The 1951 Festival of Britain; A Brave New World.

[mercia]

despite seeing many of these programmes about wartime and post-war Britain, I still find the details of rationing quite shocking. How did anyone have any energy to do anything? I'm surprised that everyone didn't have scurvy and/or rickets.

[Mary Chambers]

I loved the 'The New Look' with ther swirly skirts which suited me being tall and skinny.

Oh yes - I echo that!

[Mary Chambers]

despite seeing many of these programmes about wartime and post-war Britain, I still find the details of rationing quite shocking. How did anyone have any energy to do anything? I'm surprised that everyone didn't have scurvy and/or rickets.

I think the diet was quite carefully thought out, and 'digging for victory' - growing your own vegetables in garden or allotment - was greatly encouraged. There was state-provided orange juice (highly sweetened) for children. It's said that the nation has never been so healthy, because of the impossibilty of over-indulgence, and the increased intake of vegetables. It did us no harm to be deprived of sweets, certainly - not that we thought that, of course!

[Serial_Apologist]

I think the diet was quite carefully thought out, and 'digging for victory' - growing your own vegetables in garden or allotment - was greatly encouraged. There was state-provided orange juice (highly sweetened) for children. It's said that the nation has never been so healthy, because of the impossibilty of over-indulgence, and the increased intake of vegetables. It did us no harm to be deprived of sweets, certainly - not that we thought that, of course!

I think the body kind of adapted to the diminished food intake. I can remember, at age 10, two four-inch chipolatas. half a teacup of peas and an ice cream scoopful of mash, swimming in Oxo gravy constituting the main course of my school lunch, with a plain jelly, about 2 inches in diameter and half an inch deep, the sweet. Chips were a luxury, and suet pudding with custard or bread-and-butter puddings being relished with much anticipation!!! Main meals at home were recyclings of the sunday roast for much of the week - and boy, wasn't that beef dripping delicious! Supper I just remember as a bowl of rice cripsies and milk with grated apple over the top. As Mary says, that diet was healthy, possibly the healthiest we've ever known in Britain; nevertheles, family photos of me, my cousin and the little girl from around the corner in the back garden the summer when was 5 have us all showing our ribs.

Calum's memory of Kensington Gardens chimes with mine. Our school yard, a bomb site, was our playground, with goal posts and wickets chalked onto the ends of shored up terraces. This was a "Frobel" school - my parents were insistent on the kind of education that would make me feel one-up on the kids that went to the "council school", with the result that by age 7 I was a right little snob, even though I evidently had a cockney accent that would later have to be "elocuted" out of me so I could sing pure vowels in the school choir. But going back, the main breaktime activity at that little school consisted of throwing bricks - me cowering in the corner behind climbing apparatus which definitely would not pass H&S today. (Calum will probably also remember bombed out houses, ceilings all stoved in, ends of lopped off terraces showing fireplaces left hanging, different wallpapers on every floor). Eventually we used Kensington Gardens for "afternoon sport". At about the age of nine all the lovely tall horsechestnuts lining the Broad Walk had white crosses painted on them, and were were felled shortly afterwards - a terrible tragedy - to be replaced by saplings. Dad told everyone that the trees had died because of their use by us children for relieving ourselves!

[salymap]

S_A You say 'ends of lopped-off terraces, showing fireplaces left hanging, different wallpapers on every wall'.

I remember writing almost those words on the old MBs. When on my train journey to London every day we got to the London Bridge area that brought the war damage back to me as nothing else could. We were surrounded by bombed out homes in Kent but the awful pathos of those half bedrooms hanging in the air was very moving. It seemed years before the damage was cleared too.

[handsomefortune]

thanks for the viewing tip

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b015d486/The_1951_Festival_of_Britain_A_Brave_New_World/

just in case anyone missed it on tv.

[LeMartinPecheur]

... not silly at all. I think most of us somehow imagine that the 1914-1918 War was conducted in black and white...

I associate WW1 with sepia-and-white, not b/w. IIRC an illustrated history of the war in my school library was in that colour. Seemed very appropriate for all those pictures of Tommies in the Somme or Vimy Ridge mud

[Chris Newman]

Thanks for link. It was a fascinating programme. What a dreadful waste when they demolished the Dome of Discovery and the Skylon! Had the powers that be had more vision they would still be viable now. Oh, the sour grapes of politics.

