No Smartphones. No texting. Just POSTCARDS in the 1970s. Yay!

[Karmann Ghiaman]

Since we have clearly entered the century when all Summers will be cancelled, let's go back to those carefree 1970s when we played outside in the sun all day until it was time to ride your Chopper home for a big dollop of Smash followed by a glass of Angel Delight, all washed down with a bottle of Corona, while enjoying the latest episode of Jim'll Fix It...

 

As the Carpenters so accurately observed at the time, Those were such happy days and not so long ago.

 

 

Big Ben, LONDON. Not sent.

 

 

I like the way he's cut the top off this one so you can send it to your Muslim, Jewish and Hindu friends without causing offense by bringing any scary crosses into their non-Christian lives.

 

MILF in short skirt asks Johnny Morris:

 

 

So what the fuck time is it anyway?

 

Remember when every building in London was FILTHY?

 

 

Not to be outdone by her more glamorous rival to the southeast, we now gaze upon the beauty of BRUM:

 

 

Chamberlain Square. Two blokes having a well-deserved fag and going off for a few pints of Brew XI (as it's lunchtime, 11.30 - 3.25).

 

You call it Spaghetti Junction. They call it...

 

 

...Gravelly Hill Interchange. Spot the car.

 

At last, one that has been sent:

 

 

Borth Head, Borth, Cardiganshire. 5.45 one day in 1971:

 

Dear Vic

 

hope you are keeping well we are enjoying ourselves here. from

 

Alice Maurice & family

 

But there is an even creepier, suicide-inducing card available north of the border:

 

 

Victoria Park, the North Denes, Arbroath. Edvard Munch, eat your Norwegian heart out.

 

Here's a nice four-parter from down South:

 

 

Boating Lake  Luxury Caravan  Luxury Villas (yeah)  Swimming Pool

 

Holimarine, Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset.

 

Posted in Bridgwater, 20 June 1971:

 

Dear All.

 

Had a good trip down We stopped at Stone Henge. The weather has brightened up it was very hot today so we have both gone red. The radiator has burst on the car so up to now we have only been to Cheddar. We have bought a house in Dunstable.

 

Jenny & Tony

 

It just couldn't get more fascinating.

 

Better go to 'work' now. Further gems to follow, please post yours, your comments and memories... Perhaps you live in Arbroath or Westminster Abbey? If so, we'd like to hear from you.

[drum]

Love your postcards. I worked in Arbroath for eleven years and didn't see one suicide at Victoria Park.

 

I think it's exactly the same now but with less crinoline.

[Lankytim]

MOAR PLZ, just thought, if they used txt spk they could fit more onto the postcard.

[UmBongo]

while enjoying the latest episode of Jim'll Fix It...

 

I always thought he looked a bit odd despite being very young at the time.

 

Little did I know how odd he was...

[Guest Breadvan72]

I went from 8 to 18 in the 1970s.   I always thought that Savile was creepy and deeply uncool and unfunny. TOTP wasalways less fun when it was his turn to present it.

 

LERRRVE the postcards, and remember buying and sending many similar from assorted dreary UK shitholes while enjoying* camping and caravan hols with my parents and/or my Uncle Mike and Auntie Lil (RIP both). 

[Luckythirteen]

If you 'shopped out modern furniture etc., you could recreate that pic of Arbroath right here in 2014. You can probably still buy those clothes there.

Arbroath: it'll make you wonder why the fuck you came. Buy some smokies and go home.

[mercrocker]

I wonder if that bloke by the clock is telling her she has got twenty more minutes on the swings and that's IT....he will be closing the gates.   And don't walk on the grass.

[Guest Breadvan72]

For those of you who weren't there:  In 1970, World War Two was only 25 years in the past, and its veterans were numerous, middle aged, and active in politics and the workforce.   Much of the UK was still incredibly worn out and knackered from the War and the preceding years of depression.  Other bits were suffering from well intentioned but badly thought out and executed postwar urban planning.

