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The 1960’s . What do you think makes the 1960s different from other time periods?.
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What do you think makes the 1960s different from other time periods?
Well it’s not now, it’s a long time ago, it’s around 50 years ago! When coming to Britain I found that the place was very cold and everyone was very insular. There wasn’t much immigration, on billboards I saw ‘come to mother countries and help it’ we were being invited. From the people I saw it was a period post second world war, people were still down from the war.
I was living with a land lady there were digs, we were just paying guests, but she fed me it would include dinner, the lady would do all the domestic work like cleaning. On the weekend I would help the landlady, so I would be good in her books, she was like a mother to me since we were living there. We would also all go to the disco.
What were your most worn items of clothing during the 1960s?
A duffle, scarf, I wore it almost every day. I would also wear a tweed coat, it was a very common coat. I definitely did not wear jeans, I hadn’t even heard of them by then!
It was the time of The Beatles, Cilla Black and a little bit of Twiggy and Lulu too. Across the Atlantic there were people like Elvis Presley, Jim Reeves, we were just starting to enjoy his songs than he died in an aircraft crash in the 1965. I liked the song House of Exile by Jimmy Cliff, it was one of my favourites!
What do you think was the most significant aspect of the 1960s?
There weren’t many shops then we just had the restaurant with typical British food fish and chips, there was a lot of class division. If you entered a train, there was a major difference. Going into London you see men with striped suits, bowler hats and black umbrellas, reading their newspapers. You could tell the different classes apart. In the factory where I worked, lower classes drank with small plastic cups others with mugs both drinking the same tea. There were white collar jobs and blue collar jobs.
There was Englishness back then, now England is multiracial, cosmopolitan. The day I was introduced to landlady I had my native dress on from church, she said ‘I wonder how I am going to deal with this parachute.’ I went to the London zoo and I was admiring the monkeys. I decided to give the monkey a banana, a man watching said ‘blood is thicker than water’. That Englishness has gone, the pub was the centre of the community you went there for fun & gossip, now you have shops and restaurants, for all races.
What is the first thing you think about when you hear the 1960s?
I think of cheerful things, I think of the music back then. In the sixties there was a departure fromromantic toupbeat ones, before you had songs that would make you go to sleep but in the 60s there was songs that made you want to dance. 50s was all about ballroom dancing and black shoes, slow and majestic songs but the 60s came disco up-tempo songs, it was time to get out the dancing shoes!
What is the biggest difference between life in the 1960s and life now?
Now there is a lot of freedom, women were not much back then but now there is gender equality. There is now what I’d call integration , the world is smaller, communication is better, I would write a letter and get replies every few months. I couldn’t phone since very few people in Nigeria had a phone! Now the world is in your pocket, visually and metaphorically, politicians could hide things from you if they wanted too, now it’s a lot more transparent.
I loved to go dancing, we also had picnics that I enjoyed. I remember in a lesson of economics, in a polytechnic since back then there wasn’t many universities, the Beatles were likened to trade they would go anywhere and make a lot of money for the country. Young musicians started coming up and making a lot of money, a new sort of wealth came up, it started breaking down the class division, it broke the status quo.