I never saw any of the Festival site until 1962 when a school friend and I went to the Festival Hall, one Sunday afternoon, and heard the BSO play Shostakovich 10. My trips to London before that consisted of Mum dragging us on trains from Sussex to the January Sale at Gamages in High Holborn. She used to stock up with clothes and most of the following Christmas's presents. One year it was a peasouper fog and the train was very slow as men walked ahead with lamps and flags to check the points. The air stank. Winters seemed more dramatic in those days what with massive floods and freeze-ups. I did not see Battersea Park until about 1966 when I worked as a lab assistant at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine (now the Lister Hospital) by Chelsea Bridge and we used to pop there at lunchtimes: by then the fun fair was pretty run down.

[rauschwerk]

I think the diet was quite carefully thought out, and 'digging for victory' - growing your own vegetables in garden or allotment - was greatly encouraged.

Rationing became more severe after the war - for example in 1946 bread was rationed for the first time. This, combined with the severe winter (temperatures falling to 26 below zero Celsius and the longest sunless period since the 1880s) and a desperate shortage of coal, must have made many wonder what we fought the war for.

[salymap]

I remember sitting with my feet near the coal fire and wearing gloves indoors in that winter. The kitchen boiler took for ever to get the water hot enough for a bath. Thank goodness for central heating these days, even if terribly expensive. I don't think school was properly heated either then.

[Mary Chambers]

I remember rationing very well, rauschwerk. I was born early in 1940. Sweets (the only aspect of this that worried me at the time) came off ration when I was (I think) 14. I've already said that I remember the cold winter - the snow coming over the tops of my little wellies, and the headmistress of my small school heating our morning milk on the kitchen stove - and the smell of it boiling over! I'm sure my parents must have had a hard time in some ways, but I didn't feel any deprivation. My father was allowed extra milk because he had a duodenal ulcer, and milk was supposed to be good. The government did try to be fair, I think. Children didn't know anything different. I liked dried egg!

I wonder if the other war (and pre-war) babies on here feel, as I do, rather glad that we were brought up without today's levels of luxury. I feel it keeps my feet on the ground and stops me becoming materialistic. It still shocks me when I walk round a supermarket and see the (to me) ridiculously over-the-top amount of choice. Like saly, though, I'm very grateful for proper heating.

[Serial_Apologist]

I remember sitting with my feet near the coal fire and wearing gloves indoors in that winter. The kitchen boiler took for ever to get the water hot enough for a bath. Thank goodness for central heating these days, even if terribly expensive. I don't think school was properly heated either then.

You would think with the majority now on central heating, fuel prices would have gone down - instead the very opposite! Mass home insulation is one big answer, but will it ever happen??

[Serial_Apologist]

I remember rationing very well, rauschwerk. I was born early in 1940. Sweets (the only aspect of this that worried me at the time) came off ration when I was (I think) 14. I've already said that I remember the cold winter - the snow coming over the tops of my little wellies, and the headmistress of my small school heating our morning milk on the kitchen stove - and the smell of it boiling over! I'm sure my parents must have had a hard time in some ways, but I didn't feel any deprivation. My father was allowed extra milk because he had a duodenal ulcer, and milk was supposed to be good. The government did try to be fair, I think. Children didn't know anything different. I liked dried egg!

I wonder if the other war (and pre-war) babies on here feel, as I do, rather glad that we were brought up without today's levels of luxury. I feel it keeps my feet on the ground and stops me becoming materialistic. It still shocks me when I walk round a supermarket and see the (to me) ridiculously over-the-top amount of choice. Like saly, though, I'm very grateful for proper heating.

If things were run on a sane basis, there would be less choice; but it would be good, durable choice. Imho, naturally.

[salymap]

Before the war certainly wasn't a grey time for me. We were neither rich nor poor and always had seaside holidays and days out into the country in the summer when the sun always seemed to shine.

We had a radio with an accumulator and I sang with Henry Hall and his orchestra and danced around the house.
My parents took me to the big London cinemas for a treat and we occasionally went to the variety theatre,which I hated. There was only one cousin with a car and we explored the distant parts of the coast. We didn't miss TV or all the latest gadgets,
naturally, we didn't know they were coming. I had grown up cousins and aunts and uncles. When I was nine, the war started, then things were grey of course.

[handsomefortune]

the exact fabric/wallpaper, as seen in 'the festival of brit' (towards the end of beeb doc), yellowy background, with red, black 'mobile' shapes, is currently on sale in john lewis etc. however, not content with lifting the design, (whoever) has 'improved' it by making it large scale, so that the only home with large enough walls is buck palace! (not that queeny esq. would go for '50s retro chic')