This now well-worn plate was a present from Mum and Dad when I was young. I was a ‘cat person’ even then. The matching bowl was broken somewhere along the way, but Mum kept my plate and gave it back to me as an adult. By then I, along with many other New Zealanders of a certain age and taste, had begun my own modest Crown Lynn collection, but I didn’t know about the story of the plate’s manufacture until I looked at the stamp underneath. I now know that this plate was part of the Roydon ‘Tiny Tots’ nursery range featuring various imported cat transfers, made by Crown Lynn for the McKenzies chain stores in the mid-1960s. Part of a changing range of nursery items produced from the early 1950s through to the 1980s, the tableware competed successfully with the expensive imported Royal Doulton ‘Bunnykins’ series.1 It was as popular with adult cat enthusiasts as it was with children like me.
It is easy to forget how ordinary and everyday Crown Lynn once was. Crown Lynn ware is now avidly hoarded by a range of collectors, and pieces from the 1950s and 1960s are most coveted. While some might be weary of the cultural cachet now attached to Crown Lynn and other similar products, their very ubiquity in original and repurposed forms made me think back to my cat plate, its intended usage and the broader, everyday culture of which it was a part. I had in fact just begun work as a history curator at Te Papa, and was already thinking a lot about why, although objects told us about history in museums, they seldom featured in the many books that New Zealand historians were writing in the late 1990s. There lay the seeds of this project.
Real Modern is the result. It examines the many and varied objects ordinary people had in their daily lives, like cat plates, and focuses on what people did every day and the things they used as part of those activities. It provides a new way of looking at the 1950s and 1960s, an era which has been thought of historically in specific and rather limited ways, and reveals more accurately the richness and diversity of real people and real things in the postwar world. In focusing on material as well as social history, it opens up a new understanding of New Zealand’s recent past.
A daily part of my life as a child, this 1960s Royden ‘Tiny Tots’ cat plate was well used and well loved. Although I grew out of it, the emotions and associations that it evoked have stayed with me.
If you ask New Zealanders what they think of when you mention the 1950s and 1960s, you get a wide range of perspectives. For some, it would be the ‘royal summer’ of 1953–54 when Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip toured the country.1 Others would nominate Edmund Hillary’s successful ascent of Mount Everest, or national disasters like the Tangiwai train derailment. ‘Teenage delinquency’, detailed in the Mazengarb Report following the government inquiry into bad behaviour among groups of teens in the Hutt Valley, might also figure. Still more people would reminisce about loaves of uncut white bread on Sundays, warm school milk, endless cups of tea and women ‘keeping the tins full’ of baking. They would remember Friday-night shopping excursions but not weekend trading, and eating and entertaining at home in the absence of a developed coffee and restaurant culture. Local radio networks with rigid, governmentcontrolled programming, long-running soaps and ‘women’s programmes’, and weekly outings to the movies, including to Saturday-afternoon matinees, would rate a mention. For others, there is also nostalgia for particular art and design styles, or for a time of seemingly closer families and communities, when people knew their neighbours, and there was less crime and a slower pace of life. Many draw an implicit (and sometimes explicit) contrast with an apparently freer and more diverse present.
In conventional historical terms, the 1950s and 1960s are indeed usually understood as the stable, prosperous and safe years between the privations, stresses and submission of wartime, on the one hand, and an era of political protests, economic downturn and oil shocks, and growing social diversity, on the other.2 An historical overview of the postwar decades might concentrate on important political turning points, such as the election win by the National Party in 1949 (after the first Labour government was elected in 1935), grand economic narratives (the ‘Great Boom’ of 1935–66), policy-focused analysis of the heyday of ‘the welfare state’, and some brief attention to ‘the social pattern’, which usually means settling down after the war, domesticity and suburbanisation.3 This was, so this story goes, a time of conformity, drabness and turning inwards, when the royal family and other signifiers of orthodoxy, such as the Plunket Society, ruled.
