Little bits of social history

[Arch]

We find some interesting stuff in the recycling sometimes. We sorted a whole company archive the other day, with some interesting little stories of staff, seen through memos and stuff.

Today, I came across an old receipt - 1959. I noticed it because it had a stamp on it - back then you had to validate any receipt over £2 (so my Mum said), with a postage stamp. This one was a touch over £2 - it was £150.

The item? "One genuine Siberian Squirrel" - it was from a furrier in Stonegate, so I assume it was a coat, and not one very expensive rodent!

£150 in 1959 - Mum reckons that would have been half a year's wages for her. I seem to remember there is a website where you can enter an amount and a year and find out what it's worth in 'todays money' - anyone know where it is?

 

[accountantpete]

Here you go

here

£2k - so it must have been a skinny squirrel

 

[Arch]

Here you go

here

£2k - so it must have been a skinny squirrel

Ah, cheers!

I dunno, £2k sounds like a lot of squirrel!

A quick google suggests vintage squirrel fur coats are to be had for a couple of hundred - obviously, there's been a shift in desirability since then.

 

[wobbler]

Ah, but you are talking Siberian squiwwel, they don't come after your nuts like ours do.

 

[ThePainInSpain]

Back in the e70's a friend of mine had a business called 'Finders Keepers' and it was all things collectible. It grew out of his passion for collecting old bottles, and finding Victorian tips and digging them up.

He cleared the offices of a brewery, in Burton upon Trent, of loads of tea chests full f old invoices, receipts and other paperwork from way back that was being thrown out.

Also he obtained a load of old patents from the patents office when they moved.

He made a lot of money from selling this stuff to collectors. Old invoices in Copperplate Handwritting were framed and flogged for a fiver a piece (big money back in the 70's).

 

[mangaman]

We find some interesting stuff in the recycling sometimes. We sorted a whole company archive the other day, with some interesting little stories of staff, seen through memos and stuff.

Today, I came across an old receipt - 1959. I noticed it because it had a stamp on it - back then you had to validate any receipt over £2 (so my Mum said), with a postage stamp. This one was a touch over £2 - it was £150.

The item? "One genuine Siberian Squirrel" - it was from a furrier in Stonegate, so I assume it was a coat, and not one very expensive rodent!

£150 in 1959 - Mum reckons that would have been half a year's wages for her. I seem to remember there is a website where you can enter an amount and a year and find out what it's worth in 'todays money' - anyone know where it is?

I love bits of social history Arch - including yours.

So much of life is based a bit on the present and mainly on the future.

I love wondering around and thinking about the past where I live. A bit of research in the library (if you've still got one) adds an extra dimension (ie time) to your surroundings.

I was thinking about this this the other day, while walking along a tiny road in Chichester on my way to work called "The Needlemakers". According to a recent book I found, Chichester was Britain's biggest needle maker until the civil war, when the factories were bombed. I also know it was the site of Chichester's biggest Roman cementary

Not interesting to anyone else I guess but it brightened my day a fraction as I thought of all that had gone on while I trudged to work.

I find the older I get, the more history interests me - especially local/social history. I suppose it's because I'm realising my insignificance in the grander sceme of things

 

[Speicher]

Slightly off-topic, and apologies to Arch - I have a question about photography around 1945 to 1960.

How "easy" was it to get photographs of family members or school photographs? Would most households have had their own camera, or would people have got professional photographers to take posed portraits?

My first recollection of family photos would be ones taken around 1960. I would like to know more details about photography in the ten years or so before that.

 

[snorri]

I would like to know more details about photography in the ten years or so before that.

I think quite a number of families would have owned a simple camera in the 50s, but the developing and printing was considered expensive so the cameras would not be used much.
Regarding school photos, I recall a professional doing the annual rounds and taking a group photo of every class/year. Pupils whose parents had requested in advance would have individual photographs taken.
There was never an opportunity to look in a mirror beforehand, so untidy hair, squint ties and tucked in collars were common place in the photographs.

 

[Speicher]

Thank you Snorri. I was thinking that the cost would have been high. Presumably getting copies of photographs would also have been expensive.

 

[snorri]

Presumably getting copies of photographs would also have been expensive.

Ah yes, but of course you had to have the original negatives, so could not copy say, school photos, to send to the relatives.
Otherwise select the best photo you had taken, find the associated negative, taking great care not to get fingerprints on them, then taking them to the local chemist and going back a week or two later to collect the prints.

 

[asterix]

Slightly off-topic, and apologies to Arch - I have a question about photography around 1945 to 1960.

How "easy" was it to get photographs of family members or school photographs? Would most households have had their own camera, or would people have got professional photographers to take posed portraits?

My first recollection of family photos would be ones taken around 1960. I would like to know more details about photography in the ten years or so before that.

