Thinking back to when the vacuum cleaners were not around, what exactly did you use to clean the floors? You know, vacuum cleaners, along time ago what did you use to clean the floors?

Just an ordinary brush and pan originally, before we even had a cleaner. First cleaner we had, I suppose, was an ordinary Hoover. This is going back I mean my memories are going back to about 1933-34 that sort of time. But that's all we had.

Who did the cleaning?

Oh, my mother.

Did she have a special day of the week when she did it?

No, virtually every day.

Could you tell us your earliest memories of the washing machine? How did you do the washing before that?

We lived in the house my father had designed. He was an architect and he included in the design a sort of lobby, a sort of wash room really, in which there was a giant copper. If you can imagine the timpani in a symphony orchestra it was that kind of size and that kind of depth with water; it was gas fired. The washing was boiled and then it was rinsed, and rinsed ,and rinsed again and then it was then put through a mangle, which we had in a sort of inner shed. Then it was dried on one of these hanging racks, which worked on pulleys and came down over the boiler, which was in the kitchen, and supplied most of the heating. And that was our... we didn't have a washing machine as such, at all. When we moved house we had... I think the first item was a spin dryer; then it was aired again. It all took very much longer than it does today. That's my first memory of that.

Did you have like a special day on which you did the washing?

Oh, Mondays. Mondays was the sort of boiler day, but the rest of the proceedings took, of course, most of the rest of the week. We had a huge walk-in airing cupboard, I mean you could have put another bedroom in there I suppose, which had racks with all these sheets and pillowcases, and underwear and shirts and Lord knows what else what. My mother was very keen that everything had to be properly aired before you put it on.

And when did you... did you ever, get a washing machine?

Oh, very much later. I suppose it would be when my parents... when my mother died and we, my brother and I, were left to look after a rather elderly father in his 90's; and of course you get a lot more washing, and a lot more work to do. So we had a Hoovermatic twin tub, which was a washing machine and a spin dryer all in one; and it was very good. It was very, very efficient. Perhaps... I mean, there was only one speed for spin drying, for example, so you had to be a bit careful what you put in. Cottons tended to be... if you're not careful you ended up with a thing that was about the size of a hanky, so you had to be a bit careful what you did; but it was very good.

OK, televisions: What are your earliest memories of your television?

Oh well, the first television set we had... I rented a set for the coronation: 1953; and I can date this very accurately. Not only did we have our own family watching, but we had several friends round. There must have been something like twenty people watching. A tiny... I think it was probably a twelve inch screen, in a very large cabinet; a very poor picture always sort of flickering, and it would occasionally go off altogether; so you had the card that come up: " Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible." And you were sat there waiting for something to arrive; we saw the coronation all right. It had extraordinary side effects on what we had to eat because once we had this television set it was, it was compulsive viewing, we watched everything. I've never eaten so many Miller's pork pies in my life! You didn't want to miss anything, you see, so it altered our eating habits altogether really.

And as for when my mother died, the rest of us we down in the dumps, because it was totally unexpected and I treated them to a colour television set. At first I thought it was a bit of a gimmick, and the sales man said: "Have you thought what it would be like eating black and white bacon and eggs?" You then realise how important colour was in your life, you know, even the news, even the news reader's face; it brought things so much more to life. And as for the programmes... I mean, gardening: you know, you actually saw flowers in their true colours, as opposed to black and white. Food: there was interesting continental food people like Fanny Craddock the fore runner to Delia Smith. She became a house hold... she became a legend. And sport: snooker, which up till then most people considered to be a rather seedy sort of smoke filled, beer swilling, very lower class occupation, became a national sport. People were glued to the set watching these coloured balls potted in the pockets. It made an enormous difference, of course, to our father. As I say, he was in his nineties, and it renewed his interest in everything.

So your first television, how did it work? Did it have like a big knob that you turned to find the channel?

No, they weren't particularly big; about the size of that electric plug. There was one that was on and off, which also controlled the volume, and there was another one which controlled the channels. Of course, in the early days there was only one, but then when ITV came in and so on... It was a very... it was a very good set. It was made by Sony. I can remember that, a model called Trinitron. I don't know what that means. It's the way the colours are split up, I think. It was very reliable. We had it, ooh... best part of twenty years. It never went wrong.

So, did all of you have control of the TV, like what you watched, and it wasn't just...?