In this view, the stasis and insularity blew apart only with the rise of student protests, feminism and other generational, social and political changes of the late 1960s and 1970s. Yet the later decades of change had their seeds in the earlier years. If we look at any number of themes – arts
Four Square ‘Happy Families’ cards from the 1950s. Each card features either a Mrs, Mr, Master or Miss, then a family name associated with a grocery item. The twelve families are Nugget, Creamoata, Luncha, Gregg, Betta, Biscottes, Jojo, Bliss, Crest, Four Square, Rawakelle and Ipana.
Captivated crowds watch a parade of locals dressed as miners and colonial settlers at the 100 year festival at Ross, Westland, in 1960.
The design of this 1960s Beatty washing machine was the standard in New Zealand until the 1970s. As popular radio host Aunt Daisy argued in a newspaper advertisement for the brand: Nobody knows better than you what real hard backbreaking work family washing can be – rubbing and scrubbing all day over a hot steaming tub – put an end to it! Get a Beatty Electric Washing Machine and do all your washing in less than an hour – without effort and in comfort – just switch it on, leave it on for the required time and then take out your clothes all fresh and clean … just switch on the electric wringer, feed the clothes through and out they come ready for the line.1
The reality was rather different. Hot water was fed through rubber hoses from the washhouse, then emptied, also by hose, through a tap at the bottom of the wash bowl. For rinsing clothes, cold water entered and left the same way, although later washing machines had pumps to remove the water.2 These washing machines often had a quick-release mechanism built into the roller unit to release the pressure if too many laundry items were being drawn between the mangle’s hard rubber rollers. The rollers were dangerous, and accidents with trapped scarves, fingers and other foreign objects were common. Indeed, some women still needed convincing of the machine’s merits: I didn’t even have a wringer when I got married and that was so hard wringing everything by hand, but I was quite sure that no wash was done so thoroughly, and I couldn’t see how a machine could do it. My husband got me a machine when I had four children and he worked for six weeks in the holidays. It was second hand. I thought I was managing alright but he was determined. I soon became addicted and got rid of the copper.3
Automatic washing machines that washed, rinsed and spun clothes were more common from the 1970s. Clothes driers were rare in the 1960s, and became widely used only in the 1980s.
‘No hard rubbing with Rinso’ was the catch cry for this popular laundry powder, with its distinctive yellow logo. An advertising jingle was also broadcast in te reo Māori, and the radio show It’s in the bag, compered by Selwyn Toogood, was sponsored by Rinso.
This 1960s ‘Beatty’ wringer washing machine was popular in New Zealand. Its labour-saving features included a separate agitator and powered mangle.
Going outside to let off steam and play was one of the delights of the school day. Climbing frames known as jungle gyms were a key part of that experience. They were first introduced to New Zealand schools in the early 1930s and quickly became a favourite, alongside the ever-popular swings, slides and sandpit. Constructed out of metal pipes, they were invented in Chicago in 1920 by lawyer Sebastian Hinton, who advocated climbing as exercise and play for children, and were sold under the trademark ‘Junglegym’. Hinton’s father, a mathematician, had built a similar bamboo structure for his son with the aim of enabling children to achieve an intuitive understanding of three-dimensional space. The game involved calling out numbers for the x, y and z axes, with each child trying to be the first to grasp the correct junction.1 From 1955, jungle gyms were also known as monkey bars, as they suggested the climbing play of monkeys.2 Jungle gyms were configured in endless combinations and could be quite large, so that children could be strung out along them like monkeys, or like washing. The structures allowed for free play, but also kept children in one spot, under the watchful eye of teachers. For girls, they were sometimes tricky. Hanging upside down meant that skirts fell upside down, and inside out too, revealing knickers. Tucking skirts into underwear became a ritual and encouraged the wearing of trousers for girls. Climbing on jungle gyms also caused blisters, and could result in a nasty accident if a child fell off. But children’s safety seems to have been less of a concern than it is today. Although the jungle gym at Thorndon School pictured here was placed on grass, jungle gyms, swings and roundabouts were often placed on concrete, asphalt or gravel: children who fell on these hard surfaces just had to grin and bear it. Jungle gyms encouraged climbing competitions, stories were woven around them, and they were cherished school fixtures that were also in frequent use after school and in the weekends when school grounds often remained open to the local community.
