I have taken up the pen again after a break of four years. This is due to the fact that I read on Facebook some positive remarks about my earlier blogs and this has encouraged me to continue. If my blogs put a smile on someone's face or bring back a fond memory then, suffice to say, they have achieved their objective.
I have given this blog a title starting with "......But I Digress".
Initially, I stated that my blogs would be an account of a young lad growing up in Dunblane, Scotland. However my memories are influenced by so many other places and events that this will be a bit of a wandering narrative, hence the "......But I Digress" in the title.
Before moving to Dunblane as an eight year old in November 1961, my earliest years were spent in Halfway, Cambuslang, a Lanarkshire coal mining village on the edge of Glasgow. Parents, unfortunately usually the mother, decided what clothes their offspring would wear. Our usual attire was short trousers, shirt and pullover in winter and, in summer khaki shorts and t-shirt. Shoes were sensible: black leather lace-ups or boots in the cold months and sandals or sandshoes (plimsols) for the Scottish summer. Wellington boots were also an all year round fashion accessory, given the Scottish climate.
In Cambuslang we never really interested ourselves in a new look. The teenage boys went around in Teddyboy jackets and jeans with turned up bottoms. There was absolutely no chance of our parents dressing us up in those outfits. "You're no going round looking like a Glesca Keelie", would be the usual comment if they caught us glancing admiringly at the older boys swaggering down the street.
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| Teddyboy Jacket |
No, we would make do with a snake belt which was an elasticated, striped belt with an s shaped fastener from which the belt got its nickname. I think every lad in Scotland had one. Ahhh: the dizzy heights of Cambuslang haute couture!
Snake belts
Then came the first occasion when I realized that your clothing in some way defined you. I still remember the moment vividly. We were on a family holiday in Blackpool. I was about seven years old and playing a pinball machine in an amusement arcade in the Winter Gardens. If you got a high score then you won either a packet of Polo Mints or Polo fruits. I was good at the machine and had amassed several rolls of Polos and was joined by an admiring young English lad, obviously impressed by my achievement. He oohed and aahed as I continued my winning streak. I was just so proud of myself. Then he looked down at my feet. A look of disgust and disdain came over his face. He snorted, turned his back on me and walked away. He had seen my sandals!
They were typical for the period. Light brown leather uppers, the toe end closed like a shoe but with openings on top to allow the foot to breathe and the shoe held on by a strap with a buckle. I still cringe to this day when I think of them!
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| Sandals..yuch. |
After our move to Dunblane, nothing much dress sense wise changed, apart from the fact that I was allowed to wear jeans. At primary school shorts were mandatory wear as part of the uniform. Grey knee length shorts, grey shirt and black blazer, grey socks and the school tie. The school pullover was also grey I believe, but I stand to be corrected on that.
I was glad to change out of my uniform when I got home but it was fine to wear it at school. It was a good leveller. No arguments about Nike and Adidas, or Ralph Lauren and Hugo Boss. No obvious signs of which families were more well off than others. We were all in the same boat together.
But short trousers were still the bane of my life. Unfortunately, most of my parents' friends were either childless or had either grown-up or very young children. When we went to visit them, I was dragged along in my suit.....scratchy wool and short trousers.. and made to sit, absolutely bored to death with no-one to play with, sweating and itching in those damned clothes. In those days children were meant to be seen and not heard. That was certainly the case with my parents.
My hatred of short trousers continued until the nineties when I moved to Scandinavia. Here, everyone (and yours truly) goes around in shorts as soon as the weather allows whereas I remember the UK in the seventies when men were more selfconcious about going round with bare knees. We would rather sweat than expose our white legs. I also went on holiday time after time to Spain or Italy or Greece and would wear long trousers everywhere except on the beach.
...But I digress...
Things changed in the early sixties. Along came pop groups such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Kinks. Along with countless other acts they helped generate a flood of media aimed at us, the youth of Great Britain. Magazines like Fabulous and Rave made us aspire to dress as much as possible like our pop idols.
