72 thoughts on “ALL OUR YESTERDAYS”

  1. Pic 1: Brooklyns?
    Pic 4: I learned to type on a Remington typewriter even older than those ones!
    Pic 6: Nothing Sucks like an Electrolux (original advertising campaign)
    Pic 7: The VW factory at Wolfsburg
    Pic 11: Matt Munro
    Pic 12: Bullingdon Club at the seaside
    Pic 16: Scots singer Kenneth McKellar
    Pic 17: Kevin Keegan, English footballer

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    2. First again, DonDon…

      1. Check with Dave.
      4. But did ye have a hat as bonny as theirs?
      6. Ouch. I wonder if “sucks” was used in that way back then. It’s an American word, but that’s an American vacuum. Expensive too.
      11. I see you’ve corrected that. Yeah, easy mistake they both had fabulous voices… and strangely both died from too much smoking!
      12. Yes, Jacob’s tea party.
      16. Where’s Moira Anderson…

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  3. Pic 1 – Brooklands 1920s/30s; Pic 3 – Poster by the incomparable Alfons Mucha; Pic 11 – Nat King Cole; Pic 15 – Actress Peggy Mount of the incredibly loud voice; Pic 18 – Dole dodgers – Princess Margaret, the Queen Muvver, George VI & Princess Elizabeth – all ‘avin’ a sing-song rahnd the old joanna, probly sumfink like, ‘There’ll always be an England’ – God bless ’em! Pic 20 – AOY, you must be joking – I’ve got a set-up just like that!

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  4. No 8. Chlorodyne. You want the genuine article and not the cheap fakes flooding the market. How were such miracle cures lost to science? It’s a tragedy.
    No 9. The Blairgowrie tattie bus 1973 or an exact replica; it caused me to relive that same feeling of dread after all these years.
    No 13. Someone needs to send this to Nicola. Maybe a new twin set would supply some motivation.
    No 17. Kevin Keegan – attractive to women and also good at football. What an arsehole!
    No 18. Liz the Last, looking nane too pleased at the loving looks Margaret’s getting from her parents. I always thought the queen was a bit of a looker in her day, I just couldn’t see the big attraction for Margaret. Does that make me a bad person?
    No 20. Stacking hi fi. I couldn’t afford Sony although that looks like it all came together and therefore possibly later. Mine were Akai separates and my limited means only ran to a tape deck and amp. 60w per channel through 100w speakers. You could up the volume in my wee living room till it ironed the shirt you were wearing. That was back in the 1980s and I’m unsurprisingly a bit corned beef these days.😬

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    1. Greig……No. 18 made me realize that the royals have other pianos than Victoria and Albert’s gold one (of the Queen’s Christmas message fame.)
      At the beginning of this video, Tom Hanks talks about meeting the Queen, who described to him Margaret’s ability to play the piano by ear.

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          1. I was watching something “streaming” on the telly last night…a Scandahoovian political thriller. At one point in the dialogue a character asked a question to which answer was quite obvious. Now, in some circles and in some parts of the world an appropriate, if somewhat cliched, reply in the dialog would be ” Is the Pope a Catholic?”…but no, or our Nordic scriptwriter opted for…”Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?
            It tickled me, not least because this verbal retort included my visual cortex in the humour of it all…

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        2. By a weird coincidence Miriam Margolyes lives in the same remote town in rural New South Wales that my brother-in-law’s ex-wife moved to last year.
          I’m happy to share other fascinating highlights from my glamorous life with other readers. Anyone want to know how Elizabeth Taylor’s son’s pedal car index up in Turriff?

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          1. Well, there you go, you see, Iain.

            We only allow the brightest, best and most well-connected to be in our midst here at Munguin Towers.

            Your connection with Miriam does seem a tad tenuous by some standards, but Munguin is, nonetheless, impressed.

            Do dish the dirt on Elizabeth Taylor’s son’s pedal car!!! We are, as they say, all ears!

            🙂

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    2. 8. I’m sure, given time, Trump would have announced that used as ear drops it would cure COVID!

      9. We’d all better get used to the idea that we should be on a bus like that and off to the fields

      17. LOL, A bit of a film star was KK. Irritating when people have it all. He could probably sing too!

      18. Nah, it doesn’t make you a bad person. I’ve always though that they are seriously ugly. Even when they are good looking in youth, there’s something about them that turns stale… Andrew, Willie…

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    1. Panda Paws…..I know exactly what you mean. I grew up with a great stereo sound system like that in the house, with two analog tape decks (reel-to-reel and cassette) and a turntable that played large black vinyl disks which were called “records.” 😉
      The analog sound system has long since been disassembled, probably sometime after the CD revolution and LP records were not available in the stores anymore. I saw the old turntable in the closet the other day. So I now have almost a thousand LP records that the family had, and nothing to play them on anymore. 😦

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      1. Records had a revival a while ago…short lived, I think. But in 2016 everyone seemed to release a cd and at the same time a vinyl.

