Introduction to the project
Themes: Toys and leisure, Food, Shops, Home life, School life, Clothes, Faith, Further afield, Transport
Photos of Sudbury from 1950s to 1980s and their 2019 equivalent views
How to book Sudbury 50s-80s workshops and/or hire the Sudbury 50s-80s Loan Suitcase
Introduction to the project
Life in Sudbury in the 1950s-1980s is part of Changing Sudbury, a heritage community project by Sudbury Neighbourhood Centre, exploring the rich social and cultural history of Sudbury from the 1950s onwards through the memories of first generation arrivals and existing residents who saw, lived through and contributed to its changes, shaping the diverse and multifaceted Sudbury we know today.
The project came into existence because Sudbury Neighbourhood Centre felt the need to capture the memories of its clients, growing elderly and increasingly frail, and memories of the local community more in general. There was also a desire amongst users of Sudbury Neighbourhood Centre to record memories of Sudbury and create a display there and at Brent Museum and Archives at The Library at Willesden Green.
A gap was identified in Brent Museum and Archives’ collections for the area of Sudbury during 1950s-1980s and a partnership resulted in Changing Sudbury, a project generously funded by Heritage Lottery Fund.
Between Spring 2019 – Spring 2020, individuals were interviewed by project volunteers and these interviews were digitised. Some archival material was also kindly donated. Brent Museum and Archives now cares for these wonderful resources.
These resources were developed for use by teachers and classes of Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 pupils. They can also be used by community groups such as facilitators of reminiscence sessions.
This education pack supports the resources on the www.changingsudbury.org.uk website (Resources page) where you can listen to audio files of the interviewees speaking, view more photos showing how Sudbury looked in 1950s-80s and the corresponding views in 2019. The interview excerpts and photos in this pack are just a selection of the larger range of resources for you to use, including lesson ideas and details of the Sudbury 1950s-80s Loans Suitcase that you can hire for your school or group. A map of Sudbury showing the locations of places referred to can also be found at www.changingsudbury.org.uk
For a seven-year-old living in Sudbury in 2019, their parents were probably about 7 years old in 1990 and their grandparents’ parents were probably about 7 years old in 1950. So 1950-1990 is a time when their families were growing up and having children of their own, going out and enjoying themselves and making homes. We want the children to empathise with the people living in Sudbury at that time.
Key events mentioned by our interviewees during this time include Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation in 1953, the Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977 and the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. They also talk about the advent of Rock’n’Roll and the growing popularity of the Beatles.
From the 1950s onwards, Sudbury and its surroundings started to change, leading it to become the diverse and multicultural area we know today. Modern Sudbury has changed to meet the needs of new residents and the existing community has adapted accordingly. As an example, a wider range of products became available, a change that is visible today in the diverse range of shops along the Harrow Road. This resource explores a time when these changes were imminent, or even in the process of occurring, as experienced by the residents themselves.
Most of the old images used in this project come from our online catalogue https://www.brent.gov.uk/services-for-residents/culture-leisure-and-parks/brent-museum which is easy to use and where you can search for images of Brent including the area of Sudbury.
We have created KS1 and KS2 Sudbury 1950s-1980s workshops which we can deliver at your school or at The Library at Willesden Green plus a loan suitcase of Sudbury 50s-80s artefacts and resources for you to hire.
The content in these resources supports the National Curriculum for History at Key Stage 1: “changes within living memory. Where appropriate, these should be used to reveal aspects of change in national life” and at Key Stage 2: “a local history study e.g. a study over time tracing how several aspects of national history are reflected in the locality”.
Important note: You may use the images in this pack for personal study or use on the school grounds. If however, you would like to use any of the images for any other uses e.g. online, exhibitions, in publications you must ask for permission from:
Heritage Collections Manager, Brent Museum and Archives, 95 High Rd, Willesden, London NW10 2SF. Email: museum.archives@brent.gov.uk, Telephone: 020 8937 3600 www.brent.gov.uk/museumarchives Not all copyright owners could be found; if you know who owns the copyright of any of these images, please do get in touch with us.
Toys and leisure
Our interviewees’ experience s of childhood (and also the lives of their own children later in the period) were shaped by a simpler world in which technology had little part. Music was listened to on records, cassettes and radios, people loved to dance, children played their games out on the street, the choice of toys was limited, and the occasional gift of a magazine would be considered a real treat!
1960s
Occasionally you’d get the odd um children’s magazine as well which occasionally we were treated to, perhaps during the summer holidays (…) I remember there was one called Look and Learn, um, and that that was quite an eclectic mix of highly educational and then fantasy stories and um… adventure, er, so that was er that was quite exciting.
Francis
1970s
Oh, what did they like…? Well I was one for nursery rhymes, so we would have had a big nursery rhyme book…
Viv
1950s
You know, we used to have skipping ropes. Yeah, we used to love the kids used to skip… We used to play er games on the pavements, you know you chalk up, I don’t, probably you won’t even know, we used to have a game called leap frog, and somebody would bend down, you’d leap over them. You can’t do that now.
Viv
1950s
Well, the ball games um, if there was a group of us, we would sometimes just play ‘piggy in the middle’, which mean, meant you had um three people, one at either end and somebody standing in the middle, and you’d throw the ball from one… and the person in the middle, the piggy, was supposed to try and catch it, and if they caught it, then you’d change places with the person at the end, that was quite a popular game. Um, another game would be that you would just throw a ball and there’d be… and anybody could find it and, and catch it, and then they would do, you you change places again, just throwing balls, we didn’t worry about breaking windows or anything like that, but um, we were in a, it was only a small close, anyway, so we were able to throw balls in the street. Um, and otherwise we would play, as girls, um not so much the boys I suppose, we would play balls up against the wall… and catch it, and then you throw it, and you’d clap your hands before you caught the ball, all that, that type of ball game was what we played, really.
Barbara
1970s
Where we lived we used to have the most wonderful bonfire parties on, everybody would get together in the street, we’d build, we’d either have it in one of the houses, maybe we would actually have the bonfire party in the road, and all the neighbours came, we all brought food, um, and we used to leave the children (laughs), the children would’ve come for the early part, but when it got a bit late, we put all the children to bed, and we’d stayed out…
Viv
1950s
Mobo, I’m not sure what it was called, Mobo… and it was a horse, and it was metal, and you sat on it and it sort of went up and down, you’d push with your feet and it went along. And um, I must have been quite young at the time ‘cause they weren’t very big, and it was a toy that probably was quite expensive. And I remember being allowed to ride on it one day and um, it fell over and it scratched, and I was so scared that I was going to get into trouble, I left it there, and ran home (laughs). It wasn’t, it wasn’t anything serious, but um, um that was a sort of toy I think Mojo? No, I can’t say, I can’t say exactly what it was called but it was er a popular at the time, at the time it was quite popular. And us girls also had dolls prams. We would take our dolls prams out into the street and then there was a bit of um jealousy amongst the girls, who had the best pram, and the best doll (…) I had a doll’s pram yes, I loved mine. I actually had a replica Silver Cross, which was, you know, a small version of the, the, the, because we all had, mothers had big prams then we didn’t have pushchairs very much and buggies they hadn’t been invented. So, mums had big prams, so little girls wanted um, a similar thing, you know. So I had a Silver Cross.