In this 1953 photograph children are getting down off a small jungle gym and running back to the classroom – perhaps the bell has just rung for the end of lunch time at Thorndon School in Wellington.
School milk bottles had cardboard tops with a small hole for inserting a straw. The tops contained messages like ‘Hurrah! Milk makes merry children’, ‘Top of the class. Milk for growing children’, ‘Milk will make lesson time like playtime’, ‘Make a good start; drink milk every morning’ and ‘Attention. Milk is good for children’.
Boys were usually the official milk monitors. Around 10am they would pile crates onto a hand cart and deliver bottles to each classroom, then return the empties to the shed for the milkman to pick up. Sometimes the morning delivery would reveal older amber bottles, which were keenly sought after by some pupils.
School milk was not to everyone’s taste. In the days before fridges and chillers, nothing was worse, some people remember, than the smell and taste of warm full-cream milk. Sometimes it had started to go off, or the crown of cream in the top of the bottle would clog and prevent the liquid below getting through the straw. In 1940, Muriel Bell, the Department of Health nutrition officer, responded to concerns about the effects of sunlight on milk, and instigated the use of covered trucks to deliver the bottles to schools. Crates of milk were often stored in a small slatted shed raised off the ground in a shaded spot close to the school gates.
Children subverted the healthy initiative in a number of ways. They would leave the milk out in the sun and hope it would turn to butter. Others tampered with lids to squirt their classmates, or made milk bombs by taking the top off, screwing the bottle on to the brass water taps and then turning the taps on full and waiting for the explosion.1 The cardboard lids were often put to further use. With strands of multi-coloured wool, for example, pupils could use them to make pom-poms. By winding layers of wool tightly around a pair of lids, clipping the ends, tying the strands together then discarding the lids, they had a colourful pom-pom.
These 1950s cardboard lids (right) carry a range of instructional messages in coloured inks. They were used in school milk bottles, like the one shown opposite from the Raetihi Milk Supply Company, and had a punchable hole in the middle for the accompanying straw.
squeaking of the trolley on the serviceable linoleum. They followed its progress down the corridor, as that nice Mrs Weston called out for tea orders. There was an instant hush and then, as one, they rose and headed out the swing doors to the tea room. Such a scenario was played out in workplaces across the country. All workers stopped for morning and afternoon tea – and often a cigarette – and also took their lunch hours seriously. It was the era of nine-to-five working hours, with weekends off and little chance of work following you home.
The worlds of paid work were inextricably linked with how domestic life was organised (men going out to work, women staying at home or working part-time after marriage), and both home and work were produced and reproduced in what students learned at school (different jobs for men and women, male seniority and female domesticity). Broader changes in consumerism, popular culture, politics, immigration, and perceptions of gender and the role of women are also evident in different working worlds. Workplaces as diverse as a hospital ward, a building site, the office, the meatworks, the farm, a mine, the telephone exchange and the newspaper printing room suggest the variety of work people were engaged in, yet there were also important shifts in both the work itself and how people did it over the 1950s and 1960s. The tools, equipment and sometimes the spaces of work at the farm, the factory, the office or the commercial district also underwent inexorable change.
At the beginning of the 1950s, most paid workers were male, generally working full time, while women stayed at home to look after children. In 1945, only about a quarter of the total workforce were women. This proportion dipped slightly during the 1950s, and was around a quarter again by 1961. It rose to almost a third by 1971.1 Children in postwar New Zealand lived in a much more protected world than those of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Compulsory school attendance and labour laws ensured that they would only participate in part-time work for ‘pocket money’. Boys mowed the lawns, washed cars or delivered milk and newspapers. Girls often did babysitting for neighbours. With increasing prosperity into the 1960s, the money children earned usually went on toys, music, movies and other social activities, rather than contributing to family necessities.
