Episode 5 The 1952 Show

Hi. Len Goodman here for another '50s foxtrot around my decade.

They say of the '60s that if you remember them,

you weren't really there.

But it was the optimism of the '50s that gave us

that psychedelic decade.

So what's on offer today?

We were told we'd never had it so good

and our car industry was booming.

We got around in mass produced cars, Morrises, Austins and Rovers.

We see how the 1950s folk enjoyed their time off.

And it's doors to manual and crosscheck with the '50s jet set.

Don't forget, all this really kicked off in 1952

with the dawn of the new Elizabethan era.

And I don't believe it! Annette Crosbie is here to tell us

it was just so.

-It's lovely to see you.

-Thank you.

-Fancy a foxtrot?

No, calm down!

Now, I can remember going hop picking in Kent

with the family as a leper. We had a ball.

It was one way of enjoying yourself that didn't cost you a penny.

In fact, they paid you.

And the idea of the weekend was a whole new kettle of fish.

# Crazy, man, crazy

# Crazy, man, crazy... #

In '50s Britain, a woman's work was never done,

from making dinner to cleaning house and looking after the children,

the chores didn't stop for the weekend.

So if anyone was profiting from our increased leisure time,

it was '50s men.

The most popular pastimes reflected the gender divide,

fishing, football and racing.

Racing dogs, racing bicycles, cars, horses,

in fact any kind of racing.

It was a man's world all right.

I won my first race at 16 at a club called Castle Ray.

Often associated with flat caps and hobnail boots,

pigeon racing was a popular hobby among working-class men,

as pigeon fancier Ronnie Johnston remembers.

Belfast at the time just exploded with pigeon racing into the '50s.

The majority of fanciers were Belfast people who maybe worked

in the shipyard, worked in the linen mills, the roadworks

and this was a way that they could have a hobby which

took them through the week and then they had the racing on the Saturday.

Having been brought out to the country by train,

the pigeons would be released to find their own way home.

Owners like Ronnie waited anxiously in their backyard

for the first pigeons to head back.

You just don't know when they're going to arrive.

The adrenaline starts flowing as you start your watch

and you know the times, actually coming up

and one does come round and I can tell you it's an experience.

Only a pigeon man can tell you.

And then, if you win the race, you can guess what it's like.

It's like winning the lottery now, probably.

# Oh, he's football crazy

# He's football mad

# And the football it has robbed him Of the wee bit of sense he had. #

But pigeons weren't the only pursuit '50s man could enjoy.

Then, as now, one of the most popular sports was football.

Arthur Price was a devoted Liverpool fan.

It wasn't a rich man's sport.

When I first went to watch Liverpool, I paid nine pence.

Going in the turnstile, you paid your money or you'd have a ticket,

it was a ticketed match, and then you had to walk up about 50 steps

to get into the Kop area, where we all stood in the Kop area.

You couldn't move sometimes. You couldn't move.

When you had 27,000 fellas standing there, they were just fanatics

and they used to sing and some of the jokes used to come out with,

I couldn't even repeat them.

The rivalry between fans was mainly friendly back then.

The street I lived in were all football mad, you know.

They were Evertonians and Liverpudlians

and we used to go and play football.

A football match lasted an hour and a half.

We'd be playing football for about four hours.

I used to hate it when it wasn't football season.

A man who would gladly have given new odds on football

or pigeons was George Carrigill.

We used to say give it a name, we'll give it a price.

Welcome to the illicit world of '50s betting.

Whatever I was earning as a journalist

I was losing the bookmakers.

And then I decided when I was 21 to have a go at being a bookmaker.

All George had to do now was to find premises for his shop.

All of the betting offices in those days were on the first

or second floor, they weren't on the high street.

They were down little backstreets

and people furtively used to sneak into them and not be seen.

He found the perfect place above a rather genteel hair salon.

Hair clientele were ladies, elderly ladies who came

in chauffeur driven cars, Bentleys and so on,

and they were there for wigs.

