Remembering the 1950s

In the Diamond Jubilee Year of our Queen we have celebrated by special events and an exercise of gathering peoples memories of the 1950s. A special Tea Party was held at the Astor Community Theatre on 2nd June 2012 organised by Deal Town Council, Rotary, Inner Wheel, Addelam History Research Group and the Astor Theatre. An exhibition was prepared showing various everyday items in common use in the 50s and a list of major events from the BBC History website. We collected oral recordings and asked people to fill in Post-It notes which were then put on a panel on the exhibition.

Memory prompting questions were kept few in number. These are they:

  • Food in the 50’s. What food did you like?
  • Was rationing a problem after the last war?
  • Where did you go for holidays in the 50’s?
  • What is your most vivid memory of the 50’s, National or local?
  • What were the shops like?
  • Dances – do you remember going to any?
  • What do you remember of the coronation?
  • Has anything on the exhibition board jogged your memory?

We had a large response to this, most kept to the script others offered rare gems of information that would be hard to gather. All the responses are below in the file section. The PTDC00 number is the filename of the scan used in the transcriptions, so you can refer to the original if you need to.

+ Show 16 files

This is the song "In a Golden Coach" performed at the Astor by Vivien Clifford, 59 years after her first performance of it when in North London.

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Most of the people we have interviewed did not live in Deal at the Coronation. If you would like to add to our collection of reminiscences then please contact Alan Buckman 367711. We have people willing to come out and record speech, photographs, documents etc.

Page assembled by Alan Buckman
Data gatherers at the Party: Jim Rees, Sue Buckman, Alan Buckman and Roisin Murray.