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My old house gave me a present
We are renovating a Victorian cottage in Scotland, and it’s like an archaeology expedition. Under the hall carpet, we found a mosaic tile floor. Behind several layers of wallpaper, there was the boarded up doorway to the kitchen that I just knew HAD to be there somewhere, because surely the sensible people who built the house would have had a direct route from kitchen to dining room.
And underneath another elderly carpet, we found this (dated Monday, January 25, 1965)—
Everyone I’ve shown this to has had a different reaction.
- The Hub wondered if it means the old carpet was 51 years old, and maybe we should ask Tim the Carpet Man for a 50-year warranty on the new carpet. [Note to self: The Hub and Tim must never meet.]
- Willie, who has been helping get the garden back into shape, wondered what it would be like to get the paper for only 3d (thruppence), or to book a 54-day world tour including first-class airfare, luxury hotels, and private cars for £850.
[BUT I DIGRESS…OF COURSE I DO! ] Before the UK currency went decimal in 1971, a favorite British pastime was to quote incomprehensible prices to tourists. For example, the 3d that The Daily Telegraph charged its readers back in 1965 was a fourth of a shilling (of which there were 20 in a pound) But don’t go thinking that you now know anything about British Old Money because that doesn’t even scratch the surface of a currency system which includes the half-groat, sixpence, half-crown, half-guinea, and Sovereign to name a few. And THAT doesn’t even include all the coins that are less than a penny—farthing, halfpenny, three farthings. And THEN on the off-chance that some hapless tourist was starting to catch on to this system, vendors would quote prices in tanner, ten bob (10 shillings), florin, quid, and guineas—something which as far as I can tell, wasn’t even an actual coin. Many, in a post-Brexit Britain are calling for a return to this fun system. If that happens, I’m just going to carry around a jar of coins with a scoop and tell people to help themselves.
- I noticed the message from the Queen. Yes, that Queen.
The whole world is the poorer by the loss of his many-sided genius, while the survival of this country and the sister nations of the Commonwealth, in the face of the greatest danger that has ever threatened them, will be a perpetual memorial to his leadership, his vision and his indomitable courage. —Signed: Elizabeth R.
Can you imagine any of our current political leaders or wannabes ever inspiring such a tribute?
Nope. I’m not getting there either…
Barb Taub 
Amazing! I admit my first thought at seeing the photo was ‘wow – how amazing’ followed by ‘how unhygienic must the carpets be, having been there for so many decades?’
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I was in awe of carpet-makers whose product survived that long! Interestingly, the rugs that had actual carpetpads—presumably of a later vintage—didn’t do nearly as well, and their pads have crumbled and rotted far more than those old newspapers. (But you are right…LOTS of dust underneath.)
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What a fabulous find, Barb 🙂
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It’s a keeper! So fun.
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Wish I’d found it 🙂
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I think I’ll put it on the wall. Why don’t you come up and visit it? (Once we have working loos, of course…) Ani would love the beach.
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OOh she would…so would I 🙂
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I’ll let you know the second we can flush reliably!
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That would be helpful 😉 Thanks, Barb 🙂
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Hang on to it! What a memory!
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I know! I’m thinking of framing it along with some Victorian photos of the house that some of the neighbors found.
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I never got past visualizing that mosaic floor. How totally awesome!!
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I must admit that I love that floor!
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That’s an incredible find! I’d have it framed and put on the wall (yes, I’m a bit weird like that!!). 😉
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Me too! (Weird, that is.) There is a peculiar little toilet room (the Hub calls it the Wee WeeRoom) that’s black and white. I’m going to put this on the walls for reading material. NOTE about the headscratchers of old houses: that tiny toilet room is right next to the bathroom, which also contains a toilet. I don’t know why either.
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Haha, at least it’s inside! When I was little and visited my Grandma we used to have to run up the street to have a wee! 😉
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When we lived in rural Virginia, I had a friend who was a kindergarten teacher. She said that a ritual of the first day of school was taking all the little ones in and showing them how flush toilets work.
Where did your granny live?
