A piece by Tony Lambell who spoke at the May 2010 Sustainable Redhill meeting about life before cheap oil …
Family background
These comments are based on my remembrances of life in my youth – that is from my birth in 1937 to 1955 when I left school for National Service. My father was a bank clerk – that meant that he had a regular salary, but could not be regarded as ‘well-off’ and had no savings or capital. As was usual in those days my mother gave up work on marriage. Of course there were no credit cards. Hire purchase whereby you could buy by monthly payments with interest was sometimes available but considered to be undesirable and known as the ‘never-never’. My parents used it just once to buy a new gas cooker. We lived in a semi-detached house in North London. We had no car, and were sparing in buying consumer goods.
Heating
The house had two sitting rooms. The front room or ‘lounge’ was only used at weekends. I now realise why. It was expensive to heat for limited use on a weekday and lighting the fire and clearing the ash away in the morning was a tedious process which would have fallen to my mother who was a small woman and not physically strong. The back room was the living/dining room – it had a coal fire or we used a two bar electric fire when the room was only occupied briefly. There was a one bar electric fire in the hall.
There were fireplaces in the bedrooms but these were never used and we had no heating there. There was often a thick layer of ice on the inside of the windows in winter. We had hot water bottles at bed time. We left underwear in the airing cupboard in the bathroom overnight so we could dash into the bathroom in the morning to dress.
In the kitchen there was a boiler which heated the hot water tank in the bathroom and provided our hot water supply. It also warmed the kitchen and the airing cupboard. It was lit every day in the winter and this was a tedious and dirty task. In the summer it was only lit on Fridays, which was traditionally bath night.. A gas water heater (known as a ‘geyser’) in the bathroom and later an immersion heater provided limited hot water when the boiler was not on. Showers were not a feature of bathrooms so most days we just had a thorough wash and then a weekly bath.
Monday was washing day. We only changed underwear and shirts once a week as washing was hard work. BO was a problem – which we all shared! Originally we had a gas heated copper on the gas stove, later replaced by a washing machine that rotated the clothes in a tub. They had then to be fed manually into a very heavy electric wringer. By the late 1950s we had a twin tub machine which still meant that clothes had to been transferred manually between the wash tub and the spin drier.
Clothing
Because buildings were not well heated we wore thick clothing and several layers. In the winter we changed into thermal underwear and flannelette winter pyjamas. We wore heavy suiting, waistcoats, thick woollen socks, and had heavy overcoats.
There was no clothing just for leisure. We wore school clothes most of the time. Socks were darned, frayed shirt collars and cuffs were turned. For women dresses were often made at home using paper patterns.
Transport
Bicycles, buses and trains were the main means of transport. It was only the better off who had cars. We had no car. The few neighbours who had cars always kept them in garages. We never saw cars parked in our road. Consequently it was safe for children to play in the streets and on the road and to walk to school and shops unaccompanied. If you had a car parking was no problem and people expected to drive from shop to shop and park outside.
My father worked in London and walked to the tube every day – 20 mins each way. Primary school children walked to school – secondary school children went by bus.
Shopping
My mother walked to the shops – 20 minutes each way. She could not carry very much and we had no fridge, so therefore went almost every day. Milk was delivered daily by a horse-drawn milk cart. As we had no fridge in the hot summer milk had to be scalded to prevent it going off. Father worked Saturday mornings and arriving back from London in the early afternoon he then went with mother to do the heavy shopping she could not handle.
We had food that was in season and choice was limited – for example we would have salads only in the summer. A common content of our Xmas stockings was an orange! Imagine a child’s reaction to that these days.
Holidays
On Bank Holidays we might go out into the country by bus, to London to the Zoo by tube or to the South Coast or Southend by train or coach. Our annual holiday would be by train to a boarding house at a South Coast seaside resort. We spent most days on the beach with a few coach trips. My parents never travelled abroad or flew in a plane.
To illustrate the cost of travel, in 1958 my wife went to Greece for a month on a £50 scholarship by train and ferry (equivalent to around £1000 in today’s values). At that time the return air fare to Athens was £100 or around £2000 in today’s terms. So flying was only for the very well off.
Travel by train and ship has the merit of being less stressful than air travel. On my National service I went to Cyprus by troop ship which took a week. As far as I was concerned this was a pleasant break free of military duties.
The England touring test team would leave for, say, Australia, at the end of the summer, taking a couple of weeks to sail there. They would spend the winter playing cricket there and return in time for the next season in UK. Now test cricketers play many other countries in a period of a few weeks and unsurprisingly suffer fitness and stress – related problems.
Entertainment
For home entertainment we had the radio. There were two BBC programmes – The Home Service and the Light Programme – roughly BBC4 and BBC2.
My mother inherited some money in 1951 so we could afford to buy a TV by 1953 for the Coronation. There was one channel and limited viewing hours. My mother’s key requirement was that the set should have doors to cover the screen when not in use. The cost was £100 -about £2000 now. Many people rented their TV – as they were quite unreliable this was an advantage as you did not have to pay for repairs.
Cinema was very popular. There was a different film each week and there were queues to get in.
For those whose entertainment was reading there were good local public libraries and Boots the Chemist had subscription libraries above their shops. If you paid a B subscription you could only borrow the older books. The A subscription allowed you to borrow the latest publications
Today by comparison
Today we have central heating on all the time and a comfortable temperature in every room. We wear lighter clothing which we change very often. Automatic washing machines make laundry easy. Fridges and freezers mean we don’t have to shop so often and can keep a varied supply of food.
Personal car ownership means convenient transport, though whereas in my youth it was often a casual luxury now it has become a necessity for transport to work.
Cheap air travel means that we can travel abroad easily, going hundreds of miles for a weekend break.
Potentially this affluence makes for a more comfortable and more stimulating life.
But the down side is the consequent road congestion and local pollution from cars. Internationally there are devastating oil spills. Globally we have ozone layer depletion caused by the refrigerants from fridges and freezers and global warming form the increase usage of fossil fuels.
With cheap travel we should have more time for leisure, but people now travel miles to work and work long hours in order to fund their life style.
The aviation industry has resulted in high levels of aircraft noise and atmospheric pollution. And air travel in itself is no longer enjoyable with crowded airports and crowded destinations.
The fundamental change from the 1950s is that now we each have access to a much greater amount of cheap energy.
In the past a rich family would have servants to do the arduous tasks of cleaning, cooking, gardening and looking after transport requirements – horses and carriages or the Rolls Royce. Now we each have machines to do the tedious tasks for us – the dishwasher is our scullery maid, the washing machine our laundry maid, the gas boiler our boilerman.
We also have access to new material resources and new technologies, but this is only possible by the use of energy. So it comes back to energy and even those of us with modest financial resources use amounts of energy that once only the seriously rich had available to them. No wonder our fuel resources are diminishing so rapidly and the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses such a threat.
The dilemma is – how do we achieve a ‘‘simpler” style of living without going back to the drudgery and limited horizons of the past.
