Old Finances (back in the day)

Blackhill

Just read all the thread (can't sleep!) brings back so many memories. Just last week took a trip down memory lane and bought OH a tin of new marketed 'Kramola Foam' (Cremola Foam) available from sweetie shops (a one off treat at £3.50 a tin!!!!) Our teenagers were not impressed, told them too used to fizzy drinks and didn't know what a treat was anymore.

Eldest son(20) and his cousin were having a moan about the pay they get in their summer jobs (both at uni) and both were amazed that my starting pay at 19 leaving college was £30 per week, giving £15 to my mum towards my keep, £8 a week for my weekly bus ticket to work (lived in rural area) then the rest left for myself to buy clothes, nites out, save etc. They decided that they perhaps aren't too badly off!!

Red_Doe

I`m a child of the early sixties, so most of my nostalgia goes back beyond the eighties, if that makes any sense.
I remember old money. And going to the shop to buy a loaf of bread for ninepence, and a Mars bar, which was bigger than now, for sixpence.
We had, of course, no central heating, like so many others. Flooring was the now fashionable bare sanded wooden boards or lino with a square of carpet in the middle. Heating was coal on the open range (no cowboys, it was a vast cast iron affair that covered one wall, with bread ovens etc and I`d kill for it nowadays!) and paraffin heaters in the other rooms, one of which I`ve just bought since I can`t afford...you`ve guessed it!..central heating.
We didn`t get an indoor loo til the late seventies so had to go to the `shunkie` which was an outhouse in the field next to the house (croft house) so you usually had to pass through a small herd of highland coos to get there. Loo paper was that awful scratchy Jeyes stuff.
Dad worked the croft but also, because crofting doesn`t pay a decent living, he worked part time in a small privately owned coal mine. When the miners strikes came along he was out with so many of them, and we went genuinely hungry apart from what food he could poach and what little mum could buy from working as a cleaner at the school. Things were so bad during the strikes, people were stealing from their own...clothes from clothes lines, veg from gardens, chickens and even sheep from the local crofters.
In fact it strikes me (no pun intended) that we are returning to those times...
My first job was as an office clerkess (that`s what I was called ) and paid nine pounds a week, five of which I gave to my dad (mum having died by then) for `keep`, the rest which had to pay my transport to and from work, and food. A boy which had a similar job got almost twice the pay. But I was told I couldn`t complain and wasn`t allowed to join a union about it! Dress code was in order and I had to work in a skirt, blouse, and heels and makeup. The boss made a habit of pinching the girls` bums anytime we were daft enough to get near him, and often took liquid lunches, got tiddly and chased us round the office desks! Now, he`d be hauled to court but back then we just laughed it off and kept out of his reach. I think folks were generally tougher then and had more perspective and common sense.
I remember when decimalisation came in, and how the older folks complained because they knew we were being conned and money had devalued overnight.
To be honest, I`d give much to go back to those days, and nope, that isn`t me wearing rosy tinted specs. Even financially, life seemed simpler then...fewer choices to be sure but is that a bad thing?

GreyQueen

seraphina wrote: »

It was New Labour that introduced tuition fees, not the Tories.

I wasn't talking about the tuition fees, I was talking about student loans, which predated the tuition fees by several years.

The Student Loan Company was founded to serve from the academic year 1990-1991 and replaced the statutory duty on local education authorites enshrined in the Education Act 1962 to provide maintenance grants for full time students with low interest loans for living costs. Since this predates the New Labour government by several years, I am right.

Since tuition fees were introduced by the New Labour government for academic 1998-1999, you are also right, but we are not referring to the same thing.:rotfl:

I can remember the late 1980s era very well, and Kenneth Baker was Education Secretary and his daughter, Sophia Baker, was a student in the same place as me, albeit studying a different subject. I didn't know her then and I don't know her now but a girl on my course used to share a flat with her and was livid when she discovered who her Dad was. SB kept that very quiet, as you can imagine.

I can recall the surreal experience of seeing Sophia leaning against a wall in the college cafe side-by-side with a satirical poster of her Dad. It was a cartoon of a cowboy with a drawn body and a blown-up photocopy of his face and was captioned "The Loans Danger Rides Again!"

I've marched in the streets to try to prevent student loans and am sooooo p*ssed off that all we did back in the eighties to try to preserve things for the student generations coming up behind us didn't succeed. Mind you, the anti-apartheid and anti-Poll Tax movements which I was heavily-involved with seem to have worked out tolerably well; when the Poll Tax was first introduced I was in Scotland and we were expected to pay it as students, no council tax exemption certificates for us.