These poor old dears, losing their hair or they'd lost their hair

and my customers had to go through her salon

and of course the old dears were absolutely terrified.

In the 1950s, three quarters of us regularly had a flutter,

mainly on the GGs.

Not big bets because there wasn't a lot of money in those days.

It was almost exclusively horseracing.

If there was no horseracing, you wouldn't open the office at all.

It was a way of life.

George was doing a roaring trade but cash betting in the '50s

was illegal and there was always the chance he'd be raided by the police.

They stormed up the stairs,

there would probably be 30 people or so in the office, smoke-filled.

They were terribly smoke-filled places in those days.

Two people opened a window and shinned down a pipe.

The butchers across the road phoned the Fire Brigade,

they thought the place was on fire, smoke was bursting out.

And it was utter confusion.

I was fined £5 and each of the punters, the customers,

were bound over in the sum of four shillings.

Everyone knew it was illegal

but no-one was bothered in the slightest.

George isn't a betting man himself.

He runs the shop more as a hobby than hard work.

It's not just the winning and losing,

it's everything which is happening in horseracing,

the personalities, it's colourful, it's vibrant.

And you get hooked on it.

Now, I remember going hop picking but that was very localised to Kent.

Yes, it was. We don't have them.

-No, you didn't have many hops where you came from.

-No.

But we used to get on the old charabanc, go down to Southend

or Margate, or if it was a posh one, we'd go to Broadstairs.

Were your swimming costumes woollen?

My Nan used to knit my... Every Christmas I got a jumper

and in the summer, for my birthday, 25th April,

she'd knit me a swimming costume.

-Yeah.

-Yeah, dreadful.

And of course they were all right, they looked quite glamorous

-until you got wet.

-Until you got in the water.

-Then they'd swell up.

And there would be this huge thing dangling down here. Awful.

Now what about you? What's your earliest holiday memory?

My dad should have been a mechanic or a carpenter but he wasn't,

he was a postman for a bit and then he was an insurance agent.

During the war, he used to get bronchitis so he wasn't called up

and he built his own caravan and that's what we had our holidays in.

The top half folded down over the bottom half.

It was built of balsawood so it was very light

so it could be pulled by a Hillman Minx.

-Do you remember those?

-Yeah, the tiny Hillman Minx.

We'd drive all the way down to Keswick.

And he'd drive it into the caravan place which was just a field.

And there would be other caravans there.

And he'd wind the top up with a starting handle

while a little crowd gathered and it was called Jock's Lodge

and that's what we had our holidays in.

-What about if it got a bit windy? Was it quite stable?

-Oh, yes, it was, yeah.

-What a marvellous man your dad must have been.

-Yeah, he was.

-Built his own caravan?

-Yeah.

-My nan had a caravan in Clacton.

-It was a permanent structure.

-Right. How many did it sleep?

-Four.

Yeah, four.

-But every Sunday we used to have to go down there to air it out.

-Oh!

It had to be aired.

So... and it was quite a novelty for the first two weeks

or two months but then, every Sunday, winter and summer,

we used to go down to Clacton to air out the caravan.

Well, there you have it.

Your holidays in your cardboard caravan

and me down at my nan's, Clacton.

-It's lovely to reminisce. It's lovely to see you.

-Thank you.

I can't believe how funny it is that our connection is going to be caravans.

And whenever I think of you, I'm going to think of your dad

and the balsawood caravan. Fabulous!

Now, class ran through the whole of the '50s like Brighton does rock.

There was a lot of us and them.

I was definitely us, so let's take a look at them,

a curious band of young and upper-class, privileged girls,

the debutantes, the debs.

Did you know they were the top toff totty of the day?

'To Buckingham Palace yesterday afternoon were invited

'over 1,000 guests for the season's first presentation party.

'And each debutante was waiting for the moment when she was to make her two curtsies.'

You go like that and then you go keeping very straight,

very formal.

And I think probably dropped my head, I can't quite remember,

perhaps we did in case we caught her eye.

