Phil Gillam: Turning back time to Christmas 1966
My name – in capital letters – had been written carefully with a ballpoint pen onto little strips of paper and then sticky-taped onto my spoon, my knife, my fork, my plate, my dish, and my glass.
To this day, I cannot quite figure out why the school couldn’t have provided these utensils and crockery, but, as I recall, each child had to bring their own from home.
There was jelly and ice-cream for sure, and if not lashings of lemonade (as Enid Blyton might have put it) then certainly plenty of Corona (obviously not the premium lager of today, but the brightly coloured fizzy pop of the 1960s). You could get Corona cream soda, orangeade, lemonade, limeade and cherryade.
I’m thinking there must also have been sandwiches, sausage rolls, crisps and pork pies, but all I can clearly remember now is the jelly and ice-cream and the pop.
This was our Christmas party in the hall at the old Lancasterian School, Castlefields, Shrewsbury, in 1966.
A classic Christmas in our cold, damp, Castlefields house.
I swear I can distinctly remember Green Green Grass of Home by Tom Jones playing on the radio as myself and my younger brother played with our toy cars, lorries and buses on the carpet underneath the dining table that Christmas holiday.
Green Green Grass of Home was clearly not a very festive record (being about a man in jail awaiting execution … not exactly Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas) and yet every time I hear it, I’m taken back to that yuletide holiday, the smell of pine from the Christmas tree, the tinsel, the fairy-lights, the brightly-coloured paper decorations criss-crossing the ceiling to form a sort of psychedelic union jack.
In an era before the annual appearance of new Christmas records galore, battling it out for the top spot, it was indeed Tom Jones and his far-from-cheerful tale that hit the number one spot as we were getting ready to open our presents, pull crackers and watch some seasonal telly.
Talking of television, it’s fascinating to dip into the archives and see what was on that year.
Kids
BBC 1 on Christmas Eve offered such delights as the 1950 feature film Davy Crockett, Indian Scout, starring George Montgomery; Juke Box Jury presented by David Jacobs, Doctor Who starring Patrick Troughton; Dixon of Dock Green; The Val Doonican Show; and Match of the Day – "with Kenneth Wolstenholme reporting with outside broadcast cameras from a well-known Football League ground”.
On Christmas Day (and I swear I remember this too) we had Leslie Crowther inviting us to Meet the Kids in hospital at Christmas.
There was also The Andy Williams Show, and later, after the Queen’s speech, Billy Smart’s Circus, Disney Time, and Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp starring Arthur Askey and Roy Castle.
Highlights for the evening? Well this was still a good few years before the ascendancy of Morecambe and Wise of course. So … we had The Black and White Minstrel Show (ouch!), The Ken Dodd Show, and a classic western – John Wayne starring in The Comancheros.
Goodness. How things have changed.
Did it snow that year?
Well, as the great Dylan Thomas wrote about his own childhood: I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
Anyway.
It does strike me as odd, looking back, that there was nothing very festive about the chart at all in December 1966. Some great songs though; records from The Supremes, The Beach Boys, and Donovan.
The age of Wizzard and Slade was still to come!
But we had Corgi cars and plastic soldiers and buses with friction motors (and it might well have been that year that we had a circus set with clowns, dogs jumping through hoops, elephants, horses, and a ringmaster).
And we had chocolate, Corona pop, and Ken Dodd on the telly.