Barbara
1960s
I do remember we had our sports days and um sports events at Vale Farm (…) We had things like sack races and egg and spoon races at Vale Farm.
Francis
1960s/1970s
For Michael, as a little boy, he had a drawer full of Action Men. In fact when we moved house the young couple who bought it from us had a young son, and they left… he left the drawer absolutely full of his Action Men for this other little boy who was absolutely thrilled to bits to get all these. And for my daughter, first of all she had you know that’s one in a box, um, miss oh what was she called? Very super model. Oh I can’t remember the name. Interviewer: Barbie? Shirley: Yeah, Barbie Doll. Interviewer: Right… Shirley: She, they had Barbie dolls for a while and they bought all the various costumes but her, the hit which came in while she was a little girl was Tiny Tears. It was the very first real looking baby on the market, and you could give it a dummy, you could give it a little sip of water from a tiny little bottle and it would wet its nappy, you could change its nappy. So they were soft, made of rubber and cuddle-able. And they were all the rage, all the little girls walked out with those in their prams and adored their Tiny Tears. So things went in fashion for children, Barbie very much went out of fashion because it was rigid you couldn’t cuddle it and take it to bed with you, she was so you know stiff. And you couldn’t do anything with the arms and legs, they didn’t move very much. But for a while the children loved them because they were um, you could dress them, so you could adapt them to mini-skirts, very much Mary Quant, and short mini-skirts and short jumpers.
Shirley
1970s
We certainly celebrated the Queen’s Jubilee, I can’t remember exactly which year it was but the tennis club was all dra… draped out in Union Jacks, we were all in red and white, Pat and I were in red and white and navy-blue blazers. We put on a little concert at the time, some entertainment, and had a lovely Jubilee supper, so we would certainly celebrate it very loyally and royally (laughs), so I think the whole area was decked out, I seem to remember bunting across the streets and, and so on and so forth, so very happy memories of those times.
Shirley
1960s/1970s
We had a lovely little cottage hospital in er, in Wembley, in Sudbury it was in fact, it was just behind where the Fire Brigade is now. And every year they had the Hospital Fete, in Barham Park, because Barham then had the big house, it was only destroyed… while I was living in Sudbury they pulled it down. But Barham Park was lovely, it was a very nice place to meet, and they had huge marquees, tents and so on, and it was always the first week in June, it always rained. I don’t ever remember going there on a fine day (…) well they would have roll a penny, roll your penny down, and duck bobbing, catching little ducks on the end of sticks, um often they would have a Fun Fair so they get somebody’s er, little circus to come in, and you’d have fast rides and so on. So they made a big event of it, and um, of course it’d be crowded and everyone’d go, even in the rain with their umbrellas. So it was a nice celebration…
Shirley
1950s
The swimming pool was very popular. We used to queue up to try and get the first season ticket on the first of May. Cause if you had a season ticket it was much cheaper you know to go in, I think something like 5 shillings we paid then, 25 pence, um. But you weren’t allowed to swim until the temperature reached 52 degrees Fahrenheit, which is pretty cold (laughs).
Patricia
1950s
In that um time, the girls were expected to do badges, like sewing and knitting and, you know, I was much more keen on the more active things, um and that’s come to fruition now, because the girls can do whichever – they can join the Scouts, do that, um… my brother did more camping than I did. I think they were probably a bit more careful about the girls you know, bit more sheltered.
Patricia
1950s/1960s
We often had snow. So the early sort of time forties, fifties, right up to the sixties really, we were still sledging on Horsenden Hill (laughs).
Patricia
1960s
But as teenagers we used the cinemas a lot. And, um, just occasionally you’d get things like Chris Barber’s Jazz Band playing in South Harrow at the British Legion Hall. I can remember going there perhaps twice or three times. We were quite keen on traditional jazz, that was probably our, our group, and then of course rock ‘n roll came in, and that was quite popular. And then the Beatles, um. All of those things we used to listen together, we’d have at our Youth Club we had records sometimes, um, not vinyl, but the old um shellac, and later on vinyl and seventy-fives. And we’d bring our own records down, and sometimes dance to them. I think it was our main entertainment really, cycling, we all had bikes we used to cycle over to Windsor, Rickmansworth, the Aquadrome. Er, that was a, that was a social activity with the youth club as well, most people had bikes. …I was very keen on Lonnie Donegan, so it was um traditional jazz and Skiffle. They were my main, my main interest really (laughs) at that stage.
Patricia
1960s
Dancing? Oh yeah, yeah. We used to go parties at night and things like that (…) Any houses, anybody houses we’d have party and they invite us so we would go…
Norma
1950s
We had our local um cinema in Sudbury and, it was called the Odeon, um, I think it was in Allendale Road… And they also showed um Saturday morning pictures which I used to go, we used to pay 6 pence and we used to go in and watch cartoons and cowboy films and things like that, yeah.
Barbara
1950s
Everybody listened to the radio, my dad particularly used to always have to listen to the plays, um, and there was… there were series on, and there was one called ‘Dick Barton Special Agent’ and it used to be on every week, yeah.
Barbara
Food
The 1950s brought the end of sweet rationing, and with it, a whole host of exciting new sweets and flavours. However, leftovers from a Sunday roast dinner would still be expected to last for several days and a delivery of lemonade would cause huge excitement. By the 1970s, for the first time, it was possible for Sudbury residents to eat out in an Indian restaurant, go for pizza or visit a new McDonald’s restaurant.
1970s
My daughter was born in 1972. So when she was quite young, for a treat, we’d go to McDonalds so they were around then, so that would have been in nineteen, early 1970s, um, so McDonalds was really one of the first ones I can think and um we didn’t have fast food, really, you know, um. It, it just was a different world.
Barbara
1950s/1960s
My mother would do the cooking, she the butcher’s shop was around the corner, so it was very convenient to buy um we’d probably have a Sunday joint, um Sunday roast, and vegetables and that would probably last for the next couple of days. So the the next day there’d be cold meat served with the vegetables and then um on the… third day then it would probably be made into a soup or something else, um yeah so it was, again nothing went to waste.
Francis
1960s/1970s
It was me and my sister’s generation that would probably go and eat out, um, somewhere fairly economical, er perhaps have a pizza, go to the early, it was the early days of er Pizza Express, um, so we would have probably tried them out then.
