Shopping was confusing in the 1960s, even if you only had pocket money of one shilling to spend, as I did.
Three penny bit (pronounced thruppence or thruppenny bit)
The old system of currency could be traced back to the Roman Empire and was based on the penny, symbolised by the letter ‘d’ for denari. Under this system, there were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings, or 240 pence, in a pound. Coins included three penny pieces (pronounced thruppence) and two penny pieces (pronounced tuppence) as well as quarter penny (farthings). Needless to say, for a kid whose mathematical skills were still developing, I needed one of my parents with me to shop for anything at all!
In many ways, this is the hardest post I have made about the 1960s and it has taken me a long time to decide to make it. Many writers have tried and failed to capture the magic and disillusionment of 1960s music and I most surely must fail too. But that won’t stop me ‘taking a shot’ at it, as Americans like to say, or ‘having a go’ as Brits like to say.
I am not just talking about something in remote history when I talk about music from that era; I actually remember 1960s music. The first song I remember is Puppet on a String, which of course won the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest (yes, we had it then too!) for Sandie Shaw. I would have been 5 but I well remember the catchy tune blasting out of BBC Radio 1 on our little, blue radio set in the kitchen, or in my bedroom when I was sick, which was often. Continue reading “Memories of the 1960s – Music”→
Prepare to have all the myths of how school was Heaven in the 60s blasted away and for myths that it was Hell to be destroyed. This is what it was like for me.
I spent my school years, until the age of fourteen, in our county. Now, I am not saying our true-blue ultra-conservative county was backward, but the last time I looked at the council’s website it had chains running down each side! That was back in the 90s. In the 60s, they were just about as blue as you can get, and they certainly believed in giving every child’s sanity a run for its money.
The county’s model of education was simple: your kid had to pass their special Twelve-Plus exam to get a proper education. (All counties had the Eleven Plus, but we had the Twelve-Plus for grammar school applications and our school didn’t do the Eleven-Plus.) Anything else was failure and rewarded with being sent to a ‘secondary-modern,’ which in our county meant a school for dunces. There you would never get the chance to do O-Levels or A-Levels and you would certainly never go to University. So every day of your school life, you were having the message ‘Success is everything’ rammed down your throat. Unfortunately, the flip-side of this philosophy was the message that ‘your humanity is nothing.’ It was only many years later that we would all discover Hans Eysenick’s IQ-based formula for the eleven-plus and twelve-plus exams was all based on fake research. Continue reading “Memories of the 1960s – School”→
Occult, Sci-fi & Military 