Good Housekeeping magazine, 1950s
This title is something of a survivor – Good Housekeeping started in 1885 in the United States, becoming a monthly in 1891. The British version first appeared in 1924, following the setting up of the Good Housekeeping Institute in London, the purpose of which was to test and advise on household products on the market. What’s more remarkable is that you’ll still see the magazine on your newsagent’s shelf each month.
We already have twenty-odd copies of this title, scattered from 1923 to 2011. Now though we have another four, from 1954 and 1955, courtesy of Jo Swindell of Gloucestershire. Jo was a keen buyer of magazines from the 50s onwards. With her husband in the navy, they moved to Portsmouth, and now Mrs Swindell is being cared for in a home in Hertfordshire, near her daughter, to whom we offer thanks for sending the magazines on.
By the 1950s Good Housekeeping was a reliable source of information for the middle-class housewife. Content included fiction and a broad range of general interest articles (‘How to get on Woman’s Hour’, ‘What a Woman Looks for in a Car’, that kind of thing). But the bulk of the editorial is reports from the Institute on products, family issues, fashion, cooking, beauty, gardening and so on.
One of the copies (October 1954) is the thirtieth birthday edition, and a feature looks forward to the next thirty years, speculating on how nuclear power, ‘infra-red rays’ and ‘deep freezing’ might help the householder. It also asks, ‘Will shopping by television be the next step, at any rate for invalids or out-of-town shoppers?’ Exciting times!
I’ll feature a selection of the colour ads here. At two shillings, this wasn’t a cheap buy, but it meant colour was interspersed, giving us some excellent material and clearly demonstrating a time of increasing opportunity and choice (if only you could afford it). We’re showing Somnus mattresses (‘for the rest of your life’), BMK carpets and floorcoverings, Maconochie’s tinned soups, Weetabix, Ideal boilers, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Servis washing machines, and Persil ‘for Coloureds too!’