Female staff busy at the Te Aro, Wellington, branch of the Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) in the early 1960s. The BNZ records that in 1950 it employed 2140 staff in 292 branches, and in 1958 it opened a branch just for women clients in Auckland – a world first.
It was 10am, exactly, and the secretaries in the typing pool all heard the faint
Part of the New Zealand Railways Department, the New Zealand Railways Road Services provided buses for long-distance, tourist and suburban bus services. It trucked freight and parcels, and was also the biggest operator of coaches. In 1950 it had 276 buses, including a large number of Bedford SB3s with New Zealand Motor Bodies’ Omnicoach bodywork, like the 1958 one shown (right). NZRRS eventually bought 1280 of these chassis, which were used in suburban, local rural and longdistance services.1 They made up the largest fleet of Bedford SB buses in the world. In the 1950s, annual passenger numbers reached 24 million, only two million fewer than those carried on rail. Road services, rail cars, and private buses and trucks spelled the end of the last rural mixed train services and struggling branch lines.
With increasing competition from cars and air travel, the total number of coaches on New Zealand roads decreased from about 700 in 1956 to 466 a decade later.2 Coaches were forced to rely more on freight, mail and newspaper delivery, and school bus runs. It was common for these coaches – known as ‘composite’ or ‘freighters’ – to carry passengers in the front half, and parcels, mail and newspapers in the back. Coach companies also put together package tours to attract both local tourists and the growing number of foreign visitors.
While the buses looked modern and stylish, levels of comfort varied. Roads were still in a rather poor state in many areas in the 1950s. Sealing was increasing rapidly, but metal roads were widespread. Travel sickness on the country’s narrow and rough roads, and bus breakdowns, were common. Being stuck, perhaps for hours, with 25 other people while help came and the bus was fixed could be as much a part of the touring experience as the scenic views and the pleasure of arriving at your destination.
A New Zealand Road Services bus is parked in front of Parliament Buildings in Wellington in 1958. It had padded, seamed seats; head-rest protectors; ample windows; and spacious luggage racks.
In the 1950s, the Tourist Department’s Christchurch bureau originated the idea of group tours, for which they coined the name ‘Tiki Tours’. The department then extended the concept, organising a major programme of low-cost tours through the governmentowned hotels. This poster is from 1965.
This smart NAC bag (right), with its distinctive logo of a bird flying through the airline’s name, was a familiar sight for air travellers in the 1960s, along with snappily dressed air hostesses. Work and leisure were the main reasons for choosing to travel by air at this time. For every 100 passengers in 1966, 41 were travelling for recreation, 41 on business and 18 for ‘other reasons’.1
The New Zealand government had established NZ National Airways Corporation (NAC) in 1947. With the company slogans ‘Wings of the Nation’ and ‘Getting More People Together’, NAC was the chief domestic air service between the major centres and provincial cities and towns. By December 1951, NAC was carrying passengers on a network from Kaitāia to Invercargill: the age of mass air travel had arrived. NAC remained the dominant airline until its enforced merger with TEAL’s successor, Air New Zealand, in 1978.
NAC introduced the Vickers Viscount 807 turbo-prop planes, powered by Rolls Royce engines, in 1958. These models were one of the first pressurised passenger aircraft in New Zealand. They were mid-sized airliners designed to replace the older DC-3s, which had been reliable and versatile, and able to land on grass as well as tarmac. Viscounts reduced the flight time from Auckland to Christchurch from over three hours to under two. Three airplanes were initially ordered in 1955 for main trunk routes and then two more. Passenger numbers boomed, thanks in part to advertisements that stressed the planes’ ability to fly over the weather:
Travel in superb luxury at no extra cost by NAC jet prop. You’ll find the armchair ease, panoramic windows, above-the-weather comfort of these new Viscount and Friendships a never-to-beforgotten experience.2
The Viscounts flew more than 134,000 times, and carried over six million passengers, before being phased out from 1974.3
From 1968, Boeing 737 jets flew the main trunk routes. DC-3s were replaced on the provincial routes by Dutch Fokker F27 Friendships from 1961, and supplemented the Viscounts on the main trunk services as quickly as the provincial runways were sealed.
