This would have been a high standard of living by English standards at the time. You had to be well-off to afford a car, especially as they were highly taxed as the government wanted them to go for export. Most people still took the bus or the tram [streetcar] or cycled to work. They might aspire to a motorbike, perhaps a motorcycle combination. Although an increasing proportion acquired cars as the Fifties wore on into the Sixties. Cars were in many cases would be second-hand and still based on pre-war engines and the system of vehicle taxation encouraged small-bore, tall and fragile engines. There was one TV station, joined by a second (which was financed by advertising) in 1955. My father was the first in the street to get TV; all the neighbours came in to watch the Coronation on it. There were three radio channels, with some regional stations. Housing was scarce, wartime bomb damage was still being repaired, many inner city areas were condemned as slums and demolished for redevelopment. Many people who got married had to live in their parents’ house, or find a tiny basement apartment. Washing machines and vacuum cleaners were almost unknown, most people washed by hand or if you were better off sent it to the laundry.
Phones were for the upper-middle class; there was a phone booth somewhere in the streets nearby for desperate emergencies, although few ordinary people would have known anyone was on on the phone. Party lines remained common into the 1970s.
Identity cards were a wartime imposition that persisted into the Fifties. Food rationing continued until 1954.
Coal was still the normal fuel, electricity had penetrated to almost everywhere but apart from light and one or perhaps two sockets there would not be many outlets. Gas lighting still existed in some inner cities but was rapidly disappearing. British Rail was still building steam locomotives. The New Towns were being built in an attempt to tackle the housing shortage, which persisted into the 1960s, and people had to create a community out of nothing though they were often glad to be able to live in a brand-new house and not have to share. Employment, in retrospect, was full or almost full though the levels of unemployment seemed worrying at the time. Shortages of labour meant many black people were encouraged to immigrate from the Caribbean, mostly to work in unpopular jobs. People from the Indian sub-continent were encouraged to come from the late '50s, to work in the wool and cotton-spinning industries of Lancashire and Yorkshire which were losing competitiveness to Far Eastern markets and wanted cheaper labour to cut their costs.
And you had to license your TV!
I had no idea things were that bad.
When did England begin losing it’s World Power status? I thought it began after the First World War, a British person told me several ears ago that it was with the loss of the East India Company.
I arrived in the SF Bay Area in '52. Dads had careers at one company for life, got a living pension, and retired comfortably, for the most part. Moms stayed home and raised kids; the neighborhood was full of them, after all – it was the baby boom. That’s why we knew the neighbors - the kids all played together and people were home. We had one car; Dad carpooled to work so he didn’t take it every day, but on the days the rest of the family was home carless, going to the neighbors to borrow an egg or a cup of flour or whatever was common, since you couldn’t drive to the store.
Working moms were rare. Women who did work were nurses, teachers or secretaries. Divorce was scandalous. It happened, but there was a lot more “staying together for the kids”. Catholics didn’t get divorced - they got legally separated and lived apart, but generally didn’t remarry.
“Negores” or “Coloreds” went to school with the rest of us and played on our Little League teams, but there were definitely certain neighborhoods where they all lived.
Even though we lived 30 miles from San Francisco, we didn’t go often, and it was a major expedition. The I-80 freeway was built about 1960; in the 50s the highway was the main street through all the cities in the East Bay. You could actually tell which town you were in - it wasn’t all one continuous suburb.
Vacation every summer was a one-week camping trip, either in the redwoods or Yosemite. A couple of times there were multi-state drives to visit relatives. Sunday drives to see the local scenery were common. Surprisingly often, they managed to pass through Napa Valley, where us kids got to hang out in the car while mom & dad visited a tasting room.
Damn … I’m starting to feel old …
Twoflower: “Damn … I’m starting to feel old …”
Those of us reading this thread today, who were around to remember the 1950’s, are necessarily starting to feel older. Perhaps a lot of us have a tendency to see those days, in retrospect, with a dose of rose-colored glasses. Plus, we were kiddies then, seeing things at the time with a kiddies’ perspective.