        I bought the vinyl of “From Now On” in 2016 at a Petula Clark concert, and when I met her after the show she signed it.

        She commented that it was a joy to have records back because signing cds was much more difficult… getting the paper out of the plastic cover and then having to write a message on a far smaller surface…

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        2. Went into my son’s bedroom one day in the 80’s when he was c 10 yrs old, to find him and his pal looking quizzically at the old record player he had been given. (he already had a cassette player ). Asked what was wrong and he replied “Dad, how do you rewind a record ?”.
          Now into their 40’s, both son and daughter have abandoned CD’s but have record decks for vinyl. Son now into jazz and got c 25 LP’s away with him last weekend. So records are not dead yet !

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          1. Yes, cds are very passé now.

            It’s downloads or vinyl.

            The thing is I have shelves full of cds, and now I have nothing to play them on.

            Maybe I should buy a record player…

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        1. capnandy……Actually, my family almost never threw anything out. I still have the TEAC reel-to-reel tape deck. It’s in the same closet (opposite corner) from where the stereo receiver and and record turntable are stacked. It weighs a ton, and I am told that it cost more than $400 in 1970. Its surface appearance looks mint condition, since (I’m told) it was almost never used. (The cassette deck was used instead……along with the turntable to play vinyl LP records.) I still have the old cassette deck too……same closet. 🙂

          I don’t offhand remember the TEAC model number, but it looks almost exactly like this one, right down to the wood on the sides.

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      1. So impressed by the hifi and comments that I broke out the wind-up gramaphone wonderful sound and no electricity used just some exercise.

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        2. One of my female cousins only had a wind up gramophone (late 50’s).When other cousins babysat for her, they took their 45’s, turned the speed to the lowest they could get and played them with the massive tone arm. They asked for a loan of some of my 45’s. Guess my answer !

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          1. Ha ha.

            I’d forgotten that you could play records at different speeds.

            If you had a 45 and played it at 78, you got a squeaky sound and if you played a 45 and 33 everyone had DEEP voices.

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  7. 19 – Black Magic was targeted to courting couples. Watching them clutching the chocolates as they were in the cinema. I preferred Dairy Box, Rowntree’s competitor to Cadbury’s Milk Tray.

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  8. 1 – punters on the river Wey at (of course) Brooklands, first home of the British GP
    5 – Keef hasn’t changed a bit, has he? Remarkable. Did you know he wrote a children’s book?
    9 – Bedford OB / Duple Vista, the most popular of preserved buses; there are reputedly about 180 in existence, of which 60 or so are roadworthy.
    12 – this should be censored, a fine bunch of specimens (not), I like the top hats but surely not very practical?
    16 – did I imagine it or did Kenny once represent UK in Eurovision Song Contest?
    17 – King Kev – as a manager he put together a very fine team at Newcastle which deserved to win the championship but imploded under the pressure of a certain Mr Ferguson… resulting in a public meltdown in a TV interview.

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      1. I remember watching the 1966 Eurovision Song Contest live and from memory the Kenneth McKellar’s song only got points from Ireland and then the Luxembourg host laughed and said to the Irish Jury spokesperson to “have a good sleep”.

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      2. I haven’t read the book but it got a glowing review here….
        http://www.kids-bookreview.com/2015/03/review-gus-me-story-of-my-granddad-and.html
        “Gus and Me: The Story of my Granddad and My first Guitar”
        Gus was his grandfather, with illustrations by his daughter Theodora.
        !
        The infamous rant by Keegan… when they saw it Man Utd claimed they knew the title was as good as won, which sadly proved correct. His Newcastle team played some very attractive football.

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  9. 9. These little Bedford buses were common late 40’s/early 50’s but with slatted wooden seats so only for short journeys. Many did become farm transport for squads – must have been bloody sore after a hard day’s graft.
    13. Went to Capri from Naples on a day of choppy seas so no hydrofoils. Got even worse coming back but left me with memory of a very chic lady of a certain age who read calmly through each swing of her chair round its “mooring” to the deck.
    14 Peggy’s stentorian voice terrified everyone in Sailor Beware. I also recall one character called, I think, Carnoustie Bligh. The only other Carnoustie applied to a character was in Rawhide, when young Clint encountered a woman called Carnoustie Dundee,in plaid, driving a few coos across the prairie. Has anyone ever met a Carnoustie in real life ?
    King George VI is reported to have said on being elevated to the throne “but I’m only a naval officer” and his liking for naval uniform perhaps reflects this. I think he was at Jutland as a very junior gunnery offucer aboard HMS Lion and if I am right, he therefore had a narrow escape when Lion just survive the fate of other battle cruisers when a gun turret was hit, an explosion being avoided by the order of the dying turret commander to flood the magazines.
    Another victim of smoking in the end. Did his death have any effect on levels of smoking ? Own impression is no.