 

No fucker had much stuff.   One telly, usually still monochrome, with three channels.  One phone in the hall.  A fridge but no microwave, no dishwasher, no tumble dryer etc.  To have a freezer was to be posh.   A non automatic washing machine.  The office might have one computer taking up a whole floor of the building, with less processing power than the key fob of a modern Ford, but probably didn't have one at all.  Maybe one car and that probably not a very good one.  Olive oil was sold in chemists, never in supermarkets.   Middle class people didn't go to the football very much.  

 

Big Government, with lots of board of this and corporation of that doing stuff, and lots of bossy public information films and notices. Europe beyond northern France mostly still exotic, and anywhere beyond Europe where the hell is that.   Sexism and racism and homophobia as standard.  Also, however, stirrings of the counter culture, cool sounds, cool threads, expansion of new universities, and Bobby Moore vs Pele in the heat of Mexico.

[DeeJay]

We had a phone in the early 70's. It was a shared line. The neighbours used to pop in to use it and they'd put 2p in the "Telephone" money box.  

[DeeJay]

Jeez I feel old.

[forddeliveryboy]

For those of you who weren't there:  In 1970, World War Two was only 25 years in the past, and its veterans were numerous, middle aged, and active in politics and the workforce.   Much of the UK was still incredibly worn out and knackered from the War and the preceding years of depression.  Other bits were suffering from well intentioned but badly thought out and executed postwar urban planning.

 

No fucker had much stuff.   One telly, usually still monochrome, with three channels.  One phone in the hall.  A fridge but no microwave, no dishwasher, no tumble dryer etc.  To have a freezer was to be posh.   A non automatic washing machine.  The office might have one computer taking up a whole floor of the building, with less processing power than the key fob of a modern Ford, but probably didn't have one at all.  Maybe one car and that probably not a very good one.  Olive oil was sold in chemists, never in supermarkets.   Middle class people didn't go to the football very much.  

 

Big Government, with lots of board of this and corporation of that doing stuff, and lots of bossy public information films and notices. Europe beyond northern France mostly still exotic, and anywhere beyond Europe where the hell is that.   Sexism and racism and homophobia as standard.  Also, however, stirrings of the counter culture, cool sounds, cool threads, expansion of new universities, and Bobby Moore vs Pele in the heat of Mexico.

 

Well, I find there's loads of sexism and racism today, it's just changed its nature, become less in yer face, more subtle but just as insidious. Worst of all, it's the sheep who always follow fashion who are the most anti-racist, anti-sexist lot - the politically correct lot - who really get up my nose.

 

Government is 10 times more intrusive today than even 20 years ago. Sell a car in the 90s and it was simple. No threatening of law-abiding citizens who cocked up the paperwork with court action and the threat of no mortgage da-de-dah, no massive fine imposition unless you really took the piss and so on. Add Europe to the bloated monstrosity half of Whitehall has become and we're living in proper BIG gov'mint today, where every department is run like a private enterprise and needs to show financial profit.

 

If you went to university back then it meant something other than indebting yourself, acquiring a qualification actually guaranteed a properly good job. You could enjoy much British technology at an airshow in your spare time, which was far better than a weekend in Prague, really.

 

"No fucker had much stuff". Which is perhaps why people were more content with their lives and appeared happier, unless you were Derek Red Robbo Robinson or Arthur Scargill. But there were decent, reliable jobs with proper contracts for those who weren't too lazy. Shops back in the 70s, as I remember, were much better than today's ramshackle bunch of pound stores, charity shops, chainstores and restaurant after restaurant. Go to Germany today, where the management and unions didn't kill off most bigger products and shops are still decent, in many towns and cities.

 

Not sure how middle class people not going to football much is somehow a good or a bad thing - it's just a thing, bit like Tony Bliar altering his accent to suit his audience.

 

Yes, there was a generation of ex-servicemen running companies, the non-American way. Not sure which was better, really. I can't really accept that today's generation of business sorts are any better - much worse if you're an employee in many ways - it's just very different now. No security, no nothing. Social security is apparently understood only by those who work the system, it's so complex and determined not to help someone just out of work, thanks to the professional scroungers.

