many years is a strange experience,

a mixture of sadness and surprise, in a way,

because fortunately, with the passage of time,

one tends to forget a little bit how acute some of these feelings were.

The Co-operative Correspondence Club was Joan's release,

but did marriage for women get better as the decade wore on?

In those days, if one got married, one stayed married, and that was it.

Your fate was assured.

The '60s, you see, were the time when people started saying, "Hey, nonny, nonny," you know.

The '50s was still fairly stick-in-the-mud, I think.

For Jean, though, as the children came along,

and with her contribution to the family purse increased with a regular job,

Dennis's attitude started to change.

I helped bathe them, I helped wash them and clean them,

I put them to bed and, em...

I mean, they were there. It had to be done.

We got closer. It kept us together, more or less.

And here we are together 65 years later!

-It's lovely to meet you, Jean, I've got to say.

-Thank you.

But 61 years of marriage, so did you find that when you first got married

there were conflicts and things, I suppose?

Yes. Sometimes it was hard trying to find out things you didn't know

-and you didn't have anybody to ask.

-Yeah.

My dad was hopeless, Len. This will illustrate how hopeless my dad was.

My brother chucked me in the river once. He didn't mean to.

He said, "I'm going to chuck you in, Pam." And he got hold of me and he went, "Ah-one, ah-two,"

and on "three" we fell and he lost his footing.

My brother took me home and Mum had gone out on the bus.

And my dad, he had not a clue what to do,

so he gave my brother a good hiding

and then he stood me in the washing-up bowl, to wash the river water off me,

and at three o'clock in the afternoon, although I was perfectly all right,

he put me to bed with a jam tart! THEY LAUGH

When Mum came home, she got me up and said, "What are you doing there, lying about in bed? Get up

"and don't be so stupid and go near the river in the future."

I think it was a very commendable thing. A bit of comfort food!

-Yeah.

-So, Jean, how many children did you wind up with?

-Five.

-Five?

-I had four in the '50s and then I had a boy in the '60s.

-Four girls.

-And grandchildren?

I've got 12 grandchildren and 14 great grandchildren.

-Wow!

-How lovely!

-And 61 years so it all worked out in the end.

-Very impressive.

-It's been well worth it, yes.

-Well done.

Well, after all those lovely stories and chats with our guests,

it's time to go home. But come sit on my sofa again tomorrow.

We're going to do '50s television stars, '50s teddy boys.

You name it, we've got it.

I always like a bit of jive!

So until then, see you later, alligator, from me,

Pam Ayres, the lovely Jean, and The 1952 Show.

Go on! See you later!

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