But, in Scotland, we were pretty much conservative with a small c. Stirling was not Carnaby Street and the only choice in Dunblane was between Davie Hunter's and......Davie Hunter's. Great though that little shop in the High Street was, you couldn't buy hipsters or Beatle jackets there!
It wasn't just boutique clothing that we lacked in Dunblane, but it was impossible to get a pop style haircut. There were two barber shops on the High Street and you would go in and ask for a cut where the hair at the back was trimmed to a square shape. The barber would then show you the finished look in his hand mirror and, lo and behold, it was the same damned tapered hair that he had always done!
I experienced something similar here many years ago in my adopted homeland, Danmark. A friend of mine, Lars, rang me on a saturday morning to ask if I fancied a little trip into the area of the city known as Frederiksberg. Was this to buy more computer stuff I asked him. No, he had seen an advert in the paper for a barber who only charged 100 kroner so he was going to get a haircut there. I pointed out that the cost of a bus there and back would probably negate any savings he would make at the barber's but he was adamant.
Well, I too could use a haircut and it gave us the excuse of having a few pints in another part of town so I agreed.
We arrived at the barber's shop and I was pleasantly surprised. It was an old fashioned men's hairdresser where you could also get a shave if you wanted and a place where acquaintances would meet up and have a good gossip or put the world to rights. The smell of hair lotion and barbicide transported me back to my youth when it seemed like all barber's shops had that fresh clean smell. The furniture and fittings were in wood, obviously unchanged in many years. There were pictures on the walls of stars of music or film, displaying the differing hairstyles one could choose from.
At that time Lars was about thirty with thinning hair and was very sensitive about it. He did not like people to see how little hair he had and went around with a baseball cap on all the time to disguise the fact. "You go first while I make my choice of styles" he said so I sat down in the barber's chair. I was asked what style I wanted and I pointed to a large picture of Richard Gere on the wall.
"Just like that would suit me fine," I said and the barber went to work.
He switched on an electric trimmer and started at the back trimming my neck hair.
"Bzzzzzzzzz" went the trimmer and he moved to the top of my head.
"Bzzzzzzzzz". Then the left hand side and the right. "Bzzzzzzzzzz"
"Bzzzzzzzzz" then the front "Bzzzzzzzzzz"
It was finished. I looked in the mirror. The style was more skinhead than filmstar but what the heck. It was neat and cost only 100 kroner.
I looked at Lars. Doubled up with laughter he nearly fell off the bench he was sitting on.
Still grinning, he took his place in the barber's chair, pointed to a picture and told the barber " Exactly like that in the picture. NOT like you've just cut his hair!"
And so the barber went to work. He turned on his trimmer and.... "Bzzzzzzzzzzzz", "Bzzzzzzzzz", "Bzzzzzzzzz".
You can guess the rest. Lars was not a happy chappy. We were two baldies who went for a pint afterwards. A few years later I related the episode at his wedding and managed to embarrass him again.
But I digress..........
As the hairdressing industry in early sixties' Dunblane seemed loathe to give me the Beatles look then I stuck with the alternative. The Elvis look where the modus operandi would be application of Brylcreem! If someone is reading this who does not know what Brylcreem was (or possibly still is ) then I can explain that it was a type of hair gel for men, very popular in the fifties and sixties. Someone like my father for example would take an amount about the size of a small hazelnut and apply it to his hair. The said hair would then be stiff enough to stay in place on a windy day. Admittedly my father didn't have that much hair so for most folk the amount used might have been the equivalent of a small walnut. Never one for half measures, I usually used about one third of a jar. Needless to say, my hair never blew about on a windy day!
So. In West Perthshire, of which Dunblane was a part in those days, the lack of King's Road, Chelsea style gear (and on grounds of economy) meant that we had to be somewhat innovative in our choice of clothing and hence our outward appearance to the world.
