Bob Dinn’s Donation
We were delighted to receive some brochures and ephemera relating to living in the 1950s and 1960s. Our good friend Bob Dinn handed over a box of gems, including furniture brochures and correspondence, and women’s lifestyle magazines and brochures.
A copy of My Home from 1949, ‘the magazine for the woman who loves her home’, has some delightful adverts and features, including for the Pin-up ‘home cold perm outfit’ (to get your man), and the Acme wringer (for once you’ve got him and you’re washing his shirts). With full-colour ads for Dolcis shoes, Snowfire face powder and Clark’s shoes, this is a perfect snapshot of middle-class living in austerity Britain.
Austerity, though, was long gone when the next magazine Hearth and Home was published. We now have a copy from 1963, and we think it’s the first issue of an annual publication that survived until at least 1967. Filled with adverts, many in full colour, for boilers, cookers and fireplaces, the insert invites you to show it ‘to the ladies in your household’, because ‘the ladies seem to enjoy it very much’. Incidentally, the archive already had a copy of a magazine with the same title from 1912, and we’re confident this one, ‘an illustrated weekly journal for gentlewomen’ is an unrelated title: our 1963 example was published by the National Coal Board and there’s very little genteel about it! Best of all though are the brochures relating to furniture. It seems Bob’s parents were in the marketfor new furniture, and in 1954 wrote to Heal and Son of London. Heal obliged by sending a series of brochures outlining its range, which extended from sitting room to bedroom. The photographs, while intending to show their products to best effect, also illustrate how the well-heeled were filling their houses in the 1950s and show us examples of the latest in good taste. Now, Dr and Mrs Dinn also checked out the competition and wrote to Parker-Knoll, and we have their brochure of wing-backed fire-side chairs to take delight in. A telling difference is that Heal and Son sent a personal letter accompanying their brochures whereas Parker-Knoll’s was a 1950s version of a generalised photocopy.
To finish, Bob’s collection included the Daily Mail Ideal Home Book for 1949–50. This has a spread of beautiful adverts, some full-page and in colour, for everything from furniture polish (remember that?) to dishwashers. We have a selection of Ideal Home Book issues from the 1940s and 1950s and this copy will allow us to file some of the precious adverts in our product files.
Our thanks to Bob for thinking of us.