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She lived in Beeston, Leeds (W.Yorkshire). The house has gone now and they’ve built a school in it’s place. Me, my brother, and my dad got locked in once haha, we were shouting for ages before anyone found us! 😉
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Well yes we do nickname our currency but you pond-crossers, with your simply system arent inured to testing we visitors with your dimes and pennies and quarters and the incredibly frustrating idea that all notes should be green! That said, finding papers under carpets got my brother and I into trouble back in the 60s when we realised there was this treasure trove if only we moved the furniture and rolled the carpets out of the way. My gran went mental but then sat with us reading the Times and the Herald from the 1940s. Personally, back then I just read the cricket reports but my older brother tells me the politics of the Middle East was as crazy and volatile then as now.
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Not only should all notes be properly green, but all should be the exact same size.
Did you save any of those old cricket reports?
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sadly no. I never had my mother’s collecting gene
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My first thought—the paper’s not yellow. What’s up with that? I once read that newspapers turned yellow from something(?) they put in it during the manufacturing process. Maybe that was only here in the good old US of A. Seeing as how you’re not too busy at the moment, can you check into it and get get back to us on that? And no fair using Google. Do your research as though it was 1965 just to keep in the spirit of things. I see a trip to the library on the horizon. Do they call a library a library in Merry Old England? I better stop here. I feel a novel coming on . . .
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I don’t need to go for the library on this one. The paper would turn yellow from oxidation—exposure to the oxygen in the air. Since this newspaper was under carpets, it’s a bit yellow in places, but not too bad. I had my first article for the Wall St. Journal framed (won’t reveal how many centuries ago) under archival glass, but it still got darker over time. This one will too, but I’m going to put it up anyway.
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What a great find! Perfect reading matter for the ‘smallest room’ 🙂 Btw if we ever did go back to old money I’d be carrying a jar and scoop too!
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A lovely find – but what I love about old newspapers is always the adverts! I have a Daily Telegraph for the day I was born, in 1959, it’s hilarious!
I was 11 when the old money was abolished, so remember it well. In my junior school we used to have maths text books that still had the alternative weights in bushels, pecks, etc. And a groat was 4d, I remember farthings – I think they went out when I was about 4, but I remember you could buy these chews called Mojos that were 2 for a farthing. Halfpennies (pronounced hay-pennies) were the norm when I was a child…. waaaah!!!
My husband still refers to 50p as ‘ten bob’.
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What stuns us as Americans is the concept of coinage SMALLER than a penny.
But I know what you mean about the old adverts. So fun.
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Oh, that is just too fun! 🙂
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It almost makes up for living in a giant cloud of dust and fumes and poorly functioning toilets. Almost.
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You and your cottage are on my list to visit when I’m over next year 🙂
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At the rate things are going, it might take that long for us to have working bathrooms. But we’ll always be so happy to see you!
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If your bathroom is within 20m of the house, it’s already a 100% improvement on the loo we had when I spent all my summers on the island, way back when…
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Score!
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And if you have hot water – or any water that comes from a mains tap, you’re a 300% improvement. We were tough back then! 🙂
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As of several days of plumbing work and five spiffy new radiators this week, we not only have hot water but actual heat. (I see absolutely nothing good about old days that didn’t include indoor plumbing and hot water…)
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Back then, I didn’t care. (We had oil lights too.) Now, I totally agree!
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What wonderful finds – both the newspaper and the mosaic floor.
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I know! I wake up each morning and wonder what my house is going to give me. Yesterday, we peeled the old wallpaper off the kitchen walls, and found some graffiti from the 70’s marking an earlier resident’s 16th birthday and her undying love for “Bobby”.
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You must investigate further – we want to know what happened to Bobby.
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What a great find, Barb. Years ago we dismantled our old settee so we could take it in the car to the dump. We found £50 in loose change! Most of it was in decimal currency. Love your little digression into pre-decimal currency. I used to love the programmes on TV to prepare us for decimalisation, especially the ditty: “Six pence is two and a half new p!”
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Do you have any of that old coinage still left? You might get to use it again in a post-Brexit world…
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We do. My father-in-law also has a jar full of old pennies dating from the 1800s. Those old pennies are huge!
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We once went to reframe an old picture and found newsprint from 1914. Framed that!
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Cool! Do you still have it?
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My sister does.
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So cool, Barb.
I can remember watching Winston Churchill’s funeral on TV as a kid. They floated his coffin down the Thames and there was a commentary that his was the first PM’s funeral a sitting monarch had attended. Funny what you remember.
The house I grew up in was built in the 1860s. My dad was big on reconstructing the place and actually closed off the door from the kitchen to what was the dining room. He worked at home and turned it into his office. But the best discovery was in my bedroom, when he opened a wall to enlarge my closet — he found half a bottle of wine and a book of poetry!
