Did You Know… Life in 1960s/70s Britain: From Domestic Goddess to Women's Liberation - The Changing Role of Women

 

Changing expectations and the quiet revolution inside British homes.

In the 1960s and 70s Britain, housework was seen as "women’s work". If that sounds controversial, then yes, it was, but at the time, that was the norm. When it came to domestic chores — cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, and childcare were all seen as part of the assumed daily responsibilities of wives and mothers.

It was women that were expected to look after the home. Men, by contrast, were usually expected to “help out” with certain “manly” duties, like cleaning the windows or anything that might involve heavy lifting. General housework, only occasionally, if at all.

At the time, this was simply the accepted order of things in the home.

The Division of Labour

While women had been called upon to fill the void in the workforce in wartime, post-war Britain inherited a rigid division of roles. Men went out to work while women ran the home. It was still seen as an ambition for a woman to find a husband who had a good job, a trade, or profession, and get married. The married woman who stayed at home would invariably be described as a housewife.

Of course, there were jobs for and aimed at women, traditional jobs like secretary, typist, or care work. Many women worked, some even had careers, but they were still expected to be the homemaker, housewife, and mother. The war had brought about some change, but traditional expectations of gender roles remained.

My mother did both, she had two jobs.

She took care of the home and also went out to work, that is, until she became a home worker. She was a machinist, and a very good one. Anything that could be made on a sewing machine, she could do. After my brother and I arrived, she worked from home. Whether it was because of tradition or what was expected of her, she accepted the dual role. In fact, she was the “boss” in our home.

Even as more women entered paid employment during the 1960s and 70s, expectations at home only changed slowly, or not at all. If a woman had a day job, when it ended, she returned home to find that meals still needed cooking and the home and children still needed looking after. It was rare for men to do such tasks, as many would arrive home from work and expect their dinner to be waiting for them.

Home Life

Housework itself was time-consuming and physically demanding. For many people, the consumer revolution that brought technology to the home either hadn’t arrived or was not affordable. Washing machines, fridge freezers and tumble dryers are common now but back then were rare, as was the use of labour-saving devices in general. Handwashing of clothes and ironing was the norm, or a trip to the local launderette.

It all took time.

The idea that men should do their share of these tasks simply wasn’t widespread. When men did take part in domestic work, it was often described as “helping”, rather than sharing responsibility. It mattered because it implied that the home belonged to women and that men were assisting. Typical “men’s jobs” included mowing the lawn, taking out the bins, or doing DIY at the weekend. Daily tasks — washing up, making beds, cleaning floors — were rarely part of a husband’s routine.

And for many men, this division went unquestioned. It was how their parents had lived, and how everyone around them seemed to live, too. The roles in the home had been set by tradition and expectation.

However, all of this changed in my family, but out of necessity, when my parents got divorced in the late 1960s. For a while, I stayed with my father, and he had no choice at that point but to take responsibility for the home and all domestic chores. My memories are somewhat sketchy on how good he was looking after the home; it probably helped that we did not have much to look after.

Did You Know… Life In 1960s/70s Britain - When Cigarettes Were Everywhere: Britain Before the Smoking Ban

 

Ashtrays, blue haze, and the smell of cigarette smoke were woven into everyday life.

In the 1960s and 70s, smoking was a common activity in Britain, and it was everywhere. Cigarettes were a part of daily life. People smoked at work, at home, in cafés, on public transport, and even while watching a film at the cinema. 

It was so normal that it barely registered as remarkable.

Today, it feels almost unimaginable. But at the time, it was simply how things were.

A Nation of Smokers

By the early 1960s, Britain was a nation of smokers, and smoking rates were at their peak. Around half of all adults smoked, with cigarettes heavily advertised and culturally acceptable. It was even presented as something that was desirable. Smoking was associated with sophistication, relaxation, and adulthood. For young people, it was also a sign of rebellion.

There were health warnings, and early medical reports had made the connection of smoking to lung cancer, but they were easy for people to ignore. The warnings were often drowned out by advertising that linked smoking with a life of glamour and freedom. 

It took a long time for a shift in public opinion to arrive. At the time, for many, smoking was a part of life and popular. Cigarettes were cheap, widely available, and socially accepted almost everywhere. It was the norm. In fact, you might be considered the odd one out if you didn’t smoke.

Smoking in the Home

I lived in a home where all the adults smoked. My parents, grandparents, relatives, and just about every adult who visited would quickly light up a cigarette or be offered one. My memory is of every adult smoking. Another memory that I have is of the smoke stains on the upper part of walls and ceilings. Cigarette smoke rises; it has nowhere to go but up. Brightly painted or papered walls would develop a cigarette smoke shadow.

