It may seem hard to credit in an age when every supermarket is piled high with pumpkins around mid-October, but back in the 1960s, in Britain, there was no Halloween industry: no orange and black decorations, no ‘creepy comestibles’, no dressing up as witches, ghosts or zombies, nothing. The season was still essentially a religious festival, the Eve of All Hallows; and barring a few nods to the gothic such as an occasional item on Blue Peter, or a spooky Jackanory, it tended to pass off quite uneventfully. By the age of nine or ten, I knew about ‘apple bobbing’ (and if you didn’t have a barrel, a plastic washing-up bowl would do), and I’d seen pumpkin carving done on Blue Peter... but did you ever go looking for a pumpkin in Britain in the 1960s? There weren’t any. Maybe a few specialist farmers and gardeners grew their own, but on nothing like a commercial scale. Our mum tried make a Jack-O-Lantern out of a turnip. It wasn’t quite the same, plus you had to actually hollow the thing out. Halloween was something we did projects about at school, but we definitely did not dress up and go from house to house begging for sweets. Trick or Treat did not exist.
I first encountered the concept in a Peanuts comic strip collection, where it felt as alien and un-British as the schoolroom ‘show and tell’ sessions also seen in Charles M. Schulz’s cartoons. Judging from depictions in popular culture, the whole phenomenon of Halloween as a kind of celebratory holiday had been firmly entrenched in America since at least the 1940s, but Britain, even in the 1960s, remained strangely resistant. Perhaps it was because we had our own, home-grown late autumn event in the form of Bonfire Night, which incorporated various aspects of what any American youngster would think of as Halloween celebrations... the wearing of masks (predominantly styled after Guy Fawkes, but also depicting various horror characters) and canvassing for money on the streets, which in Britain took the form of ‘penny for the guy.’
I doubt anyone beneath the age of 40 has ever seen this taking place, and coming from an aspirational middle-class family, I didn’t participate myself, but I do remember seeing kids of a certain stripe (‘from the council estate’ as our mum would say) pushing guys in barrows around the streets in hope of soliciting money from strangers. The guys were usually fairly rudimentary, consisting of a bunch of old clothes, stuffed with newspapers, and topped with one of the green papier-maché Guy Fawkes masks you could buy in Woolworths. They tended to be pushed around in hand carts of home-made origin, essentially an old fruit crate with pram wheels... sometimes the whole pram, rusty and long past its prime, would itself be pressed into service.
Unlike the average Trick or Treater, who can usually be fobbed off with a fun-size Milky Way, the Penny-for-the-Guy brigade were after your money, and they wanted it to buy fireworks – an alarming reminder that there was then no age restriction on the sale of pyrotechnics. Any of the ranges of small to medium sized garden fireworks could be bought over the counter by any child in possession of sufficient funds.
This state of affairs remained
unchallenged until relatively recently, but from the late 60s onwards, the media began a long campaign aimed at raising awareness of firework accidents and ultimately changing legislation governing their sale. The move was spearheaded by the BBC's Man Alive film of 1968, Remember Remember, which included graphic film of children who had suffered firework-related accidents. I saw the programme on at least two occasions (It was much repeated) and it certainly helped to change the way I thought about what had formerly seemed like an innocent back garden entertainent.
In 1970, the BBC's Nationwide showed us how certain children's comics were still setting a bad example with depictions of firework mayhem in various forms. The item included a page from a firework number of Whizzer and Chips wherein Ginger (a tom cat) proposed some manner of mischief with the aid of a ‘Mount Vesuivius firework.’ Where would the madness end? In hospital, of course...
The Central Office of Information weighed in with a series of public information films dealing with the dangers of fireworks, but their sombre little films were utterly eclipsed by a chorus of advertising jingles, of which the most memorable was ‘light up the sky with Standard Fireworks’. I can still sing it to this day.
Personally, I never did ‘fool with fireworks’ as the COI had it. I wasn’t actually afraid of them, like the lad two doors down our street, who used to watch our displays from his bedroom window, but I had enough sense to leave them to the grown-ups. Sparklers were okay (and the COI’s ad illustrated them in the hands of children), but I remember being astonished to see some of the smaller ‘fountain’ type garden fireworks declaring that they could be held in the hand.