 

I don't have a dishwasher (as much work in my opinion), microwave (kills good stuff in food - doesn't matter if you're reheating ready-made shite I suppose) and the tumble-dryer bit of the washing machine is something used in emergencies, perhaps three times a year. So it's just more to go expensively wrong.

 

I agree, urban planning was a disaster with whole swaiths of mediaeval England replaced with concrete (mainly in the sixties) but not sure the out of town shopping mall is so much better - now the town centres are dying and can be semi-ghost towns in evenings.

 

So with one phone in the hall, no internet and just three channels on telly - which were at their peak of qual in the 70s and early 80s, I reckon - there were REAL things to do. Like enjoy cars, bikes and women no doubt. Women possibly still had some resemblance of feminity and were treated with a lot more respect from how I see things now, and weren't almost universally gobby, overweight/stcik-diet thin and dressed to enhance their worst bits.

 

Shops still offered individual service, olive oil was for sale in better ones and supermarkets hadn't rampaged their way through almost every sector of the high street. Interesting that towns which still resemble 1970s ones have very high property prices today.

 

Houses were affordable, either to rent or to buy. Yuppies hadn't been invented and Audis were strange, metal and plastic, unfashionable machines. Sports cars required adjusting after every trip, but provided more fun than several rides on the dodgems. Everyday items had character, politicians argued honestly for very different ways of running the country and the American street culture wasn't in much evidence. Money was something which wasn't talked about, to have too much was damned rude.

 

Bad bits in my mind? Educationalists were beginning to reduce the chances of bright kids from poorer backgrounds from being 'socially mobile' as it's termed today - ie getting on and earning some money and stature, architecture was almost all crap, traffic jams were bad in towns on roads to holiday destinations at peak times, we were spewing out highly radioactive nuclear waste pollution into the seas and air as if it was harmless, the French appeared to have all the fun, Italy was too far to drive in a day, the Iron Curtain was tightly drawn and America and Russia were playing 'who's got the biggest' with weapons which could have rendered us all to dust.

 

Would I want to go back? Of course not - impossible. The internet is a huge democratising force, which more than makes up for a lot of what has gone. Everything's different now, which is what the human brain needs.

[Noel Tidybeard]

in about 71-72 we moved house possibly so that i fell into a school catchment area

we had (iirc)

 

daf 44, b/w telly, central heating!, party line telephone

 

within a couple of years we had

 

colour tv, corsair auto, private phone line, a "new-pol" auto washing machine and an upright freezer!

[Bobthebeard]

Watching old sitcoms like 'Open all hours' and 'Last of the summer wine' made in the late '70's or early '80's everyday things did often look very shabby/rusty/broken and dirty...

Even newish cars looked grotty. It was just how it was I suppose! I was there, but have no memory of stuff being so bad.

[Junkman]

In 70-71 we had many, many phones in my father's office downstairs, one on each desk.

We also had a computer that was so unbelievably compact, it fit into one room!

We had a Renner 16 and a 4L and two R4F4 Fourgonettes and a Citroen H van.

My father even had a Star Class racing boat. Us was posh folks!

 

We had a B&W telly though, and I used to watch Star Trek on it.

Then we visited my Grampa, who already had one of those ultra expensive colour tellys.

For the first time ever, I watched a Star Trek episode in colour.

I was so disappointed, I haven't watched another episode since.

[Squire_Dawson]

Three or four TV channels and infinitely better quality viewing. It also used to close down late at night and the test card was shown until about 6 am. Now there are hundreds of channels and there's almost nothing worth watching. It is a crying shame that television, a media which could be put to so much good educating the masses and diffusing culture, is now almost solely used for banal 'entertainment' purposes, 'reality' shows (where nothing could be further from reality) and dreadful imports of US 'comedy' - an oxymoron if ever there was one.

 

There is still quality TV to be had, but it seems to me to be the exception rather than the rule.

[chaseracer]

Not to be outdone by her more glamorous rival to the southeast, we now gaze upon the beauty of BRUM:

 

 

Chamberlain Square. Two blokes having a well-deserved fag and going off for a few pints of Brew XI (as it's lunchtime, 11.30 - 3.25).