Since the 1980’s or so, it’s been popular to view Growth and Development as (perhaps necessary) evils: Destroying pristine open spaces; paving the continent; crowding, congestion, pollution, . . .
But back then, Growth and Development was commonly seen as some kind of Marvelous Thing (though not without controversy). The “suburbs” were growing and developing, as people moved out of the “urbs”. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley (a part of Los Angeles), at a time when that area was mostly fully-built-up but not quite. It seemed that there was always much excitement in the air as new roads, housing tracts, and shopping centers were built where open space and orange groves once were – although at the same time, there was much hand-wringing and moaning about the congestion, pollution, and loss of orange groves. Air pollution, on bad days, was much worse than today.
I took some flying lessons when I was in 12th grade (1968-1969), out of Van Nuys airport. One smoggy day, upon landing, we noticed a distinct film of gritty brownish-yukky oil coating the leading edges of the wings and propeller. To which the instructor commented something to the effect: 'Yuck! That’s what we’re breathing all the time!"
ETA: Now, fast forward about 30 years, long after I’ve left Southern California. Driving back for the occasional visit, I pass through Conejo Valley (Thousand Oaks area), a somewhat smaller valley next up the road on Highway 101 – Seeing all the growth and development now going on there, I say to myself: Awwww shit. It’s the next San Fernando Valley, growth and development all over again! More ETA: Ditto Simi Valley.
My house in the San Fernando Valley was built in 1951. When I moved in I met the lady next door - she was the original owner of her house! Her and her husband moved in when it was a brand new development. I asked if she had seen a lot of changes over the years - her reply, “Yep.” That’s all she said on the subject.
You can still see traces here and there of the pre-building-boom valley. Up that street is a horse ranch, down that road is a couple of houses from before the development.
In the Halberstam book, someone brags about getting 100,000 miles from their car. That’s nothing nowadays. In the 50’s, there were plenty of auto mechanics (gas stations on every corner!), but there were also plenty of guys who could tear down and engine and put it back together.
What Senegoid says about growth and development is true, and nothing for 50’s developers to be ashamed of. People wanted to own their own homes, they wanted yards, and some open space. Some developers even built schools, playgrounds and swimming pools.
Now we recognize population density as an efficient way to live, if managed and planned, but back then, the suburbs were new, and people will always look favorably on new. Fresh air, sunshine, all that stuff that wasn’t happening in the cities.
Halberstam doesn’t overlook the fact that most of the people buying in the burbs were part of White Flight.
That is a big difference - there was a lot more open space back then. The house I live in now was build in 1954, and was in the real hot part of town. There was a major shopping center one block over. Bigger ones got built and the center died, and was finally torn down for houses since I’ve been here. There was even a little airport in walking distance, now occupied by retail.
This has been a continuous process. In 1975 when I was at the U of I there was nothing but empty fields between Willard airport and the Ford dealership towards Champaign. Now it is full of developments.
The crackerbox company house (2BR, slab on grade) that I grew up in in Anchorage still stands, but now sells for big bucks (double lot, good neighborhood). Where I lived from 1998 to 2009 was nothing but moose pasture when I was a kid. Unimproved dirt roads then are now major thoroughfares. Typical for most towns of any size, I guess.
I recall taking summer vacations with my dad driving us in a brown Rambler from Arkansas to California. We had no air conditioning, and my mom packed a cooler with lunchmeats, fruits, and drinks. We ate most of our meals out of the cooler, because there just weren’t fast food joints and we couldn’t eat in “fancy restaurants” all the time.
No air conditioning, and no seat belts. I don’t recall seat belts being introduced in cars until I was in high school, and didn’t start using them until much later.
And there was no such thing as “baby seats” in the car. Babies just laid on the bench seat, hopefully with Mom or an older sibling sitting next to it so it didn’t roll onto the floor in a quick stop. My baby brother was born in 1960, and I recall that he rode home from the hospital lying between me and my sister in the back seat.