Up until 1958, curtsying to the Queen and even to a ceremonial cake

was the thing to do for upper-class 'gals'.

At the age of 17, Mary, the only child of a military family,

officially came out.

'The honour being presented make this an especially memorable occasion.'

And embarked on what was known as the season,

a ritual which went back to the 1700s.

And even in those days, a debutante's season had to commence

with being presented to the monarchy.

You could only be presented to the Queen if your mother had been

presented herself or knew somebody who had been.

And we all lined up and we had to queue in and out.

And then off we trotted and did our curtsy to both the Queen

and the Duke of Edinburgh so there were two curtsies involved.

But it was happy, it was exciting. But it was fun.

And the fun continued for the next six months.

A dizzy round of parties, pretty dresses, dinners and dancing.

If you were lucky enough, you had a dance given for you by your parents

and they were astonishing.

We were so spoiled. You know, the food was absolutely delicious.

And poor, old fathers having to write cheques for drinks

and God knows...and bands.

Tommy Kinsman.

And the point of all this privileged preening and primping?

To bag a rich husband, if possible.

My father didn't have a great deal of money,

but he had enough to do this, sort of, launch me into the world.

And, actually, it worked. So, it was a sort of investment, I suppose.

But was it all as glamorous as it appeared to be?

The dances were lovely, but alarming,

because if you weren't absolutely sure

that you were going to be asked to dance,

you could have quite a difficult time of it

because you couldn't ask them to dance with you.

I had a programme I had to fill in.

People would say, can I have the third one, or whatever it was,

and you wrote it down with a little pencil attached in little book,

like the, sort of, 18th century.

And hoped it would be full.

The highlight of the season was the Queen Charlotte's Ball.

It was based on Queen Charlotte, George III's wife, her birthday.

And we had to come down a long staircase, all of us, altogether.

The cake, I think, was at the bottom of the staircase.

And we had to curtsy to it.

And then, somebody rather grand, a duchess or somebody, cut it.

And then, I imagine, we were all given a bit of it to eat

and then, we danced the night away.

And all the young men wore white tie, actually, for that.

I mean, dinner jackets, they could just wear to dances,

but white tie was still what you had to wear to proper, grand dances.

And who were these white-tied followers of fashion?

Meet the deb's delights.

They were mainly brothers, friends of brothers.

They all had to be slightly checked.

Not safe in taxis was one of the things

that mothers used to talk about. Not safe in a taxi.

If you got into a taxi and he leapt on you,

that was considered a bad idea.

But let's face it, in truth, it was a highly competitive cattle market.

I mean, there were some very pretty girls

and some extremely rich girls and some very glamorous girls.

It was competitive, like it just is anywhere, isn't it?

When there are, you know, you're jostling for a chap

or whatever it is.

But Mary was the last of a dying breed.

The Queen called a halt to court presentations

and 1958 saw the end of the official debutante season.

When the Queen decided, probably quite rightly, to stop it,

it did seem to lose its point, really.

I mean, the point was that you had lots of parties

and met lots of people and got married.

And lived happily ever after.

Well, Annette, that is a blast from the past, truly.

-What did you make of that?

-Well, it was extraordinary and really...

archaic.

Well, it is archaic.

And we'd just been through a war, it's absurd, the whole business.

Yeah, well, I guess that's why, gradually, it petered out.

But, you know, did you find, up in Scotland,

-it invaded your sort of world or...?

-No, no.

Because everybody in Scotland who wanted to be there

went down to London.

-That kind of thing did not go on in Scotland. We were far too busy.

-Yeah.

There was an old dance teacher called Josephine Bradley.

-Oh, I read about her in the newspapers.

-Really?

-Yes.

Well, she was, I don't know if she was the official one,

but she used to teach lots of the debs how to dance and how to curtsy.

-Curtsy, that's it.

-They'd come to her dance studio

and there they'd be, and, of course, the deeper you could go, the better.

