The 1960s were famous for some spectacular and dramatic epic drama films one of which was the film version of Cleopatra made in 1963 and starring, amongst others, Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra.

It really was a film of epic proportions well worth seeing a second (or a first) time but this article is about the eye make-up used by Elizabeth Taylor which bought in the ‘Cleopatra look for eyes’.

The image at the top of this post is a still from the film from which you can see the way that her eyes have been made up to make them appear larger and more noticeable. This style of eye makeup follows closely the way that Egyptian women decorated their eyes at the time of Cleopatra and the link at ‘Love To Know’ below explains this in more detail. In the wake of the film, Cleopatra style eyes became very popular in the mid to late 1960s.

The search from Bing below is the long search page which contains a wealth of eyes and is well worth looking through for ideas (pun intended). In fact this forceful and eye-catching style of eye make-up went well with the 1960s which was, in general, characterised by the heavy use of eyeliner.

Everything, of course, comes back around again if you wait long enough and the Cleopatra look for eyes made a comeback in 2008, particularly when used by Christina Aguilera. I am sure that even today, if you want to make sure you get noticed, then it has its place.

Creating the look is easy if you have the right eye makeup and is made simpler by the number of pages on the Internet which give instructions on how to achieve the style and the wing that goes with it. I can do no better than refer you to the links below for further details.

This is a wonderful way of drawing attention both to your eyes and to your face and I believe that this heavy eye make-up is due for (yet) another comeback.

Links
Love To Know
Bing’s long image search page
Ehow Style article giving written instruction
Although written for Halloween, this Ehow Style article is also worth a read
The definitive guide from Glamour Daze (wait while page loads)
For more information use this search, made using Bing, for more links
YouTube search for Cleopatra Eye Makeup which returns a whole host of interesting and worth-seeing results

The Leader and Arrow were motorcycles produced by Ariel Motorcycles of Birmingham in the 1950s and 60s and were both examples of the way that the company tried to adapt to the 1960s idea of what a motorcycle should be.

Ariel were an old firm of motorcycle manufacturers having been established in the previous century and had a reputation for producing fine motorcycles with large engines but it was decided, at the end of the 1950s, that for the new decade they would try smaller two-stroke machines. The Ariel Leader, designed by Val Page, was a very advanced machine for the time and a 250 cc two-stroke motorcycle was ideal for learners.

The Leader was a success and, based on that success, the Ariel Arrow was produced which was essentially a stripped down version of the leader with lower handlebars and generally a more sporting appearance. One thing that Ariel had done was to pioneer the use of different and more striking colours for their machines and the Ariel Arrow was available in a golden colour and so became known as the ‘Golden Arrow’.

Although these were excellent machines, they were unable to compete with the tide of motorcycles arriving from the Orient and eventually BSA, the parent company, decided to close Ariel and production ceased. However, both the Ariel Leader and the Ariel Arrow were excellent motorcycles and, with different company management, perhaps the result could have been a continuation of the machines into the 1970s.

The estuary of the river Camel in Cornwall passes Wadebridge and goes downstream as far as Padstow. It is an area of considerable beauty made more popular by the Camel Trail which is designed for both walkers and cyclists although not, and this was intentional, for cars.

The Camel Trail runs on a disused railway line which follows the path of the river and which was closed to passenger traffic in 1967 (although freight traffic continued until 1983) and which has now been resurfaced as a public amenity. Obviously train lines are laid on ground which is relatively flat or which has a slight incline and this, of course, makes the trail excellent for the use of cyclists and walkers. So successful has this been that, along the way, various shops and businesses that hire cycles have appeared. With recent extensions, the trail is now over 17 miles long and has parking facilities for cars at various points along its length.

A much needed development
What could have been simply a disused and overgrown railway track left desolate or, worse, left for commercial development has been turned into a useful and much needed public amenity. The Camel Trail serves as a good example of what can be done with lines that are no longer in use following the extensive 1960s closures. In fact, this is not the only trail, it seems, that is available for cycling or walking that follows old railway workings and I hope to feature others later.

For more information follow the link below to the Wikipedia page and at the end of that page there are several links to useful information about the area and the Camel Trail which also give details of cycle hire.

Wikipedia page (with links at the end) here.

After the war, as the 1950s began, girls as well as boys began to find that jobs were easy to get.

In reconstructing the country there were abundant opportunities and jobs were plentiful enough to ensure that every girl had a choice of where and when to work. Of course pay was less than a man’s wage (no equal opportunities yet) but it was still not bad and, as rationing began to end (sweets were the last off ration in 1954), life began to get better.

