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Friday 27 July 2018


Web Page No 2496

28th July 2018

1st Picture. Sides to Middle

2nd Picture. Darning a Heel
 3rd Picture. Brooke Bond Tea





4th Picture. Ostermilk Tin


Make Do and Mend

The phrase ‘sides to middle’ crept into my brain the other day and this set me off to thinking about when we were kids how often our parents, especially our mothers, had to get the sewing box, or the tool box, out to undertake every day running repairs.

Most of the work seemed to be on the mothers as they attempted to maintain standards at home. The sides to middle phrase referred to sheets because as they started to became thin and they wore out more in the middle than along the edges. During the war, housewives would cut threadbare sheets down the middle, turn them over, then sew them back together and this accepted practice carried on well into the 1950s and later, effectively almost doubling the life of a sheet. Possibly the introduction of nylon sheets rang this practices death knell.

Something else that has disappeared since the introduction of nylon is the darning of socks. The sewing technique for repairing holes or worn areas using needle and darning wool was special and it was often done by hand, but it is also possible to darn with a sewing machine if you had one. The essentials for sock darning were large darning needle, woollen thread to darn with, a thimble to protect your fingers and a wooden mushroom to place inside the sock so as to have something to darn against.

What else? Elbow patches on jackets. Elbow patches were common in smart society in the early 20th century, but before that working people wore clothing until they had holes in them and then the lady of the house patched those holes, usually with off cuts of leather making it possible to wear those clothes for many years to come. I can remember my mother and grandmother both being busily engaged in sewing on patches. The other form of patches were to line the edge of the cuffs when they became worn, again leather off cuts came to the rescue.

Turning collars so the worn bit was sewn inside was another money saving plan, as was turning cuffs, especially after the war when materials were in very short supply.

I have spoken before of home shoe repairs, I still have my father’s last! In the past I have also spoken of handmade rugs or mats and the products of the Reddicut Wool Company.

Nothing was wasted, if our groceries were delivered by Mr Parry from Farlington in an old orange box that box was grabbed, chopped up and used for fire wood. Old stockings were washed and sewn into long sausages as door draught excluders or retained by father to sieve his paint through when it got a skin on it.

Strange things come to mind, I remember my grandmother knitting dish cloths on very large needles, also my mother opening up the bottom of a packet of loose tea because there was always a little left in the folds in the bottom. Probably enough for just one cup of tea! These were the green packets of Brooke Bond with the orange label across it on which was a savings stamp. I never did find out what my mother did with those stamps apart from stick them on a card!

The ends of toilet soap bars were saved up and then placed into a special little wire container to help with the wash here again I never did understand how a Blue Bag made things whiter!
We had a school uniform that was just for school. When we arrived home at the end of the day it was straight into the bedroom and change out of the uniform, to keep it looking nice, and into play clothes. Then we were set for the evening.

There were no such things as plastic containers and most families kept things like biscuit tins as sewing or button boxes, (my son still has my mother’s button box it is a round Sharps Toffee tin with kittens on it). My father was the master in retaining tins. He had two rather dilapidated shed which were always in a muddle but the one thing that you could always guarantee to find in them were piles stacks of Ostermilk tins all with nuts, bolts, screws, washers, hinges and all sorts of ‘Useful’ items. He must have had Portsmouth’s biggest collection of these tins, I wish I had them now, some are quite valuable.

Hope I have stirred a few memories.

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Yours

Peter

gsseditor@gmail.com

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On this day 28th July 1960-1965.
On 28/07/1960 the number one single was Please Don't Tease - Cliff Richard & the Shadows and the number one album was Elvis Is Back - Elvis Presley. The top rated TV show was Rawhide (ITV) and the box office smash was Psycho. A pound of today's money was worth £13.68 and Burnley were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

On 28/07/1961 the number one single was Temptation - Everly Brothers. The top rated TV show was Harpers West One (ATV) and the box office smash was One Hundred and One Dalmations. A pound of today's money was worth £13.25 and Tottenham Hotspur were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.The big news story of the day was No Hiding Place (AR).

On 28/07/1962 the number one single was I Remember You - Frank Ifield and the number one album was Pot Luck - Elvis Presley. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was Lawrence of Arabia. A pound of today's money was worth £12.89 and Ipswich Town were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

On 28/07/1963 the number one single was Confessin' - Frank Ifield and the number one album was Please Please Me - The Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was The Great Escape. A pound of today's money was worth £12.64 and Everton were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

On 28/07/1964 the number one single was A Hard Day's Night - Beatles and the number one album was A Hard Day's Night - Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was Dr Strangelove. A pound of today's money was worth £12.24 and Liverpool were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

On 28/07/1965 the number one single was Mr Tambourine Man - Byrds and the number one album was The Sound of Music Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was The Sound of Music. A pound of today's money was worth £11.69 and Manchester United were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.