But, of course, the deeper you went,

-the more fraught with danger it became.

-Getting up.

Yeah, you had to get up again.

The bottom line is, I think, we're both glad that that era,

-as far as the debs is concerned, is over.

-Yeah.

-I'm glad I missed out on that.

-Yeah. I'm glad I did.

Although, I do look good in a white tie and tails.

-Oh, I think, probably, we had a good time.

-Yeah.

So much of our free time was accompanied

by this unmistakable noise.

ENGINE STARTS

Yeah. We started going places by car.

My mate's car was a Wolseley Hornet and I can't tell you,

the things we got up to in that car.

The Wolseley Hornet was built by the British Motor Corporation

and they were in their heyday.

We were world-beaters in the '50s.

So, for old times' sake, let's burn some more rubber

and give it some welly. Go on.

MUSIC: "Move It" by Cliff Richard

# Come on, pretty baby Let's move it and groove it... #

Two '50s petrol heads.

# Well, a shake a baby shake...#

Lou, who loved driving cars.

We never bothered about motor safety in those days.

You put your foot down and that went.

And John who loved designing them.

People wanted cars, would you believe?

And so, that opened a whole, new vista for us.

Yeah, and the world was almost our oyster.

It was all a big, big challenge.

I know I was much younger in those days, but it was great.

The start of the '50s was boom time for the British car industry.

Wannabe car owners crowded the Earls Court Motor Show

to ogle the latest models.

Back in Sussex, farmer's wife Lou couldn't wait to get mobile.

She didn't go to Earls Court to get her perfect car,

but to Bognor Regis.

So, we went down to the garage and they'd got nothing there.

I was feeling absolutely sick.

And there, on the kerb, stood this car.

And I said to the salesman, "That's what I call a car."

And he said, "You can have it if you want."

Lou had fallen for an MG Magnette,

but true love came with a hefty price tag.

It was just over £700.

An awful lot of money.

And the payments, I believe, were £17-something a month.

It was a struggle, but the trouble was,

women couldn't get hire purchase in those days.

So, it had to go in my husband's name.

And the hire purchase agreement was in his name also.

But I still had to pay it off.

And, eventually, got it back into my name.

In Birmingham, John, a young car designer, firstly for Alvis

and then the renowned British Motor Corporation,

had to bide his time before getting his hands on the wheel.

We'd just about got a house, we'd had our first daughter

and I thought we ought to go in for a car, you know,

because both my wife and I used to run around on cycles.

That was fun because it kept us healthy, but we wanted a car.

So, my wife rather liked the look of the A30, an Austin.

So, I said, "OK, we'll have that."

After nearly 60 years, Lou's car is still on the road

and has served her, and even the farm animals, well.

It's had several years of farm life.

I've even had a six-month-old Hereford hobbled on the back seat.

That was all right until I was pushing it a bit and "plonk",

he fell off the seat. and hit the back my seat.

So, I had to get out and try and get him off the floor

and get him back on the seat again, but I got home.

And he was none the worse for wear and neither was the car.

Rising car ownership put more places within reach of motorists,

eager to see more of their surroundings.

This freedom of the road was massively expanded

by the building of Britain's first motorway in 1958.

# Come on, pretty baby Let's move it and groove it... #

The motorways, when they opened, they were going to be a godsend, no doubt.

We needed them, for goodness' sake.

And my in-laws had both retired north of Blackpool

and it was a tedious journey.

And when they opened the first motorways, ah!

Oh, gosh, I well remember that.

You could just put your foot down,

I don't remember looking at the clock, I just went.

It was great.

On one occasion, it was rather funny

because what should be in front of us,

but the new Farina Magnette, the Mark 3.

Down went the toe. Whoosh. Bye, bye, Farina.

Just left it standing.

The glory days of Birmingham's car industry are long gone.

But, before the strike-torn '70s and '80s,

John recalls what made thousands of '50s workers clock in

to make motors.

We'd got the innovation,

we'd got the people who lived for motor cars.