Francis
1950s
…that was delivered. And, quite a lot of excitement with um, oh, the fizzy water, R. Whites, R. Whites lemonade (laughs). We used to get a bottle of that perhaps every month, as a treat. That was certainly late fifties. Glass bottle with the push top where you had to press for the little top to come off, you still see them now. Not a screw top.
Patricia
1960s
There was a fish’n’chip shop, but we didn’t have restaurants. People didn’t eat out, um, as I say fish’n’chips shops were about the limit if you wanted to have something already cooked for you, you’d go out and buy fish and chips, you wouldn’t go and sit in a restaurant and eat. Unless you were in London I suppose up in London, it’d be different.
Barbara
1970s
Yes we did begin to get the Asian shops, mostly fruiterers, mostly fruiterers, and of course you also have the time when the curry houses were open, and I remember going out for a curry with my husband, in Wembley somewhere, and we thought it was wonderful, such a big deal! You know, we thought we were such smart young things, eating foreign food…
Shirley
1970s
Michael would have always come back with a bag of sherbet, a sherbet suck. We used to get fizzy lemon, in a paper bag, with a a hollowed out stick of liquorice in, and you put that in the bag and (makes sound of slurp), sucked the lemon (slurps), through the liquorice and made a lovely frothy feeling in your mouth (laughs), so I do remember those! And um, jelly babies they had, which they still have and… Mostly I remember them buying lucky dip bags at Mrs… whatever her name was, this sweetie shop, because they’d always have a little surprise in and some sweets. And we had Lovehearts, I remember them buying Lovehearts, with ‘I love you’ and ‘You are my lovely one’ written on the sweetie, I think they still have those. And um black bullets, we used to have black bullets (…) Were lovely, they tasted, er… like, um, what did they taste like? Oh, I don’t know, sort of candy? Oo, lovely to suck, they were big black sweets and my dad used to get really worried. ‘Don’t you give those children Black Bullets, they’ll choke!’ Cause he’d once, as a little boy, seen a boy choke on a sweetie, and he’d hit him squarely between the shoulder blades and the sweet shot out across the street (laughs) so he always worried sick if I gave the children… And we used to get aniseed balls, oh, we absolutely loved aniseed balls, and they were just aniseed, they were orange in colour, and you sucked them ‘til your tongue went all orange…I remember the children buying those.
Shirley
1950s
Beef was the, the most common food anyway, chicken was unusual, I said to you we had chicken because we kept them but that wasn’t the norm, really.
Patricia
1950s
I remember sweets coming off ration, that was quite late, I was certainly at secondary school. And my mother buying a Mars bar, which she cut up into little slices, and we had, I think we had one slice each, not to have too much because it might make us sick (laughs).
Patricia
1960s
Food? Oh when I first came here there wasn’t anything over the years with aks for things… It’s ok now, we get all that we could have from home, so that side is ok (…) I learnt to adapt, get over it.
Norma
Shops
Throughout this time period, deliveries of food and goods to your front door were a regular occurrence, from the coalman to the collar man, the milkman to the baker. Clothes were usually bought in the bigger stores in Wembley or made by hand, but our interviewees remember being able to buy almost everything else they could possibly have wanted here in Sudbury, from shoopkeepers they would know by name.
1950s/1960s
There were three sets of deliveries, milkman, grocers, green grocers. And then my father would probably have had his collars, separate collars, um because collars were er shirts were collarless, and so we had um ‘Collars of Wembley’. There was a specific firm that just um er laundered collars, from memory, er on a sort of fortnightly basis and they got delivered in a in a brown box.
Francis
1960s
Mr Manson, that’s the name Manson not Hanson, and he had a fine array of Matchbox cars, and they were all boxed up and ah all looked very attractive and they were all 2 shillings, 10 pence. And um so I amassed so, with my pocket money, which was probably about 2 and 6 at the time, and um so now and again I treated myself to a Matchbox car and so er they were on the display cabinets at the front, um on the er right as you went in. And then behind Mr Manson, and it was the man himself, er were all the sweets that you’d want as a child as well.
Francis
1960s
It would have been very much a cash register where you had to use both hands and push all the right keys down and then it would, the flag would come up with the total. Or, you do individual items and then the total would come up um, so yes quite a long winded experience by today’s standards.
Francis
1960s
There was a Boots I remember, really quaint, near the bus stop on the left hand side as you come out of Wembley there was a a very small Boots, just one shopfront (…) they had a library they called it a ‘tuppenny library’ and you paid tuppence to borrow a book (laughs). I never used it, but I used to wait for a bus just outside Boots and it always tickled me, I don’t know what the purpose was I mean I presume it was there before the public library became such but, um, it was er a, a quaint thing. Tuppence to borrow a book.
Kathleen
1950s
I’ve thought a lot about Sudbury shops, there was a little newsagent down the road here, that um, sold newspapers and birthday cards, and they also sold gramophone records, which we were all getting into in our early teenage years, Lonnie Donegan and Chris Barber, an’ people you’ll never have heard of possibly (laughs) I don’t know, and then rock ‘n roll came in. But we would buy our records there, and there was another record, two record shops in Wembley. But I remember going to Keat’s quite often for that sort of thing, um. And the other thing that possibly several other people have mentioned to you, is the butchers in Sudbury, Putman’s, and they were still um slaughtering their own cattle at the abattoir, so you knew about that I expect. Um, I can remember seeing the cows go through, and hearing a lot of ‘mooing’ (laughs).
Patricia
1960s
I think we had a first tiniest glimmer of a supermarket, um in Sudbury, one of the shops there started selling lots of different things. And that would have been in the early sixties (…) There was a shop up the road here that sold biscuits out of a tin, and when the tin got quite low, it would be all crumbs and you could buy a cone of crumbs for a penny. That’s definitely fifties, early fifties. Um, I think the changes mostly started in the sixties, which is when the um, the general area changed quite a bit.
Patricia
1950s
I think it was the co-op um had a franchise, and the coal man used to come with sacks over his back down our side entrance and tip them into the um, the coal bunker and I was charged with counting to make sure there were ten that came, it was always ten, um, and then mother paid.
Patricia
1950s
Along the parade of shops there was this… um, er, Tobacconist but it also had a small Post Office and the proprietor’s name was Mr Jones, and my friend and I would go around there on Christmas morning, he would be open on Christmas morning, and we’d always get a small gift, it might be some sweets, or it might be a comb, but it used to be… we had to do that, Christmas morning, we had to go round and get presents so, something that would be unheard of these days (laughs).