I have never smoked, but for the first fifteen to twenty years of my life I was a passive smoker. At the time I had no idea that was the case, but later I became aware of it, after the death of the British entertainer, Roy Castle, in 1994. Castle died of lung cancer, which, as he was a non-smoker, he believed happened while working in the smoke-filled rooms of jazz clubs in the 1960s. As far as I know, my lungs survived the passive smoking years.

Smoking at School

At school, I knew certain boys that smoked. Yes, they would usually find a secretive place to go for a cigarette,  sometimes behind the bike sheds. That place was too obvious, though, and boys caught there would end up in the headmaster’s office for ‘six of the best’. 

I was never tempted.

A mate of mine was given the nickname JP, after John Player, the name of the company that made the cigarettes that he smoked. Later, we would call him ‘Wheezer’, as he would always end up coughing his lungs out when cross-country running.

The Writers Life: The 4000 Weeks of Life, How Do You Plan to Use Them?

I was reading an article recently about the average life span. It informed me that, on average, we have about 4000 weeks of life. From birth to death, we have 4000 weeks to live.

If you’re reading this at age forty, you have around 2,000 weeks left to live. 

At sixty, which I reached five years ago, it is approximately 1000 weeks. 

It’s a startling thought when you first encounter it. Not because it’s dramatic, but because that is the calculation. Most lifetimes, at least in advanced industrial nations, stretch to roughly 80 years — about 4,000 weeks. By midlife, at the age of forty, half of those have already slipped quietly behind you, often unnoticed; time has just passed.

But the average life expectancy will be different depending on where you live in the world. There are many factors that will determine how long we might live, and they are not equal across the world.

So, I looked into the numbers a little deeper.

According to the United Nations, the current average age at death for people across the world is around 73.3 years, which is 3822 weeks. For women, the average is 76 years (3963 weeks/912 months), and for men, 70.7 years (3687 weeks/848.4 months). It is well known that women, on average, live longer than men.

Weeks are an uncomfortable unit of measurement, and 4000 does seem a lot. Years can feel generous, decades abstract. But weeks are tangible. They are ordinary, repetitive, something that we feel and easy to waste. It is seven days of life — the here and now — they come and go. 

Many of us spend the first half of life building careers, working, raising families, chasing stability, and waiting for the “right time”. Somewhere along the way, we forget to ask what we actually want our remaining weeks to look like. We assume there will always be more time later.

There won’t.

Our time on this planet is finite, and the clock is always ticking. Life is full of numbers and averages.

Did You Know… Life in 1960s/70s Britain - The British Staycation - The Nostalgic Charm of Holidaying at Home in a Bygone Era.

 

Caravans, B&Bs, and seaside towns — before foreign travel became routine.

In the 1960s and 70s, for the majority of ‘Brits’, taking a holiday abroad was still something of a novelty. Far-off lands with exotic names were a dream holiday or not even thought about — they were out of reach. For most families, a summer holiday didn’t involve airports, passports, or sun loungers in exotic places only seen on a world map. Foreign travel happened, of course, but it was far from common, and holidays were shaped by cost, access, and habit. 

The chances were that if you went overseas, you had money.

Instead, a British family holiday meant packing the car, catching a train, or boarding a coach and heading somewhere in Britain. It could be the countryside or more likely, a familiar holiday town that provided everything a family could want.

The big deal was a holiday by the seaside, at one of the country’s many resorts. Britain, with its long coastline and well-established holiday towns and industry, was where the vast majority of people spent their annual break. In many ways, British holiday trends were well set and predictable.

The Rise of the British Seaside Holiday

By the mid-20th century, Britain already had a strong tradition of domestic holidays. Since Victorian times, resorts like Blackpool, Margate, Brighton, Skegness, and Scarborough welcomed holidaymakers. By the 1960s, these towns were at their peak, packed with amusement parks, piers, theatres, arcades, and boarding houses.

Many factories and workplaces closed for set weeks, particularly in industrial towns, creating a shared “holiday season” when entire communities decamped at once. In the north of England, this was known as Wakes Week, which began during the Industrial Revolution.

For working families, the annual holiday was often the only extended break from work all year. Two weeks of summer, traditionally the first two weeks in July. As children, school holidays gave us a long summer holiday taht seemed to go on forever.  I remember that it lasted about eight weeks, but those two weeks away, if we were lucky, were the big event of the summer.

Once I knew that a holiday to the seaside was planned, I would save my pocket money and everything that I had earned for those two weeks away. The call of the arcades, the slot machines, the chance to be a pinball wizard, or a hotshot on one of the gun machines was strong. Even the seaside bingo, much loved by grandparents, had its attraction. I counted the pennies, knowing that back then, a penny went a long way in the arcades.

