Barclaycard - "The New Kind of Money"...

Finding this advertisement for Barclaycard in a 1967 Readers Digest rather surprised me as the concept of "plastic money" had no real effect on me or my family until the mid-1980s.

It is worth taking a copy of the ad and enlarging it so that you can read the inset letter which contains such gems as:

Alright, you've been swamping me, for almost a year, with this fancy propaganda about how you 'make shopping simpler'.

So it would seem that the card had been around for almost a year by April 1967.

WOW!

I was born in 1965, so don't remember 1967, but as a working class kid in the 1970s, I knew nobody who had a credit or debit card. In fact, round where I lived, not many people had bank accounts!

Every week, my step father would bring home his pay packet (he was paid in cash), put it on the kitchen table, and he and my mother would work out the finances for the week.

We knew about credit cards, they were advertised, but as a kid I never thought that I would have one. There was "Them" (those that did have them) and "Us" (those that did not have them) and the gulf seemed unbridgeable.

When I began work in the early 1980s, I, like my step father, was paid in cash and the whole of the office where I worked looked forward to Thursday when the pay packets were brought round.

Some years later, I changed employers and my new boss paid salaries directly into bank accounts. It was then that I opened an account and first met plastic money via a debit card.

I was considered very advanced and adventurous by most of my family.

And this was in the 1980s.

The 1960s were certainly ahead of their times on occasion!

1967: "Peace and Love? But Won't that Ruin the Carpet, Dear?"

The girl with the winklepickers and the panda eyes wants a groovy party. Mum wants to preserve her lounge carpet. How can both their interests be catered for?

Johnnie and Fanny Cradock...

A 1967 advertisement for Phillips, featuring Fanny and Johnnie.

Rising to fame in shows like Kitchen Magic in the 1950s, TV cooks Fanny and Johnnie Cradock reigned supreme in the 1960s. Fanny was the most formidable woman to ever not don an apron (she didn’t need one) and commented: “I’m no Women’s Libber, I wouldn’t be such a clot!” She didn’t need to be a Women’s Libber. Fanny ate adversaries, male or female, for breakfast!

To watch Fanny and monocled husband Johnnie was to watch a great double act. He played the silly dodderer, she the domineering doyen of the kitchen, and they were compulsive viewing.

Fanny's food was exciting - including such bizarre offerings as blue eggs, and she helped dissolve the mood of post war austerity in the 50s with her lovely (often) French fare. Like many cooks of the time, Fanny believed that French cuisine was it.

But she also dealt with other things. The earliest reference I have yet found to prawn cocktail was in a 1962 episode of Coronation Street, when posh Annie Walker mentioned it. In 1967, Fanny Cradock wrote:

One of the most sordid little offerings is the ubiquitous Prawn Cocktail with a good old ground padding of lettuce cut with a knife and darkening at the edges, a tired prawn drooping disconsolately over the edge of the glass like a debutante at the end of her first ball and its opposite number - a piece of lemon tasting of the knife - clutching the opposite side of the rim like a seasick passenger against a taffrail during a rough Channel crossing. This kind of presentation almost certainly confirms that the mayonnaise will be that bottled stuff, further sharpened by bottled tomato sauce…

Fanny proceeded to give her own super-dupah Prawn Cocktail recipe. Little old me, being lower working class, did not even glimpse a Prawn Cocktail until the 1980s. And then it was the bog standard version - complete with bottled tomato sauce.

And I loved it - wolfed it down. Philistine!

Oh well...

Fanny marched through the 1960s, making numerous television series and writing several books. She entered the 70s as she had entered the 60s - as TV Cook Supreme. But then she came unstuck...

More here.

A Brief History of the Lava Lamp...

The history of the lava lamp began in a pub in Hampshire, England, with a very unusual egg timer.

In the 1940s, one Edward Craven-Walker walked into the aforementioned pub and saw a strikingly odd object on the counter behind the bar. It was a glass cocktail shaker containing some kind of mucus-like blob floating in liquid. Mr Craven-Walker made enquiries, and was told by the barman that the device was an egg timer. The 'blob' was actually a clump of solid wax in clear liquid.

How did this “time” your egg, wondered Mr Craven-Walker? The barman elaborated:

“You put the shaker in the boiling water with your egg, and as the boiling water cooks the egg it also melts the wax turning it into an amorphous blob of goo.”

When the wax floated to the top of the jar, the egg was done. Mr Craven-Walker was very impressed by what he saw and he began to wonder - could he turn the egg timer into a lamp with thicker oil that would form sculptural shapes? Would this be a viable commercial product?

The inventor of the blobby egg timer, somebody called Dunnet, was deceased, so Craven-Walker was able to patent the invention for himself. The Astro/Lava Lamp was finally released in 1963. Craven-Walker had spent fifteen years perfecting the design.

In the hippy-trippy Summer of Love in 1967, the lamp gained great popularity - mainly with trendies and people experimenting with mind-expanding drugs.

In the early 1970s, the lamp became deeply naff. It was seen on the serving hatch at Stan and Hilda Ogden’s in Coronation Street - a sure sign of its complete and utter non-trendiness, and then Mildred Roper acquired one in George & Mildred.

Oh dear! My mother, middle aged and with absolutely lousy taste, bought one and we spent the evenings trying to avoid looking at something that resembled a blob of orange liver in yellow bile floating up and down.

At our local pub, which was all plastic beaten copper tables and “genuine” olde Englishe horse brasses, a lava lamp suddenly appeared. Frumpy Nellie and Fred, the mine hosts, were thrilled with the thing and became a bit of a laughing stock amongst right-minded regulars.

Finally, the lava lamp’s fascination for (a minority of) 30 and 40-somethings evaporated, and by 1980 they were just about dead and gone.

C. 1988, the awful blobby shapes associated with lava lamps appeared in a couple of pop videos. The new drug culture of the Acid House/Rave era seemed happy to embrace a couple of icons from the original Summer of Love. The lava lamp was one, the Smiley Face was another. Not that 1988 seemed like a second Summer of Love to me. It was faster and more streetwise - “Right on one, matey!” but, as we moved into the 1990s, 1960s trends became more and more “in” and lava lamp sales boomed.

Apparently more lava lamps were sold in the 1990s than in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s combined.

Bleurgh!!