Barbara
1950s
Every Saturday morning, my dad would have a lie-in, um, and my mum and I would get the bus, go up to the Harrow Road, catch the 92 bus, and we’d go to Wembley. And my aunt, my dad’s aunt who lived upstairs, Aunty Annie was her name, she worked in Wembley Market. There was an indoor market, in Lancelot Road. And it was there for years and years. And she ran the sweet shop (…) and also, a lot of things then were still on ration. She had to pay… she, she had to go to a certain butcher, and to a certain grocer, in Wembley, um, then use the coup, use coupons to buy what she wanted (…) and sweets I think, I believe sweets were on ration until about 1953. Um so the basic … if if if you had a home, if you had a sweet store, you could have home-made sweets.
Barbara
1950s
In Wembley there was also, there was a big shop called Killip’s, um and it was a, it was on several floors and it was um haberdashery, um wools, um… material, everything like that it would sell, um, it was it was quite a big shop.
Barbara
1950s
There was also a Dairy, Unigate Dairies in um Perrin Road, almost opposite Sudbury School, um because there used to be a farm there in the old, back in the day (…) the milk used to be put into churns there (…) and most people had their milk delivered in glass bottles then, no plastic, no plastic.
Barbara
1960s/1970s
But then you knew the milkman, so you would say to him, oh whatever his name was, “I want some yogurts tomorrow. Can you leave some yogurts?” or something…
Viv
1960s
Eight shilling used to last us for the whole week, food and everything. Now you go, eight shilling would be what? Four, forty pence? Forty… what would I say eight shilling was? Um, less than a pound? Would last us for the week? Now we got to the shop with a pound, you give a child a pound. Is nothing. It changed so much.
Norma
Home life
Our day to day home lives have changed perhaps more radically than any other area. Our interviewees remember the days before fridges, washing machines and central heating, when ice-cream had to be raced home and eaten before it melted, washing clothes by hand took many hours and a fire would be hand built with coals. The excitement of renting, owning or even watching a television for the first time is a memory that seems to stand out for nearly everyone!
1960s
When I came here I have to wash by hand (…) We put them in the bath, the dirty clothes in the bath, with soap, and then we had to wash them by hand (…) It was hard but we get on with it (…) sheets and blankets, and so we had to take them to the laundrette. And then we um, we leave them there and they get them clean and then we had to go back for them, pay, you had to pay for them (…) those that we washed by hand, we got to find somewhere to hang them and they’ll dry.
Cislyn
1960s
We didn’t have central heating like now, we had to… the paraffin heater. We use the paraffin, put the um oil in the lamp, big glass lamp, and then we light it, and we get heat from that.
Cislyn
1960s
Not when I came here, to this country, we didn’t have a fridge (…) We had to go out every day to buy fresh food.
Cislyn
1960s
They used to have a milkman coming around, put, drop the bottle milk on the steps and then we collect it. Every day we get a bottle of milk, you know. Or we often buy um tin milk.
Cislyn
1950s/1960s
The thing that struck me about my Grandfather’s house was that they had like big curtains behind the front doors which I could never really work out, er I just understood them to be draft excluders but actually it’s a throwback to the second world war where they were used as part of blackout and um indeed I think there were some remains in the back garden, um of an air raid shelter.
Francis
1950s/1960s
Milk bottles were in like earthenware containers in a larder, um so every house had a larder. And In fact, I’ve only just got rid of mine um as part of refurbishing the house. Er, and then, we had an early refrigerator, and then everything in life was different.
Francis
1950s/1960s
I don’t remember having gadgets or washing machine. My mother would have a mangle which folded into um a surreptitious sort of table, but otherwise it was hard work um in the er Belfast type sink, a sort of china sink, and scrubbing on the wooden er draining board to get the clothes clean with soap, and then wring wrung through the mangle, and then rinsed and hung out to dry. So quite a lot of hard work involved. Um and I don’t think she probably got a washing machine until the early 1970s very early 1970s.
Francis
1960s
My neighbour (…) he’d also come round and er show his er cine film of holidays um in Europe, or in Devon. So that was, we would have a good laugh about it…
Francis
1960s
We had television at home um round about 1963 ‘cause I remember hearing and seeing something of the assassination of President Kennedy. So, that was a huge thing, it’s just one of those moments you do remember. And um, so we did have a television. Um and we always it was always either rented or had a very poor quality picture and we were ever fiddling around with the TV aerial to make, to try and make the best of it.
Francis
1950s/1960s
In the back garden is we had some very tall elm trees, and elm trees were very common in the Sudbury, Sudbury court area. Tall fine trees with tops which were, they looked a bit top heavy, impressive trees (…) in those days you would hear owls hooting in there and fights between owls and crows.
Francis
1960s/1970s
When I found that my neighbour was a Geordie across the road we began a popping system which meant you could pop in to each other’s houses without any warning or telephoning. And I remember her mother in law was absolutely horrified, she said “You pop in to see Shirley and you don’t ring first!” (…) so on would go the kettle, in would come the neighbours and it was altogether a really lovely, lovely little group of people. So we loved living there. And my dad when he came, he was such a friendly person, sat out the front in his wheelchair, and he spoke to absolutely everybody who went by, so before you could say Jack Robinson he knew every single person in the street. There were about 40 houses I suppose, and he’d say, “Oh that missus up at number 40, y’know, she’s got a lovely dog!” and he’d know all the names of all the animals. So we did love living there.
Shirley
1970s
We had a back gate which opened straight on to Horsenden Woods, so the children all used to gather out the woods (…) So the back gate was open during holiday times, off the children went with their sandwiches and lemonade and we didn’t see them ‘til nightfall. They built a tent in the woods and that would be their gang, and we had about 8 children round about, and of course the mums would all come in or I’d go there for coffee and altogether it was very very sociable.
Shirley
1950s-1970s
We had television, not in the very earliest days. I think the Coronation was the big thing wasn’t it? When they had, television was introduced more widely. And I know Dorothy was looking after a school party on that day. I, my father and I went up and slept in the park to go and visit, see the um see the procession, and Mum was left at home and she went into a neighbour to watch the television for the Coronation, that was a big moment. Then um, then we had a television later. It was always black and white, and Mum never wanted colour, so it wasn’t until after she died that we in fact we had a colour television (…) “That was the Week that was”. That was a great programme. People used to stay in on a Saturday night to watch that, ‘cause it was a sort of satirical programme taking the lift out of everything that had happened during the week (…) We rented it in the first place, and er, we continued to rent (…) we bought a television, and had colour. That would have been… in the, in the 70’s really, yes, ’73.
M
1970s
I saw the first computer when I worked for Rank Xerox Data Systems back in the early 70s but they were in those days huge great things in air conditioned rooms um, not the little handheld things we have today. They were um enormous the very early computers.
Kathleen
1960s
…before that um it was public phones. You’d go to your red phone box with four pennies, big old ones and er and, and chat from there. So getting er the phone at home was a real novelty, yeah, we used it a lot (…) Well before we got a phone at home, um, I used to try and ring my mother every day. Er, which meant going out of the house and and up to Sudbury town station that I used to go, um, to ring her. And of course if you wanted to make an appointment for anything or enquire about anything you had to go to the public phone box as well.
