Back In My Day: How much did things cost back in another decade ?

luxor4t

In 1967 when we moved up the hill, the corner shop sold Mars bars for 7d and a bar of Cadbury's chocolate was 6d. (Needless to say, the bars were a very different size to today's!)

6d is 2.5p

monnagran

The examples from 1958 seem a bit odd to me. I started teaching in 1959 and for the first year I was receiving almost exactly £30 a month and £29 something if it was a 5 week month, an extra NI contribution accounting for the difference. Women teachers had not then caught up with the men's salaries but that happened soon after. I remember being quite annoyed because friends who were working in offices were earning as much, if not more, than me and had been doing so for at least 5 or 6 years while I had spent that time studying. Still, I wasn't in it for the money.

I certainly wasn't in the housing market then but in 1958 my parents bought a large 4 bedroomed house with 3/4 acre garden and orchard in the south of England for £3,000.
I do remember being appalled when a friend got married in 1963 and paid £2,000 for a tiny 2 up, 2 down house with a pocket handkerchief back garden and no front garden at at all.

I also recall that when I started driving in 1962 petrol was 3/8d a gallon which these days would work out at about 5p a litre.

It all sounds horrific but I'm still far better off now than I was then.

Fascinating stuff.

x

ollybass

In 1958 prices were in £s, shillings and pence - £2 5s 6d etc. Small items less than a pound were priced like 2/6d or 2 shillings and six pence.
The price of £0.13 is an incorrect decimal figure whereas decimal currency didn't start until 13 years later in 1971. Even 1/3d (one shilling and threepence) seems much too expensive for milk in 1958.
My figures for Retail Price Index says that 1/3d in 1958 is about £1.35 is todays money which is still much too dear for a pint of milk.

Many people make the mistake of converting pre decimal prices into decimal ... eg. "that Dinky toy cost 2/9d in 1958 which is 14p " ... NO IT ISN'T .... that 2/9d is over £3 today.
I haven't visited the website but it seems that someone has got faulty maths and conversion ratios.

eastcott5

Some things are much cheaper today when compared annual salary. When we first got married - 1969 - I earned £1200 a year as an industrial science lab rat and my husband £999 as a fledgling computer programmer - yes I earned more than him and our first purchase was a Golden panoramic sewing machine that cost £100 -nearly 1/10 of my salary. We paid a deposit and then 10£ a month on HP - guaranteed by a faithful Aunt. No credit cards then. I still have it after 2 motor rewinds and a new foot -and lots of sewing, but even the more expensive ones today don't cost 1/10 of the average salary. Bread - as a child I remember going to van to bread for 6d farthing - 1950s' .

ollybass

teamwork wrote: »

I have documents showing my grandfather bought a 4-bed house in Battersea, London for £630 in 1969. That's about £1500 in new pounds that were used from 1971. In 1971, I also have payslips of a bookkeeper who was earning £3500 p.a. which means a house could be bought for about a third of a gross annual salary. He never did any repairs on the place and let it decay until it was sold in much worse condition (subsiding and infested with rats) for £610,000 in the year 2010!

1971 is also the year that the UK left the peg to the gold standard, which allowed the Bank of England to print unlimited quantities of money (what they call QE). Before that date, house prices went up very gently, and after that date they began to shoot up until we have today's inequality, where people who own property are far richer, and continually enriched, than those who rent. I have a graph that Moneyweek sent out showing this but I'm not sure how to post it.

Nothing else has appreciated as quick as house prices, because as the currency was devalued, all the new money was funneled into mortgage lending.

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4-bed house in London for £630 in 1969 - NEVER - 3 bed semi dormer bungalow in Yorkshire was £3000 ??
Buying a house for a THIRD of salary - NEVER
££s didn't change in value in 1971 - only the pennies did - from 240d to 100P. How did £630 change to £1500 in just 2 years ?
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tooldle

My parents bougt there first house in 1963 for £3000, put down one third as deposit, and the rest in mortgage.
Seem to remember my grandfather mentioning a cost of around £500 for his house, which was bought in the late 20's as a new build.

Katiehound

teamwork wrote: »

I have documents showing my grandfather bought a 4-bed house in Battersea, London for £630 in 1969. .

Sorry, I'm pretty sure there is a zero missing there!