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That’s so cool. Do you remember what the book of poetry was like?
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It was Thanatopsis (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/50465). In French! I had visions of a handsome frenchman hanging out in my room. Fortunately, he was likely long dead (and not in my room).
I have no idea what kind of wine it was. Red.
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How romantic!
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Very similar finds to what turned up in the late-Victorian mid-terrace house we had in Oxford. But the most entertaining piece of newspaper was the ad(vert) for ‘Harpic’ which wondered what your friends thought of your lavatory. My other half liked it so much that it is still (15-odd years and two houses later) blu-tacked to the inside of the bathroom door.
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I love that! (It would make a great blog post!)
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The average home here in Tennessee isn’t very old. If it is from our Civil War times in the 1860’s, it’s now a museum. My husband has had two rather large (one quite elegant) office buildings that he designed torn down to make way for high rises or sprawling office complexes because the land is now considered so close in and valuable. When we traveled to Europe, he commented on the age of so many buildings, even small ones. He said we design for a 20 year life span on average buildings in America. My brother complained about something not working in a small hotel in London and the owner said, “This building is older than your country. What do you expect!” I do have newspapers from the 1940’s because my father was a newspaper editor and saved some poignant and significant ones about WWII. And I have his letter from a group of scientists signed by Einstein asking for help raising awareness of the dangers of nuclear weapons to the world.
Not as much fun as finding something in a truly old house.
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What an excellent find–not just the tile, but the historical references. Do you plan to frame the paper or anything?
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Absolutely! We have a teeny little loo (conveniently if inexplicably located exactly next to it’s big brother, the big loo). I figure that anyone in there would appreciate the reading material to distract any incipient claustrophobia once they realize that they can touch all four walls without getting up from the toilet. That newspaper section could basically wallpaper the space.
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What a great find! I was particularly interested to read the tribute from Queen Elizabeth, both because of what she said, and also because it underlines just how incredibly long she has reigned. When she eventually passes (and I hope it’s not for a long time yet), there are going to be so many British people who cannot remember any other monarch.
Just by pure coincidence, I happened to read something the other day about the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses the Great. He apparently lived to be 91 at a time when a typical lifespan for an Egyptian was about 35. It’s said that when he died, a number of his subjects wondered if it would mean the (literal!) end of the world. Beloved though the British monarch undoubtedly is, I suspect few Brits will have the same concern.
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The whole concept of a Queen is hard for Americans to wrap our heads around. On the one hand—a role conferred by GOD??? And on the other hand—Queen! How cool is that? But either way, we just can’t figure out what she’s supposed to do. Clearly she does a spectacular job at … whatever she does, but the best we can come up with is that she’s kind of a combination of the Vice President and the Pope and the Statue of Liberty, but with better hats.
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I’m not completely sure, Barb, but I think a king, a queen or an emperor is basically somebody that a nation can trust to meet foreign dignitaries because they don’t want their shifty used-car salesperson of a prime minister doing it.
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In that case, we can only hope that Pence fills that role if Trump is elected. (Although, it is kind of fun to speculate about which pieces of Trump anatomy she will remove if he goes in for a p-grab with Angela Merkel…)
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I have my legs crossed just thinking about it.
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I can remember the confusion it caused us all when the old monetary system was changed to decimal. Thruppence and two pennies became pretty much the same value, and the tanner (sixpence) was worth two and a half new pence. On the plus side, when you converted those values, pocket money seemed quite stingy, so it wasn’t long before we were getting 5p (a shilling) or 10p (two bob!). Ah! The good old days.
Thanks for bringing back some happy memories, Barb – though I don’t actually remember Churchill dying (I was only two at the time).
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I absolutely love the tile floor. So much character! Churchill’s death must not have meant much to my family in the states-I don’t remember them ever discussing it but then again, politics was a very hushed topic. As for a leader in today’s world receiving such a compliment-I don’t see it. Would be more of – they came, they conquered, they left a mess for the rest of us to clean up…glad they are gone. OK-the last part was a little much.
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I’ve just started my blog and am still trying to figure out how this site works – so happy that I managed to negotiate my way to your blog (still not entirely sure how I did it)! That mosaic floor is beautiful! And what a fascinating piece of history to discover beneath an old carpet, you should definitely frame and display it!
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Wow! That’s a great find…..the newspaper I mean. Great blog.
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