Kathleen
1960s/1970s
Oh gosh yes yeah, yeah, everything had to be mended. You didn’t toss um cast it aside and buy a new one like they do in these days. Shoes were repaired and sheets were turned sides to middle and er collars were turned on shirts and um, everything that could be was repaired…
Kathleen
1960s/1970s
We had parties in the house of the old fashioned sort you know the party games and the jelly and ice cream sort of party.
Kathleen
1960s/1970s
One thing I didn’t think about was was the heating, you know, coal fires and such like which, um, was obviously quite a big part and you had to light a coal fire when you came in from work every day. And down where there is that there there’s a new estate being built just down the road at the bottom of Sudbury, that was a coal yard when er we moved over here. You bought your your five, your hundred weight bags of coal. Interviewer: Um and how when when did it change from coal to more electric?” Kathleen: Um… well we certainly had coal fires up until the late 70s, um, we had an open fire in the early years and then when we moved up to Eton Avenue we had um a glass fronted… what they used to call a Rayburn, um, which wasn’t exactly coal I think it was coke we burned in that, but it was solid fuel in the same thing applied.
Kathleen
1950s-1960s
Well, if you think right back, um, we kept the butter papers, and the sugar papers that things came in, so we recycled everything, in the post war years. And certainly I saved everything in the fifties, sixties, anything that could be reused. Then I think probably supermarkets changed things, you got lazier, and packaging wasn’t preserved, you know, you just chucked it.
Patricia
1950s
We did have, um, a vacuum cleaner, that was an old fashioned hoover, um, but we had coal fires, my father used to do those every morning, sweep up the ash, take the ash out into garden and use it on the, on the vegetable garden, um. I’m not really very aware of other electrical appliances, I mean, washing was once a week. Bathing was once a week actually, when the water was hot, um. And I was quite lucky because my room was a little warmer. If you had a cold winter, there’d be frost on the windows, um, and my room was probably a little bit warmer, didn’t get so much frost, you had lovely patterns in the frost on the window (laughs). No um electric heating of any kind, really, there was one, a one bar electric fire downstairs in the front room.
Patricia
1950s
First one is, um, a bar of green Fairy soap, it was used for most, er, laundry purposes.
Patricia
1950s
Liquid detergent came in I think probably about the late fifties, sixties, I really not sure of the date, but every household was, um, had delivered to them a little plastic container, holding fairy liquid detergent to use for your washing up. And, er, the same little Fairy chap on the front, which you see on the current bottles. And that was a great innovation (…) It’s quite a thick plastic bottle, um, unlike the current see-through ones … there were no plastic bags shopping (…) my mother used to have a lovely big basket which we used to take up to Wembley for the groceries um but anything that was packaged for you was in a paper bag, certainly no plastic at that stage … um, although we had um toilet roll, when I was at my grandmother’s there was only newspaper hanging in the outside toilet but at home we had Izal toilet paper that was a bit like transp… um oh what do you call it when you do transp… tracing paper, just like tracing paper um and soft toilet tissue came later on along with Kleenex tissues ….but that, that was not common in our childhood, in the 50s, because it was actually quite expensive when it came in (…) other laundry day things… did we mention before? Laundry day was Monday, um, all the washing was done then and it took pretty well most of the day in a house of, just with two children, and the bed linen would be hung out on the line to dry, and then ironed probably on Tuesday… the other things that went on the Ideal boiler racks were rings of apple… and pear, my mother used to preserve by drying and so the Idea, Ideal boiler was perfect for that. We’d have apple rings for later on in the year, and dried pear. And then, quite often too the Ideal boiler too was home to the chickens, because the eggs were put in the um, in boxes, to hatch out, and er so the Ideal boiler was heating the water for the laundry, drying the fruit, and getting the chickens hatched. All sorts of uses that had.
Patricia
1950s/1960s
My mother had a twin tub washing machine after her copper boiler, um, which you washed in one part of the machine and rinsed in the other, and it all had to be drained out into your sink, you had to have a hose into it. I think she had that by the time I was at college, so, late fifties early sixties, and I myself had an early Keymatic washing machine in the mid-sixties. I think we were probably about average in getting them, most people were getting machines like that. Refrigerators we’d had although my mother didn’t have a fridge when I was very young. And I had hers when I got married first in 1962, she had a new one and I had her old one, an old Electrox. So I think these sort of machines were just becoming available, and affordable in the sixties. Mmm.
Patricia
1950s
… you could put them in a saucer of water, and leave them on burning at night, my mother used to do it occasionally if we weren’t feeling well you wanted a bit of light in the room, we would have a night light put on, um to keep us company really. But, I can remember them also being used round the house when we had a power cuts, which were quite common in the fifties, and again in the seventies funnily enough, um there was a bad patch of the um supply of electricity, and we had quite a lot of power cuts.
Patricia
1960s
Yes, it was um, a great surprise, I didn’t expect it, and er, it gave me a lot of pleasure for probably only a few years really ‘cause things moved on to, cassettes came in and er, we all had the cassette recorder and little cassettes, and then later if you had a car, you know, you could play. I still have a car that plays cassettes (laughs) and they were much more convenient than records obviously, and tapes were quite cumbersome so, yes, that was a, a great delight. Interviewer: When did you get the tape recorder? Patricia: My 21st birthday (laughs).
Patricia
1960s
My parents moved up to the Sudbury Court Estate in 1961 and, I think we still had coal fires then, in Sudbury, um (…) it’s hard to remember. ‘Cause I know when we came up to north Wembley, er my father put in storage heaters. We didn’t have central heating there as such, they were heaters that you turned on. They were great big things that had bricks in that stored the heat and then you, and we’d use it later so you had to turn it on earlier for the heat to build up and we still had coal fires there (…) we had coal deliveries all the time when I was in Sudbury, pretty sure because they were coal fires, coke, coke for the Ideal boiler, occasionally wood, wood fire in the other two rooms.
Patricia
1960s
But it was so great having a washing machine, I don’t have to use my hands anymore (…) Oh, it was like my birthday! (Laughs) ‘Twas like my husband treat me to my birthday present! Yeah, yeah, it was good ‘cause the kids were small then an’, used to have a lot of washing and things like that, but it was good.
