A group of Sixth Year students were singing a medley of songs from the 1970s, songs from times when their grandparents would have been young. The odd selection included Middle of the Road’s Chirpy, Chirpy, Cheep, Cheep.
It was 1971 that the transistor radios were constantly filled with the sound of Chirpy, Chirpy, Cheep, Cheep.
My dad had a week’s holiday and we spent time picking blackcurrants at a fruit farm which paid pickers so many pence for each pound of currants they brought to the farm buildings, the buckets being placed on scales and then the fruit being tipped into bigger containers. There were lots of people there; there was not much money around in 1971 and the chance to earn something extra was not one to be passed.
Did we pick enough fruit to earn a few pounds? It’s hard to remember. A few currants were eaten, but after a few handfuls the hands and the lips were black and the appetite had worn off.
We spent the other week of my dad’s holiday in a caravan at Lyme Regis. It was our first family holiday and remains an important moment.
It is strange thinking back how few holidays people had. There were Christmas Day and Boxing Day, Good Friday and Easter Monday, Whit Monday and August Bank Holiday – six public holidays a year and perhaps a week or two annual holiday.
To spend a week blackcurrant picking would seem odd now, but working for part, or all, of the annual holiday was common enough. Irish people living in England would have returned to family farms to assist with saving the hay or gathering in the harvest, returning to England at the end of the holiday might have come as a relief.
Looking back on such times, there is a sense of how much time people have now. The working week was often five and a half or six days and working an eight hour day might mean starting at 7.45 am and finishing at 5 pm, the tea break and lunch hour being in your own time.
Of course, public holidays come at a cost, but anyone who looks at the history of industrial relations in the 1970s will see the cost of extra holidays is far outweighed by having a workforce considerably happier than their counterparts were fifty years ago.
To have had four or five weeks annual holiday then, as well as extra bank holidays, would have left you feeling like a millionaire – and have provided many more opportunities for picking blackcurrants.