Men Only / July 1950
I’m not sure where to start with this one. Perhaps the first point is that it’s impossible to kill all the animals featured in one safari, given that you’d have to go to at least two continents to do it.
Tags: adverts totally made of wrong, retail, scary thoughts, social history
Men Only / September 1951
Given recent events in the Crimea, this feels oddly timely, but of course it’s another part of the campaign that this ad comes from. By the way, I think the illustration is of hand grips on the Tube stock of the day, but it took me a couple of minutes to work it out!
Men Only / July 1950
Ah, nothing like a bit of emotional blackmail to help a government hedge its bets in a brave new post-WW2 world.
The Territorial Army is the official reserve armed force for the UK, although the situation in 1951 was complicated by the fact that conscription into National Service for 17-21 year olds wasn’t to end until the early 1960s. However, the advert here is aimed at men who served in WW2 and had been sent home after the war to either continue to support their families, or to start one. Given that some conscripts weren’t sent home until 1949, it seems rather unfair to immediately haul them back, just because Britain wasn’t getting its own way in the post-WW2 world.
But then, for men brought up on the idea of British Empire, the early 1950s would indeed have been frightening; the various conflicts related to the Cold War, such as the Korean War lasting from 1950-1953, the Malayan Emergency lasting throughout the 1950s, and the chaos of Indian independence in 1947 would have all contributed to a feeling of the world order as most Britons knew it falling apart. No wonder some feared that they’d have to go through it all again.
Tags: dodgy advice, emotional blackmail, scary thoughts, social history
Woman's Weekly / 7th May 1965
So, yeah. As icanhascheezburger.com have highlighted before, funny captions for animal pictures are nothing new. Although this editorial tells me more about Princess Margaret’s sham of a marriage than I ever wanted to know, the centenarian feature is quite startling, given that it’s talking about people born in 1865!
Tags: lolcats, scary thoughts
Woman's Weekly / 18th June 1965
Women who could clearly remember the fashions of 1926 in 1965 must have been, at the very youngest, 50 when this was published. Oddly enough, I’ve just worked out that this group of women would have included my grandmother, which is something for me to ponder for the rest of the day.
Tags: bemax, health, scary thoughts, vitamins
Woman / 9th December 1967
Ooh, blimey. Those of us born from the mid-70s onwards won’t have remembered that it was once normal for shampoo and the like to be in glass bottles. Just think about that for a moment. Ouch. I drop bottles in the shower almost every day!
Tags: beauty, retail, scary thoughts, social history