What I remember, as a child (born in 1949) was how much freedom I had, freedom from fear of molestation or harm from predators. Part of this was knowing the neighbors (my sister got into it once with a lady who lived a block away, and she came marching up to our house and discussed it with my parents). We lived in the same house from the time I was 2 until I was at college. So we had the sense that there were people behind those windows looking out for us.
Another part was that my parents were both working and were too busy to helicopter me. I was a latchkey kid from the time I was 6. I had to take allergy shots, originally twice a week, and I went on the bus by myself way across town (about an hour on two buses) by myself from the time I was 7. One of the days was Saturday, but the other day was Wednesday after school, so it was generally dark by the time I got home.
The 50’s was the decade when my parents laid the groundwork for pulling themselves up from blue-collar lower-middle to solidly middle class. My father started going to night school when he was 35 to get a law degree (he had never been to college). They bought our house in 1952 for something like $12K.
A lot of things were taken for granted. I lived near a color line street - all white on our side, mixed race on the other side. My grade school was all white. This was in Portland, Oregon, by the way. Education was taken for granted, in the sense that everyone went to school, but not everyone went to college.
I remember we did a lot of things as a family (2 parents, 2 kids). Dinner together every night, we always went to movies together, berry-picking (and other fruit) in season, the kids had to help around the house and/or yard to earn our allowances. A special treat was popcorn in the evening for TV watching. I watched a lot of TV in the 50’s, we got our first set around 1954. I remember my father watched the Friday night fights (brought to you by Gillette), but I think it was only because that’s what was on. I remember a 15-minute nightly network newscast on CBS with Douglas Edwards. I remember the local weatherman on the CBS affiliate, and how my mother made fun of the way he looked (kind of like Mr Peepers). I remember my father calling the single woman across the street who walked like a man a Lezzie (I thought he said Lizzie and I didn’t know why because that wasn’t her name). I remember “This Old House” was a top tune on Your Hit Parade for a long time - and I didn’t really understand what it was about. I remember my father smoked at the dinner table, although he did try to blow his smoke away from the rest of us. We had a record of Tex Ritter singing “Smoke Smoke Smoke That Cigarette” which my sister and I used to rag our father with.
There were international tensions and fallout shelters and all that too, but as a kid I didn’t really take them seriously. From what I understood, if people were stupid enough to start a war like that, most of us wouldn’t survive, and so I didn’t believe anyone would be that stupid.
So this is some of what it was like to be a kid in the 50’s in my neighborhood. As I look back on it, it doesn’t seem too bad.
Roddy
Girls were girls and men were men
Actually you had to license your radio as well, in those days. That was only abandoned in 1971, after truly portable cheap sets made it unenforceable.
By 1897, the year of the Diamond Jubilee, Britain was already in the afternoon of power, her industrial output being overtaken by Germany and America.
I was born in 1960 and I could’ve written this post (insert Ohio instead). We kids practically lived in our treehouse in the summers. Rode our bikes everywher and had friendly nieghbors who would bake cookies or make candied apples to give us when we trick-or-treated. I was about 10 and spit on the little brother of my friend once. His dad came out of the house and smacked me a good one. I never spit again and I spent the rest his days respecting the heck out of him.
In her 70’s, Mama Plant would still stick her arm out to keep me from falling off the seat. 
From what I have read and heard from parents/grandparents the situation with food was quite different from today.
“Eating out” was a special event; people overwhelmingly ate at home.
People traditionally had large gardens and would can perhaps hundreds of quarts of vegetables and fruit for use throughout the year. I am surprised no one (not-so-fondly) mentioned weeding the garden as a youth.
For fruits and vegetables people would eat
- in-season fruits and vegetables
- canned fruits and vegetables from the store
- what they grew or canned themselves
Getting fruits and vegetables from all over the world and frozen fruits and vegetables were uncommon.
People basically prepared meals from scratch, rather than the huge variety of prepared foods supermarkets offer today. Potatoes were a much more popular food then. Pizza was of course an ethnic food then (something you might eat if you were of Italian descent).