In the early days it was... in the black and white days it was... it didn't need a control; it was on. We watched virtually everything... children's programmes... There was a... what they called a 'toddlers' truce' somewhere between 4 o'clock and 5 o'clock in the afternoon when there was no programme, so mums could put their babies to bed, bath them and all that sort of thing without missing anything, you see. I don't think anyone, perhaps because we had more or less similar interests... I mean, we were interested in the news, sport and so on, it was before the days of what they call 'soaps', there weren't any in the early days. Even the news casters, they appeared as if they were going before royalty. They dressed very... quite often they would wear evening dress, you know, just to present the news. Because that was the way. The BBC was very autocratic, and they expected the very highest standards. There was no... There was a kind of BBC language, a BBC accent. If you see recordings of the very early days of television, the news readers or people introducing artists, they had a very posh tone, very much home counties. There was none of this Northern accent or Welsh accent or Southern regional well, Hampshire accent, which I've got. That would be completely unacceptable.

What about VCR's, did you have a VCR?

No.

When did you first get one, or did you ever get a VCR?

No we never did, they didn't interest us.

Before the television, what other technology was there to entertain you?

Well, we had the wireless. I can't remember the first set that we had. I can remember the first portable we had because, although it was portable in theory, in practice it almost needed a crane to lift it. It was enormously heavy to go from place to place with. The reception was poor. And then I can remember when VHF came in because we had a set where you could actually tune very accurately, a light sort of increased in size according to how accurate your tuning was. So the maximum light was the best tuning spot. You could play around for ages moving it within fractions of an inch to get the best tuning.

Oh, yes...

But then of course we had the gramophone, which resembled... I don't know whether you've seen the HMV sign with the Horn and the little dog? Well it was that kind of gramophone that had the horn attached. It made everything a bit scratchy because the needles on the head were metal. And then I went over to a rather more advanced sort of set, when LP records came in, long playing records - they were a tremendous advance you know, I built up quite a collection of those. And then in more recent times we've had compact discs. Heaven only knows what's going to happen in the future. It's an exiting thought really. Yesterday we were introduced to the Internet, that they're going to put us all on, I think. And, you know, we wonder what on Earth's going to happen next.

The telephone: Can you tell us when you first got a telephone?

Well, my father being an architect, he reckoned that the weekends and evenings were his own, and he refused point blank to have clients contacting him out of office hours. He was very reliable very trustworthy and he worked very, very hard when he was at the office; but he reckoned his own time was, his own time. So we didn't have a telephone. In fact, we didn't have a telephone for the best part of 30 years, until he retired. And then, of course, there was a riot. But we didn't use it a lot. We didn't have relations or friends a long way a way that you could have long chats with.

But what did the telephone look like when you got it?

Oh, it was an ordinary black bakelite horizontal hand set, with a dial that you dialled the numbers with.

Do you remember if it was expensive to use?

Well, not really. If you relate it to how valuable it was in an emergency - we looked upon it as an emergency service, for the doctor - it was very, very convenient. So the expense didn't come in to it really. There was a basic, as there still is, a basic rental charge, and then so much for calls, I can't remember. We may have had one or two phone calls to London but that's about as far as it went. We never had any transatlantic calls at any point

OK microwaves: Thinking back to when your mum was in the kitchen, when she was cooking dinner, did it take all day for her to cook?

We had two forms of cooking in the kitchen. There was a Rayburn, a stove which not only provided central heating such as it was with just two radiators. It had two ovens one to heat plates and a main oven; and it also supplied hot water. Quite a machine: it ran on coke (not the drink) a residue from coal, boiler fuel. One of my jobs as a boy was to rake out the ashes. Often you would get bits of clinker left, which you would then take out to the shed and dump in a pile; and when cool the dustman would take it away. Good form of cooking. Cheaper cuts of meat in a casserole become succulent with the slow cooking. As a back-up we had an electric stove as well. That was in the scullery next door to the kitchen.

Off that was the larder; we did not have a fridge over 30 years ago. My father had designed this walk-in larder with a slate floor and marble shelves all the way round and two air vents. It was beautifully cold and you could keep food for months. Going back to the microwave, when my mother died I was teaching and my brother designed fire engines; we were both very busy and my father was confined to a chair. So, first of all we had an infra-red cooker, the sort that they used to have in pubs for heating up pies in pre-microwave days. When the microwave came in, of course, that was a godsend; if you could only know how to work the thing. If you are used to food that takes a hour or so in a conventional oven, you tend to not believe that it could be cooked in minutes; and of course it comes out like a bit of charcoal. An invention that changed our lives.