They were mechanics, they didn't mind getting their hands dirty and oily.

They weren't particularly interested in the money,

it was making a car, for goodness' sake, look what we've done.

And for Lou, she's still moving it and she's still loyal to her MG.

It's been a faithful, old companion. It's had a hard life

and it's done about 380,000 miles.

Well, this car has been with me so long, I would never part with it.

In fact, I've told everybody I want to be buried in it.

Because I would hate to see it go into anybody else's hands.

And I mean it.

Well, it's lovely to be joined by you, Lou. Nice to see.

Well, it's nice to meet you.

Well, how's the old Magnette going? Is it still going strong?

Very, very well indeed. Starts on the button,

-even when it's been sitting dormant for a week or so.

-Really?

-Yes.

And what sort of speeds does that get up to?

You a bit of a speed freak?

-Well, dare I say it, it's been a ton-up.

-Really?

Oh, yes. In the days when you could get proper petrol, five star,

110 octanes, the engines were built for that.

-And it's been over 100?

-Yes. I have proof of it as well.

Oh, I believe you. Yeah.

And have you still got the same engine or has it been reconditioned?

It's had another engine in it, yes,

cos the first engine, its crankshaft broke.

But they were proper cars, weren't they?

With the starting handle and everything, it's all there.

-Couple of cranks and off they go.

-Yes.

I don't know why they got rid of the starting handle.

-Neither do I. People wouldn't know how to use them today.

-No.

What about you, Annette? What's your first memory of a vehicle?

-It was my dad's old Morris 1000.

-Oh, there's another cracker.

-Ah, I loved it.

-Yeah.

Do you know, we knew a man who put cement in the floor of his

-and the car still went.

-Really?

-Yeah.

-What? He sort of concreted it over?

-Yeah.

Yeah, well, it saves on mats and things.

My dad's greatest joy was taking it all to bits

and putting it back together again.

Yeah, you could do that in those days cos they were simple.

-Yes.

-Yes.

You looked to the engine and you... Not that I'm mechanical,

but you sort of knew what was what.

You look at a car now, you lift up the bonnet

and you haven't got a clue of what anything is anymore.

My mate had this Wolseley Hornet,

open-top thing, two-seater with a dicky thing in the back.

-Oh!

-It was a proper, proper vehicle.

And we used to go, and he used to wear a deerstalker, my mate.

And when we went up a hill, he had, in the side,

he had a little fishing rod and a carrot.

And he used to say, "Get the carrot out."

And he'd put it over the top, going up the hill with this carrot.

We had so many laughs with this car, all right. Oh, it was such fun.

-Not so much traffic either.

-Well, no traffic, really.

-No.

You know, we used to drive, nothing.

Coming up into London or going down the seaside.

Lovely.

Well, Lou, I've got to say, I congratulate you on keeping that car

and I bet it's still in pristine condition.

Now, on your way home, I don't want you speeding along,

you've got to calm down, dear.

-I will do as I'm told.

-Do your best.

-Will do.

Now, I became, I don't want to think about it,

an apprentice engineer in the '50s and I hated every minute.

Luckily, I found my dancing feet.

I can barely cope with computers now,

so Lord knows how I would've dealt with the threat of them

way back when.

In the heady days of fifties' full employment,

they started them young on the treadmill of office work.

I was 16 when I started and I remember, to this day,

that I joined on the 18th August 1950.

I was 14 years old and I started working January 1946.

Brian Pierce was a clerk in a bank.

We had to wear dark suits and stiff collars.

And the stiff collars were separate from our shirts and,

after a little while,

I realised there was a company called Collars Limited

that took these collars away every week

and laundered them and we got them back.

And when they wore out, they replaced them for nothing,

that was part of the laundry charge.

Margaret Studwick's first job was an office junior

in a distribution company.

The idea was that you were given different types of jobs to do

and if you were any good at them, OK, they sort of thought,

well, you can do that, now we'll try you on something else.