Norma
1950s
I lived downstairs with my mum and my dad, so we had to share one bedroom. I slept in my mum and dad’s bedroom til I was eight, um and upstairs was m my dad’s aunt and also my dad’s cousin and his wife and their young child, and they all shared the kitchen downstairs so… but it was, wasn’t unusual, um in those days. It was, it was a quite common thing to see, sort of families all living together…
Barbara
1950s
We didn’t have a refrigerator (…) We, we didn’t have um running hot water (…) we had an immersion heater in the airing cupboard which was up on the landing, so if you put the put the hot water, so people were then able to have a bath, basically, you know, um, which you only had certain days of the week, when it was your turn. So once a week, I would have a bath once a week, usually on a Friday I think, after last day of school, you know (…) she used to have to heat the iron on the stove, then, she had two so when one got cool she could replace it and use another iron. My friend’s mum, I remember, used to plug her iron in to the, to the light switch (laughs), which wasn’t the right thing to do… (laughs) dangerous! (…) not having a fridge, if, if you wanted something in the summer, like we, we used to quite like an ‘ice cream sundae’, but… which was lemonade, with a dollop of ice cream in the top. Used to be lovely. But, we had to go around the corner to the shop, which was, as I say, on the main road, about five minutes. Um, we’d have to buy a block of ice cream, because he had a freezer, a block of ice cream, which he’d wrap in newspaper, we’d rush home with it, because we couldn’t, we didn’t have a fridge to put in, we had to eat the whole lot because it would be melted (laughs). But that was one of our treats (…) We had a TV, like a lot of people, for the Coronation, the Queen’s Coronation in 1953. Not many people had televisions in our area anyway before then, and we wanted to watch the Coronation, so they had um… I think it was called ‘Radio Rentals’ in Wembley (…) the size of the television screen would have been about 12 inches, so it’d be about that big, but we thought it was fantastic. All in black and white, of course, um, and that’s what we did for the Coronation, that’s when we had our first television.
Barbara
1950s
Well I enjoyed the Saturday morning songs, yes, I did like to listen to it. Um, there was Sparky and his Magic Piano…
Barbara
1950s
Yes I did, when we had the radio, I’ve actually got a picture of, a photograph of me sitting by the radio, um, they used to have um, like children’s hour and they would have stories, there would be like stories for children.
Barbara
1950s
Well, there was a programme on a Sunday afternoon which was, which um, which was unusual, there, there weren’t, I mean television wasn’t on all day then I mean, it came on at, I think about around 6 o’clock usually and went off about 10 o’clock at the night. But I think on a Sunday afternoon, they had a children’s programme called ‘Muffin the Mule’ (…) It was a, it was a puppet, a string puppet, and the lady who talked to the puppet sat at the piano, the the puppet was, danced around on top of the piano, and her name was Annette Mills, and she was of the famous… John Mills’ family, he was a famous actor and there were lot of people, the Millses, around then. And she was er, she used to talk to it and she used to sing ‘Here comes Muffin, Muffin the Mule, dear old Muffin playing the fool’. Then it went on, I can’t remember the rest of the words but that was a regular song, and she just used to talk to it and it used to whisper and she used to listen, it used to whisper to her (laughs). Wooden, it was a wooden (…) well it was a, a mule, it was supposed to be like a mule but it was wooden and I think it was all jointed because it was like, you know, like a, like a proper string puppet, and I think it was, I think it was spotted, had spots on it. Just a little, wooden, mule, really.
Barbara
1950s
And he used to buy a comic for me, which was called ‘Girlfriend’, and that had stories about school child’, school girls and things, it was for girls, um, and he also used to buy the comic which I think was for him, called ‘The Eagle’, because that was more, it was comic strips, but it was more boys stuff and I think he used to like that. Um so that was every Friday on his way home from work, and a bag of sweets (…) It would be mixed sweets because you’d buy them loose so it’d be a variety, perhaps toffees, pear drops um, acid drops (…) I used to have, oh I think also Beano was around then, the comic Beano, and that had The Bash Street Kids in there, which was popular (…) Oh I used to love it, yeah. Every Friday it used to be a treat. (…) Oh goodness me, it was in old money of course. Probably, let me think, no more than probably about 6 pence, which would be two-and-a-half p.
Barbara
1960s
We had open fires (…) I remember the smogs, caused by the smoke from it, terrible, awful, you literally could not see your hand in front of your face (…) my friend had a car, and she lived in Wembley so she gave me a lift, but I was in a passenger sheet, seat and I had to keep the door open to see where the kerb was because it was, it was really dreadful so that was open fires then…
Barbara
1950s
We called him the Corona man, he came round every week and sold um fizzy drinks like Tizer, orangeade, lemonade, cream soda, to name but a few, um, dandylockn, dandylockn, dandy, dandy… dandelion and burdock! (…) and of course, we used to have the rag’n’bone man. He’d come round with his cart and his horse, and shout out “rag’n’bone, rag’n’bone!” and people would go out with whatever they had, if they had anything, and if you gave him quite a lot, um, and you were a child, you took it took it out, and he’d give you a gold fish in a bowl, as a gift. He used to carry them, these gold fish in bowls, he used to hand them out! (laughs)
Barbara
1960s/1970s
We had a, a record player, we used to listen to, you know you used to listen to the records, and radios, of course (…) then of course er we had not the CD players, now, we used to have um, tape, cassette tapes, we used to have a cassette player, so then we used to get the cassettes, maybe my husband would buy them in town…
Viv
1960s
We didn’t have a phone, a telephone when we were first married, when we lived away, we didn’t have that facility, um, and when er we moved into Sudbury Avenue, we had what was called a shared line, so ourselves and the lady lived next door had a shared line. So you could pick the phone and somebody would be on the phone and she’d say ‘Excuse me, I’m trying to hold a conversation’, ‘Oh, sorry!’, put the phone down.
Barbara
1960s/1970s
People, everybody bought a newspaper in those days, you know, so your news would come from that, you wouldn’t go to the computer and switch on and get the latest news, but you’d, you would buy a newspaper.
Barbara
School life
Whilst some of our interviewees remember the strictness of their school days and having to walk across the playground to outside toilets, others remember the joy of foraging in farm ruin for scraps to feed the school guinea pigs!
1960s
In the 1960s we, we had a new school built at Sudbury Hill which was also a Catholic school which was associated with our church and that was quite exciting and I went there in 1965 (…) I know one of the excitements I had, um, was watching television at school and this um television on stilts was wheeled around when we had um children’s programmes on in the morning. That was one thing. And another thing was, er, we had some guinea pigs were in a cage, and they had to be fed.
Francis
1960s
Myself and one of my friends were chosen to go and help this lady er collect the guinea pig fruit, food which meant going outside of the boundaries of the school um towards the foot of Harrow on the Hill and there were some old farm ruins and we were collecting the food but it was just so exciting getting lost amongst these remnants of farm buildings, which is now where the Clementine Church Hill School is, and um also it was overlooked in those days by a convent, which rang out um two or three times a day the Angelus and um so we had to stop for that at school.
