From the mechanical age to the age of artificial intelligence

When I was a boy... that was a long time ago now, at least sixty years and almost seventy from my first memories - a vague recollection of King George VI's visit to South Africa when I was two-and-a-half - apparently the King smiled at me, according to my mother but I can take that with a pinch of salt, because I saluted my small hand held up against my brow below a pancake of mt then bright blond hair - but all I can recall, or think I recall, was a big, shiny black car passing by while people waved flags and cheered).

The Broons

My first clear memories are from 1950 when at age 5, I lived for almost a year in Dundee. The streets were cobbled, the old trams were running; 'old' men looked like characters out of the cartoon strip 'The Broons' (Sunday Post) with waistcoats and fob watches, many with large moustaches, flat tweed cloth caps, and many smoked pipes. 

There were many horse drawn carts - milk carts, costermongers with horse and cart selling fruit and vegetables. Other men wore trilby style hats and some 'posh' men in pin-strip trousers wore bowler hats. Women tended to wear hats too, or head scarves. On a Sunday, many would wear fur coats or have a fox-fur neck wrap. 

TV was to all intents and purposes, unknown - 

we had large valve radios in living rooms. 

Women seemed to be obsessed with washing their front steps. 

My grandmother, Grannie Mem (Jemima) did not own a washing machine (few homes had one) so she took her washing to the 'steamie' - a public steam laundry - her 'washing' transported there in a converted pram. Then she'd bring it home to be put trough a 'mangle' - a wringer a mechanical laundry aid consisting of two rollers in a sturdy frame, connected by cogs and, in its home version, powered by a hand crank. It was hard work - especially when bedding was washed - usually by tramping on it in the home bath (a bit like squashing grapes to make wine!) The clothes were then hung on drying racks on a pulley system that lowered the racks from the kitchen ceiling and then raised them again.

We didn't own a refrigerator (a 'fridge') in the 1950s - just used the old food safe (see picture) usually kept in a cool and draughty place - and sometimes covered in hot weather with a wet muslin cloth which waskept moist by placing its ends in a basin of water. To keep butter cool, many used a butter cooler, crocheted from porous cotton thread and weighed down with beads.

(It was easier to crochet a perfect round than to knit one.) The cooler was made wet and placed in a dish of water (not shown) so that the edges dipped into the water. This kept the entire crochet wet, and the evaporation caused cooling. 

US sailors boarding Edinburgh electric tramcar in 1947

The 'old' trams were still running in both Dundee and Edinburgh, sparks flying from the above-head lines when trams crossed at junctions. Trams and buses still had conductors (and they continued on the buses until the 1970s, happily providing me, and my brother with employment during the summer vacations in our student days). Many people did not own cars in the 1950s and early 1960s. Travel beyond the immediate area in which you lived was unusual - so daring to travel to the continent (Europe). Airfares were very expensive and cheaper, but longer, travel was still common on ships. My brother, Donald, travelled to New York on a ship from Southampton in 1966 - I hitch-hiked down from Scotland to see him off.

Transistor radio or 'trannie'

I remember returning from Nigeria (where my father worked in 1959-60) with a small portable transistor radio in 1959 - quite a sensation when I showed it to friends at school. 'Trannies' became the 'must have' electronic device of the early 1960s! (NB Not transvestites as in contemporary expression.) But in many ways it did signal the beginning of the electronic age.