General Chat

If you're in your mid 60s aren't you a bit old for school meals? :-S

:-D :-D :-D

MANY THANKS TO EVERYONE FOR YOUR HELP I AM NOW PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
THANKS AGAIN
WENDY :-)

I used to make the occasional burger from scratch, for my children, which they loved.
when my eldest was given the choice of one at school (1985) she (thinking it would be like mine) took one bite - and threw up. It wasn't like mummy's - apparently it was vile :-(


...and I don't regard myself as a good cook.

I remember my first school dinner,

Was asked at home what I had been served and told them it was baked potato, salad and dog meat.

We never had Spam at home.

Yes, I've got 2/6d in my mind as well. We used to be sold Saving Stamps for that amount, which was probably were I was getting confused.

I would have sworn that when I was in the Infants (early 60s) a week of school lunches cost 2/6d. Obviously I have misremembered.

6d from the tooth fairy :-0
I got a 3d bit.....I loved that coin :-)

Chris

Rollo I do take exception to 'unkown table etiquette. My parents were strong on this as was I when I became a parent. My adult g.children know how to behave.

I am always horrified to see when dining out, patrons of all ages with elbows on tables using flatware like shovels with mouths wide open.

When I had school dinners in the early/mid fifties for two years - the menu never changed during that period. Monday I can recall - sausages/cabbage.

From mid sixties my mother was a school meals manageress and she spent a lot of time in her office during school holidays compiling menus for the following terms and then had to argue with the Nutritions Expert from County Hall about suitability of the menus.

One insisted salad once a week - Mum argued for an alternative as under twelves
weren't awfully keen on salads etc.

Sixpence for a tooth Sharron baby Satan gets a tenner :-D

inflation and all that lol :-D :-D

Puddings often consisted of a big square of sponge. One I remember eating regularly was topped with white icing and sprinkled with multi-coloured 'hundreds and thousands' which bled into the icing. It was always served with pink custard.

After the meal had ended the dinner ladies walked around with metal dishes containing strips of carrots to clean our teeth. :-)

PM sent to Wendy in case she was expecting personal messages instead of people adding to her thread.

I remember it costing 5s as we had to take the money in ourselves, mum's were not allowed to escort you to the classroom like today

Senior school it was 60p... Enough to buy 10 cigarettes a day :-D

........and quite often you did :-D

A tooth was 6d from the fairy so you would need to lose two teeth per dinner.

Found this about the daily cost of a school meal

http://www.educationengland.org.uk/articles/22food.html

1957-1968 = 1/- ( 1 shilling/5p)
1968 - 1969 = 1/6d ( 1 shilling and 6 pence/7.5p)
1969 - 1970 - 1/9d (1 shilling and 9 pence/just under 10p)

Wendy, you'd need to explain to your students that 10/- (10 shillings/50p) was considered a decent birthday present for a Primary school aged child.

Dermot - Coffee in primary school? :-S

Rollo, the question is about school meals not home cooking.
It's also about the mid 60's, not the 50's.
We weren't very well off, but had a fridge, toaster, and an adequate cooker - mum cooked for 6 on it.
We also ate at a table with knives and forks!!!

...and I can never remember my mum using a washing dolly - she tended to have some sort of washing machine!! :-D
Failing that, there were plenty of launderettes.

Ahem! All you lucky people.

Our school provided an urn of boiling water from which we filled our cups & added our own tea/coffee or coca.

Food? A simple sandwich of some sort brought in from home.

We were lucky to have a bike shed where we could eat without being pestered by the swooping & noisy pesky seagulls or dampened somewhat by drizzly rain.

I was slim in those days.

I had a look on this thread this morning it made me feel ill. Don't remember much about school dinner but after lunch we had to take it in turns to carry all the waste food in metal buckets to the local farm for pig swill Yuk :-0
Thanks for reminding me Wendy :-)

Primary school food in the 1950s was mostly terrible the worse thing being that there was not enough of it, not the least reason being theft by the food providers. For the kids the choice was roughly between terrible food with odd high spot (eg jam roly poly) or starvation. Hence the high number of thin kids you see in old photos. Other delicacies which went on into the 1960s were snark (whale meat), Fray Bentos corned beef (luxury?) dried eggs and mince of unknown origin.

Being bigger than average I predated the lunch table lol. Meat pie with boiled potatoes was good but the mash was horrendous. Lambs liver usually needed power tools to make an impression. Swede was often served but my memory mercifully ahs erased "the greens". The girls liked various sorts of rice pudding / tapioca/ semolina mixed up with jam. If you could get out of school during lunch there was a chance of buying sweets and chewing gum from machines. Cardboard money from school maths was popular for the latter. I never saw any food left by the boys however inedible though the girls tended to be picky.

In the 60s school food had improved a lot as the country as a whole moved on from Lyons Corner House and Wimpy to pizza, US style hamburgers and Asian wonders. Good job too as cooking skills at home took quite a dive.

By then was away at a boy's only school far from the culinary delights of home or even the best efforts of the LEA. Whatever the fees were for it was most def. not for catering :-(

If you are doing a project you should be very aware that food took up far more of a family budget than it does today and a lot more time was spent cooking and eating as a family without the tv on. Clothes & shoes cost heaps more too. A lot of people did not have a fridge let alone a freezer while most cookers/ovens were very basic. Stuff such as toasters, blenders and kitchen gadgets in general were pretty well unknown. So was table etiquette...

looks like i had the best school dinner so far
home made like your mother would make




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