Homes and Gardens magazine, 1953-63

Homes and Gardens magazine first started in 1919 and still survives in a print edition. By chance I recently unearthed seven copies for the period 1953 to 1963. They are glossy, packed with ads, and beautifully define fashion and aspiration for the time. Just about all possible bases are covered: fashion and knitting, weddings, local living, gardens, beauty, furnishing, cookery, fiction. So, that suggests to me then that most of the editorial and advertising makes this a magazine intended for women, but there’s just enough to get the man of the house flicking through: the motoring column, ads for exterior paint and so on.

As I now know though, for all those aspirants, keeping up with the Joneses didn’t come cheap. For example, the May 1961 edition weighs up the pros and cons of owning a fridge. With Prestcold advertising their range starting at fifty guineas (say, one to two months’ wages), you could see why this would be a big decision to make. I say that, but glancing through the June 1953 edition - only ten years earlier, then - I came across an ad for a Frigidaire fridge, and the price then was £99 19s!

Another ad for Holmbury Carpets suggests you could have a carpet in your bedroom ‘and you won’t need a raise to pay for it’. How you were covering your floor was clearly the thing: for your sitting room you could have Semtex floor tiles, or Barry’s Arabesque linoleum, while Stoddard, for some reason, but it clearly got my attention, had one of their carpets laid out on the very large back lawn, with a, er, helicopter parked alongside.

Kenwood advertise their Chef food mixer (27½ guineas!) saying ‘it does everything but cook – that’s what wives are for!’, with the strapline, ‘I’m giving my wife a Kenwood Chef’. Lucky thing.

In October 1961 edition, McMichael advertise their televisions (starting at 55 guineas) and transistor radios (12½ guineas). Televisions – and it’s 1961, so there are only two channels – were usually bought as separate items of furniture in their own right, so you’d buy the stand or legs to go with it (extra, of course). And if you were really it, you’d go for the telly with sliding doors.

Many items were sold with ‘easy terms’ available. For many people, you either saved diligently for a long time, or bought on tick. However you paid, it’s easy to see why goods were meant to last longer in those days – you wouldn’t want to just finishing off paying for it, only to find you needed a new one…