The new work may not have been back-breaking,

but there was a price to pay for sitting in a warm office all day.

It was a job for life and you just worked through, for year after year,

and, now I look back on it, numbingly boring years,

until, with a bit of luck, you might have become a branch manager,

probably in your early 40s.

By the mid-'50s, Margaret had risen to become a typist,

but, as a woman, she faced other problems.

There was no question of ever furthering your career,

you could not.

Young men could go on and do their examinations

and they were able to get onto a ladder, if you like,

to further their career.

But we were never offered anything like that.

And some of the girls were very cross

because they knew they weren't getting anywhere near

a reasonable rate as far as they were concerned.

Before the computer, all office work had to be done by hand.

Business was paper-driven, dull and repetitive, though it was.

We wrote up the ledgers by hand and then,

we had to transfer the items to the customers' passbooks.

And some customers would bring their passbooks in,

not having been in for two months or so

and then, we had to write in two months' entries while they waited.

In those days, you had carbon copies

and you always had a number of leaves behind the top one.

So, if you made a mistake,

it was an awful faff to try and get it sorted out.

So, mostly, you tried not to make too many mistakes.

But that was just one part of what we were doing

and they were your invoices. And lots of filing went on.

One of my jobs was to list all the cheques that were paid in.

And the cheques were delivered to us

and we had to list them on an adding machine

which simply had a handle

and we'd just pull the handle down all the time.

So, there was no mechanisation.

But while Brian was relying on his little adding machine

and Margaret was filing for England, down in London, in 1951,

something big was being developed.

It was brewed up in a most unlikely place.

Lyons Corner tea shop.

Lyons had nearly 200 tea shops, scattered through the country.

The daily orders for new stock of tea and cakes

were all done by pen and paper.

'Each manageress has a standing order

'depending on the day of the week.

'After lunch each day, she considers her stock,

'weighs up local conditions

'and decides what variations, up or down,

'she will make to her order.'

Lyons thought the time had come to streamline their business.

They hired Ernest Kaye, a young electronic engineer

to work on a new project they'd cooked up.

They heard about these peculiar machines

that were being developed in America called computers.

And, being interested in all the latest developments,

they sent a team of people out to the States

to find out what this was all about.

They returned home, brimful of new ideas.

Ernest got down to work on building a computer for Lyons.

It was called LEO, short for Lyons Electrical Office.

It was a revolutionary idea

and everyone on the team was enormously enthusiastic.

I must say, I've never worked so hard in my life.

I spent days and nights designing electronic circuits,

till they came out of my ears.

The result was unbelievable.

LEO was a gigantic machine.

It was colossal, it filled a room 5,000 square feet.

Half the room was taken up by nine-foot-high racks

full of electronic equipment,

the other half of the room was taken up by the printers

and the tape readers and also a huge power supply.

The machine contained over 6,000 valves.

Used to get very hot and had to be air-cooled.

Lyons used LEO to plough through vast amounts of clerical work,

which had been done by hand, such as payroll for their 10,000 staff.

It was soon being used for all sorts of other calculations too.

'LEO worked out the shortest distance by rail

'from each station to all the other 4,000.

'This would have taken 50 clerks five years.

'For the Chancellor, LEO worked out the PAYE tables for '55 to '56

'and printed them off in one night.'

But although LEO was the world's first business computer, soon,

others caught on and, eventually, it was outgunned by the Americans.

We applied, at one time, to get a government grant

to help us develop the computer business.

And there was a letter saying,

they didn't think there was a future in computers.

-Well, Sir Brian, it's lovely to have you here.

-Nice to be here.

-May I call you Brian?

-Certainly.

-Oh, that's much easier.

Well, what did you make of that? And how did you cope back in the '50s?

Oh, it's interesting to look at it now, at this stage,

because it was amazing. Even in those days,

we had a lot of work to cope with, lots of people on the staff.

I was in a branch in Liverpool with 70 staff

and we had just begun to bring in mechanised machines

to post some of the major accounts.