Thursday 19 July 2018


Web Page No 2494

21st July 2018

1st Picture. Traditional Smartie Tube


2nd Picture Hexagon Smartie tube
  
3rd Picture The Yummy bit
4th Picture Giant Smarties


Smarties

Probably the most popular sweet when we were kids, and I should think that it still is, is a tube of Smarties. Those coloured-varied sugar-coated chocolate beans that have been manufactured since 1937, originally by H.I. Rowntree & Company in the UK, and are currently produced by Nestlé.


For the technically minded each Smartie is an oblate spheroid with a minor axis of about 5 mm (0.2 in) and a major axis of about 12 mm (0.5 in). Believe it or not due to the European Union's 2007 Food Standardisation Act, every Smartie must be measured and logged before shipping. Nestlé employ more than 9,000 Smarties Measurement Officers throughout the UK and the EU, although more than half of them are also responsible for measuring the consistency of the caramel inside the Nestlé chocolate bar, Toffee Crisp. Smarties come in eight colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, mauve, pink and brown, although the blue variety was temporarily replaced by a white variety in some countries, while an alternative natural colouring dye of the blue colour was being researched.

Smarties are not distributed in the United States, where the rights to the name belong to the Smarties Candy Company, which manufactures its own hard tablet sweet under the registered trademark name Smarties.

Rowntree's of York have been making "Chocolate Beans" since 1882. The product was renamed "Smarties Chocolate Beans" in 1937and Rowntree's was forced to drop the words "chocolate beans" in 1937 due to trading standards requirements (the use of the word "beans" was felt to be misleading so they adopted the "Milk Chocolate in a Crisp Sugar Shell". Later, the sweet was rebranded as "Smarties".

Smarties in the UK were traditionally sold in cylindrical cardboard tubes, capped with a colourful plastic lid usually having a letter of the alphabet on it. The purpose of this, according to a Rowntree's spokesperson in the 1980s, was for them to be useful as a teaching aid to encourage young children to recognise the letters. Over the last 25 years, Nestlé and Rowntree's have manufactured five billion Smarties lids. Believe it or not some lids are very rare and are now regarded as collectors' items.

In February 2005, the Smarties tube was replaced with a hexagonal design. The rationale according to Nestlé,  wasto make the brand "fresh and appealing" to youngsters; the new packaging is also lighter and more compact, and the lid (which is now a hinged piece of cardboard) has a card clip which holds the lid shut when it is folded over. The new lid still features a letter like the old plastic lids, but it is in the form of a question, the answer for which can be read when the lid is open. The hexagon can be stacked in many layers without the pile collapsing, which is an advantage at the point of sale. The last 100 tubes to leave the factory in York had a certificate inside them.

Smarties are no longer manufactured in York; in October 2007, production was moved to Germany, where a third of them were already made. Outside Europe, Nestlé's largest production facility for Smarties is in Canada, where Nestlé has been manufacturing products since 1918. Canadian-made Smarties have a noticeably thicker shell than their European ones.

In one of the earlier ranges of colours there was a light-brown Smartie. This was replaced in 1988 by the blue Smartie. Before 1958, dark-brown Smarties had a plain-chocolate centre, while light-brown ones were coffee-flavoured. The orange Smarties contained orange-flavoured chocolate, however these days the orange flavour is added to the shell only.

In 2006 Nestlé removed all artificial colourings from Smarties in the UK. but unable to source a natural blue dye, they removed blue Smarties from circulation and replaced them with white ones.In February 2008, blue smarties were reintroduced using a natural blue dye. Artificial colouring was removed from Smarties on the Canadian market in March 2009. The new range included all the colours except blue. Blue Smarties were re-added in May 2010.

Today Smarties are also sold in the form of chocolate bars and eggs with fragments of Smarties in them, and chocolate-and-vanilla ice cream with Smarties pieces.

In 1997, larger-sized Giant Smarties were introduced, and, in 2004, Fruity Smarties.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the phrase "Buy some for Lulu" was sung playground style. 

Note this was before the rise of the singer Lulu.



