'Looking forward to the new self catering holidays with Pontins at £42 per person!'

Eating out still didn’t figure much in the festive plans unless at a relative’s house. There was the spectre of the rationing years hanging over many families, and mothers were reluctant for long enough to spend money when they could produce a meal at home at much less cost. However, places to eat were springing up, and with growing affluence and car ownership they started to become popular. I remember Mary Gentles fish restaurant on Cambridge Street. Opening in the late 1950s and called ‘Gentle Marys’ by its regulars, it was handy for a meal before the Christmas pantomime at either the Empire or Lyceum. Tuckwood’s on Surrey Street was popular with ‘ladies who lunch’ It was very elegant and my mother loved it. The staff wore smart uniforms, and the lady customers wore stylish hats! It is still very much missed today! Other famous Sheffield institutions were Butlers on Brook Hill, and the Society Park Restaurant in the new B & C Co-op which opened in 1962. There had been an earlier store, on the site of Sheffield Castle, but it was destroyed in the Sheffield Blitz of December 1940. The Society Park was waitress service, the food was predictable and when it was meat and potato day, clients would bring their own bottles of Henderson’s Relish!In the mid-1960s, Boxing Day, which today seems to be a day composed of left-over food, sales and football matches was when we enjoyed the holiday ads on the commercial television channel, ITV which broadcast for the first time in September 1955, with an advertisement for Gibbs SR Toothpaste. Holidays with Hoseasons and Pontins featured largely on those as it was a while before Brits started to travel abroad.Hoseasons were advertising boating holidays, whilst Pontins were exciting Brits with the new phenomena that was self-catering holidays in their holiday camps at only £42 per person. Although, by the mid-1970s Thomson’s were advertising 10 days full board in Spain for only £36!By 1979, and for the first time in history, Brits spent more on overseas holidays than holidays at home. There were advertisements promoting a week in Majorca with a hotel bedroom featuring a balcony and, an ensuite bathroom. Gosh, and for the princely sum of just £50.Eventually, holiday advertisements started to become fewer on television with the advent of computers and the ease with which you could book a holiday yourself.Also, a Boxing Day ‘must’ was the promotion of furniture, especially sofas. You couldn’t keep up with the neighbours if you weren’t thinking of replacing your present one!One of the more memorable Boxing Day furniture adverts was the one in the 1970s for Williams Furniture Store featuring a man dressed like a well-endowed superhero. His very tight costume caused a certain amount of concern amongst viewers who felt that he should have been wearing a cod piece. The slogan which was ‘As you walk through the door, your pound is worth more’ had its words altered by naughty schoolchildren and eventually the superhero was replaced by a conventionally dressed sales assistant!