Love and peas GQ x

sandraroffey

thirty years ago i was 33 and we had just bought a big house out in the country, (moved away from Luton which at that time was a dreadful place to live). it was a HUGE house that had four bedrooms and an annexe, accessible through from the main house, that had 2 bedrooms. massive place. cost £17,500. can you believe it?? we had to give the broker a £50 backhander to 'arrange' a mortgage for us because to get a mortgage for £15,000 on my (then) husbands pay was almost impossible. repayments were something like £350 a month. things weren't so cheap then because folk earnt a lot less although i do believe that you got more for your money. a favourite meal then was pork strips that we grilled with hoi sin sauce on them and i could buy ten porks strips, quite large ones, for less than a pound. the rates were generally around £25 a month. and the bin men took everything!!!! i remember the absolute horror at one time, probably around 32 years ago that a phone bill we had came in £32!!!!! normal phone bills were around £10-15.

before we moved to there, i was working in luton part time. did 9-3, 5 days a week in an office. it was just me so i did everything and got the grand sum of £15 a week.

we didnt have a car, or any luxuries. we went on holiday if my parents took me and the kids. wasnt a happy time for me im afraid. much happier now.

i do remember though, when i was still at school (im 63 now) and realise just how hard it must have been for my mum, making money stretch and often going without herself - 'i had a big snack earlier so i will have a sandwich later'. as kids, you dont question that, do you??. i used to get one new dress a year, for when we went on holiday. the week in a caravan is something that was never missed. looking back, i think my dad was very tight with the money he handed over for the housekeeping. my mum had to pay all the bills and everything out of that. the rest was his. although he did pay for the holiday. as i said before. much happier now.

butterflylady131

We had bathnight too, Wednesday and Sunday. We must have been small because I remember all 4 of us bathing together !!!!
And we used to go round to my "little" grandma's for tea (was never dinner) on a Sunday, and always having Salmon, and not to complain, because Salmon was expensive! And then watching "Songs Of Praise" or "Cathphrase" on her black and white portable telly.
Ah good times!

ani_26

jackieb wrote: »

My dad had an 8 track player in our car. He only had a few tapes - Elvis, Charlie Pride, Sydney Devne and Jim Reeves are the ones I remember. I thought it was so cool being able just to press a button and get the song you wanted without having to rewind or fast forward.

I still love Jim Reeves to this day. What a voice!

This does bring back memories. Jim Reeves was always on the radio at sunday lunchtimes.

As for Angel delight, not a patch on Instant Whip. I seem to remember some kind of butterscotch flavour? Yum.

In fact, whatever happened to butterscotch? You used to be able to buy butterscotch fruit gums.

taplady

ah yes - I remember well the public information films:) plus was anyone else in The Tufty Club?:o:D

Justamum

drusilla wrote: »

Asking who wanted the skin off the custard.

Yuck. I remember that awful stuff. We had to queue up to get our dinner, and the custard was always in huge metal bowls. The dinner ladies would stir the skin to the bottom of the bowl, and you could always guarantee that the person in front of me would ask for skin, and the dinner lady would fish out something that looked like you could make a pair of shoes out of:eek:

3v3

taplady wrote: »

ah yes - I remember well the public information films:) plus was anyone else in The Tufty Club?:o:D

Did you have the badge, hankerchief (imagine giving out hankies these days :rotfl:) and the pen?

Ida_Notion

Justamum wrote: »

Yuck. I remember that awful stuff. We had to queue up to get our dinner, and the custard was always in huge metal bowls. The dinner ladies would stir the skin to the bottom of the bowl, and you could always guarantee that the person in front of me would ask for skin, and the dinner lady would fish out something that looked like you could make a pair of shoes out of:eek:

My favourite was always the Spam fritters. People either seemed to really like them or really detest them. I tried to make some once but as usual, it didn't work out (don't ask ) so I bought some last year when they were Yellow Stickered in Asda and they did nothing for me at all. What sticks in my mind (and probably stuck in my throat too!) was the rock hard school shortbread we had for pudding. Tables were only set with a knife, fork and spoon - a Black and Decker was not made available and so you had to use brute force to break it. Consequently there were so many chips of custard-topped concrete pudding flying around that these days the kids would probably be made to wear safety goggles.

I did get to like school meals a lot after a period we went through where we had 'too much' money to qualify for free school meals, but couldn't afford to pay for them. Heinz Sandwich Spread must have been pretty new at the time, and I think I'd made the classic mistake of saying that I liked it. It wasn't bad, but I certainly didn't want it every day, and definitely not after the warmer weather had kicked in. Even after all these years my imagination can still conjure up the smell of warm orange squash that's been enclosed in a lidded plastic beaker all morning, and the feel of a warm and flattened Sandwich Spread sandwich that looks about as appetising as the cling film it's wrapped in. I don't think I ever complained about another school dinner again