Swindon in the Past Lane

In which Mr Huws tries valiantly to preserve my crumbling teeth.  A visit to the dentist and a lesson in dental history, which throws a light on my own predicament. The provision of dental care in the 19th century was definitely increasing. In 1887 the GWR Medical Fund set up a dental clinic with the appointment of a dental surgeon.  Four years later the expanding practice moved into consulting rooms in the new flagship building on Faringdon Road. Meanwhile residents of Old Swindon could call upon the services of visiting Bath dentist John Hay available every Monday 10-4 while Thomas Wrench (ouch) was practising in Bradbury, Chiseldon. Mr Huws tells how a high point for 20th century British teeth came during the second world war with the restricted consumption of sugar during food rationing.  Unfortunately for our molars once sugar made a come back our teeth went into decline and dental well being hit a low in the 60's.  Education, improved toothpastes and f...

I've just celebrated a birthday.  Not a significant birthday, but a birthday none the less and one I was quite happy to keep to myself until my daughter posted an effusive greeting on Facebook. There are days when I don't feel any different to twenty years ago - then I look in the mirror. When my mum was the age I am now she had lived through an economic depression, mass unemployment and two world wars.   She was unhappily married with a 16 year old daughter she didn't understand.  Nothing had gone quite according to plan, and I wasn't the daughter she would have been, given half the chance. She sewed curtains in our pokey back room, the Singer machine positioned beneath the window to make best use of the natural daylight.  She now wore her glasses all the time, no longer just for sewing and reading.   She had a wash and set at the hairdressers every fortnight and she wore false teeth. She loved day trips to the seaside, especially B...

Shortly after 11.00 am on September 3, 1939 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was forced to break the news everyone expected but no one wanted to hear. In a radio broadcast made from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, Chamberlain announced, that for the second time in a generation, Britain was at war with Germany. By 1921 Austrian born WWI veteran Adolf Hitler was leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, popularly known as the Nazi Party. In the 1932 July elections he led the Nazis to a victory which saw them become the largest party in the German Parliament with over 37% of the votes and 230 seats. Throughout the 1930s Hitler climbed the political ladder in pursuit of his ambitions, the creation of a thousand year Third Reich and the annihilation of the Jewish people. In defiance of the Treaty of Versailles he had rebuilt the German armed forces in preparation for the seizure of Lebensraum, ‘living space’ for his Aryan master race. Hitler resolved to reunit...

Today advertising is big business as firms spend huge budgets on promoting their products. While celebrities  supplement their income persuading us to eat everything from crisps to luxury frozen meals, sports stars can earn seven figure sums from sponsorship deals and endorsements. We tend to think of advertising as a modern phenomenon, one of the evils of a media dominated lifestyle, but it was ever thus. An early example of the flyer, fodder for the recycling box today, was produced by Smith, Nash, Kemble and Travers 'wholesalers and retailers,' who in 1779 informed their customers of a sugar shortage due to 'the loss of Grenada.'  And by the beginning of the 19th century no entreperneurial opportunity to advertise was missed from bill boards to sandwich boards and of course, newspapers and magazines.  Swindon newspaper proprietor William Morris called his broadsheet the Swindon Advertiser, because it did just that. Regent Street was a proliferation of adver...

In the 1950s, when greetings cards were relatively modest, dad always bought my mum a big card in a box for her birthday and at Christmas.  Not big compared to those on offer today, but a box none the less.  His careful, rounded handwriting embellished with curls and loops conveyed the emotions I seldom heard him utter. The printed verse, often running to several inserted pages, said what he couldn't. The card, a padded confection of bows and bells - well, perhaps not bells - was always received with derision.  However mum kept them - in homage to the money they had cost him rather than the emotion expressed within them. Nothing in my parents's relationship was straight forward, but then how could it be?  There was too much sadness and too many secrets - and considering they had both experienced such deprived and lonely childhoods, a surprising absence of compatibility and empathy.  Mum wanted someone with ambition and drive.  Dad want...

Despite the growing deprivations on the home front, hard pressed Swindonians were asked to dig deeper into their pockets as Britain entered a second year at war - and the response was phenomenal. "It does not matter how much we women detest war, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that in this war women and children are in the front line," May George, Swindon's first Lady Mayor 1935-36 wrote in a letter to the Evening Advertiser.  "Let the women of Swindon show what they can do to help in the defeat of the enemies of everything that we hold dear." Just days before the town's War Weapons Week was to begin, ten people were killed and several others injured during an air raid on October 20, 1940.  Houses in Rosebery Street took a direct hit while a second bomb dropped in the middle of an adjoining road.  Local residents were commended for their great fortitude and the calm way in which they responded to the emergency. If ever the people of Swindon needed ...