All the others were still on ledger posting,

quill pens, by the way, and ink.

And passbooks that we had to complete each day

to bring them all up-to-date for our customers.

Some were left in the branches,

some, they came and took them every night.

Some, for the bigger customers, very big passbooks indeed,

that we had to complete, pages of them.

And then, we had to add them all up.

Funnily enough, it was easier to add them up in our heads

-because we'd got used to that.

-Yeah.

But there were beginning to be Burroughs Adding Machines

where we could put the numbers in

and then pull a handle as we went through.

But that, actually, took longer than adding up a whole row of figures.

We were better using our noddles, as it were.

-Maths was better than in those days, really.

-I think it was.

I mean, when I look back on it, of course,

we had no aids at school, we just trawled through paper and so on.

-Yeah.

-But we had to improvise quite a lot.

Not really to do with paper, but, rather amusingly,

we had to move big volumes of coin.

The branch I was in, had all the coin

from the Corporation of Liverpool paid into it.

And we had to get it to the head office of the bank,

which was about 500 yards away.

There wasn't a motorised vehicle that was big enough

and had sufficient suspension

to, actually, carry the coin at that time.

So, what we used to do, once a week,

we used to rent a Threlfall's brewery dray cart.

And one of the cashiers sat on the front

and we'd put all the coin on the back.

The other junior and I sat on the back with the coin

and we trundled off and went along Dale Street in Liverpool

to deliver all this coin.

-On a horse and cart.

-On a horse and cart.

Rather more interestingly,

from a security point of view, coming back...

Very few people had bank accounts,

very few personal customers had bank accounts,

and we had some pretty big customers

who would draw large volumes of cash to pay the wages.

And we would come back with suitcases and, at certain times,

we'd have £300-350,000 worth of cash in suitcases

-on the back of this horse and cart.

-And nobody tried to take it?

-And we never even thought we would be challenged.

-No.

We looked round and admired the view.

-Yeah, and off you go with your suitcases full of lolly.

-We did.

-Amazing.

-It's quite amazing.

-And what about you, Annette?

You got any paper stories for us?

When I was on holidays from drama school,

I used to do secretarial work

because my mother had insisted I have something to fall back on.

So, she sent me to a secretarial college

and I worked at the Coal Board, which was close to my home in Edinburgh.

And I remember my first day there and I typed out this,

I don't know what it was, some kind of report with about six pages

and I got them all stencilled together.

And I was terribly proud of it and carried it into this man

and all he had to do was sign it.

And I left them and I went back to my...

And I got the, "Could you come in here a minute?"

So, I scuttled back in to see what I'd done wrong.

And he pointed to the top one and he said, "Where do I sign?"

I said, "Well, on the last bit."

He said, "Right. Well, bring them back to me with just the last page.

"I don't want to be turning pages."

-Really? Oh, dear.

-Took me a long time to get over that.

Well, it's amazing.

-Brian, it's been lovely to talk to you.

-Thank you.

Now, things were hotting up on all fronts in the '50s,

not just with computers.

The decade also gave us the Jet Age.

America might have had the Boeing, but, in Britain, we had the Comet.

This great, silver bird was launched in 1952

and the jet set couldn't wait to get on board.

# Straighten up and fly right Straighten up... #

There's Talbot, who was radio officer.

There's me, there's Captain Alabaster.

And something quite unusual

and that is, they all have moustaches,

apart from me.

Audrey Iliffe was an air stewardess on the inaugural flight

of the Comet jet aeroplane.

British-designed and manufactured,

it was the world's very first passenger jet plane.

And no-one was more surprised than Audrey that she should be on it.

I got a phone call from BOAC to say, would I go for an interview.

Which I did. And, to my great surprise, passed it.

Particularly, as I'd skidded on the floor

to where the four of them were sitting looking very, very...

much as people look when you're having an interview.

And then I saw them

and they started to laugh and so did I, couldn't help it.