What about working appliances at work?

The technological world in schools: I came out of the army and started teaching in Dunblane. They provide the pipe band for the Rugby international at Murryfield. When I went into civilian teaching my first school was a double decker school with boys on the bottom girls on the top and god help you if you got them mixed up: never the twain shall meet situation. A very old fashion school, the room divided by partitions which could be pulled back. Teaching was very much chalk and talk. Desks and seat bolted together very uncomfortable. Portable black board, and one of the first things you had to learn was to write with chalk. You had to get it right straight lines, no wobbles. There were no technical aids really. One of my subjects was music. There was no music room. The one that we used most was the hall, which was also the gymnasium and the dining room. So there was always this permanent smell of Brussels sprouts and gym shoes! Not the best atmosphere to learn how to sing. The pianos were dreadful; I used better in the army, which had had beer poured down them.

The Headmaster was not really interested. All he wanted me to do was to teach the children five hymns, Monday, Tuesday etc. When I had done this he said teach them five more, so that they had a bit of a repertoire of 10 hymns over a fortnight. Because he thought it was just as easy to teach a hundred children, all the classes were over forty, he used to amalgamate three classes into one; and there I was at this aged piano teaching these kids to sing " Oh God Our Help in ages past". There was a hundred there with the headmaster at the back to make sure that they did not mess about. He was very strict. Music, as I know it, did not really exist. I mean, there was note taking... the teacher would dictate notes to the children and they had copy them up into their books. There was limited homework as the resources at home were limited and quite poor. Many of them did not even have a fountain pen or a biro. When the ball point pen came in it was discouraged because they thought that it would ruin handwriting. Left-handers were discouraged too. On this wooden desk the ink well was on the right hand side as everybody was supposed to be right handed. If you were left handed you just had to manage. It was a strange world. I don't think people would put up with it these days.

Then I moved to a Grammar school. The facilities there were much better. We had a grand piano; a stark contrast to the machinery I had been using in previous years. The only machinery I had was a duplicating machine. You typed out what you wanted on a waxed sheet, which you put on a cylinder and then you reeled off how many copies you wanted. The Geography department had an over-head projector, which was considered to be one of the marvels of the day. People would come and glue themselves and say "Isn't it marvellous?" Nobody else had one. Very occasionally films would be shown. One I remember was "Latitude and Longitude", which was an extraordinary film... because in film you can show exploded diagrams and you can see the world being pulled apart and you can then understand why they talk about 30 degrees North. Where are the degrees? Where is the angle? And when you show a film like this it is wonderful. The only snag being that in an attempt to make it very simple the narrator said that a place is either on a line of latitude or above or below a line of latitude.

Do you know what the 11 plus is?

Yes.

Were you teaching when the 11 plus was in?

Indeed I was. Because my previous experience was teaching in a secondary modern school, I saw both sides of the coin. I saw people who had thought that they had failed, children coming home having heard the 11 plus results, crying.

They did not fail though did they?

They thought they had, and their parents thought they had; it was a matter of perception. The 11 plus, believe you me, was an incredible unsatisfactory and unfair test. Quite often in the grammar school I taught the lower stream, and they were no where near as capable as the top stream at the secondary modern school that I had come from. It was completely inefficient, this test, if you had 400 children taking this test the top 10 you could have picked any way. You only had to look at them to see that they were bright and keen and their parents were bright, had plenty of money and they could have everything they wanted. At the other end of the scale you would have 56 children who would be better of being educated in an hospital; they are educationally subnormal. Cruel people would say that they are thick or dull, the rest you could have put into a melting pot and taken out higgley piggledy and it would have been just as efficient as the 11 plus. So I could write you a book on the 11 plus.

I saw one of the questions that they had in the 11 plus and I could not answer it.

Some were down right wrong. I remember one question, was a sequence of letters and it started O T T F F Blank O T T F F Blank, you see. Now what's the right answer? Well some intelligent children would say well now OTTFF must be a single letter, O is to T, between O & T are PQRS so four letters there, if you work your way back from F four letters EDCB the correct answer is A. Now that is an intelligent answer isn't it, but it happens to be wrong. Because the correct answer is S. O for 1 T for 2 T for 3 F for 4 F for 5 S for 6. Now who is the intelligent one then.

That's not intelligent that answer.

Well...

The first one was the intelligent answer.

Right, you see, but you were discouraged, you see.

That why people were placed in the wrong school.

Not just one or two in a wrong school.

Twenty percent wasn't it?