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    1. https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/george_and_the_dragon/videos/6326/george_and_the_dragon_georges_pills_s01e04/

      LOL I’ve never heard of a Carnoustie, never mind met one.

      It’s a thought that if George had died at Jutland the throne would have gone to the next brother down, Henry.

      So we’d have had a King Henry and a Queen Alice. Their son, William was killed in a plane crash, so right now we would have had King Richard and Queen Birgitte … and we wouldn’t be paying to keep senior princes out of jail.

      I think the whole lot had health issues related to smoking and a lot of them drank to excess too.

      Margaret died after a stroke. She smoked 60 a day and at one point had a part of her lung cut out… She too was a heavy drinker.

      I doubt it had any effect on smoking. People always tend to think that it won’t happen to them.

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  10. Nat King Cole was the only face I recognized this week.
    There was a time in the late 1930’s when he was simply billed as Nat Cole. Wiki: “When a club owner asked him to form a band, he hired bassist Wesley Prince and guitarist Oscar Moore. They called themselves the King Cole Swingsters after the nursery rhyme in which “Old King Cole was a merry old soul”. They changed their name to the King Cole Trio before making radio transcriptions and recording for small labels.” “In 1946, the trio broadcast King Cole Trio Time, a 15-minute radio program.” By 1956, he was Nat “King” Cole, and as time passed, finally became Nat King Cole (without quotation marks.)

    Nat Cole:

    King Cole:

    King Cole Trio:

    Nat “King” Cole:

    The King Cole Trio in 1950:

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    2. Nat “King” Cole:

      A nice cover of “Route 66”, with its many place names from Chicago to L.A. Old US Highway Route 66 was called the “Main Street of America.” After St. Louis and then Joplin in Missouri, it passes through Oklahoma City. It was therefore the highway the “Okies” took to California when fleeing the dust bowl in the 1930’s. John Steinbeck called Route 66 the “Mother Road”, which his Joad Family in “Grapes of Wrath” took west.

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        1. Absolutely!……….and “kicks” rhymes nicely with “six”. All of the towns are in the correct order……moving west…….except for two in Arizona, (would have to check a map to remember which) that were reversed to fit the meter and rhyme scheme.

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            2. Thanks John. I should have remembered that Winona is east of Flagstaff, and how well “don’t forget Winona,” where it’s incorrectly located in the lyrics, rhymes with the word “Arizona.”

              The almost 2500 miles of the US 66 “southern route” to California from Chicago got its number in 1926 with the original numbering of the old “US highway” system. Today, 66 has disappeared as a US numbered cross-country highway, but still has many marked “highway 66 historic routes” along the modern Interstate (“I” numbered) Highway system. I-40 across California, Arizona, and New Mexico, and then I-44 from Texas up through Oklahoma and Missouri to St. Louis carries cross country traffic along the old Route 66 alignment to Chicago. I’d always heard that Highway 66 ended at the Pacific Ocean on the pier in Santa Monica. Actually, the 1926 alignment of 66 ended at 7th and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. Here’s the story:

              https://www.lamag.com/askchris/ever-wondered-route-66-ends/

              Below, from John Ford’s movie of Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” the diner scene, set along the highway in New Mexico. And an interesting account of the making of the movie on location on the highway by two of the child actors who played Joad family children in the movie. (The two kids in the diner.)

              They buried Grandpa Joad along the highway on the Arizona side of the Arizona/California state line, since they knew that a family of Okies would never get through the California agricultural inspection station with a body. Cross county traffic still has to stop at the California border for agricultural inspection. You have to dump any fruit you have and anything else that might have fruit flies and the like. Agriculture is still California’s biggest industry, and they take fruit flies very seriously.

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              1. If you listen carefully to Lonnie Donegan doing a skiffle rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “Hard Travelin'”, you’ll hear highway references to “that 66”, as well as “Lincoln Highway.” The Lincoln Highway originated in 1913 as an early “named” transcontinental highway route through 14 states, from Time Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. After the US Highway System was assigned numbers in 1926, the Lincoln Highway became US-30 over much of the route west of Pennsylvania, and today, Interstate route I-80 carries traffic along the old US-30 and Lincoln Highway alignments.

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