Where wartime was ‘make do and mend’, the 1950s gave women in general a chance to become much more fashion conscious. Girls, in common with young men, wanted to establish their own identity and create their own fashion rules and this ultimately lead to the mushroom in fashion consciousness that was the 1960s.

Teddy girls
So, where were the Teddy Girls to go with the Teddy Boys? The short answer is, surprisingly, that there were hardly any! For the most part these girlfriends dressed the same way any other young girl dressed in the 1950s; there were no, or very few, special Teddy Girl clothes.

To every rule there is, of course, an exception and a limited number did wear clothes that sported velvet collars and trimmings and perhaps had Bolo (Bootlace) style ties. The jacket might have been cut a little squarer and was of hip length but was worn with a traditional pencil skirt and normal shoes. It’s hard to generalise but it is probably fairer to say that the girlfriends of Teddy Boys were indistinguishable from the any other 1950s girl.

Have a look at the links below to see photos of the period and see what you think?

Links
Teddy Girls 1
Teddy Girls 2
Teddy Girls 3
Teddy Girls 4  (Scroll down just over half way and continue scrolling to see two pictures)

As time went on maybe the girlfriends of Teddy Boys might have been less prepared to wear new fashions and so kept to styles more in keeping with the 1950s and this is certainly true of the Teddy Boy revivals. Incidentally, to back this up, I was unable to find any current Teddy Girl clothing. If you know of any, or make any, please let me know.

Rocker Chicks
Obviously any girlfriend of a Rocker had to travel by motorcycle and the same considerations applied to girls as they did to their boyfriends. Leather jackets were worn, along with trousers and either boots or no-nonsense shoes and, if you had any sense, warm leather gloves.

There are few pictures taken at the time of girls on bikes but adverts for the period show the same jackets, jeans and boots available for girls, the difference being, presumably, just the sizes. Makeup, of course, was kept to a minimum and elaborate hairstyles were out of the question under a crash helmet.

One thing that is worth saying is that a lot of girls liked the excitement and intimacy of travelling on the back of a bike and, it has to be said, looked good in leather and tight clothing.

Images
There are none that I can bring you but a search through these groups will give you an idea.

The Black Leather Biker Jacket (modern images)
Rocker Chicks (almost the same as the above)
Girls and Motorbikes (you have to look through the pics but it is rewarding)
Women and Motorcycles (again there are few original photos)

As a further idea, this page on Amazon UK provides a page of ladies’ leather coats many of which would not have looked out of place in the 1950s or 60s. A link is provided below to both leather jackets and leather motorcycle jackets and it is interesting to compare the results as well as the jackets shown.

Link to ladies leather jackets on amazon UK

Ladies Leather Jackets

Ladies leather Motorcycle jackets

Ladies leather motorcycle jackets

So, girls in the late 50s and 1960s tended not to wear any special clothes and this is certainly my own recollection. However, girls looked smart, took an interest in what they wore, and were as fashion conscious as girls today.

The Amazon UK link below is also set to show books from 1960s fashion although a look in the books that I have did little to help me prepare this article.

One of the most unusual and for a lot of people, one of the most popular programmes on the television in the 1960s was University Challenge presented by Bamber Gascoigne.

The programme, which was based on a similar American programme, began in 1962 and was produced by Granada Television being filmed at the Granada Studios in Manchester (which, of course, gave us Coronation Street). The format used was simple; two teams of university students answered questions both on specialist subjects and on general knowledge and the winner was the team who could amass the most points.

The person chosen from the beginning to compare the programs was the theatre critic and university graduate Bamber Gascoigne and he continued as quizmaster throughout the 1960s, in fact I believe he continued until the program was taken off the air in 1987. As this was a program that I used to watch almost from the very beginning, I was pleased to see that Bamber Gascoigne, now in his late 70s, is still with us.

The programme racked up an unbelievable number of 913 episodes from 1962 until 1987 and, of course, it was revived in 1994 by the BBC (but it was still produced by Granada Television) and presented then by Jeremy Paxman when it was equally popular.

Similar programs using the same format have also run in other countries and, as far as I know, have been just as popular as the programme was here.

Sugar, Sugar was a pop song by The Archies that I heard the other day and realised that I had not heard it since the 1960s.