Tremendous... Eventually one of my jobs at the grammar school... I was in charge of the examination administration. I had to make all the entries and I had to deal with all the results when they came through. This was in the days on O level and A level. It was before the days of GCSE, thank God, I don't think that I could have coped with that. But when the O level results came out in the grammar school... the lower forms and the lower streams, if they got two O Levels that was quite remarkable. Where as in the secondary modern school when they started taking O Levels they were getting five six, seven, eight, nine, ten O Levels. In a completely different class. I suppose that what happens is when you are at the top, or you are deemed to be at the top of a group of people you respond accordingly. Whereas the converse is true, people say: "He in the lowest stream must be a real old thick-o". One teacher once described it as the... we had four streams ABC & D... The A stream were clever and quiet, the B stream were clever and noisy, the C stream were stupid and quiet, and the D stream were stupid and noisy. I don't know if you are still interested in schools?

You carry on, we have finished our questions but this is interesting.

Well, as I say, I was in charge of the exam administration, and one of our leading departments was the economics department. The examination board that we used were the London University and our school became the guinea pig for the first multiple choice exam in economics. You know multiple choice exams? Where you get four lots of answers.

And you have to choose the right one...

Well now, you can imagine the very first one was extremely expensive to set up. I mean, any fool can produce 100 questions with 100 right answers but the trick, of course, is getting the questions which are not quite right but are nearly right. So of say four possible answers you get one that is obviously wrong, two is a little bit right, the third one is very nearly right but the forth one is absolutely right. It cost a small fortune several thousand pounds to set this exam up. It came to us. I had a whole sheaf of information beforehand about what I was supposed to do and what I had to supply. I had to supply 2B grade pencils because they made a precise dark mark as they were all marked by machine. So we had to have two 2B pencils in case one of them broke, and you had to have an India rubber so that they could rub out the one they wanted to change. I was a bit surprised when the exam turned up though, because they were delivered by Securicor complete with helmets, men carrying baseball bats; you would think that they were carrying the crown jewels. We had a special room set up. The desks had to be so many feet apart, so there was no cheating. The economics staff were banned; they weren't allowed anywhere near the room or exam. I was the only one allowed there because I was the sort of invigilator chap in charge of all this you see. Everything had to be timed with a stopwatch, you were told exactly what you could say, what you must not say, and then the exam took place. You gave them a time half way, and then when there was five minuets to go, then when to stop writing. Then everything, everything, had to be collected by these heavies, it was a bit frightening really. But of course it was the first one and it cost a lot of money and they couldn't afford to let any of the questions slip into the general knowledge. There, a curious set up.

The early calculators, originally of course calculating machines were not allowed, for maths exams you had to work it out for yourself. You were allowed log tables, I don't know if you have even ever used those, but it helped you to do very complicated calculations very quickly.

What are they?

Well, they are tables, you know, if you wanted to know what 956.507 multiplied by 427263 you can, by looking it up in the various tables, you can come across the answer. It's a bit long winded. Of course nowadays you just tap it into your calculator, press a button and bingo there it is. The early calculators were like typewriters about twice the size of that box. They were incredibly noisy, and you can imagine if thirty candidates were hammering away at their calculators It would be a hell of a row. They had to put them into a separate room for the exam for the A level so that they did not disturb the other candidates doing other subjects. Nowadays, of course, every one brings in their own portable things. This is the advance of electronics, isn't it really? I finished there in 1973 so we didn't have a computer of any kind, but we had these wretched calculators.

Well that about it I think. I've just sort of taken down notes of things which might of interest you, things like transport, because in Southampton where I lived, we had tram cars which ran on rails. They got their power from overhead cables, and its funny how its all come around full circle because they are thinking of installing trams back into Southampton now, some 40 years after they got rid of them. Because of the traffic congestion in the town they want to discourage people from using their cars. So they have huge car parks on the periphery of the town and then have these tram cars, which perhaps they might charge people for or allow them free if they think it is worth while, which will trundle their way in, 'cause they use them quite often in Germany, where they have articulated tramcars. One tows another one like a string of sausages. But the early days in tramcars was quite good fun. The top deck was open to the elements and the driver was open to the elements. He used to have a huge black waterproof sowester hat and long coat. There were two controls: one controlled the speed at which he went, and the more power he put in the faster he would go, and a curious brake that he turned like a rotary movement, which didn't work quite as well as people hoped, but an extraordinary business. But anyway that's enough material from me...

Yes, brilliant, thank you.

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