The Writer's Life: The Writer As An Observer of Life - A Hospital Visit

 

A writer rarely enters a room without quietly taking notes. Not with pen and paper; that would be too obvious, but with something far more instinctive. I find myself observing what is going on around me, and the potential for a story forms in my mind.

A writer notices the way a conversation develops or stalls, the glance that lingers too long, and the sigh that says more than words ever could. The looks on the faces of everyone in the room, friendly or grumpy, hostile even, every room has its own look and character.

I was in one such room last Friday, when I had to pay a visit to a local hospital. A hospital waiting room is not a place where most people would want to be. Uncertainty about our health takes most of us there, unless you were in support or there to assist someone.

The hospital was busy; they always are, but the first thing I had to do was find the waiting room. Report to Ward 34, I was told by my local surgery. I diligently wrote down the details, including a long abbreviation that must have been code for something. It was the only writing that I had done for a few days.

Ward 34? I began to wonder about all the other wards (33 of them), and then how many more there were after 34. The hospital was a big place. I arrived at the main reception, where I noticed someone, who looked like he might be a volunteer, advising others on where to go.

“Do you know where you need to go to?” He asked.

“Ward 36.” I replied, without realising that I had given the wrong number.

“I’ll take you to the lift. From there you go to the second floor and turn left, and the waiting room for Ward 36 is at the end of the corridor.”

The Writer's Life: When Illness Strikes - The Art and Fear of Being a Writer

 

I recently caught a winter cold, which turned into an infection,  or it came with it, just before Christmas. It was just a cold, or so I thought.

The common cold had taken a backseat in recent times, as COVID-19 got all the headlines. But it has been around a long time; there are about two hundred strains of it. It was just waiting its turn, or a new strain was around. Old or new, I got it from somewhere.

And it was a lingering cold.

A continuous cough is not just something that comes with COVID-19; mine from this simple cold lasted three weeks, and I’m still not over it. The cough pounds away at the rib cage — it’s like going ten rounds with Mike Tyson at his peak.

It all meant that I struggled to write. That’s the way it is when I’m ill. I might have good intentions, that having all that time,  I will write. In reality, that doesn’t happen. Being ill drains any desire to do anything, other than to get over it.

You eat a meal without tasting a bite. You read a message twice and still don’t absorb it. Watch a YouTube video, without taking it in. Somewhere along the way, you forget to write. The hours drag on.

And this is where writing lives.

To be a writer is to exist half a step removed from the world, constantly translating experience into language in a way that, hopefully, someone will like and understand. The writer is always watching, listening, and storing fragments away in the mind for future use. Even in moments of rest, or illness, thoughts are working, shaping sentences, rehearsing conversations, rewriting endings that never happened.

This is the art of it.

Did You Know… Life in 1960s/70s Britain - British Television History - When Missing a Programme Could Mean Missing Out Forever

No repeats, no recording — and the pain of missing an episode.

In 1960s and 70s Britain, television was often an event, but it was also unforgiving and fleeting. If you weren’t at home when a programme was broadcast, you simply didn’t see it. There were no streaming services or catch-up options, and until video recorders arrived in the seventies, once a programme was broadcast, that was it. There wasn’t even a reliable repeat. Miss it, and it was gone.

Sometimes, it was gone forever.

In the early days of television, many programmes were not recorded. It was broadcast, often live, and no record remained, as there was no copy. There were many reasons for this, including cost, but at the time, the idea of building an archive for future reference and reuse was a low priority. A big event might be recorded, but most were not.

In the home, television schedules were rigid, and families planned around them. Evening routines might be changed to fit the broadcast times of favourite programmes. Meals were hurried or delayed. A raised voice from the living room would annouce, “It’s starting!” This sent everyone racing for a seat.

The television would be in the main room of the house, known as the living room, and most homes only had one ‘telly’. In the sixties, the television looked like a large wooden box with a small screen. Turn it on, and it could take several minutes to warm up and produce a picture, which was in black and white.

By the seventies, sleeker television sets, offering a bigger picture, arrived, as well as colour. But there was still one thing that you had to do, and that was to get up to turn the set on or off, change channels, or the volume. The remote control was still a few years away.

The TV Schedule

The Radio Times and TV Times weren’t just magazines; they were essential guides, unless you were happy to rely on a newspaper. There was something else about these two magazines, in that they only gave details of their own programmes. The BBC had the Radio Times, while commercial television had the TV Times. You had to buy both to get the complete picture of what was on for the week ahead.

My parents didn’t buy them, except at Christmas, so we relied on the local paper and memory. I suppose that it helped that there were only three television channels, BBC 1 and 2, and a commercial station that showed adverts, which, in the region that I lived, was ATV.