The song was one of those strange songs that you never thought would be a hit since it was not recorded by the proper pop group. Like the Monkees, the Archies were a manufactured pop group and the track was produced, in fact, by unknown musicians in the studio. The song was written in 1969 and recorded in the same year and, as is often the case with unusual records, it caught the public imagination and was released all over the world

Aside from being a big hit in America, the songs spent eight weeks at the top of the UK singles chart in 1969 although, interestingly, so far as I can see, the song was not recorded by any other artists. Sugar, Sugar was also, and again this is not surprising, used by a breakfast cereal company, I believe an American company, in its advertising.

I have to admit that it’s a good song; it was written by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim, which, once it has been heard, is difficult to get out of your mind. Both Jeff Barry and Andy Kim were already known in the pop music business and both went on to achieve considerable success.

The Archies were characters in an animated TV series called, unsurprisingly, The Archies Show which, again so far as I know, was only seen on American television. Other songs were also recorded but none of them had the success of Sugar, Sugar.

Should you wish to play the song, and it’s a great song to play, both the lyrics and the chords can be found by searching for the song title in your favourite search engine.

One of the most noticeable trends of the 1960s was the idea that you could make more use of the rooms in your house if you improved access to them by getting rid of the interfering doors, walls and windows.

The idea was to open the house out thus making access to the various living spaces easier. Where most houses had been built with separate rooms, each divided one from another by a door and a wall, it was thought desirable to remove as many of these as possible thus opening out the space and making access from one living area to another quick and easy and, in many cases, merging the spaces together.

The through-lounge
Looked at now from our perspective of the ‘dining-kitchen’ and the ‘living room’ (not lounge) as well as the ‘studio apartment’ these are easy concepts to imagine but they were revolutionary in the 1960s. Take for example the through-lounge that swept the nation. The idea was that most semi-detached houses had a seldom used front room (in many houses the ‘best’ room) and a lounge at the back. These rooms were divided by a wall and, if you took that wall away and substituted a supporting girder, then you had a living area nearly twice the size. The room became, as we would say now, a ‘living room’.

Then, once this had been done, the next improvement was to block off (permanently or as a temporary measure) one of the doors thus increasing, once again, the useable space within the room.

It was this emphasis on improving the existing fabric of the house you lived in that fuelled a DIY boom that had never existed before. As the 1960s progressed everyone, it seemed, was either employing their local builder to knock down walls or, and it’s amazing how many people did this, doing it themselves.

DIY
Today you would not think it at all strange for someone to, say, build their own fitted wardrobe or change the position of a door. The DIY boom, or the idea that you can change your house yourself, was to last to the present day and the proposition of sharing space between rooms was also to change house design quite radically producing many of the designs we see now.

Modern houses have a large (or often small) living room and a dining-kitchen at the back rather than a front room, lounge (or dining room) and small kitchen of the pre-1960s house. Flats and apartments, too, have benefited with the growth of open plan kitchens merging into, or being part of, the living room and, in that ultimate amalgamation of space, the studio flat where sleeping, eating, cooking and lounging are combined into one area.

No one likes to look the same every day and we have had this website since we started in April 2010 (was it really that long ago) so it’s about time we had a makeover.

The website is powered by WordPress and the new look is from a theme called Coraline. This is the theme that was used by WordPress to replace the Cutlines theme when that theme was dropped. It’s a nice, clean theme that is easy to customise and which has few options but which fits easily into the idea we have for the overall look of the website.

We have made a start on customisation but there are still some final touches to complete and some new wording for the static pages to write but we are almost there and the website will be finished before Christmas giving us a good start to the New Year.

We hope you like the Sixties Britain new look and that you will bookmark us to come back again soon. In the New Year (2012) content will be updated at least every two days and most weeks we try to update each working day.

As well as the continuing series on Men’s fashion (something that receives little coverage from other retro websites) we have plans for a major new series on Coffee Bars and what they did for the 1960s as well as some more general articles about the history of this important decade.

In the 1950s, while Teddy Boys gathered on street corners, other young men, perhaps those with a little more money in their pockets, purchased motor cycles and became ton-up boys or Rockers as they would be called.

The Rocker Look
At 100 mph on a motorbike on the A5 in the pouring rain your clothing is going to be leather, a strong and tough leather jacket sculpted, not for looks, but for durability. Add to this some tough, slim and tight-fitting trousers with heavy-duty leather boots and leather gloves (no compulsory crash helmets yet) and you feel at least a little safer. The clothing was practical yet it was worn with a certain pride and panache for Rockers, although not popular with the press and certain elements of society, were looked upon with awe by their peers for the glamour and excitement in their lives.

