Can a UK plug have round pins?

ISTR the Conservatives were in power from 1951, Eden won an increased majority in 1955, and in autumn 1955 put up the rate of purchase tax. Sales of vacuum cleaners, washing machines and fridges and TVs continued to grow

Plenty in the early days used extension leads.

That was the other way of doing it.

That depends on what you mean by "always". Labour were in power

By the time they next got in, PT had been abolished.

My memory is that the demand control mechanism favoured by Labour during Wilson's time was manipulation of Hire Purchase terms (which were subject to regulation).

For example, in the late sixties, ISTR that the minimum deposit on a car (new or s/h) was increased to 40%. That was a lot for a deposit. It led to all sorts of marginal scams were prices of used cars were overstated, but prices of trade-ins (not necessarily another car) were even more overstated, in order to make it look as though a low-value item was worth the 40% deposit.

;-)

There were certainly some changes after Churchill got back in in 1951. It had been the policy of the Attlee government to really cane the would-be purchasers of certain consumer durables with Purchase Tax. Part of the reason was to free up production for export. Cars, for instance, were subject to *double* PT in the late 1940s. This had unintended consequences, including almost stopping the sale of new taxicabs. There was a shortage of cabs in London and a glut at the factory in Coventry. It was simply not good business for a proprietor to try to bridge the gap because of the increased tax. Eventually (I don't know whether it was the last knocking of Attlee's government or the incoming Churchill administration), Purchase Tax on new taxicabs was abolished altogether (there was no export market to speak of anyway). Other commercial and all private vehicles continued to be subject to PT. This was undone to an extent (10% at first) when VAT was implemented in 1973.

I meant useful in terms of whereabouts in the rooms vis a vis other furniture, but I take your point.

I remember the days when washing machines were trundled out of a corner or cupboard (perhaps under the stairs) and plugged in. The idea that they would be in a fixed position, permanently connected to the water and electricity supplies, was almost sci-fi.

The same for those Flatley dryers (my grandmother had one). It could only be used in the living rooms because there were no power points in the kitchen.

As ever, the tax rules had interesting unintended consequences.

Does anybody remember that schools continued to buy desks with inkwells long after they needed to provide an ink-dipping facility?

By doing so, they did not pay purchase tax, so an item which cost more to make became cheaper to buy.

Chris

Heh! I never knew that!

I wonder what the rationale had been?

At primary school, we weren't allowed to use our own pens (not even fountain pens).

When we started to use ink, my already bad writing got worse. The ink also seemed to work its way inexorably up our fingers when using pen holders.

There was then a downward spiral exacerbated by the teacher (in her probationary year - seemed to have a few things to prove to herself) who required me to re-do the previous week's essay more neatly before I could begin to write the current one, which I would then have to hurry to complete, further untidiness...

Chris

What did you write with then?

When I switched from the infants' school to the junior school, which for some reason happened in the middle of a term, I had to learn on day one how to use a pen with ink from the inkwell. Prior to that I'd only used a pencil.

The supplied steel-nibbed pens, charged with ink in the desk's inkwell.

A bit like this (but more "education committee basic"):

Everybody had a day like that!

And the concept of "Monday is wash day" is something which is unknown to anyone under about 40 - nowadays we wash whenever we have a full load - and ideally when it's sunny so the washing will dry on the line and we don't have to use the tumble drier. The day of the week tends to be fairly irrelevant.

I can remember my mum's twin-tub washing machine which lived in a corner of the kitchen and was trundled out to sit in front of the sink (so the inlet hoses (*) could be attached to the taps and the outlet hose could be hooked over the sink.

When we moved to a new house, mum got a brand new *automatic* washing machine and a separate tumble drier which sat on top of it, and these were permanently plumbed in, in the bathroom. Wow! A washing machine that you didn't have to stand over, picking out scalding hot clothes from the washing tub using wooden tongs, and dropping them, dripping wet, into the spin drier next to it, and then the washing machine dancing all over the floor until the clothes had distributed themselves evenly in the spin drier. And the evil job of scooping out any sludge of undissolved washing powder from the washing tub at the end, before the machine could be "put to bed".

My grandma still used a single-tub washing machine with a mangle attachment, until the late 70s - so not even a spin drier. Guaranteed either to shatter shirt buttons or else (if you moved the rollers a bit further apart to prevent this happening) leaving clothes still sopping wet when the were put on the line.

While we're on the subject of "electrics", does anyone remember the ceiling light fittings with a bayonet-fitting side arm where you could plug in an iron, and the round/rectangular pin adaptor with a bayonet fitting so you could power the same iron (with a bayonet plug on the end of its cable) if you weren't near a light fitting. H&S would have had kittens: fumbling around in the dark under a table to feel for the adaptor, hoping that your fingers wouldn't touch the exposed pins in the bayonet.