One Chance Only

Most programmes were shown once, and once only. Popular shows might be repeated months, sometimes years, later, but that was never guaranteed. As a child, if you missed an episode of your favourite programme because you were out, ill, or late home from school, you had to rely on friends to tell you what happened. Sometimes, they would make it up, especially football results.

Once you had missed a programme, there was no way to catch up. You either saw it, or you didn’t. This made television, and your favourite programmes, something to be remembered. Each episode carried weight. Cliffhangers mattered, because if you missed it, you might never find out how they were resolved.

Did You Know… Life in 1960s/70s Britain - There Was a Time When All Fizzy Pop Drinks Came in Glass Bottles with Deposits?

Pop bottle returns and the excitement of reclaiming a few pennies.

Long before plastic bottles, ring-pull cans and multipack deals, fizzy drinks in Britain came in solid glass bottles. In the 1960s and 70s, every bottle of pop carried a small return deposit, usually a penny or two, which you could reclaim by returning the empty to the shop. For a young boy (or girl), those bottles were far too valuable to throw away.

It was a simple system, but one that shaped a childhood routine. It could make a difference to pocket money economics. There was also the thrill of walking into a shop clutching a bag of empties, which would soon turn into a pocketful of pennies.

A Local Shop For Local People

“Where did you get them from?” The shopkeeper might ask.

I would try not to look guilty. Sometimes, I would take them back for neighbours, having agreed that I could keep the pennies. Often, I would find them. To the shopkeeper it looked like we drank a lot of pop, little of which had been bought from him.

The shopkeeper would inspect the bottles, count them, and either hand over coins or deduct the amount from whatever you were buying. A big haul could go towards sweets, crisps, or, maybe, another bottle of pop to start the cycle all over again. A few bottles might buy a comic.

The local shop was central to this system. Many had wooden crates stacked by the door, out the back, or behind the counter. The shopkeeper knew exactly which bottles belonged to which company and which were acceptable for return. Some were stricter than others. A bottle from the “wrong” brand might be rejected with a shrug. Others took them all. It depended on the shop, the supplier, and if your parents were a regular customer.

The Twelve Posts of Christmas - Day Twelve: A Brief History of the Twelve Days of Christmas

 

For many, Christmas ends on 25 December, or the day after Boxing Day. The decorations come down, television schedules return to normal, and attention turns to the celebrations for the New Year.

Yet traditionally, Christmas is not a single day at all — it is a season. At the heart is the Twelve Days of Christmas, a period with its own history, symbolism and tradition.

In mediaeval and early modern Europe, this twelve-day period was a time for celebration, feasting, music and social gatherings. Work was often suspended, and each day held its own significance within the Christian calendar.

Twelfth Night: The Final Celebration

It begins on Christmas Day (25 December) and ends on Twelfth Night (5 January), which just happens to be today.

The beginning of the Twelve Days of Christmas can be misunderstood. It is often assumed they lead up to Christmas Day rather than beginning on it. It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when the celebrations of Christmas carried on into the new year.

In earlier centuries, however, Christmas Day was the start of the celebrations, not the finale. Decorations traditionally remained in place until Twelfth Night, after which it was considered unlucky to keep them up.

Twelfth Night, on 5 January, was historically one of the most important nights of the Christmas season. It marked the end of festivities and was often celebrated with parties, plays, music and the sharing of a special Twelfth Night cake. The cake sometimes contained a hidden bean or coin. Whoever found it would be crowned “King” or “Queen” of the festivities for the evening. The tradition of role reversal — servants becoming masters, rules being relaxed.

Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night takes its name from this tradition of misrule and celebration.

The Twelve Posts of Christmas - Day Eleven: New Year's Day - A Day Of Superstition.

 

It was New Year’s Day, sometime back in the late 1960s, and my school football shirt was dirty and needed cleaning. I had a big game coming up, and I only had one decent football shirt. In my schoolboy mind, it was a matter of urgency.

I asked my mother if she could put it in the washing, as I needed it as soon as possible. I expected that it would soon be washed and ready again.

“No, not today,” she replied.

“Why?” I asked, surprised.

It seemed to me to be a reasonable question, as she always seemed to be doing some washing. There was a never-ending supply of laundry that needed to be washed. Why not today, I wondered? 

“I’ll tell you why,” she replied. “It’s New Year’s Day, and you don’t do any laundry today, as it will bring bad luck.”

“What bad luck?” I wanted to know.

“If I do it today, it will bring bad luck. That’s what they say. Have you not heard of washing a loved one away? You don’t want that to happen, do you?”

Now, I didn't want that to happen, but surely washing my football shirt was not going to cause a death in the family?

The superstition that doing the laundry on New Year’s Day could result in the death of a family member is one that is widely held. Many seem to believe it, or at least observe it, and for some it is extended to not doing any house cleaning on New Year’s Day.