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Peter

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From Griff


I came to Solent Rd after my Mum & Dad & Sister (Suzanne Griffiths)  moved from Purbrook to Station Rd. Drayton. I have to say for a long time I did not like Solent Rd as my school and I wasn't keen on my teachers either. The start of my education was at Purbrook church school a very old flint stone building on the London Rd. through to Waterlooville and which is now a private house. Purbrook had class sizes of 15 pupils and you started school at just 4-1/2 to 5 years old depending when your birthday was in the school year. Just the two lady teachers who were, as far as I remember, great.
My late Mother has kept ALL of my old school reports from the very 1st one at Purbrook School right through Solent Rd and to Manor Court 5th year so after much thought I have asked Peter to put one up on the website from Solent Rd. mainly to give everyone a good laugh.........or maybe not. Read the bottom comment. Those of you who know me well would tell you that very little has altered as far as that comment was recorded in 1954 aged 8.   Strong reading glasses required perhaps?

By the way and for the record the class size in Pop Wing's class rose to 50 at one time through the school year. Imagine that now. It never dropped below 43 either.

Mr. King's class was probably my worst in the final year at Solent Rd. I didn't like him one bit and I liked him even less when his mis-aimed wooden blackboard rubber hit me square on the head (and hurt!) instead of the boy he should have been aiming at for some minor infringement. No apology from him he just assumed it was me who should bear the brunt of his instant punishment. Imagine that happening in today's classroom. He was always bad tempered or so it seemed to me. This memory runs deep.. lol.

So it would come as no surprise that when the Solent School visit was announced by Peter my instant reaction was to give that reunion a miss.

Also if you look at the Solent school photo's on the website your will see a photograph at the bottom of Solent Rd. Boy's Winning netball team and I am seated front row 1st chair on the left. That photo was taken in the final year at Solent Rd. in 1957 Peter not 1959 as recorded.

I have written this memory mainly because I have just seen my Granddaughter No.2  about to leave junior school to enter her new senior school. What a fantastic junior school this is she has attended. Little wonder the Kid's do so well. Everybody counts and are encouraged to do well to the best of their ability. Oh! and it is a Church of England primary/junior school as well in Gloucestershire.


 Best Regards to everyone. Melvyn Griffiths.



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On this day 21st July 1960-1965.


On 21/07/1960 the number one single was Please Don't Tease - Cliff Richard & the Shadows and the number one album was South Pacific Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Rawhide (ITV) and the box office smash was Psycho. A pound of today's money was worth £13.68 and Tottenham Hotspur were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions. The big news story of the day was Beer goes up 1d a pint to 1s7d.

On 21/07/1961 the number one single was You Don't Know - Helen Shapiro and the number one album was Black & White Minstrel Show - George Mitchell Minstrels. The top rated TV show was Harpers West One (ATV) and the box office smash was One Hundred and One Dalmations. A pound of today's money was worth £13.25 and Ipswich were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.The big news story of the day was East Germans close E-W German border.

On 21/07/1962 the number one single was I Remember You - Frank Ifield and the number one album was West Side Story Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was Lawrence of Arabia. A pound of today's money was worth £12.89 and Everton were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

On 21/07/1963 the number one single was Sweets For My Sweet - Searchers and the number one album was Please Please Me - The Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was The Great Escape. A pound of today's money was worth £12.64 and Liverpool were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

On 21/07/1964 the number one single was Do Wah Diddy Diddy - Manfred Mann and the number one album was A Hard Day's Night - Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was Dr Strangelove. A pound of today's money was worth £12.24 and Manchester United were on the way to becoming the Season's

On 21/07/1965 the number one single was Help - The Beatles and the number one album was The Sound of Music Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Riviera Police (AR) and the box office smash was The Sound of Music. A pound of today's money was worth £11.69 and Liverpool were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.



Thursday 12 July 2018


Web Page No 2492

14th July 2018

1st Picture Jessie Matthews (with her arm in a sling) with Noel Dyson in 1963 in Mrs Dale's Diary.

2nd Picture Jessie Matthews in later life. 


3rd Picture Jessie Matthews and Charles Simon, Mrs and Doctor Dale

4th Picture Recording the programme


 5th Picture Blue Plaque


  
Mrs Dale's Diary:

My mother and grandmother were avid listeners to this Radio programme and everything in the house stopped for that quarter of an hour so they could listen.

