Can a UK plug have round pins?

Other odd one and more recent. A Revox tape recorder was subject to purchase tax. Buy it with 'fixed' NAB adaptors, not. They were easily removed and replaced with the standard cine ones - which the NAD adaptors fitted over, if needed.

My mother loved the twin tub. You could do whites first, then coloureds. Then dusters, etc. Saving on both powder and hot water.

Wasn't PT abolished in favour of VAT when joining Europe?

I had one of those bayonet cap adaptors (with a switch for the outlet used for the lamp) in my bedroom when using the record player there.

Like this (if it works):

Even more recent... when the 25% rate of VAT was introduced (by Callaghan, I think) in 1975, it applied to hi-fi systems and to some guitar amplifiers. But not to guitar amplifiers of more than (IIRC) 35 watts output.

The rationale was that those above that power output were tools of trade whilst the smaller ones were akin to domestic audio equipment.

I'm hoping I've got the detail right... but that's certainly not far out anyway.

It was in very common use in the UK right up until (probably) the 1970s.

Properties dating from much before about 1920 were less likely to have power outlets above the ground floor and anything from an electric alarm clock to an electric blanket (let along a bedside mains radio) could only be connected via the light socket or with a long extension cable trailing down the stairs OR let out through the window frame and in via a window frame on a lower floor.

The easily unit was easily available. Woolworth's sold it.

Until my dad rewired (in the 1970s), my parent's 1930s' semi had a single, 2-pin socket in the back bedroom, none in the boxroom or on the landing and I can't remember what was in the front bedroom.

Prior to the rewire, that 2-pin socket was used mainly for my OO-gauge railway.

Yes that was my understanding - that PT continued until the mid-70s when VAT was introduced, maybe as a result of the referendum to join the EEC. So PT continued beyond the end of the 1964-70 Labour term.

I've never lived in a house that still had round-pin sockets. The 1930s semi where we lived from 1967-71 had recently been converted to rectangular-pin sockets. We found a pile of the old surface-mounted round-pin sockets (complete with paint smears on from when walls had been painted!) in the garage when we moved in. The whole house had been redecorated, probably to make good the damage to the walls where plaster has been dug out to fit recessed rect-pin sockets, and *maybe* to recess the cable into trunking if it had previously been surface mounted.

irony!

Sorry.

A 1930s semi would almost certainly have had recessed wiring for the 5A sockets. How many 13A sockets did you have, versus the number of discarded 5A outlets? If there were a greater number of 13A units, there was probably some new recessed wiring added.

Yes, Purchase Tax was abolished with effect from the date (in 1973) that VAT was introduced. This was a requirement of membership.

There was *no* referendum on joining the Common Market.

I remember different coloured price stickers appearing in the local mini-market for cashiers to ring-in VATable and non-VATable items separately

That is probably the reason that so many sockets were fitted to skirting boards - easy to cut a square or rectangle out in-situ, poke behind to make a hole through any bits of plaster and pass cables past the edge of the floorboard or drill a hole from below, running all the cabling under the floorboards.

I really don't remember after all this time, but I wasn't aware of a lack of

If the 5A wiring was recessed, it is quite possible that its trunking was used for the 30A ring main wiring - with some widening of channel and replacement of trunking. I was only about 3 when we moved there, though I was a very inqusitive and technically-literate 3 year old and picked things up quite quickly. I was 8 when we left the house.

After I got married, our first house was a 1930s ex-council terrace house and although it had been rewired and changed to rect-pin sockets long before we bought it, it definitely suffered from single instead of dual sockets, sockets in the wrong places etc. We had a lot of bookcases in the bedrooms/studies, and there was a need for long lengths of extension cable from the one socket in the room (often placed by the door hinges) to the places where power was needed for bedside lights, charging phones, PCs etc. We got into the habit of using the original ring-main sockets for anything that used a lot of power, because of the implications (unload/dismantle bookcases) of the fuse blowing in the plug that fed an extension cable.

Were 5A and 15A round-pin sockets usually fed by spurs rather than ring mains?

Ah, was the 1975 (?) referendum about *staying* in the Common Market, after we had joined some years earlier without referendum?

I have vague memories as a teenager a) of being dragged along to Leeds Town Hall to see a debate between Tony Benn, Roy Jenkins and Sir Keith Joseph about the right/wrongs of staying (or joining, as I had mis-remembered it); b) of my school staging its own referendum, with sixth-formers giving for/against debates as part of the debating society and then everyone voting (no idea whether the result was similar to the one for the national referendum).

The one thing I don't remember being discussed at the time was any plan for the EEC "Common Market" to mutate into the greater political/legal union EU that it became after Maastricht. My parents were obviously old enough to vote and to take an adult interest in the issue, and they don't remember it being mentioned, though I've seen a lot of documentation around the time of the Brexit referendum that some MPs were mentioning it, and we now know that it was Ted Heath's plan all along which he didn't publicise for fear of a No vote.

Round pin plugs weren't normally on rings.

The ring main was a post-war - 13A - concept.

It was.

I'd moved from flat to flat in mid-1974 and now cannot remember whether I was on the register at the time of the 1975 referendum. I certainly wasn't at the time of the October 1974 GE and so didn't get a vote. The register was, in those days, compiled in a very strait-laced manner. Miss a certain date and you were off for a year.

I remember attending a meeting at a local school, with the local MP and a gaggle of councillors of various parties in attendance. They were all in favour of staying in.

There was absolutely no mention of that. And none of freedom of movement and its effects.