My father had one of these folding cameras that he used to take pictures in Southern Africa 1947 to 1955. Then on going to Cyprus he moved to a cine camera. We have loads of reels but not much idea what's on them!

One early job I had was in a factory where the warehouse had been offices years before. A lot of the pillars where people's desks had been still had old postcards stuck to them that people had sent from their hols. Eric Gill and that sort of thing. I wondered where the people were who'd sat there once.

 

[Arch]

I love knowing little snippets about town, street names and so on. York is heaving with oddly named little snickleways and so on, and I always mean to check out the derivations. I do know that Grape Lane is a derivation of a much, much ruder name that the street had in the Medieval (and actually, I think many cities have a similarly named street, I know London had one).

Old maps, there's another treat.

Something I've come to realise, is that you miss a heck of a lot if you only look around at head level. Spend a day wandering about town looking up at first floors and gables (minding where you're going of course) and you'll see all sorts of bits of architecture and sculpture and social history you'd miss otherwise - things like fire insurance plates and coats of arms and stuff. And not just old stuff - there's a chimney pot on a building by the market that has (or at least still had, a couple of years ago when I last looked) a smiley face painted on it in black paint. No idea why.

And photography - I remember when I was little, we had a Kodak camera, with a big silver dish that held the flash bulb - bulbs that had to be changed after each use, and were hot. Being allowed to actually use it was a real treat, normally Dad took charge of it. Everyso often, when I snap away with my digital camera, or my phone, I think about how easy it is these days, and how difficult and relatively expensive it was back in the days of film. The ability to take dozens of shots to capture one perfect one, heaven!

 

[Fiona N]

On the camera question, it seems like there were a lot of simple Box Brownie-type cameras around from the late 40s to the 50s, if my extended 'family' are anytihng to go by. I remember as a small child going with my Mum to visits auntys (my Mum's aunts) and they often had photos of holidays at Scarborough on the beach taken years before but brought out to show us what life used to be like with long black woolly swimming costumes. My Mum certainly had her own camera (and she was a carpet mill girl, nothing middle-class) by the mid-50s when she went on holiday to Spain with a female friend who was a director's secretary in the carpet company. So we have some amazing photos of Mum and Aunty Jean in really amazing swimming costumes on the beach at San Sebastian. <br><br><br>My Dad was a fairly serious amateur photographer and had bought a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex (precursor of the SLR) camera in Germany before the last war.&nbsp;&nbsp;I've been using it since the '70s and it's still going strong - when I can get hold of the 120 slide film. I still have a stock of the huge (6cm x 6cm) glass slides I bought in Germany about 20 years ago. I realised availability was quickly drying up and bought a load only to find now that the film is the bigger problem.

 

[beanzontoast]

There's a bridge over the River Derwent in Derby that I cross regularly on foot and on cycle, and ever since I saw a photo of a WW2 fire boat crew doing a hose drill pumping water onto an imaginary blaze on the bank against the bridge, I have been unable to cross it without imagining the scene.

I have 2 books of these wartime photos of the city during that period and they're full of places I know and go to regularly. One day I'm going to have a walk around the middle of town with the books in tow and see if I can take some modern-day photos from the same vantage points as the 70-year old ones.

 

[deptfordmarmoset]

I love knowing little snippets about town, street names and so on. York is heaving with oddly named little snickleways and so on, and I always mean to check out the derivations. I do know that Grape Lane is a derivation of a much, much ruder name that the street had in the Medieval (and actually, I think many cities have a similarly named street, I know London had one).

Old maps, there's another treat.

Something I've come to realise, is that you miss a heck of a lot if you only look around at head level. Spend a day wandering about town looking up at first floors and gables (minding where you're going of course) and you'll see all sorts of bits of architecture and sculpture and social history you'd miss otherwise - things like fire insurance plates and coats of arms and stuff. And not just old stuff - there's a chimney pot on a building by the market that has (or at least still had, a couple of years ago when I last looked) a smiley face painted on it in black paint. No idea why.

And photography - I remember when I was little, we had a Kodak camera, with a big silver dish that held the flash bulb - bulbs that had to be changed after each use, and were hot. Being allowed to actually use it was a real treat, normally Dad took charge of it. Everyso often, when I snap away with my digital camera, or my phone, I think about how easy it is these days, and how difficult and relatively expensive it was back in the days of film. The ability to take dozens of shots to capture one perfect one, heaven!

Because there's loads of us down here and humming beans have been here for a long time too, London is great for finding traces of history sitting alongside - or just underneath - the present. In addition, Charles Booth did a series of poverty maps of London just over a century ago and it's fascinating to read his accounts of my neck of the woods.

Just underneath the veneer of change and modernity there's a layer of continuity - you simply have to just look to one side, up a bit, or slightly askance, where you find those things you haven't seen for years simply because you stopped seeing them years ago as they were always in your face. Oh well, at least it keeps me busy