The big hit present for boys in the 1960s was a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Your first one was usually a little battery-powered unit. If you made good use of it throughout the year, and had parents with enough money, a larger, more reliable, mains-powered recorder would arrive the following Christmas.

The “good use” of the tape recorder was hard to define. The first thing to do was to record your friends chatting and telling off-colour (for the times) jokes, then play it back to general hilarity. Once that phase was over, you either mostly abandoned the device, its use spent, or combined it with another hobby.

Trainspotting has always been a big hobby, and the 1960s saw the notebooks supplemented by cameras and tape recorders. Tapes full of the sounds of steam engines, local shunting and new electric trains sparking are now added to back to contemporary photographs and cinefilm to recreate those times.

For pop music fans, the Top 40 on the off-shore stations or Radio Luxembourg could be caught, the DJ edited out and the records preserved for listening to later without the expense of buying singles. The money saved could be put towards buying the reel-to-reel tapes your were recording the records on.

For school drama and music clubs, owning a reel-to-reel made you important and gained you promotion: now somebody could record the concert or provide amazing sound effects for the play, things guaranteed to create popularity.

Or you could do what I did: obsessively record theme tunes, jingles, television continuity, DJ chatter, idents and interlude music, put the tapes on a shelf and rediscover the gems within some 50 years later.

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Popular music had never been the BBC’s “thing”. It had done well with fans of dance band music in the 1930s and 1940s, the pop music of its time, who got a couple of hours every day. But as the 1940s turned into the 1950s, the dance music continued while the new rock and roll, the roots of pop, was largely ignored.

By the 1960s, the absence of pop on the BBC Light Programme was very noticeable. True, there were the odd request programmes, but the station’s appeal to children and to old ladies meant that some odd novelty and crooner numbers slipped in, ruining the flow for teenagers who wanted to “groove” to the Top 10.

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Into this gap stepped the off-shore stations like Radio Caroline and Wonderful Radio London, who provided pop music throughout the day. But they went off-air mid-evening each day to make space for the granddaddy of popular music services: Radio Luxembourg.

With the BBC’s habit of rationing popular music and light entertainment in the 1930s, Radio Luxembourg had made a very profitable niche for itself putting out exactly those types of programmes for 6-8 hours a night every night, interspersed with advertising and sponsorship. The signal, coming all the way from the German border with Luxembourg, was not as robust as modern ears would like, but when the choice was Radio Luxembourg or a three-hour dramatisation of Trollope or yet more dance band music, the Luxembourg “fade” be damned.

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By the 1960s, Radio Luxembourg, Your Station of the Stars, had embraced popular music in a way that even early BBC Radio 1 would never manage. The record programmes, brought to you by each label in turn or by various shampoo and chocolate manufacturers, were very different from the American-style output of the “pirates” but still very cool. And best of all, the new transistor radios that came on the market in the 1960s truly were small enough to listen “under the bedclothes” and had pretty good reception of medium wave signals. Thousands of us fell asleep to the latest tunes played by Your DJ BA Barry Alldis, Don Wardell and Jack Jackson until the early hours every morning.

Archive source: http://208.retropia.co.uk/

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At the start of the 1960s, the majority of travel was still done by train. This was about to change: an increase in disposable income combined with a decrease in the cost of cars; the car building industry employed more people than the railways and had more businesses depending on them; cars could be readily exported, trains only rarely. After 100 years of focussing on the railways, the government turned to cars as a driver, as it were, of the economy and as a measure of popular prosperity.

The railways suffered under this change of direction, not helped by Dr Beeching closing a third of the network. At the same time, British Railways fought back with electrification schemes, a whole new brand called “British Rail” marked with the definitive UK logo of the 20th century and an array of special offers and cheap travel options.

Here’s an offer for a day return to London from Liverpool in 1966/7 for just £3 – that’s £52 in modern money. The same journey with Virgin Trains now costs £156 (£9 in 1966 money).

Image source: http://ageofthetrain.retropia.co.uk/

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The most useful coin for a child in the 1960s. Sure, half a crown – 2s 6d – was what everyone hoped for and often got from uncles and friends of parents for Christmas or birthdays. But that was special money for special use.

A sixpence was daily currency, handed out by middle-class parents as a method of getting their child to go out, used as an incentive or reward by working-class parents to their offspring. Sixpence was twelve ha’penny chews. Sixpence was both the Beano and the Dandy together. Sixpence was six goes on the pinball machine at the back of the local cafe that thought of itself as a “milkbar”. Sixpence was a medium Cadbury’s Dairy Milk or a large Fry’s Turkish Delight. Sixpence was a half return to somewhere nearby – often just the next station or so – on the train. Sixpence was a child’s seat in the stalls for a matinee at the local ABC.

To live a full life as a kid in the 1960s, all it took was 6d.

Image source: http://numismia.retropia.co.uk/

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A long clip from Radio Caroline North, one of the biggest of the off-shore “pirate” radio stations, in July 1967. The Don Allen Show ends, Dave Williams reads the news, and The Jerry King Show begins.

Source: https://soundcloud.com/transdiffusion

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