Misconception of the Fifties in the Famous Five Books

[Irene Malory Towers]

Reverting to the 50s decade - pluses and minuses I have always felt that the 50's were the golden era, past the war and the rationing and enough technology to make life less of a drudgery for those not rich.I think there was also 100% employment and children had more respect for teachers and parents and there appeared to be less violence on the streets. However, it is easy to say that when I wasn't around the 50's, I daresay there was plenty of misery around too. Certainly it was not a good time to be disabled (or whatever the PC term is now), gay, transgender, I daresay black or other minorities. I would love to access to have a tardis and be transported back there so I could judge properly (and if I preferred it to stay there). Maybe I could even meet my hero Fatty !!! or Bill. I can but dream.

[Debbie]

Rationing continued until 1954 for some things.

[Chrissie777]

The price for groceries has tripled since the pandemic over here in the US.
Way back in 2019 we still paid on an average $ 78 per week at the super market, now we pay close to $ 200 per week. And we don't buy any meat.

That is so true, Anita and Monique. Even with the inflation we are facing today, some food items I buy have not gone up in price for a couple of years (I hope I'm not speaking too soon on them), whereas others have gone up 50% or more in the past six months alone.

[Chrissie777]

I was born at the end of the 1950s, so my earliest memories are of the 1960s (among other things I can remember watching the Beatles singing "She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah" on TV and Churchill's state funeral...all in grainy black and white). It would be great to go back in order to obtain all the missing Blyton books for my collection at low prices (some of my older paperbacks are priced at 2/6...I have no idea what that is in today's money but it sounds extremely good value!!!). However, apart from that I would imagine that it would be a shock to return to an era when there was so little choice in terms of food, clothes and TV channels (I am speaking from the experience of my childhood in Ireland...there may have been a wider range of products elsewhere), with no mobile phones, internet/computer or supermarkets and cars with no heating (in winter my grandmother always brought a rug with her when travelling by car).

I was born in 1955 in Munich and remember the early to late 1960's very well.
We were allowed to ride the bike, to walk in the woods, to have sleep overs and to swim in Lake Constance (Bodensee).
My parents told me to not speak to strangers and to not get into their cars.

The TV program was a lot better then than it is nowadays with 600+ channels and nothing interesting except TCM (old movies). I particularly loved the British CFF films on German TV.
The children's books in the 1950's and 1960's were still about adventures (I remember discovering Enid Blyton in the fall of 1965, before that I've read Norman Dale and Astrid Lindgren (Bill Bergson trilogy aka Kalle Blomquist).
Then a big change came, to my big disappointment children's books were no longer about adventures, now it was all about divorce, loss through the death of a relative and bullying at school. How boring...

Vacations were usually taken to Austria and Switzerland (I would have preferred going to the UK) and once a year we visited my grandparents and uncle in East Germany.

[Chrissie777]

That's fascinating Anita - I left school and started work on a YTS in 1983, so was still on the princely sum of £25 a week for part of 1984! Even after I'd given my parents something towards my 'keep', I still felt I had a 'fortune' left over.

I seem to remember driving lessons were about £7 an hour, but can't really remember the prices of anything else back then. Apart from perhaps the food in our staff restaurant - we got 30p a day in luncheon vouchers and that would cover the cost of most of the sandwiches, apart from I think the prawn ones which were just over 30p!

I left high school in 1974 and when I started my training as a town clerk in April 1975, I earned 300 DM per month (Ausbildungsbeihilfe). I had to pay 30 DM for the church, so I quit church and got a net income of 300 DM. 30 DM was a lot of money way back then and I didn't see any reason to make the church richer and richer.
I lived with my boyfriend (I was 19 years old) at his mother's apartment and contributed 100 DM to food and electricity expenses (I remember how upset she was that I needed a 100 Watt light bulb in my reading lamp and she exchanged it for a 25 Watt bulb, but I kept changing it back to 100 Watt until she gave up ).

[Chrissie777]

I'd like to go and visit the Fifties just for a day or two but I'm quite happy that I've been born later.

Me, too.
Especially that I was able to take the birth control pill.
10 years earlier that would not have been as easy. I think it was available in Germany from 1963 on.

[Chrissie777]

Recently there's been a lot of old black & white films on Talking Pictures set in 50s (and earlier) Britain. It looks picturesque. Everything depicted looks so much better. Lovely safe roads with few cars around. Clean tidy streets you could eat your dinner off. No plastic lego eyesore bins in front of gardens. Beautiful looking cars far nicer than the tasteless styleless ones of today. People who know how to speak properly, dress appropriately, behave themselves and have actual morals and manners.

Talking Pictures airs several CFF movies every month. Wish we could receive it over here in the US!