Jackets were usually thick, black leather zip-ups with a zipped cuff and pockets and often a fancy lining inside. They were not cheap, they cost in the mid-60s between £10 and £15 for a good quality one at a time when the average young worker was lucky (very lucky indeed) if he earned £20 a week. So a jacket represented, for many riders, the best part of a week’s money.

Boots, too, were black leather, usually mid-calf or sometimes almost knee high and often with a warm lining. They, too, were not cheap, at the same time costing around £5, with a pair of lined leather gloves adding another £2 or £3 to the price.

Trousers were normal, everyday trousers although heavy-duty were preferred, or they could be denim (often made by Levi or Wrangler) and jackets in the same material were also available. If you get the chance, feel the denim used, it is quite different to the denim used for jeans today; much harder wearing and coarser. Underneath the biker wore a shirt or, later, a ‘T’ shirt and, to stay warm, long knitted socks and warm underwear!

But no one, of course, likes to wear just plain clothing and it became the fashion, probably in the later 60s, for the Rocker to embellish his jacket with badges, studs, rivets, chains and similar. During the 60s, as part of the hippie movement, fairs sprang up that had stalls selling all manner of these metal embellishments, often made specifically for bikers. Perhaps these were hanging chains, garish club badges, skulls or a pattern of very prominent and sharp studs. This is, after all, a very macho style and these were macho men who wanted to wear their masculinity for everyone to see.

For the most part, Rockers tended to be less concerned about the fashion of their clothes, preferring them to be functional and this attitude applied to hair, also. Again, it’s hard to generalise but pictures taken at the time show hair slicked back, as in the manner of Teddy Boys, but with less emphasis on the actual style.

So, the Rocker has a leather or denim jacket which was short, to just below the natural waist, trousers that sat at waist level and either boots or stout shoes. In general the colours used were black or other dark colours or maybe a dark blue for the denim. Later, jackets in particular were embellished with chains, badges and the like often with designs made from studs attached to the leather. This was, in a sense, a tough, soldier’s look: no-nonsense clothes for no-nonsense men. Teddy Boys, too, looked tough but in a different way for their toughness came from the shape of their clothing making them look bulky and menacing, in a way like outlaws from the Wild West comics and films that everyone saw in those days.

Another way of looking at Rocker fashion
Another way to look at this fashion is through the eyes of necessity. Everything above indicates that the clothing was chosen because it represented the best way to stay warm and provide protection in the event of a spill.

Until rockers began to customise jackets, they were just traditional, unadorned leather jackets. The trousers, which later became jeans, were mostly devoid of any particular style as were the boots or shoes. Perhaps, the Rocker style was just born of necessity rather than by making a particular style choice.

Whatever the answer, people kept riding motorbikes and they remained and still remain today as popular as ever. Although clothes in general have become more sophisticated, the clothing for motorcyclists remains similar to that described above as a glance at the two Amazon UK pages below for leather jackets will show.

Leather Motorcycle Jackets

Leather Jackets

Images
There is a picture (and an interesting article) on the Wikipedia page here. I am not sure when this was taken but the hair is dry rather than greased and the clothes look too modern.

The Ace Café Reunions group on Flickr gives a lot of information and some excellent images but bear in mind that these are not from the 1960s. The link is here.

Some good images and also some original ones can be found on this group, Ted and Rockers.

Finally, one that covers a wide timescale, Vintage Motorcycle Pictures

Discussing the upcoming Christmas festivities recently, we began to talk about Christmas drinks that were around in the 1960s and which today seem to be almost missing.

Avril remembers Babycham which you can, in fact, still buy in the supermarket but only, it seems at Christmas. Babycham, of course, is essential for adding to brandy for a little bit more of that Christmas spirit!

I recalled cocktails and in particular Snowball, a cocktail I always associate with the Christmas and the New Year holidays because that was the only time anyone used to drink it. It was a standard drink that we used to offer people who called round and, so far as I recollect, it was quite popular.

Making a Snowball
Snowball is a great retro drink for the Winter season and you can make it this way.

Find a large jug or measuring cup or, if you have one, use a proper cocktail shaker. Add ice to it and then pour in two measures of Advocaat.
To this add some lime squash, shake and then add some lemonade and shake again to combine all the ingredients. Simple as that!

Now pour it into a glass and it is ready to drink. We never used to add anything to it but you can add some ice and maybe a sliced lemon as a garnish if you wish. Cheers!