 

I was there just a few hours ago!  Only one of those buildings (and the fountain) still stands, and their wonderful Brutalist replacements will soon be no more...

[oman5]

I'm feeling quite nostalgic for the '70s now. I can just about remember the Victoria Wine shop my dad ran having candles everywhere for use in the numerous blackouts, every other car being a Cortina, and looking forward to the shop deliveries (Booker distribution Bedford TKs, the driver would let me sit in the cab)

I seem to remember people used public transport a lot more and even allowing for inflation, fares were cheap.

We did have a colour TV but it was rented and had a redifusion dial fixed to the wall to change the channel. oh, and everybody smoked.

[Junkman]

...and their wonderful Brutalist replacements will soon be no more...

 

Yep. And not replaced with anything nice, either.

 

oh, and everybody smoked.

 

Yeah, no concern regarding passive smoking was necessary, because everybody smoked quite actively.

[Pillock]

Is that really a postcard where they've written some dull and tedious stuff about going to Cheddar, and then "Oh by the way, bought a house in Dunstable"?

What an odd way to sign off.

[chaseracer]

 

Yep. And not replaced with anything nice, either.

 

Quite.

 

The windows of the Central Library are now covered with CG images marketing the dubious wonders of the new Paradise Circus.  Could be bloody anywheresville.

 

John Madin will be rotating at 10000rpm, six feet under...

 

 

#savetheziggurat

[michael t]

Absolutely love these, I was born in the wrong decade (90s)....

[MrDuke]

We had a phone in the early 70's. It was a shared line. The neighbours used to pop in to use it and they'd put 2p in the "Telephone" money box.  

 

 

Wow, 'Telephone Boxes' - what the hell happened to them? I remember when I was about 7 or 8, one of my parents' friends popping in to use our phone, and asking if there was a telephone box somewhere. I immediately envisioned a red Phone Box and thought "what the fuck do you need one of them for, you've just used ours", and presumably looked at them as though they'd offered me some Blue Nun, as they shuffled awkwardly away.

 

Middle-class child? Me? Gosh, heaven forbid........

[Sloth in a bowl]

 

 

Dear All.

 

Had a good trip down We stopped at Stone Henge. The weather has brightened up it was very hot today so we have both gone red. The radiator has burst on the car so up to now we have only been to Cheddar. We have bought a house in Dunstable.

 

Jenny & Tony

 

It just couldn't get more fascinating.

 

 

 

That reminds me of the e-mail that was miss sent in my direction many years ago that prattled on about strange stuff for a while then finished with 'will the knitting never end?' 

Half a random conversation leave's so much to the imagination. 

[Karmann Ghiaman]

 

 

There is still quality TV to be had, but it seems to me to be the exception rather than the rule.

 

It's called Sky.

 

This thread seems to be having an effect... A few more to keep the Flame of that Decade of Zokko and Multicoloured Swap Shop (it was the e-Bay of its day) burning brightly.

 

 

28 July 1971:

 

I had a pleasant, uneventful journey on Sunday, although the fen roads become a little tedious after a time. The course is interesting and well organised. Should prove very useful.

 looking forward to seeing you on Saturday

 Love, Peter.

 

 Special Prize to anyone who can name the four Loughborough colleges!

 

After all that education we need to relax on...

 

 

Dear Aunty Doris,

 

Having a nice rest from everything, weather nice last week.

 love from all

     Alan

 

That's Alan-Lacking-in-Adjectives Alan. He posted it in Truro on August 1st 1971, Mother's 40th birthday which is a creepy thought (she sent a letter (remember those?) today telling me to bring carpet tacks (the large-headed kind), a fuse for the lawnmower and a big rake. My wife suggests I take her to a place called 'foockin' B and Q', wherever that is.)

 

Scots Wa'hae:

 

 

Posted nine days later in Dunfermline:

 

Enjoyed my flight to Glasgow I was down in no time they all met me, went to Perth yesterday & Montrose on the coast, weather dull, Love Floss.

