I don’t tend to belong to all that many Facebook groups and the ones I do belong to tend to be relatively light in terms of traffic. Many are about yesteryear when, we are led to believe, things were always far better than they used to be. I suppose these things depend on what you see as being better. One such group is called ‘Bristol then and now photos’ which I usually find moderately entertaining, if only for the rose-coloured glasses view of how things use to be. There’s one thread today which shows an area of Whitchurch and here’s the memory of one member:
“Fond Memories growing up as a child in the 1950’s & 60’s Planes flying over low landing at Whitchurch Airport, Plenty of fields to play in, You could go out & leave your House doors unlocked all day. The Ironmongers, The Paper shop, The Veg shop. Happy days.”
Far be it for me to knock someone for their memories, real or imagined. Whatever floats you boat or in this instance flies your plane. But how much of this was real and how much was a time and a place that never really happened?
In this instance, planes did fly into Whitchurch airport, but only until 1957. There were a few local flying clubs and there were sporadic scheduled services to the Channel Islands, the Isle of Wight and the Isle of Man, as well as, briefly, France. But as demand grew it was quickly realised that Whitchurch airport was too small and because of the rise in housing in the area impossible to develop and expand, hence the opening in 1957 of Lulsgate Airport.
It is true that there are fewer fields to play in, but new homes for the expanding population had to be built somewhere. But could you really “go out & leave your House doors unlocked all day”? This implies that throughout the 1950s and 1960s there were no burglars, which simply wasn’t the case. It’s true that crime has grown far more quickly than the population has expanded since the 1950s and 1960s, but the idea it never existed back then is simply nonsense.
In 1958, the Conservative home secretary face calls for the return of flogging and pledged himself to a programme of short, sharp, shock detention centres to counter the ‘sudden increase in crime and brutality’. And in the 1960s, young people were twice as likely to carry knives than today.
Geoffrey Pearson, professor of social work at Goldsmiths College, London, said this: “There never was a golden age when we were comparatively crime free. Although people hark back to some peaceful period, which is always 20 or 25 years previously, the reality is that these eras never existed.’ Random violence and street gangs are nothing new. ‘Lager louts have always been around, in one form or another.”
Unlike this particular member, I spent little time hanging around “The Ironmongers, The Paper shop, The Veg shop” but perhaps the crowd I was with were interested in other things, like playing football, reading comics or waiting for computers to be invented? It’s true that in Brislington – Briz, as it is known – Village where I grew up we had some independent shops. A dairy, a cobbler, a butcher, a veg shop, a newsagent and, quite possibly, an ironmonger but give me a Sainsbury’s any day of the week, thank you very much.
Were they “happy days”? They clearly were for people who liked to see the odd plane fly over and for those with a particular passion for certain types of shop and I suppose if we’d wanted to we could have left our house unlocked all day because we had nothing worth stealing. A tiny, cronky black and white television, no form of heating beyond a coal fire, no fridge, no washing machine, a cooker with two rings and a grill that didn’t work…happy days?
The simple fact is that the warm, fuzzy past didn’t really exist. Even in the war, when we were fighting the fascist threat, there were still wrong ‘uns on the take, stealing, ripping people off, carrying out violent crimes.
If today’s world really is as crap as so many old timers say it is, then ask yourself who made it that way? They did and then they handed it down to their children and grandchildren. But it isn’t as crap as all that because things are far, far better than they used to be. If you’d like a world without the internet, without the ability and means to travel, without decent transport systems, without the vast variety of food we are able to eat these days, without a million and one things that have improved our lives, then by all means wallow in dreams of the past. But dreams are all they are.