Shoes were a problem for me. My parents always insisted on buying 'sensible shoes' for me, ones which looked good but did not take account of comfort, the result of which in later life were hammer toes. They have never really bothered me however, but how many of you out there have been forced to wear shoes that cut into your heels?
Every single pair of shoes my parents bought for me have cut or scraped the skin off my heels. I swear it would have been quicker and easier just to stuff a couple of razorblades into the shoes!
Luckily I was able to buy a couple of pairs of shoes on my own. It so happened that my best friend's mother in Cambuslang could get me a pair of winklepickers on the cheap. I borrowed (or scrounged !) the money from my grandparents and 'Voila!' my own winklepickers at the grand old age of ten.
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| Winklepickers |
Incidentally, I bought my second pair two years later in Blackburn where my friend and his family had moved to.
A shoe repairer named Tommy Ball started a small business buying up faulty shoes from manufacturers, repairing them and the selling the on to the public at a low price. He ended up with a chain a shops in Lancashire. The boots I bought there cost me 5/- and were reddish brown leather with stud fastenings on the side and again were winklepickers. For those who do not know what I'm talking about, the winkle is a small shellfish, once very popular in southern England. The only way to get them out of their shell in order to eat them was to 'winkle' them out with a pin. The shoes got their name because of their very pointed toes.
The boots I bought in Blackburn were so pointy that my toes only reached two thirds of the way down the shoe with the result that the toes turned so much upwards that they ended up looking like something a court jester or an elf would wear.
My original winklepickers were my favourites though. Unbelievably our teacher Miss Hunter ( Her of the belt and crabbit disposition) told us of a dance at the Victoria Hall and encouraged us to go as it was for charity or something. ( To this day I still cannot believe she did that as her raison d'être in life seemed to be to dislike children.) So, on the friday evening you can picture this eleven year old putting on his 'disco dancing' clothes. Ice blue coloured jeans, black bri-nylon polo neck jersey and favourite shoes which, by the way, had holes the size of half crowns in the soles. I stuffed cardboard into them and headed off to the Victoria Hall. Halfway down the Old Doune Road it started to rain and by the time I reached the hall I was soaked through. I stayed at the dance for half an hour then, daunted by the fact that almost everyone at the dance was a stranger to me and at least five years older, I crept away home, wet and dejected, with my tail between my legs. My precious winklepickers never recovered from the soaking they received that evening and I was forced, reluctantly, to throw them out. One good point to the evening though.... my hair kept its shape due to the Brylcreem I had plastered on it!
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| Victoria Hall |
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| Victoria Hall |
When I was buying my winklepicker boots at Tommy Ball's in Blackburn it was at the height of the Mods & Rockers period in England. Although the craze never really took off in Scotland I adopted the Mod look. I thought I was the bees knees. I wore one or the other of my two 'Mod' shirts. One violet coloured with which I had matching cufflinks and the other bronze coloured in nylon. (!!!)
To go with the shirts, I had a purple, knitted, clip-on tie.
I had a smart pair of silver grey hipsters but my 'go to' trousers with this outfit were my 'Rupert the Bear's.
For those of you familiar with the tales of Rupert, you will remember the bear's famous trousers:
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| Rupert the Bear |
My only saving grace was a normal looking, long, black corduroy jacket which, incidentally, had huge pockets which meant I could get into football matches with a six by two foot canvas banner, a bottle of Lanliq wine and four cans of McEwans Export hidden away in the jacket.
This was the outfit in which I posed, trying to look like a member of the Who!
The Dunblane girls also kept up with the times and we boys were never happier than when the miniskirt and hotpants became the fashion. The latter end of the sixties was at the height of flowerpower and our girls were expert at matching the different styles available. They always looked good whereas we, the male of the species, had a bit of a difficult time regarding the wearing of floral patterns especially as it could be harmful to a growing lad to be seen in a football stadium in a shirt decorated with bluebells and roses!