This was the first significant radio serial which began on 5th January 1948 and ended 21 years later on 25th April 1969 after 5,431 episodes. There was an outcry at the time, with Liberal MP Peter Bessell attempting to introduce a Parliamentary Bill to grant a reprieve to the programme, which was famous for Mrs Dale's catchphrase "I'm rather worried about Jim", her words about her fictional doctor husband. 
The most famous Mrs Mary Dale was Jessie Matthews, who took over from Ellis Powell in 1963, a year after the show was re-named The Dales. Her GP husband was most famously played by Charles Simon, who died aged 93 in 2002. 
Such was the popularity of the series that Charles Simon found himself treated as a star. "For six years," he recalled, "I could hardly open a paper without seeing my name and face." He was besieged by fan mail, and listeners would regularly write asking him for prescriptions. On one occasion, when his character complained of a slight cold, more than 100 bottles of cough mixture were delivered to BBC Broadcasting House. 
Jessie Matthews, however was buried an unmarked grave in 1981. Her had a career had flagged after the end of the programme and she never hit the headlines again. More than 20 years later, she was recoginsed as a unique British talent and was celebrated in a West End show called The Jessie Matthews Story. 
She was one of 16 children of a Soho stall-holder and first took to the stage as a child dancer at the age of 12 and was a star in the Thirties with stage and screen versions of the review Evergreen. 

She was no goody two-shoes and she stretched her professional rivalry with Evelyn Laye as far as running off with her husband Sonnie Hale. She later married him, and the two dueted, perhaps insensitively, on Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love. 
Her career then foundered after a series of nervous breakdowns, but she came back in the Sixties and recorded no fewer than 1,500 episodes of Mrs Dale's Diary. 
The show struck a chord with the public because it was an accurate account of daily life during post-war recovery and reconstruction. The Dales lived at Virginia Lodge in the Middlesex suburb of Parkwood Hill and The Queen Mother was reported as saying this about the programme: 'It is the only way of knowing what goes on in a middle-class family." They had a son called Bob played by Nicholas Parsons, Hugh Latimer, Derek Hart, and by Leslie Heritage for nearly twenty years. and a daughter called Gwen who was successively Virginia Hewitt, Joan Newell, Beryl Calder and (for many years) Aline Waites. Bob was married to Jenny and they had twins. Gwen was married to her, not always faithful, husband David who was Jenny's brother but was eventually left a widow when David was killed water skiing in the
The title character was a nice middle-class doctor's wife, Mary, and her husband Jim who lived at Virginia Lodge in the Middlesex suburb of Parkwood Hill. Bahamas whilst holidaying with his rich mistress. Derek Nimmo was brought in at this time to play Jago Peters a boyfriend for Gwen.
Mrs. Dale's sophisticated sister, Sally, (always pronounced "Selly") lived in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, and ran a dress shop and also had a country cottage with a housekeeper called Zenobia.
There was also a char lady called Mrs. Morgan (played by Grace Allardyce) who subsequently married Mr. Maggs (played by Jack Howarth).
The neighbour across the road, the grumpy Mrs Mountford (played by Vivienne Chatterton) had a nervous companion called Miss Marchbanks and a parrot called Coco along with a liking for chocolate cake.
An occasional character was Mrs. Leathers who was a Cockney and rather common (played by Hattie Jaques). Mrs. Freeman (or Mother-in-Law as Dr. Dale always used to call her) had a cat named Captain (always pronounced "Kepton").
The milkman was played by Michael Harding.
Eventually the stories were relocated to a town called Exton and the cast had to roughen up the famous cut glass vowels and become a different kind of family.  Gwen became a mature student and the characters started to have a social conscience.
The final episode, in 1969, featured Gwen's engagement to a glamorous TV professor played by John Justin and the final line of the last episode was "I shall always worry about Jim... " but who could forget Marie Goossens' amazing harp introduction to the programme?
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Peter

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On this day 14th July 1960-1965.
On 14/07/1960 the number one single was Good Timin' - Jimmy Jones and the number one album was South Pacific Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Rawhide (ITV) and the box office smash was Psycho. A pound of today's money was worth £13.68 and Burnley were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

On 14/07/1961 the number one single was Runaway - Del Shannon and the number one album was South Pacific Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Harpers West One (ATV) and the box office smash was One Hundred and One Dalmations. A pound of today's money was worth £13.25 and Tottenham Hotspur were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

On 14/07/1962 the number one single was I Can't Stop Loving You - Ray Charles and the number one album was West Side Story Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was Lawrence of Arabia.

On 14/07/1963 the number one single was I Like It - Gerry & the Pacemakers and the number one album was Please Please Me - The Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was The Great Escape. A pound of today's money was worth £12.64 and Everton were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions. The big news story of the day was UK Ministry of Defence proposed.

14/07/1964 the number one single was It's All Over Now - Rolling Stones and the number one album was Rolling Stones - The Rolling Stones. The top rated TV show was Labour Party Political Broadcast (all channels) and the box office smash was Dr Strangelove. A pound of today's money was worth £12.24 and Liverpool were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

On 14/07/1965 the number one single was Crying in the Chapel - Elvis Presley and the number one album was The Sound of Music Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was The Sound of Music. A pound of today's money was worth £11.69 and Manchester United were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions. The big news story of the day was Mont Blanc Tunnel officially opened.