(*) In the days when washing machines used the house hot water rather than heating it on demand.

I remember the joys of carrying around a glass bottle of Quink ink so I could refill my own pen whenever it needed it. Biros were banned - never must you utter the name ;-) My handwriting has never been good, and I found that the ink from a pen would find itself up the pen onto my fingers or smear across the page or splatter from the nib as I was writing. I remember one English essay being handed back to me with the comment "The spider which crawled out of your ink bottle and staggered across the page - was drunk!". The funniest end-of-term report I ever had was from that same English teacher, in which he complemented my command of English but criticised my atrocious handwriting - but my parents and I struggled to read what he'd written ;-)

ISTRT with ours the mangle was pivoted from one corner of the machine, and could be swivelled between two sides, and the water collector magically flipped to point the right way, except when it didn't...

Great excitement when we eventually got a separate spin dryer.

Much later, at my own place, I took over an AEG twin-tub that a relative had finished with. Built like a battleship, and it had a facility to rinse by running water into the spinner. It was certainly better than having to use the laundrette.

Is it my imagination, or are there much fewer laundrettes around these days, except perhaps where there are concentrations of students?

Chris

My reports usually included remarks upon my bad writing. Interestingly I once found one of my dad's old reports with very similar comments.

However, writing which looks "neat" isn't necessarily legible. I remember someone at school being praised for the appearance of their written work. Teacher picked up the book, showed us all, then began to read, only to find that he had great difficulty. The script was quite a heavy italic, and many of the characters were indistinguishable from "n".

We also had to provide our own ink at secondary school, which for me was from 1961 onwards. Does anybody remember Skrip, with a little internal reservoir in the bottle?

I eventually had a Sheaffer snorkel, which extended a probe to suck up ink - quite a neat mechanism. It was a victim of a clear out as all the rubber parts had perished.

Memory is hazy now, but I think all our proper work had to be done in ink, ballpoints were only permitted for rough notes. How are things arranged these days?

Chris

A washer and a drier are less than a weeks social security for the average chavily. Everyone has one. If they wash.

I worked with a guy whose *normal* handwriting was very neat, italic with lots of flourishes. Like you'd pay someone with calligraphic skills a lot of money to write the names on certificates. It was the handwritten equivalent of Palatino Italic aka Zapf Chancery. It somehow looked wrong to see snippets of C code written in beautiful italic handwriting ;-)

My school reports for games are the things I treasure to this day. My games teacher was a bit of a weirdo (he moved very jerkily, as if his elbows and knees had been fused, and spoke in a silly high-pitched mechanical voice) but he was spot on with my games reports. No-one had ever taught me the rules of rugby and cricket, and I hadn't the burly physique to risk tackling anyone, and if someone passed the ball to me, I'd probably drop it. Cricket was terrifying: my hand-eye coordination was such that I rarely made contact between bat and ball, so I was at risk of being clouted by a very fast and very hard ball: I didn't even have the coordination to work out its trajectory so I could move out of the way.

Autumn: He views the rest of us with faint amusement, much disdain or occasional horror. Spring: I am sure the fresh air is conducive to new lines of thought. Summer: He skipped merrily amongst the daisies on the cricket field.

He was a biology teacher and in the school folklore it was reputed that he kept a croc-oh-dile (always said like that) in the school pond. We all became very adept at mimicking his mechanical voice. I once tried his temper too far. We were getting changed from swimming when he walked through the changing room from the biology lab. I called out something in "the voice". He stopped, debated whether to make an issue of it, and decided that he would as I'd used not only his nickname but also his surname. "Who - said - that?" Everyone said nothing but looked at me, so the guilty party was obvious. "Brrrrrrring - me - a - slipper" he yelled. "Bennnnnnn - Dover". He grabbed hold of my hair on my forehead, pushed my head down to make my bottom stick out and simultaneously raised his "slipper" (trainer shoe) arm. He then brought that arm down and pulled my head up. The silly bugger was

Now that is very neat. So much easier than risking the tip of the nib on the bottom of the bottle, especially when you are trying to suck up the last few millilitres in the bottle.

My pens either had a rubber bladder that you squeezed with a U-shaped piece of metal to expel the air before sucking up ink, or else had a lever on the side which you pulled out to achieve the same purpose. One pen could either take a removable bladder and U-shaped metal or a pre-filled cartridge: both had the same fitting into the pen upstream of the nib.

I've still got a Parker cartridge pen (I found it somewhere, and no-one claimed it so I acquired it) which takes cartridges. I last used it when I wrote letters to friends before the days of email.

I imagine anything in ink is fine, as an alternative to most homework being submitted electronically as Word/Excel/Powerpoint/PDF as appropriate.

Yeah, that looks familiar.

You had *hot* water taps?

Luxury...