I described earlier how I was inspired to become a Mod after a visit down south. After the Mods & Rockers period came the Skinheads and I became one, by accident I might add.
The reason for this conversion was an item called the razor comb, or trimmer. Comprising two pieces of plastic snapped shut over a razor blade and with teeth like a comb on one side, you simply combed your hair and trimmed it at the same time.
I cannot remember whose this evil contraption was but I strongly suspect Arthur Kerr. We were on our way home from Callander in the school bus when the razor comb appeared. Never being backward, "I'll have a shot at that!" I exclaimed and applied the comb to the top of my head. All went quiet for a moment then the laughing started. Carole Rae produced a mirror from her bag and showed me what I'd done. The reflection showed my dark brown hair but, right in the middle was a two inch long, diamond shaped 'hole' exposing my scalp. Try as I might, I couldn't find a way to cover that diamond shaped bald patch so desperate measures were called for.
That evening I visited my friend, Neil Stewart, who stayed at Kilbryde. His sister, Lyn, had cut his hair a couple of times so I asked her to do her best and, thus, I ended up as a skinhead. Neil liked the look and he had the same done.
The following weekend we went into Stirling. I had gotten a holiday job at Keir and Cawdor that Easter and needed a pair of work boots so, with the haircut and the boots already in the bag, I could just as well go the whole hog and get the rest of the gear. A Ben Sherman shortsleeve shirt was procured along with some slimline braces. Now I only needed a pair of wrangler jeans.
The cheapest place for jeans was in a little shop in the arcade in Stirling. They didn't have a changing room so I guessed my size. I should have been a little better prepared. As it turned out, my waist size as a sixteen year old was 27 or 28: the jeans I bought were size 36!!
Instead of a belt, by using braces in order to get the right look, it meant that I nearly always had to go round with my hands in my pockets simply to hold the trousers down as the jeans had a constant tendency to rise up towards my chin. Richard Stobbs took a photograph of Neil and me and those jeans just looked terrible.
Not long after this, Scotland played England at Hampden and with Gordon Bounds and Roy Anderson, along to the game we went. The skinhead fashion had not reached Scotland by that time and people kept mistaking us for english until they heard us talking. Luckily for us our scots accents saved the day and we were able to survive the day intact.
Other fashions and places followed, for example my Brighton hippy period with longer than shoulder length hair, 50p cotton loon pants and afghan coats. I had a visit from Ewan Simpson there and he nearly did not recognize me.
Eventually I grew older. Realizing the old adage of 'mutton dressed like lamb' I have now settled for what I would have regarded once as an old fashioned look.
I have seen pictures on facebook of old friends at football matches in Scotland: Duncan Garden, Gordon Boyd, Duncan Strathdee, Willie Heuer to name but a few. Not only have they aged well but so has their clothes sense so it is nice to know that I'm not the only one who has changed.
A couple of years ago, I threw out my old Barbour jacket after thirty years of use. But of course I bought a new one. Now I dress in what could be regarded as a hunting and fishing look. Clothing and accessories from Barbour or Hoggs of Fife, moleskin trousers and Harris Tweed Bunnets.
Although I say I don't follow fashion any more, I suspect I'm bending the truth a wee bit.
As a final comment: we looked at the generations before us and laughed a wee bit about their old-fashion tastes. Now I think my father and grandfather would look at me and say, "I like your clothes, son."
The circle has gone the whole way round.
Afternote: After I had published this blog I received a few suggestions about additional clothing fads and fashions I had not included. The reasons for these omissions were quite simple, I didn't want to bore the reader too much with a lengthy blog that went on and on and on. Now however I have changed my mind, so be prepared for the arrival at sometime in the future of " ..But I Digress: Fashion 2...."
All the best
Alan
P.s.
Sounds a bit like the Rocky series....
" ..But I Digress: Fashion 3...",
" ..But I Digress: Fashion 4...",
" ..But I Digress: Fashion. The Movie....".
Only kidding 🤣
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