Cigarette smoke. Everywhere. Nobody complained either. There were non-smoking carriages on the railways that guaranteed you always got a seat. (It was where all those people you did not want to sit next to sat.)
In 1973, most adult men had been in the armed forces, either doing National Service, or the real thing, 1939-45. It is almost impossible to explain the extent to which this affected every day life. For a start, the service industries were packed out with men who polished their shoes to within an inch of their lives. Their hair was dripping with Brylcreem. They always called you "Sir", even if you were a spotty, long-haired youth. Of course, there were many ways to say, "Sir". You could make it sound civil or as sarcastic as hell. I remember trying to pay for a British Railways dining car meal with a cheque. In those days you could still just about get away with putting your address on the back. The steward, in reply to my request to pay by kite, replied, "If you wish.....SIR". It was a stab in the back. An affront to my class and his position. The import was clear and immaculate. I was doing a very bad thing. The steward could do nothing about it but he made it very clear how he felt. It was the kind of magic of social discourse, between those of the servers and the served, which I so enjoyed. Of course the roles were reversed in Harrods, when one was always served by an assistant whose suit and shirt were better than yours and who was clearly an aristocrat fallen on hard times. You were, in this instance, called, "Sir" with the kind of sneer that Jeremy Paxman does so well on Newsnight.
I don't remember there being a lot of cosmetics. These days our bathroom has overflowed into a large cupboard, filled with enough chemicals to make Big Pharma alarmed about its monopoly. You got soap, shampoo and bubble bath if you were lucky. In 1973, had you asked an assistant in Boots for After Shave Balm, they would have called the Cops. Moist lavatory tissue was the kind of thing people would have thought impossible - rather like levitation and time travel.
Nobody had AIDS. But then again, nobody had sex either.
There were no celebrities. You got "famous" people, but they were usually famous for actually doing something. As someone said at the time, Television is for appearing on, not watching.
A word about the rest of the world. Imported items had the word "foreign" stamped on the bottom. This was tantamount to an admission of social deprivation. Perhaps even worse was anything "made in Hong Kong" - then a synonym for tat. People even looked upon Japanese machinery with disdain. Jap bikes were still a bit, you, know, edgy, and there were men who would never buy a Japanese car because they had been guests of the Japs in 39/45 and did not like it. Not being made in England was a huge perceptual mountain to climb for foreign manufacturers. The only person I knew with a BMW was a film director. I did know someone who owned a Messerschmitt KR200 Kabinenroller, but she was the wife of a Mercedes dealer, so it didn't count. Most people drove a Ford Popular or a Zephyr or maybe an Austin with leather seats and little woven rope pulls in the back.
In 1973 I had about 20 LPs. Most of them had been gotten from bargain bins in Smiths. Consequently I had a very unusual collection of stuff that now fetches hundreds of pounds on eBay. If only I had kept them. I bought my first version of the Sibelius Symphony No2 around this time (see posts passim) for about 40p and the Bruch Violin Concerto which very nearly got me laid.
I dropped out of Art College after two years and had to get a job. I turned up at the Regent Palace in Piccadilly Circus and worked as a porter. All life was there. I loved it. Apart from being pestered by rent boys and punters on my late night journey back to Surrey. (In those days I had long golden, curly hair, a slight figure and a tendency to look like a poof.)
The Regent Palace was full of former Corporals and Sergeants. It was all run along military lines and I was never addressed by anything other than my last name. I never felt that my human rights or my dignity were impugned for this, either.
The clash of cultures in the early Seventies is difficult to sum up. On the one hand you had men who had saved this country from Hitler and on the other, poovy young men like me who wore floral t-shirts and espoused free love.
I wonder, looking back 40 years, who won? Who won?
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