Francis
1970s
Interviewer: And…how did, did you feel that um the way your children were able to go to school in Sudbury was different to how you went to school? Kathleen: Er they had more opportunity, and they had more space. St. George’s has got lots of green space around it and it’s a modern school newly built of course, whereas the old school I went to was, um, very restricted and surrounded by houses. Little bit of hard playground, very old building no facilities. The toilets were across the playground outdoors so um, they had obviously much better facilities and opportunities.
Kathleen
1950s
Oh we’d have separate playgrounds, (laughs), the boys’ playground and the girls’ playground, yes.
Barbara
1950s
It was much stricter when I was at school. Much stricter. We had a lot of respect for our teachers, um, I’d go as far as to say we were quite scared of some of them, really, they were strict and you sat… we had, I remember have being in a class of 45 children and we all sat behind a desk, in rows, and the teacher would be at front of the, um, the classroom, and you wouldn’t hear a sound (…) you learnt your times tables, we all left school knowing our time tables up to twelve, times tables, all of them off by heart, um, it was important, um, and if you left school and you got a job in a shop, you had to work the change out yourself, the machine didn’t tell you. You had to think.
Barbara
1960s
I was originally in Perrin Road school (…) it was still very much a school um which was aligned to Anglicanism, the Church of England. So as a few Catholics as we were there we weren’t allowed or we didn’t go to the same, um, hall meetings um, as er the rest of them, we had our own special room for just us Catholics. We were separated out…
Francis
Clothes
This period enjoyed some fantastic fashion, from the thin ties and stiff petticoats of the 1950s, through the pinstripe suits and Mary Quant skirts of the 1960s to the changing traditions of the 1970s, when it finally became acceptable for a woman to wear trousers to work.
1960s
My father went to and from work in the early 1960s wear, wearing a bowler hat and a pinstripe suit and that was normal for a printer’s representative, and a rolled umbrella.
Francis
1960s
Everyone wanted to be made up like Mary Quant, everyone wanted to have Mary Quant um clothes (…) That Mary Quant look was very short bobbed hair, which flicked round onto your face, very heavily made up eyes, a natty little top which only came to your waist and then a very short skirt (…) that would be pleated or black or whatever…
Shirley
1950s
It was called the Kannibal Pot and it had a juke box, which is what we all wanted ‘cause it was the start of rock ‘n roll, really, era. Um, in fact outside the Swan pub my friend and I used to go down and we used to meet some Teddy Boys there, with their smart suits with the velvet collars, and their drainpipe trousers, and their thick-soled shoes and they, and string ties, and we thought, and their hair was in a big quiff, loads of Brylcreem on it to make it stand up and back then we used to call it a da… a duck’s something or other (laughs)…
Barbara
1950s
…and rock ‘n roll, and dancing. I used to have um, I used to wear um, a very full skirt with petticoats underneath, which were net, and had about six of these, so the skirt would stand out like this, so when you, if you danced, if you jived um, you’d turn so that your skirt’d come up and you’d wear very thick belt, wide belt and very often us girls wore our cardigans, but buttoned up down the back, and that was sort of our, our fashion then.
Barbara
1960s
I was pushing the pram and I’d made myself a shift. Shifts were absolutely the thing. And my mother came to stay, and she looked at me walking up the road and she said “Shirley Dodd – which was my name before I was married – I can see your knickers when you’re bending over pushing that pram!” (laughs) So that’s how short our skirts were in those days. You know youngsters now think they’ve got the prerogative on shorts skirts…
Shirley
1950s
Whereas locally here, we would attend, um, tea dances at Wembley Town Hall, which is now a school. And the Majestic ballroom, that was a cinema at the top of Wembley, and they had regular dances that we used to go to, but they were much more low-key, you know, you didn’t have to dress quite so much. A smart skirt and a pretty top, an’ the chaps had to have a tie and a jacket, but…no the chaps would be in smart jackets and trousers, and a tie, always a tie, um. I think that was a time when the, the different knots that you did in your tie were quite significant, and a lot of people followed the um pre-war Windsor knot. The Duke of Windsor was a very popular character in pre-war times and he used to tie his tie in a particular knot and some of our chaps liked to do that too. And then they had the era of very thin ties, just a sort of strip, um but they all wore a tie for the dances. And we girls had full skirts, taffeta skirts, with um sugared petticoats underneath. You could get net petticoats, that we’d starch up with sugar, it was cheaper to do it with sugar water (laughs), so you had a nice full skirt and a top, flat shoes probably. Some people probably wore little kitten heels, um, fashion… we made a lot of our own clothes, my friend Janet and I.
Patricia
1950s
My mother had a sewing machine, another electrical appliance that I’d forgotten about, um, and of course my father being in the upholstery trade, there was a lot of sewing and making and things at home. He upholstered all our own furniture, mm, loose covers and he, he touched on dress-making as well, and my mother had always dress-made, so, she taught me, and again this friend, I started school with her at six, and we are still friends now. She and I made our own clothes, swapped patterns, learnt to cook together.
Patricia
1960s/1970s
I do remember very clearly my first teaching post, um, I had to go into morning assembly in a skirt and, you know, traditional women’s wear, and tights, tights had just come in, as opposed to stockings, and suspender belts, um. And then I had to go and change into my games outfit to go and teach (…) trousers were really not acceptable until the end of the seventies, very traditional, um, and then of course a lot of young people came in and said, ‘well this just isn’t on’, you know, much more practical. But women generally in my, again, in my circle were in skirts right up until that time. Just not seen to be in trousers.
Patricia
Faith
Although our interviewees represent a range of faiths, they all have one key thing in common: they have very much enjoyed the social aspects that worship in Sudbury offered them, from parades and festivals, to youth club outings and the forming of new friendships.
1970s
We also had great festivals. Every, probably every 2 years we ran an arts festival in the whole circuit. They always took place here at the Sudbury Church, because it was the biggest church in the area. And we’d have singing competitions, duets for men and women, choir competitions, verse speaking, but most of all arts and crafts, you’d have wonderful needle craft. And um, always an outside adjudicator to come and award the prizes. So it was a, you know, a really big event. And also we had a really big youth organisation called MAYC, which was Methodist Association of Youth Clubs. And um, every year in the Albert Hall in May, there was a huge rally called MAYC weekend, and um we’d do all sorts of mad things. So clubs from all over the place earlier in the year would submit a script of their idea, and if your idea was chosen you would be expected as a group of churches to produce it, get it together and take it up to the Albert Hall. So we were linked with Harrow. I did the scripting and the producing and my friend Eileen Goddard, who was chairman of MAYC for the area, she’d do all the admin. So we’d off we’d go in a huge lorry with people from this church and Park Lane, doing some sort of amazing production in the Albert Hall. And one year, it was the 250 celebration of John Wesley, so we did ‘To John Wesley People Matter’ and did it in dress of the period 1870-80 and um it was just the year the Queen opened the façade of Wesley’s chapel, in um, in up in town, near er, Moorgate. And um so our people had built a huge 40 foot high frontage of Wesley’s Chapel, exactly a replica of what was there. And um, they’d slotted it together.