 

Incidentally it was still a Two-and-a-Half-Pee pink stamp to send a PPC in '71, which most people would have thought outrageous if you converted it back into a pre-decimal 6d!

 

And a couple of the Scots themselves:

 

 

I don't know WHERE this is, since it doesn't say anything on the back and wasn't sent. Does anyone know the 'Duke of Gordon'? I'm guessing somewhere like Braemar? The band look as though they'd far rather be in there at the bar having something to drink.

 

This, however, was taken at the Nairn Games:

 

 

Thurs.

 

Dear Dorothy

 

I am having a good time up here we are going to the Trossacks on Sat

   Love Aunty Floss (again! Also posted from Dunfermline where she was staying in Poplar Grove. She gave the complete address on her Edinburgh card. Was she expecting a correspondence, forsooth?)

[Pillock]

Awesome. Picture of Loughborough Colleges sent to SWMBO who works at Loughborough College and is originally a Fen-inhabitant. She's not Peter though.

[Richard]

The bored pipers are in Kingussie.

[Karmann Ghiaman]

The Loughborough Colleges card was sent to Bracebridge in Lincoln, so I imagine Peter came from East Angular (as the late great Jane Goody correctly named that non-EU country) and made an epic trip west into Leics.

 

Meanwhile, down in Oxfordshire:

 

 

Saturday 14 Aug. [still 1971]

 

Having a great time on the Oxford and Grand union Canals in a narrow boat. The boat is 37 feet long and weighs 10 tons, so rather difficult to manage. The locks come in flights of 6 or 7 rather tiring for the muscles of the crew! Not sunk it yet though!!

 Auntie Marion

 

I've driven specially to Cropredy (from nearby Oxford) to visit the Bridge and battlefield, battle won by Charles I in 1644, but the postcard people are more interested in that Morris 1100... Result!

 

Another 4x:

 

 

This is Frinton-on-Sea defined as Crescent Gardens  Connaught Avenue  Cliff Walks  The Cliffs

 

Nice Alan would know how to describe the place, but that particular card was never sent.

 

Down in Exeter, the Guildhall:

 

 

Sat. [same date, 14 August 1971, a great day for postcards]

 

Having a wet but quite pleasant W/E. Spending the day here - just been into the museum! Many thanks for your birthday card and the candles which will be most useful for Xmas - D & E  S & J

 

...and for all the power cuts coming up later in the decade. Annoying, but mildly better than having to be in the Battle of Passchendaele or the Blitz, or indeed catching cholera or bubonic plague.

 

Even further south:

 

 

Superb British Classics all lined up there. Also Saturday, but this was a fortnight later and is franked 5 - PM 29 AUG 1971, which I make the Sunday (not impossible):

 

Thank you so much for all you did. I hope your arm is better now. We arrived safely in time for a cup of tea and the hotel & people are first class. No complaints. We are going to Polperro today. Fine yesterday. but chilly. Bit drizzly today. Hope to see Navy at Plymouth this week. love A.

 

Ha! That'll be gone by now, but don't worry, Prime Minister Farage is going to bring it all back, exactly as it was at Trafalgar. That'll show the Foreigners.

 

Here's one the Luftwaffe missed:

 

 

Chester, Eastgate.

 

H.A.L.T. in Chester.

W.Y.W.T.                 Sunday

 

The races were an interesting experience but not one to be repeated too often, I hope.

 We seem to be having a bit of sunshine, too!

 Will write more later.

 Lots of love,

   ffran

 

Sent a long way, the following year, 17 July 1972, to North Shields. Anybody know WTF what HALT and WYWT stand for? (I only know WTF).

 

Coming up: Dorset, the IoM, Plymouth, Lyme Regis!

 

[Karmann Ghiaman]

The bored pipers are in Kingussie.

 

That info gratefully received, Richard. 

[Norbert]

At a guess:

 

HALT = Having/Had A Lovely Time?

WYWT = Wish(ed) You Were There?

[Guest Breadvan72]

Cropredy is also known for the annual hairy folk rocker festival run by hairy dudes Fairport Convention since the days of beards with badgers in them, and for a somewhat overrated Jensen garage.