So, there I was, asking, "Please can I become an air stewardess?"

And I couldn't keep on my feet.

Made by the De Havilland company in Hertfordshire

for the British Overseas Airways Corporation, BOAC,

the Comet took off from London to Johannesburg on 2nd May 1952.

The weather was lovely and when we saw the aircraft,

we just couldn't believe it.

It looked so smooth and modern,

made the other aircraft look so old, when they weren't at all.

What made the Comet really different to other aircraft

were the Ghost turbojet engines buried in its wings.

Nobody could see propellers,

that was the thing that did worry, really did,

because they just felt if you didn't have a propeller,

it was never any good, you couldn't do anything without one.

But the world of air travel changed

the moment the Comet's wheels left the ground.

It cut journey times almost in half and flew above the weather,

eight miles up in the stratosphere.

It was, kind of, a very fast float.

You just took off and there you were in the air

and, of course, going fast, very fast.

And you just couldn't believe it possible.

# Straighten up and fly right Straighten up and fly right... #

The air-conditioned, fully pressurised cabin gave passengers

a quiet, smooth ride, previously unheard-of in commercial aviation.

I don't guarantee it every time, you know.

-I'll try.

-Go on.

Why does it have to be...?

And, of course, because it was so stable,

there was no fear that your dinner might end up in your lap.

With a lot of the other aircrafts, if it was bumpy weather,

it was a question of getting the food on their plate if possible.

Sometimes, if it's too bad, you couldn't do that.

You'd try and it would be disastrous.

In these golden days of jet air travel,

only the very rich could afford to fly.

They expected the best of everything.

You would ask each passenger what they would like to have a drink.

Usually champagne and I don't blame them either.

It just was like having a very, very big birthday party.

The landing in Johannesburg was a triumph.

The whole feeling was

that the Comet couldn't have done better

for the whole air industry.

For all the advances, the Comet was still a grand experiment

and, over the next few years,

a series of tragic accidents would ground the British jet fleet.

The future of jet design now belonged

to the Americans and Russians.

But that doesn't take away from the fact that, in 1952,

it was the British-made Comet that was king of the air.

# Fly right. #

Well, what a marvellous, little bit of film.

Makes you proud to be British, well, it does me, I hope it does you.

It was great, wasn't it, eh? That fabulous plane.

Do you remember your first flight?

Yes, I think it was when we went to the Lebanon.

We went to the Baalbeck Festival with the Bristol Vic Theatre Company.

And, in those days, the pilot used to tell you where you were.

"If you'd care to look out the window, on the right-hand side."

And I was sitting there with my friend Maggie Jones

and a lot the company surged to the side of the plane,

Maggie and I screaming, "Sit down! The plane..."

-With visions.

-"You're going to wrong the thing." Yeah.

Well, I must say, I never, ever got on a Comet, that's for sure.

And I never flew until well into the '60s. Well, we didn't.

-We went to, we went to our caravan.

-Absolutely.

Didn't we? We didn't fly off to foreign parts,

exotic ports of call. It was unheard-of.

I must say, though, when you look at that,

and how elegant flying was then.

-Oh, yes.

-And how it is now.

-Yeah, sardines.

Sardines and you need a cattle prod, really,

to move you along a bit quicker.

-Progress.

-It's a shame, eh? But...

It's been lovely to reminisce with you.

-It's been lovely to be here.

-It really has.

And I've enjoyed reminiscing about the '50s with you,

-it's been so nice.

-Any time, Len.

-Oooh, you little saucepot.

Just as the '50s did, all good things come to an end.

I hope you've enjoyed our romp through my decade.

There's no doubt about it, the way we were has made us what we are.

And do you know,

there's a tune been running through my head all the time.

Get ready for it, Len's about to sing.

# There's Teds in drainpipe trousers

# And debs in coffee houses

# Oh, fings ain't what they used to be. #

Calm down, dear.

Goodbye from all of us on The 1952 Show.

MUSIC: "Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be"

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd