MEMORIES - Growing up in the 1950s and 60s

Dunlop Wellington Boots

In the 1950s there was a schoolboy corporate identity - grey short trousers, long turn-over-top socks, grey shirt and drab-coloured pullover. It wasn't that boys all wanted to look the same, that's just the way it was, that's all that was generally available for boys to wear. I don't ever recall thinking about what I was wearing as clothes were just not a significant part of our childhood.

When I was in the last but one year of junior school one of the boys in my year turned up for school on a warm June day in a pair of wellingtons. There was nothing unusual in wearing wellingtons when it wasn't wet as most boys of that era only had one pair of shoes so if they were unavailable your boots were worn instead. This boy though would have had alternative footwear such as sandals or daps (plimsolls) and some of the boys teased him a little for wearing wellington boots on a dry summer's day. Unabashed he anounced they were his new Dunlops and proudly described the features of his new wellingtons: first of all they had a nice chunky sole with good grips for the mud; unlike most other boots of the 1950s they were seamless and they had the name Dunlop in raised lettering all around the trim at the top and also a Dunlop diamond-shaped logo on the front about an inch below the trim; best of all they were in a matt-black finish and, to my nine-year-old eyes, looked very smart indeed.

I now realised the visual inadequacy of my own shiny wellingtons especially when many other boys my age were beginning to own a pair of the new Dunlops. For a year or two I desparately wanted a pair of those boots so when it was eventually necessary for me to have a new pair I had to trick my mother into buying the more expensive Dunlops. When she asked where we bought my last pair I marched her off to Halewoods, one of the shops that sold them, knowing that once inside she would not want to leave without making a purchase. And so, in 1960 at the age of eleven, I had my matt-black Dunlop wellington boots, size 3 and costing 25 shillings (£1.25p), a fortune in those days!

My Dunlops and I had many adventures in the woods and fields behind our house, but that's another story!