Yesterday I was trying to explain to the kids the wonderful TV of my youth. The swinging sixties, when we were treated to half a dozen hours of black and white programming every single day. Luckily, ITV 4 is showing reruns of On the Buses.
"I know. It was crap even by crappy sixties standards."
"It isn't even in colour. Can we watch something else, dad?"
"No. This is educational. You can discover how we lived back then."
"I'm happy with the present, dad."
And with that, Andrew sloped off upstairs to rot his brain with some computer game. I felt obliged to keep watching. I'm glad I did.
Stan (Reg Varney) had been working night shift. He arrived back at breakfast time and got stuck into a steak and kidney pudding. When his mum offered him a cup of tea, he turned it down. "Naah. You know what goes with steak and kidney pud? A nice glass of Stout." He then took a screw-top pint bottle out of a cupboard and poured himself a glass.
A fascinating bit of social history there. The episode is from 1969. My guess would be that screw-top bottles of Stout would have been pretty old-fashioned, even then.
Doesn't Guinness Extra Stout (badged as "Guinness Original" for some reason) come in a screw-cap in the UK? Was it ever thus?
ReplyDeleteThinking back to the 60s I seem to remember internal screw-top bottles although not sure what for. I can remember Corona (the soda not the beer) coming in metal screw-top bottles and thinking that was very modern so I guess they may have been changing over from the internal screws in the 60s.
ReplyDeleteSadly I wasn't interested in beer very much back then. Now in the 1970s...
Beer Nut, I'm talking about the old type of screwtop bottle, the ones with the thread on the inside of the neck.
ReplyDeleteThread on the inside? So more like a cork, then? What was the stopper made from?
ReplyDeleteBet it was a quart bottle. Internal screw-top quart beer and cider bottles hung about for ages. It was, of course, because large bottles had to be resealable. I don't know why they did not move over to external screw cap bottles, but probably because the volumes did not warrant investment into new bottling machinery and new bottles.
ReplyDeleteWhen I were a lad, Corona came in swing-top bottles, like Grolsh.
Beer Nut, I think the stopper was ceramic with a rubber seal. The system predates the crown cork.
ReplyDeleteZythophile mentioned them in his post on bottled beer:
http://zythophile.wordpress.com/2010/01/15/a-short-history-of-bottled-beer/
So he did. I'm confused by the "caught on rapidly" bit. It doesn't seem to have done so here. In Ivy Day in the Committee Room, for instance, Joyce shows us a trick to open a bottle of stout when you don't have a corkscrew. Decades later, my grandfather still drank his stout from a corked bottle, draught beer being only for poncy townies.
ReplyDeletewould be interested to know if there was real stout in the bottle, I did read once that some episdoes of the Likely Lads were filmed in a pub and they were drinking real beer and when there were too many takes, both the lads were a bit, shall we say, tipsy; meanwhile the pints of ale that Morse drank were Kaliber or something similar.
ReplyDeleteYup, Henry Barrett's internal-screw tops lasted a long time, particularly on larger bottles where the purchaser would want to reseal them: the stoppers were made of a hard rubber called ebonite. I can remember them, just, on quart bottles of beer bought from the off-licence in the mid-1960s. Here's a link to a reference in David Hughes's A Bottle of Guinness Please (scroll back one page to see some illustrations) and here's a picture of a bottle of stout with such a stopper (scroll down the page a bit). Whether Guinness came in such bottles in the 1960s, I dunno.
ReplyDeleteThe stoppers were probably ceramic initially but later they became vulcanised rubber (Ron posted something about recycling them during one of the world wars in order to save rubber).
ReplyDeleteYou can still buy the tops and rubber seals (but not, sadly, the bottles) and they are now made from some sort of plastic.
Here's Ron's post about recycling bottle tops: http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2009/06/war-is-hell.html
ReplyDeleteRon, sadly your offspring will only appreciate On The Buses when they have grown up, have assimilated 60s/70s UK TV quasi-political culture, have a sense of nostalgic yearning and learned to appreciate true crap for what it is. Took me years to get there but mere minutes to pass it by - with a swift and earnest "good riddance" with a capital F. Here's to Reg Varney - what a memorable guy. What a guy. What guy? What? Who? Why?
ReplyDeleteZypo said...
ReplyDelete"Whether Guinness came in such bottles in the 1960s, I dunno."
As Guinness never bottled themselves, I would suspect that Guinness could turn up in any shape or form of bottle; depending upon what the bottler's / brewers machinery was set up for. Like Bass, it was the issued label that gave it authenticity, not the bottle.
Screw top bottles; Mackeson in pint bottles, 12 in a crate; Dandelion and Burdock, Lemonade in big bottles and ginger beer in small 1/2pint bottles, all with screw tops. Black, hard rubber(?) with a soft rubber gasket! Oh joy, memories. Some things were better back then.
ReplyDeleteWhatever happened to Dandelion and Burdock it was my favorite
ReplyDelete