Separate butchers, bakeries, fruit/vegetable stands were more common. The grocery stores were a lot smaller and only sold food (if you need drugs you went to the drug store).
Britons still licence their TVs.
Let me begin by going back to the 40s. We were a lower middle class family living in a lower middle class neighborhood in West Philadelphia. There were no blacks living there then. When I got home from school, the door was, of course, unlocked and I threw my school bag into the living room and went out to play in the street. There were almost no cars parked on the street and a car might have come down the street every 15 minutes. We played totally unsupervised and if there were organized Little Leagues or anything of the sort we unaware of it. We mostly played a baseball type game from April to September and touch football the rest of the year. Sometimes, we played hopscotch with the girls. There was a public pool a quarter mile away, but we were not permitted to go there because of the danger of polio, which was a constant threat during summers. And we all knew people who crippled more or less severely by polio.
Our mothers listened to soaps much of the day and we listened to 15 minute daily shows like Lone Ranger, Jack Armstrong, The Shadow,… When TV came, we imagined they would be transmuted into TV shows, but TV could not operate on such a schedule.
Antibiotics were gradually introduced during the late 40s and took away a lot of fear of infection. We got DPT and smallpox vaccinations routinely and there were no idiot anti-vaxxers (except, I guess for Christian Scientists, but I never knew any of them). There was a mad rush for polio vaccinations when they became available around 1955. I lost my appendix in 1950, but except for a few procedures like that, doctors couldn’t actually do much until they antibiotics. Transplants were unthinkable things like statins and beta-blockers were in the future.
Men basically got lifetime jobs; their wives raised children and cleaned house. And listened to soaps. Unemployment was low, income taxes were high (up to 91% on the wealthiest) and life was improving all the time. We had always had a fridge (before I was born), a telephone, and indoor plumbing. I don’t know if there any outhouses left in the city. Until about 1950, we had coal heat. Clearing ashes was a major undertaking for the city. I wonder when they stopped it. But our coal burner was converted to oil around 1950. More and more neighbors got cars, but our first was in 1953, a 13 year old DeSoto. Public transit was good and there were neighborhood stores. Of course, after we got the car, we would go to the supermarket and gradually those neighborhood stores must have closed. A couple of blocks from us, there was an A&P with counter service, but the real supermarkets were self-serve.
In 1955, blacks started moving into our neighborhood and we, along with virtually all our neighbors, fled to the suburbs. I am not proud of this, but facts are facts. As far as I am aware only one Philadelphia neighborhood avoided this (Mt. Airy). When my son lived that neighborhood for 2 years about 10 years ago, their neighbors on each side were black and the neighborhood had been stable for decades.
Life was improving, albeit slowly. As 1950 began, we had neither TV nor car. As 1960 began, we had at least one TV and something like three cars. From one phone, we had at least two extensions (including my sister’s Princess phone). We now had a large fridge with a freezer big enough to store at least a few packages of vegetables, 1/2 gallon of ice cream, and several cans of juice.
One thing that I want to note. We dated. We didn’t go out in groups. We dated, then we went steady, and then we married young. My mother was aghast. Why don’t you go out in groups like we did? What is this going steady? She didn’t understand at all. Then in the 80s I discovered that my kids didn’t date much, if at all. They went out in groups. Now my teenage grandchildren seem to be back to dating and going steady. The only constant is that the pendulum continues to swing.
By 1950, the year I started HS,
I believe mass auto manufacture, frozen food and antibiotics were from WWII.
Had America still been part of Great Britain, one doubts if Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler would have tried to mess with England. 
I was very young in the fifties and remember getting our first tv. Going to school in ME and meeting my first black classmates, all two of them who were brothers. Also remember that Elvis Presley was on the Ed Sullivan show and the Andrea Doria sank. Nobody locked their cars and you only locked your house if you lived in the city. We also had a coal furnace.
My grandfather got sick and we had to go to his house in the country where there was no central heating, only cold water from a hand pump in the pantry and an outhouse attached to the shed. He had an old crank phone with a party extension.