Shirley
1950s
St George’s Church, Catholic Church in Sudbury, up the Harrow Road here, um, was where I was baptised in 1955, by the priest who was the priest who founded that church (…) yes he was a quite a character um, wandering around with his black cat. Er, quite an unusual figure really.
Francis
1950s
Talking about St Cuthbert’s Church: The hall, I suppose it was built in the 50s (…) there was a big fundraising campaign round the parish to build the church, and we all put our, we put our, our pennies – we had penny bricks, I think to um, we were all given a sort of church bit of paper all made out into bricks and every penny you put in was signed off. And eventually the church was built (…) I had gone abroad to teach. When I came back, I found this church had been built, and I looked at it and I thought ‘Oh, how awful!’ It looks like a cinema! (laughs) It, it was all blue and gold, and lights. It wasn’t (laughs) it wasn’t to my mind like a church.
M
1950s
I, I was a member of the church here, er for many years, and my, my mother was, my father didn’t come to church, um. And we used to attend all the activities. Youth club was a big thing, we had a, a little hut around the back here, where we had a wonderful man called Mr Briant who used to lead the youth club activities, and we had talks and dance lessons, ballroom dancing, um and we did one or two outings and coaches, to Windsor and places. He was a fantastic chap, very tolerant (laughs) (…) Sudbury Methodist (…) you did get the social activities. So, if you went to Sunday School in Church you were already meeting people and then you joined the Youth Club or the Guides or the Brownies or whatnot, um so you were meeting people and as I say, there weren’t really the sports facilities, so… so I think the church was a major centre for social activity.
Patricia
Further afield
Days out at the seaside and the excitement of a trip into central London were common amongst our interviewees. Travel abroad was just becoming a possibility, involving the new and exciting adventure of caravans, tents and map reading for some of our Sudbury residents!
1960s/1970s
People were beginning to have foreign holidays. Thomas Cook was just beginning to develop, we had a Thomas Cooks in Sudbury and a Thomas Cook in Wembley and people could go and book up reasonable holidays. Cheap flights came in. And er people were tasting for the first time French food and um Italian food, and beginning to make spaghetti and pasta dishes for themselves, so that was very much of the period. And of course we had Mary Quant in the fashion and the Beatles, coming in while I was in Sudbury…
Shirley
1970s
By then we’d bought a caravanette and we were going on holidays to France. So we were beginning to spread our wings a little bit. And we bought a tent for Michael and a tent for Katie so that when we got to the campsite we could put their little tents up, and they slept in there, and of course we slept in the caravanette. It was just a Volkswagen where the roof went up, we had a little fridge in and so on…
Shirley
1960s
Tupperware every now and again, took us out for a Managers meeting, we’d have a very swanky weekend up in town, not the husbands, just the, the girls. And, um, I remember going to ‘Talk of the Town’ and we sat right at the front of the stage where Judy Garland made her last appearance and, um, we had very memorable weekends about once a year. We’d stay at the Dorchester, and the London Garden Hotel, and all these big hotels, the Savoy we stayed at and… so that would be very exciting…
Shirley
1950s
I began my teaching career in a school in King’s Cross (coughs). An’ the staffroom looked down over St Pancras coal yard, where they had (coughs)..excuse me.. they had the horses, and they would be rolling the barrels onto the drays, and the horses would be carrying them off. It was quite a sight. You’d go up there at lunchtime and watch all this activity, and the railway lines in between. It’s all gone, of course, it’s um, now the British Library (laughs) (…) I would go from Sudbury Town to Sloane Square, on the train, on the Piccadilly Line.
M
1950s
And er we did go abroad when we were, I was probably sixteen, my brother, er twelve. And I’d got some language skills by then, so just went, dad booked the ferry, and we just stopped at various places, and my job was to ask if they’d got rooms for the night, and my brother’s job, he was a brilliant map reader, so he used to read the maps! But um I don’t think that was typical of Sudbury residents. I think we were quite um, quite adventurous really as a family then, so, talking about the late fifties, so, when Sudbury was really quite different.
Patricia
1960s/1970s
… The other day my son was saying ‘You know?’ – sure he was talking to his friends – because I have them over sometimes for lunch or things like that and he said ‘I think I know every seaside in England ‘cause mum used to do that with me, every weekend we go to some seaside in the summer’ (…) I think it was Margate when I went for the first time…
Norma
Transport
Transport is another area that has seen radical change. Trolleybuses had both their heyday and their final usage during this time period, the bus conductors that were such a common sight for our interviewees are no more, and it’s truly hard to imagine a time when you could be the first people in your neighbourhood to ever own a car!
1950s/1960s
My father worked in London as a printer’s representative and used to commute up on the um train, um, and then we used to wait for him to come back from home, in the early days he used to walk across the fields, across from er er from Sudbury and Harrow Road station um via Fale, Vale Farm um and then we used to run across the fields to meet him.
Francis
1960s
People wait for people to get off the open back of the routemaster bus and then you’d get on and go upstairs or downstairs and very often you’d have a, a jovial bus conductor who would have his own or her own style of doing things. Um, one thing I do remember was one old character going round upstairs on the bus um collecting the fares and saying ‘money for the poor, money for the poor’ er, and then when he wanted to attract the driver’s attention to carry on from, from the stop there was no nothing to, um no bell, so he would just get a coin and rap it on the er, er front of the front deck of the, the bus so the driver could hear this coin (laughs).
Francis
1960s
I got to know some people from the, when I was to travel into town, I got to know people on the train, and some mornings, we’d wave, I’d wave to them from my bedroom window as the train was going past. You know, it was really that sort of area.
Viv
1960s/1970s
So I would say we were one of the first people to have a car in that that area. We then moved up to Elms Court um and I think yes we were almost one of the first to have a car up there as well. Now you can’t get into the road for cars.
Kathleen
1950s/1960s
But it very easy to jump on the bus, and the trolley buses came up here to Sudbury (…) Um, it was an electrical vehicle, probably a little larger than the current red buses, with two antenna on the top, which attached to wires that had been um, connected to poles all the way round the street and there was a terminus here, so at the roundabout down the road here at Sudbury, the trolley buses would turn round and go back to… um, 662 the number was, and I can’t think where the destination, but it was Sudbury, to somewhere (laughs) and trolley buses in most um urban areas, actually (…) I can remember jumping on, I think we went to somewhere like, we must have changed several times, but we got all the way over to Clapham, using trolley-buses and buses, and the trolley-buses you really had to hang on because being electric, as soon as you were on, they put them into gear and shot off, very quick. Yes, it was quite a good form of transport.
Patricia