Glamorous NAC air hostesses pose in their 1965 gold uniforms. These ‘trolley dollies’, as they were patronisingly nicknamed, are framed by a newly opened, modernist airport lounge.
Andrea Hill bought this vinyl NAC travel bag in 1964. One in three airplane travellers was a woman at this time.
This timetable was released on 17 August 1962. Passengers were permitted 35lb (24.9kg) of baggage, and they were advised to memorise their flight numbers. The airline provided complimentary transport between the airport and city. Flights between Auckland and Wellington took one hour 25 minutes.
Tearooms were an integral part of the glamour and allure of department stores. They were often located at the top of the building to make sure customers traversed many departments en route. Cage-like elevators staffed by attendants who announced the various departments on each floor on the way delivered customers in style. Tearooms served lunches, as well as dainty morning and afternoon teas, and provided table service with uniformed waitresses. Patrons selected treats from cake stands, poured tea from silver teapots and ate off fine china. As tearooms were largely feminine spaces, stores used them as the venue for chic fashion parades as another way of advertising what was for sale. Many children in the 1950s and 1960s went with their mothers and grandmothers to department store tearooms as a special treat.
But by the 1960s, department stores, and their formal tearooms, were beginning to seem old-fashioned. At the same time, coffee consumption was rising. The stationing of American servicemen in New Zealand during the Second World War, and the arrival of European refugees and settlers used to drinking coffee rather than tea, boosted coffee consumption from the 1940s. The introduction of instant coffee in the 1950s stimulated more interest in and awareness of coffee. A new custom-built Nescafé factory opened at Cambria Park in Manukau, Auckland, in May 1962. The following year, Crown Lynn produced the ‘coffee can’, along with a range of new dinner sets. The can was similar to a tea cup, but with straight sides, and was a novel concept. In 1968, the company released three coffee sets with straight-sided cups, based on entries in the Crown Lynn Design Awards. Their names are redolent of the time: ‘Carnaby’, ‘Time Out’ and ‘Novelle’. Corning ware coffee percolators were also popular. The Palmerston North Milne & Choyce department store introduced a coffee ‘garden’ on its ground floor in the early 1960s, and displayed its sign on a board inside the store. Tearooms and coffee bars in the 1960s were selfservice and less formal than those in department stores of the early 1950s and before.
In the late 1950s, a coffee bar was opened in the Farmers’ department store in Auckland. Modern and advanced, it had streamlined counters, neatly uniformed staff and a gleaming coffee machine. Tea was off the menu.
The design for this sign was created by Allan Smith while working in the display department of Milne & Choyce, which operated in The Square, Palmerston North from 1959 to 1966.
Demitasse-sized Crown Lynn ‘Mogambo’ patterned coffee ‘cans’ and saucers from 1963. Many coffee cans are branded with ‘Cook & Serve’ on the base alongside the name, a practice which was introduced that same year when a heat-resistant clay body was developed.
Young people dancing with a live band in a community hall in the 1960s. The young women are wearing slacks and even the young children are joining in. By this time the stiff etiquette of partnered dances had given way to rock ’n’ roll.