I bought a terraced house in 1975 , it was £5000- that in a low priced part of the country. London prices have always been considerably higher.... certainly not lower.

dekaspace

From a young un here I remember when I left home in late 1999 at the tail end of the bean wars paying like 1p for a tin of beans and 5p at most places and thinking 9p tins of beans were expensive (to be fair I had about £2 a week after rent was paid to buy food crazy to think that was 1999 just as parents were on benefits and bursary was low)

I remember paying about 6p for big bags of flour, about 9-19p for value bread, 3p for tins of peaches, 40-50p for the value pizzas, 25p for value pasties and pies, 15p for rich tea biscuits, 30p for a large bag of porridge oats. 10p for bag of spaghetti.

Milk if I remember was more expensive than it was now hence I never really got it or got powdered milk and watered it down, was foul but did the job.

I remember working in early 2001 aged 18 for something like £2.60 a hour in my first permanent job and paying about £80 a week in tax due to messed up admin by employer.

Fitzmichael

In 1956, on leaving school after O level, I got an office junior job with a shipping company. I was paid £2/10s (£2½) plus 5 luncheon vouchers each worth 2/6d (12½p), which in several small 'business' restaurants (not 'cafes') would buy a plain but waitress-served 3 course lunch or main+dessert+tea/juice.

[Deleted User]

Our first house bought in November 1970 in Dartford (had to move from Croydon as the houses were too expensive ) cost £6.850 for a three bedroomed Victorian EOT.It had sash widows which rattled like blazes in the wind and no central heating.An old kitchen range which if you lit it rattled the whole house, and was decidedly dangerous.
It was soo in need of a lot of updating there were still working gas mantles in the dining room !

When we bought it we looked at it on the Friday and the chap said if you don't buy it today it will be £7.200 on Monday !!.It was a real money pit and when we moved in Jan 1971 it was so cold that we had ice on the inside of the windows and one night My OH and I and the two children 4 & 2 slept in the sitting room on the sofa all together to keep warm We lived there until 1974 when we sold it for £10.900 and moved to a more modern house with CH and d/glazing

In 1946 my late Dad bought a house in Blackheath London for £1200.00 it had 13 rooms and a huge garden It was an old Edwardian detached house.Grade 11 listed now
After living in the eastend it seemed like the countryside.My Mum hated the place as it was too large and freezing in the winter.Fuel costs were horrendous, and we stayed there until 1957 then moved to a smaller more modern house with only three bedrooms but a lot warmer.Costs are relative to the times

In 1971 when we bought our first house my OH's take home pay was £112 per month and our mortgage was £60.00, but we had a free phone as it was part of his job as he was on-call and he had a company car with free fuel.It was still tight and I went back to work and my oldest friend whom I still am in touch with looked after the girls along with her two children.She lived 6 houses down the road.
She used to work part-time nights at the local Dartford hospital and I would help with her two until her OH got home from work.Life was much about the same for all of the young Mums in the road and we would share clothes as our kids grew out of them.No designer stuff back then:) Knitted cardi's and jumpers did the rounds of most of the children in the road at some point:) I knew we were all in the same boat and there was a great deal more community sprit amongst people back then There were 60 houses in our road and I knew the names of everyone in the road and their children .

I have lived in my existing house since 1995, and know the names of perhaps half a dozen neighbours on a nodding good morning basis.Very few young children in the road though, and most people are out to work all day.Different times really, and probably different values.

I certainly wouldn't want to go back to the 1970s again with the three day week and the lights going out all the time.Food prices did rocket quite a bit after decimilisation, and there seemed to be lots of shortages of many things due to strikes etc.But then I can remember the austerity of the post war 1950s so I think most folk had got used to shortages and high prices for a lot of things.Today some things seem exhorbitant to me newspapers,stamps lamb,and beef but its a case of 'you pays your money and you takes your pick'
I rarely post a letter and haven't bought a newspaper since 2003, the internet saves me a fortune meat has become a treat, especially lamb chops but I still treat myself now and again and I have at least two to three meat free meals a week anyway so its not a problem.Today's food in the shops is far more adventurous than it was back then, and herbs and spices can make even the boring meal tasty.Nope I am quite happy with the 21st century I am warm, fed, and my windows certainly don't rattle anymore :):)

JackieO