My mate asked me to sell his stamp collection and during a bit of research I came across this snippet. it made me remember previous posts about driver training, When I learned to drive it cost me a months wages, much as it does today, but looking at this we are much better off now
I shall now digress because this is interesting and amazing: As late as the early 1960s, children could buy four (very non-pc - since the wrapper carried a picture of a black boy’s face) ‘blackjack’ chews, or ‘fruit salads’, each one individually wrapped and utterly delicious, for a single penny. With a pound you could probably have bought the entire blackjack and fruit salad stock of the shop, since this would have translated into nine-hundred-and-sixty individually wrapped chew sweets. A strange quirk (circa 1962-64) meant that despite the price being four-for-a-penny it was impossible to buy just a single blackjack or fruit salad chew because the farthing coin was withdrawn in 1961.
And digressing further, my Dad remembers circa 1945 being able to buy big sticky currant buns costing one penny each - that’s one two-hundred-and-fortieth of a pound each. A pound would have bought 240 sticky currant buns. Cigarettes were one shilling - a bob - for a pack of twenty, in fact the cheaper brands in vending machines had a ha’penny change in each pack because they only cost elevenpence-hayp’ney. So a pound would have bought twenty packets of 20 cigarettes. Of course wages were a lot lower too. At the end of the war, 1945, a national service conscript soldier’s pay was around four shillings a day, or twenty-eight bob a week. Around 1950 a bank clerk earned about five pounds a week, so perhaps spending a fifth of your weekly wages on 240 sticky penny buns would not have made particularly good sense…
I found this interesting as nowadays, four packet of ■■■■ costing £5.60 would still leave you with some wages left over, unlike the soldier who smoked 80 ■■■■ per day. 4/-
An agricultural worker in 1960 earned £8 8s/4d per week according to the NFU
The average wage now is showing at £442 per week (23k)
My mate just reminded me a new 1960 Austin Mini Van was £360
I have seen bigger wheel bearings or am I just looking back while I am wearing my rose coloured magnifying glasses 
, I received ten Bob a week for doing five morning paper rounds and then five rounds after school with the evening papers, Monday to Friday.