[Chrissie777]

Beautiful looking cars far nicer than the tasteless styleless ones of today.

I agree!!!
Today the cars look all alike in their shape and even though there is a plethora of the most beautiful metallic colors, all you ever see is black, white and silver cars with the occasional red car in-between.
I wonder why people don't want to drive a purple or pink or green car? I certainly would!

[Chrissie777]

Beautiful looking cars far nicer than the tasteless styleless ones of today.

Last year I spent two months scanning 4.400 old slides from 12 trips that I took to the UK, US and Canada between 1987 and 1998 onto my computer.
I noticed how beautiful the cars were still looking way back in the 1980's and 1990's.
Wonder why the car companies made them all look like SUV's?

[Chrissie777]

I'd give a good guess that one of the reasons the FF are still so popular today is that many people yearn for the living style of the fifties and reading them is the closest they can get to it.

Plus where in real life can we experience underground passages, caves, sunken ships and buried treasures?

[Chrissie777]

The major advantage for me when I compare life in the 1960's and life since 1998 (access to the Internet) are the sources that I can use now which didn't exist for me before.
When I went into a second-hand bookstore in Braunschweig, Germany, in the early 1970's, there were no Enid Blyton books at all. It took me 10 years (until 1985) until I had my FF series complete with the original Eileen A. Soper illustrations. I found a few FF sequels (old German translations) on flea markets, but most of the missing books I found through personal ads in free newspapers.
Thanks to the Internet I was able to order EB books from the UK.

I remember asking my father in the mid to late 1960's when people could finally afford a VCR (I had seen one in an episode of the classic TV series "The Fugitive" with David Janssen which was centered around a HiFi exposition) and my father said that VCR's were still too expensive for most people, however, big companies and universities had them.
So in 1980 I was finally able to purchase a VCR and life improved dramatically, I was now able to watch old movies which were aired at midnight and avoid boring shows like Jeopardy and "Who wants to be a Millionaire" at a time when I was watching TV, but wanted to watch old movies much rather than those boring shows.

Finally in 2007 my husband discovered TCM and we watched Hundreds of old movies which were never aired on German TV. I feel like a kid in a candy store.

[Anita Bensoussane]

The price for groceries has tripled since the pandemic over here in the US.

I don't think things are quite as bad here, but food prices in the UK do seem to have gone up a lot more than the inflation rate of 10.7 - 11.1% that one hears about on the news. Obviously, the overall rate takes into account other goods such as clothes, stationery, household appliances, etc.


I prefer the look of older cars too, IceMaiden and Chrissie - especially ones with chrome features.

[Chrissie777]

Perhaps the greatest threat to a comfortable and prosperous future is overpopulation. The human population passed 8 billion last month, whereas there were only 2.5 billion of us in 1950!

And this is so hard for me to understand, because I took the birth control pill from December 1973 on for 30 years until I was 48 and had to stop taking it due to high blood pressure.
I wonder why so few women take advantage of the pill and still get 3 or 4 children?

[Boodi 2]

The TV program was a lot better then than it is nowadays with 600+ channels and nothing interesting except TCM (old movies).

While I totally agree that despite the huge selection available, most of the TV programmes today are rubbish, I also wonder if we were less critical or had lower expectations in the 1950s and 1960s? In fact that could apply to many aspects of life and not just the choice of TV programmes. It seems to me that most people in those far-off days were generally content with what they had and were not always clamouring for more/different/bigger items.

[Chrissie777]

Social media and smartphones are terrible inventions and a lot of modern technology seems to be a case of just because it can be done doesn't mean it should be. Frost on the inside of windows is nothing, I've had that myself this week. I can't think of anything that's an actual improvement to be honest. Paper books completely outdo screens. Petrol cars are far more useful than electric rich men's toys. Food tasted much better when it wasn't a flavour-free "improvement". TV was better when it only had 3 or 4 channels, which I watched, compared to the hundreds available now, which I don't. Phones were better when people could only talk into them then put them down instead of doing so much they're permanently glued to them. Don't get me started on the music...
Maybe it's just me but I don't see any improvements there.

No, I feel the same, IceMaiden.
First of all I refuse to use a cell phone, we still have our land line and my cell phone is all the time in my car in case of an emergency. I recharge it every other month and that's it.
My husband turns off our land line and his cell phone at 7 p.m. and we enjoy peaceful nights without any phone calls from solicitors.

I never liked paper backs as the font is too small (I'm near-sighted), so since the 1970's I buy hardcover books. No Kindle for me!
I agree, TV was a lot better with 4 channels only in the 1960's.
And I prefer old jazz, Swing, classical music and 1960's pop music to the songs nowadays.
The female singers all sound as if they are in great pain.