For me, the appeal of fireworks was twofold. Firstly, you got to look at the wrappings, the design of which must have kept several graphics departments in gainful employment for decades. The formula was simple: two or three-colour separated artwork in bright shades of red, yellow, green and blue, stylised sparks, floral explosions and the name spelled out in exciting jagged lettering. Alonside the familiar Roman Candles and Catherine Wheels, an average selection box might contain such goodies as ‘Flower Pot’ (multi-coloured floral type popping stars), ‘Traffic Light’ (a kind of signal flare that started by emitting red smoke before shading into amber and green), ‘Screech Owl’ (a cross between a garden firework and a rocket which, when lit, took off on a small plastic wing, – resembling a V1 rocket – and emitted a piercing shriek) and the triangular ‘Mount Vesuivus’ type from which you got a fountain of golden sparks.
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The examples above (scanned from Robert Opie’s excellent ‘1950s Scrapbook’) are entirely typical of the types that were on sale in the 1960s and 70s, and their appearance had most likely not changed in several decades. I liked these designs so much that, on November 6th, I would sometimes collect the burned-out husks from the garden and, on at least one occasion, brought them into the house where our mum allowed them to be displayed on the fireplace for a day or so – until the smell of sulphur necessitated their removal.
Our dad took charge of the actual business of lighting fireworks and the occasional building of bonfires: you had to take care not to set the fence on fire, if your Catherine Wheel hadn’t already done so. For years, one fence post in our garden bore the scorch marks of a stalled Catherine Wheel.
The fireworks themselves were never disappointing. Those on sale today seem to be over in mere seconds, whereas I remember getting a good long show of sparks from most of the ‘stick it in the flowerbed’ varieties, and one particularly explosive example sent us all scurrying around the side of the house to take shelter. Rockets, however, were always a let-down, and never equalled the huge blossoming explosions you saw at organised displays. It was a fair few years before I attended one of these local events, held in a nearby farmer’s field, with a huge bonfire and a few stalls selling hot dogs and baked potatoes – the latter subequently becoming a November 5th tradition in our house, long after we’d lost interest in the actual fireworks
As mentioned above, most British comic papers tended to offer a ‘firework number’ on the week of November 5th but by the late 60s the tradition was tending to fizzle out (if you’ll pardon the pun), in a move that reflected growing awareness of firework accidents amongst children. Nationwide’s feature shaming IPC’s Whizzer and Chips had appeared in 1970, and the following year, D.C. Thompson’s 4th November dated edition of The Beano contained not a single reference to fireworks. My own personal favourite firework ‘text’, if you will, was a strip book from Enid Blyton's now forgotten Mary Mouse series, charmingly illustrated in naive pen-and-ink by watercolourist Olive F. Openshaw. When the doll’s house family children Melia, Pip and Roundy decide to hide their illicit box of fireworks up on the roof next to the chimney, you just know it's not going to end well...
Happily none of our own fireworks ever went awry, and the worst we suffered was an occasional ‘damp squib’. But Bonfire Night itself could, occasionally, be a washout. This was the case in 1966, when our dad came home with a box intriguingly labelled ‘indoor fireworks.’ These appear to have been more of a Boxing Day tradition and were mostly about as interesting as watching a smouldering cigarette. Some of them were, indeed, merely matches that flared for fractionally longer than the average Swan Vesta. The one that remains in my mind was called ‘snake in the grass’, and when lit, created a long, coiling serpent of brown gunk that looked like something an errant pet might leave on the hearthrug...
From the early 70s onwards, media scare tactics began slowly to diminish the appeal of Bonfire Night as an event for children, and as the years went by, other Guy Fawkes traditions like masks and penny-for-the-guy have dwindled away. But popular culture abohors a vacuum and the way was now clear for the wholesale importation of Halloween in its American incarnation. Bonfire Night lingers on, but increasingly in the shadow of All Hallows. What was once an officially sanctioned day of public celebration has become a simple social occasion: and with the prospect of organised bonfires unlikely under the present climate, 2020 could prove to be a genuine ‘firebreak’ that could well end the four-hundred-and-fifteen year old festivities for good. Fireworks will, of course, never go away, but since the millennium they’ve become increasingly associated with New Year’s Eve. And the stylised face of Guy Fawkes is now a symbol of anti-establishment protest, which almost brings us back to square one.
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