In 1975, we were sovereign consumers. In 2025, we are half-baked serfs
My mother and father met at a New Year's Eve dance in Manchester in 1940. Against the wishes of both families - he was a dirt-poor Catholic and she was a rather posh Protestant - they were married in St Thomas's Catholic Church [no flowers or organist allowed] Salford in October 1942. After that, only the Second World War and death separated them. My mum died in 2009 at the age of ninety, after sixty-seven years of completely faithful married life.
On their first date in January 1941, Dad took mum to 'the pictures' (as the cinema was then known) at the Premier Theatre in Cheetham Hill. At this point in Britain's darkest hour, Hitler's Blitzkrieg had taken his armies to within twenty five miles of Dover. So each feature film was preceded by earnest propaganda Public Information Film shorts. As my parents took their seats that night, one such PIF warned of the dangers of "easy women" in those strange times, and the likelihood of eager males succumbing to the deadly incurable sexual disease of gonorrhoea.
As it happens, my mother was a Schools' champion diver whose chosen sport had resulted in damage to her inner ear. She was therefore already hard of hearing. So as the PIF short ended, she turned to my father and said, "I have that as well".
She had misheard 'gonorrhoea' as 'inner ear'.
It took several hours of delicate investigation by Dad to establish that the woman of his dreams was not a prostitute.
My father had every aspiring kid's desire to devour what he saw as 'improving' knowledge. So he had, at night-school, read Hitler's Mein Kampf in the British edition My Struggle. Concluding that the author was mad, he volunteered for the Royal Air Force, but was turned down because he lacked depth perception and suffered from colour-blindness. It's worthwhile bearing in mind that Pop read the book in 1937, whereas the arch-appeaser Neville Chamberlain never did.
By 1941, however, the RAF was taking anyone it could get, and so upon his call to the War Effort, Bernard Ward became an armourer - that is, an expert in airplane weapons and bombs - but not allowed to fly missions. His shortcomings ensured that I appeared in 1948, because had he been a pilot, his likelihood of survival would have been in the order of three per cent.
Although the war ended in the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by this time my father was stationed in Singapore, and so was not reunited with his wife until late 1946. My late brother Mike had surfaced in 1944, and within 15 months of Dad's return, I popped out in February 1948. Concluding that at this rate he'd be the father of a soccer team by 1960, Dad embraced contraception.
Let me just, if I may, list the reasons why the foregoing history is not just self-indulgent nostalgia with a bit of double-entendre humour thrown in:
1.It's a study in risk-taking and how it should always overcome blind obedience to inflexible religious clergy power-plays that seek to divide
2.It's a lesson about discernment and human instinct that shows a triumph of primary senses over doctrinaire herd compliance
3.It's a history of loyalty to a partner as the polar opposite of the self-absorbed narcissism that we see everywhere today
4.It's a lesson about the liberty to think freely....and to Hell with the Imams, Priests, Pharisees or fundamentalists who would rather reality was ignored in favour of Settled Science
5.It's a story about how two ordinary people in a now distant era of innocence wanted the best for their kids....but the aspiration was about independence of thought, not money
6.It's a timely reminder of what we have lost as a species: the Voyager gene. My parents were prepared to blaze new trails. So for example, they were both engaged in the Lancashire cloth trade, but Dad's wartime Asian observations taught him to import, not export; whereas Mum was a wholesale fashion buyer ready to embrace button-down collars, deck shoes, bell-bottom jeans and hipster Mod threads.
Each evening when we got home from school, my brother and I would read the Manchester Evening News, then switch on the TV at 6pm for the BBC News "on the telly". Both media were devoid of propaganda, the analogue television didn't require a degree in electronics to switch on or change channels, and whether it was cold, hot, raining giant hailstones or snowing outside, just one TV aireal on the roof ensured perfect reception on the TV screen. We didn't have to sign in, wait for daily updates - or watch the 'tube' variouly buffering, booting up and barking orders at us. Satellite pixcellation, jargonised excuses for crap reception and digital freeze episodes lay in a distant future as yet to be provided for us by the criminals from Silicon Valley, Blackrock, Murdoch the marauding Fox, Google and Microsoft.
More history - designed to demonstrate how and why 96 per cent of us have lost our personal sovereignty - in due course. As of 23rd September 2025, we are two thirds of the way along the Grey Brick Road to dystopian slavery.
Have a good day.