News Twenty-five gallons of petrol? That will be just over a fiver
We were paid much less then and almost everything was much cheaper. But when local drivers fill up their vehicles with fuel during the next few days one could hardly blame them for wishing they could turn back the petrol pump dials to where they would have been 50 years ago.
One calculation last week put the average price of unleaded petrol at £1.19p a litre, roughly equivalent to £5.44p a gallon. Now comes the sobering thought: Spending that sum on standard petrol in the Goole, Howden and Selby districts in the summer of 1958 - in pre-decimal currency, just under £5 10shillings - would have bought you more than 25 gallons!
Standard petrol went up a penny in August, 1958, to 4s 3d a gallon (today a little over 22p). Of that, 2s 6d - half a crown as we used to call it - went to the Government in tax. Nowadays the fuel tax on a litre of petrol is more than 50 pence - and that is before the addition of VAT.
By today's standards, the cost of vehicle repair work 50 years ago was staggeringly cheap, too. When a Goole firm had major work performed on its delivery van in 1958, the fee charged for decarbonising the engine and reseating the valves was £5 4s 6d - less than the cost of a single gallon of unleaded in 2008!
That van belonged to James Hopley and Sons, then one of the larger businesses in Goole's Aire Street. And the surviving bill for work carried out at the Goole garage of Thompson of Hull, contains many other indicators of where costs stood half a century ago. The price charged for six spark plugs, for instance, was what today would be expressed as £1.5p. The 1958 price of engine oil was 1s 8d a pint - today it is about £4 a pint. Replacing an oil filter then cost what today would be shown as 27d, whereas nowadays the basic cost of an oil filter for even a small car would be at least £7.
Labour costs 50 years ago reflected the way things were then, too. For example, work on the Hopley van, which included decarbonising the engine, resetting the valves, welding work on both rear wings and repairs to the vehicle's exhaust added up to - in today's terms - £7.30. Even a couple of years ago labour costs for, say, a 30,000-mile service on a typical family saloon amounted to more than £80... and that was before the adding of VAT.
A NEW CAR FOR £685
Of course, life in Goole 50 years ago was substantially different in countless ways to the way it is in the town and district today. A new Austin A55 saloon car for sale in a Goole showroom in 1958 was priced at £685. But then many local houses - and certainly those located in terraced streets - changed hands for substantially less than £1,000 which, around that time incidentally, was the basic annual salary of a Member of Parliament.
An MP's finances, of course, never were any guide to pay scales in Goole. Thus, while in those days of Goole Borough Council, the post of Town Clerk had a yearly salary ranging between £1,355 and £1,580, local hospital cleaners earned about £6 a week. A postman earned a maximum which in today's terms would be 22 pence an hour. Goole's dockers at the time were on a weekly basic of £8 12s. Dockers did, however, receive a pay-rise in August, 1958, of - wait for it - seven shillings and sixpence a week - today 37.5 pence.
SALARY £1,000 A YEAR
So a pre-tax income of £1,000 a year? In 1958, the vast majority of working men in Goole and district would each have been willing to surrender their car for it. Not that they had that option, however, for in those days most local working men did not own a car. Goole was a town then when more people made local journeys on two wheels rather than four. Among the rest the majority used two feet. In most local residential streets then the number of car-owners could be counted on one hand.
Not for most folk, then, the matter of heading into the town centre hoping to find a parking space. The big issue then - especially on Saturday mornings in Boothferry Road between the railway station and the Clock Tower - was finding a vacant spot on the roadside kerb to prop-up the bike.
For local drivers half a century ago life on the roads was vastly different, too. No motorways at all then - anywhere in Britain. At least, throughout the land, there was not a single stretch of motorway-standard highway until the opening of the Preston by-pass in December, 1958. At that time the opening of that section of the M62 on Goole's doorstep was still some 18 years away.
Around Goole and elsewhere half a century ago, driving in the non-motorway era was also a far quieter affair than today. Yes, there would always be a nose-to-tail crawl to the East coast through Goole and over Boothferry Bridge on Bank Holidays in summer. Yet, in the entire year of 1958, the distance covered by ALL vehicles using all of Britain's roads added up to 84.6 billion kilometres. Even with cycles and motor cycles excluded the corresponding figure for 1998 was 455.4 billion.
That, though, was a decade ago, and in Goole or Howden or Selby, or anywhere else, just think of how much more congested our highways and byways are ten years on.
Published on 24th July 2008 in News.
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