—WHEN A QUEEN SUCCEEDED A KING
Civil servants at the Treasury were still wiping their bottoms with hard, abrasive, old-fashioned toilet paper marked ON HIS MAJESTY’S SERVICE. When it was time to restock, it was thought indelicate to change this wording to HER MAJESTY. The next batch just said GOVERNMENT PROPERTY.
—COMMUTING IN THE 1950s
In 1958, E. W. D. Tennant of Ugley, near Bishop’s Stortford, complained to The Times that the carriages in the morning rush hour were being ‘invaded by ladies, with the result that business-men holding season tickets are crowded out and forced to stand in the corridors’.
“Which is the more important,” he asked, “that the regular workers should be able to read their newspapers and keep abreast of world affairs and arrive fresh for their business or that the seats should be filled by women travelling to London to have their hair permed and to shop?”
—A STAR IS JAILED
Mick Jagger [sent to prison for drug offences] said he had some “interesting experiences” and that the cells were “not much different to a hotel room in Minnesota”.