Thursday 5 July 2018


Web Page No 2490

7th July 2018

1st Picture: Broken Biscuit Box

2nd Picture: Milk Delivery



 3rd Picture: Typical Corner Shop



4th Picture: String Bag
Shops
Much of the packaging of shop goods in my 1940s and 1950s childhood was little different from how it was in the early 1900s, as used by our mothers and grandmothers. The main difference was that more goods were arriving in the shops ready-packaged, although this was still on a very much smaller scale than today.
Pre-packaging was mainly in tins, glass and stone and pottery jars, and there were far, far more lidded tins around than there are today. It was never difficult for my friends and me to get hold of an empty and reasonably attractive lidded tin for craft or to store things in or for making tin can and string telephones.
Even medicine came pre-packaged, in boxes (Beechams Powders) or in gall bottles in brown, blue and green. Green was for poisons. Liquid poisons were always sold in ridged glass bottles, so that even blind people could tell that they were poisonous. The bottles were usually green. I understood that anyone could buy poisons as long as they signed a poison book, but there may well have been restrictions that I didn't know about. Chemists made up doctor's prescriptions themselves. Pills were packaged in small brown glass bottles, and liquids in larger brown glass bottles, invariably labelled as 'the mixture', whatever happened to be in them.
Milk bottles were always made of glass.
Many goods were weighed or measured out and wrapped specially for every customer, just as they had been for years. Biscuits, for example, were sold loose for much of my childhood. This presented problems because they broke easily while being weighed out and in the paper bags on the way home. In fact ,broken biscuits were sold off cheaply. It was very difficult indeed to keep biscuits crisp because they were continually exposed to the air in the shop before we ever got them, because the large supply tins with the heavy glass lids had to be opened every time customers bought biscuits.
Brown or white Paper bags were the norm for packaging, and they came in several sizes, sometimes with the shop's name printed on the front. A wad of them hung on a string behind the counter and were torn off as required. Paper bags had a very limited life. They disintegrated if they got wet, either from holding damp produce or from rain, and they crumpled easily.
Boots the chemist wrapped goods up in brown paper parcels, tied with string. This was extremely labour intensive and was still going on in the late 1950s.
The lack of packaging in shops gave rise to something I recall with nostalgia from my childhood. It was the smell of shops: A grocer's shop smelled like a grocer's shop, a greengrocer's shop smelled like a greengrocer's and so on. The reason was that the food was open to the air. With the advent of almost entirely pre-sealed packaging in the 1950s and 60, all those wonderful aromas disappeared - and along with them, the individual character of the shops.
When shopping baskets got overfilled, there were no plastic bags tucked away for emergency use. The answer was string bags. They were made of ordinary brown string woven into a fairly large open net with a string handle which didn't take up much space in a shopping basket. Being brown string, they always looked rather dirty and were accordingly popular for carrying vegetables, which were never sold ready-washed. Potatoes and carrots were the worst offenders. We always had to wash them at home before peeling them, and the water ended up black and gritty.
Women also carried string bags for shopping. My mother's string bag would have the vegetables in it and would then hang on the back of the pantry door with the vegetables in it ready to use.
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Yours

Peter

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On this day 7th July 1960-1965.

On 07/07/1960 the number one single was Good Timin' - Jimmy Jones and the number one album was South Pacific Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Rawhide (ITV) and the box office smash was Psycho. A pound of today's money was worth £13.68 and Burnley were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.
On 07/07/1961 the number one single was Runaway - Del Shannon and the number one album was South Pacific Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Harpers West One (ATV) and the box office smash was One Hundred and One Dalmations. A pound of today's money was worth £13.25 and Tottenham Hotspur were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions. The big news story of the day was Mario Dubois born.

On 07/07/1962 the number one single was Come Outside - Mike Sarne with Wendy Richard and the number one album was West Side Story Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was Lawrence of Arabia. A pound of today's money was worth £12.89 and Ipswich Town were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions. The big news story of the day was 94 die in Bombay air crash.

On 07/07/1963 the number one single was I Like It - Gerry & the Pacemakers and the number one album was Please Please Me - The Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was The Great Escape. A pound of today's money was worth £12.64 and Everton were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.
 On 07/07/1964 the number one single was A Hard Day's Night - Beatles and the number one album was A Hard Day's Night - Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was Dr Strangelove. A pound of today's money was worth £12.24 and Manchester United were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

On 07/07/1965 the number one single was I'm Alive - Hollies and the number one album was The Sound of Music Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was The Sound of Music. A pound of today's money was worth £11.69 and Manchester United were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.