Popular Nostalgia

Popular Nostalgia from the 1940s. Memories of events and items from popular culture recorded in words and pictures on the internet. Share, remember and get wonderfully sentimental…

This song sums up everything nostalgic about Christmas. Christmas in Australia just wasn’t the same without chestnuts roasting on an open fire or snow glistening outside. Bing felt the same way when he sang this classic as part of the 1942 classic “Holiday Inn” and later the 1954 hit “White Christmas”: Lyrics I’m dreaming of […]

I never quite understood why we had satsumas in our stockings at Christmas and oranges at the Christingle service. It may well be something to do with them being expensive in “the olden days” and so reserved for special occassions like Christmas. However, I always much preferred the sweets, chocolate and other presents inside and […]

They always used to serve arctic roll for school dinners. I don’t know whether arctic roll was especially cheap for some reason, or whether someone just liked making it but I always enjoyed it and could never work out how it was made. Everyone always tried for seconds and thirds when arctic roll was involved. […]

I love having mobile phones but there was a time before, when people could be unavailable, dates had to speak to the parents who answered the family phone and mates had to agree a time and place to meet. Landline phones meant that nights out on the town were a nightmare to organise. If someone missed […]

The whole reason we have 999 -the circular dial telephone took aaaaages to return to start before you could turn the next number in. People didn’t make so many phone calls because it was actually less effort to run round to your mate’s house or write a letter to your granny. I’m not quite of […]

Yo-yos have always been around, though for some reason they become faddy every now and again. In my school, during the early 90s, the yo-yo fad came back hard. All of a sudden, everywhere you looked was someone “walking the dog” or doing a “cats cradle” or some other yo-yo move. There was always a […]

I wasn’t there but I watched the film in history lessons like the rest of my peers. Down with salt taxes. Mahatma Ghandi’s philosophy made it much easier for the rest of the world to distinguish the good guys from the bad. Ghandi knew that if the Indian people were beyond reproach, international sympathy would […]

The Saturday afternoon classic with a wonder-dog who could save a man trapped in a mine by barking signals to her owner. The original idea for Lassie was based on the true story of a collie who saved a drowning sailor from HMS Formidable. Eric Knight used this as the basis for his character, Lassie, […]