Rita’s 50s

The people of the North and South were in some respects the same and in other respects different. They seemed to wear the same kind of clothes, although I believe that the people who lived in the South (Londoners) were slightly more up-to-date with clothes or new appliances. This I can’t be certain about as I never visited the North.

I do remember the tin baths we had to use for our bath. There wasn’t such a thing as running hot water, you had to fill the tin bath from the kettle or saucepans you boiled first. And most of the family would all bathe in the same bathwater. If you were the youngest member of the family you were just unlucky enough to have to have the last bath. Unless you were only a baby then you would most probably be bathed in the kitchen sink. There were no such things as steam irons you had to iron your clothes with an old iron that was put on a gas ring to get hot. You would have a piece of cloth to hold the iron with and you had to rub the iron on another old piece of cloth before you started to iron your good clothes, otherwise you would get brown rust on your things. There were no hot hair rollers or curlers, most of us used pieces of rag or long strips of cotton material. We used sugar water for hair spray and to make it look as though we were wearing stockings we would draw a black straight line down the back of our legs. Sometimes, to make our legs look a bit browner, we would make up a paste of gravy browning and smooth it all over our legs.

We would never wear any of our best clothes for work or shopping, they were kept for going out in the evenings or at the week-ends. Best clothes mostly consisted of tight little short black skirts, stiletto heeled shoes and some kind of, in those days, fashionable little top. Sometimes the girls who were not quite so fashionable would wear twin sets. That was a kind of T-shirt with the same design and colour cardigan. Wages were very, very low back in the fifties but there again our clothes and appliances were a lot cheaper as well.

Sometimes if we were lucky enough to own a pair of stockings we would need a suspender belt to hold the stockings up, more often than not we would have to attach the suspender belt to the stockings with a sixpenny bit as the little rubber things on the end of the suspender belt would either rot or come off, mind you in some cases you couldn’t always afford to put a sixpenny bit on your stockings so you had to use a farthing instead.

There were no such thing as jeans or denim and, apart from the war years, I can’t remember women wearing trousers. I think maybe that’s where the saying comes from (the men wear the trousers).

If you look at the fashion today the fifties fashion is coming back, so you see we were not so old fashioned after all. Were we!

by Rita Joel

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