their peers in the northern hemisphere. The Beatles’ performances on stage were in fact brief – less than 30 minutes – and they performed the same 11-song set at every show: ‘I saw her standing there’, ‘I want to hold your hand’, ‘You can’t do that’, ‘Till there was you’, ‘All my loving’, ‘She loves you’, ‘Roll over Beethoven’, ‘Can’t buy me love’, ‘This boy’, ‘Long tall Sally’ and ‘Twist and shout’. Ringo Starr also sang ‘Boys’. In Auckland the band put on two back-to-back shows at 6.30 and 8pm on two consecutive nights:
Auckland fans were as riotous as those in Wellington. The music went almost unnoticed as everyone commented on the audience: ‘Yes, they certainly did Auckland proud, that audience which provided squeals of such volume, the uproar and the footwork under the seats. The Beatles? After all, you can’t watch everything at once,’ said concert reviewer Pat Booth.21
The shows marked a turning point both in the nature of live music and the audience response to it. Posters, records and popular music magazines filled up New Zealand bedrooms and lounges; male fans adopted the famous mop-top hairstyles and black ankle ‘Beatle’ boots; and female fans adopted white knee-length go-go boots and other Mod fashions. Young people began making their own entertainment based on a shared love of music, fashion and the freedom to enjoy increasingly varied and colourful urban experiences.
Jacqueline Ottoway worked at the Auckland Central Library in the late 1960s. The sorting room had a record player. ‘On Thursday evenings (when all the senior staff were off duty) we would gather in this back room to drink coffee, chatter and listen to Bob Dylan’s latest album or selections from “The Planets” by Gustav Holst.’ In summer all the women on the same shift would ‘spend the afternoon at a nearby beach or go shopping in the city checking out the range of sandals available from the newly established sandal maker at Khartoum Place, visiting “Form”, the new Swedish glassware shop, or strolling around Cook Street market’. Winter socialising included ‘the visual delights of the film festival, and they would eat out at Tony’s Restaurant or visit a friend’s flat to talk, listen to records and burn incense for the afternoon. Sometimes we just lingered around the University Quad and spent the rest of the afternoon lounging in Albert Park, taking photographs of each other wearing our “Easy Rider” sunglasses!’22
An eager fan clings onto Mick Jagger onstage at a concert in Wellington in February 1966. New Zealand fans saw a surprising number of international pop and rock acts in that decade.
At the other end of the spectrum, more formal and ritualised occasions continued. Afternoon teas, cocktails, balls, dances and occasions for drinking punctuated ordinary, everyday life, as did other celebrations of birth, life and death. These occasions, which were shared with wider families and communities, provided special anchor points in the 1950s and 1960s.
Kapa haka is a modern form of community display through song and dance that expresses customary cultural values. The term ‘kapa haka’ means ‘a group or groups standing in rows to perform traditional Māori dances, accompanied by sung or chanted words’.1 The performances became popular in urban settings after the Second World War. As well as fundraising and providing tourist entertainment, kapa haka groups played a key role in sustaining Māori language and customs. They provided ‘a cultural connection for those dispossessed of their culture by urbanisation’.
The growing popularity of kapa haka encouraged the use of distinct outfits. These combined traditional Māori garments, which had by then become rare in everyday use, and ‘reinvented’ clothing. The piupiu, a traditional kilt-type garment worn by both men and women, is one example. ‘Piupiu’ means to sway to and fro. The dried flax strands make a distinctive swishing sound as the wearer moves.
The growing number of local kapa haka groups led to regular regional and national competitions. Not long after the Second World War, the Gisborne region held its first annual competition. Rivalry was said to be so fierce that during rehearsals teams attempted to spy on their opponents’ performance plans. From 1953, the Taumaunu Shield was presented to the winning group. This shield commemorated Karaitiana Taumaunu, a Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti composer.
In 1963, a group of 150 kapa haka performers based at the Temple View Mormon centre in Hamilton travelled to Hawai‘i to help complete construction of a Māori village at the Polynesian Cultural Centre. This group, Te Arohanui o Te Iwi Maori, went on to tour California and Utah, which included an appearance on The Danny Kaye show, a nationwide US television show. Their tour was ‘a critical and commercial success’.
A kapa haka group practises in a car park in 1960, probably at Tūrangawaewae marae in Ngāruawāhia. The performers have painted moko. The women wear piupiu with poi tucked into the waistband, as well as woven headbands and bodices. The leader strums a guitar.
This bodice and headband were hand-woven by Pirihira Heketa in about 1946, using traditional techniques and commercial knitting wool, backed with cotton and silk ribbon. These items would have been worn for kapa haka performances.
