A year seen from the kitchen table
The famous images of 1967 are of festivals, protests and wars. Most people, though, spent the year doing something less photogenic: going to work, shopping, cooking, watching television and arguing about money. This article looks at that ordinary side of the year, mostly in Britain and the United States, where the material is best known. Living standards, housing and habits differed a great deal between regions, classes and countries, so the descriptions below are broad patterns rather than universal rules.
Homes and household goods
By 1967 a large share of homes in both countries had a television, a radio and a refrigerator, but the picture was uneven. In Britain, many homes, especially older terraced houses, still relied on coal or gas fires, and central heating was a feature of newer or more expensive houses rather than the norm. Washing machines were spreading, though plenty of households still used a copper boiler, a mangle or a launderette. In the United States, suburban houses with garages, fitted kitchens and several appliances were common for middle-income families, and the suburbs had been growing for two decades.
Interiors reflected the decade’s mix of old and new. Formica worktops, vinyl flooring, bright patterned wallpaper and teak-effect furniture were typical of a modern British home, while an American family might have wall-to-wall carpet and a console television. Many people still lived in housing that predated the war, and slum clearance and the building of tower blocks and council estates were part of everyday British life.
Work and money
Employment was relatively plentiful in both countries by later standards. American unemployment was below 4 percent for much of the year, and British unemployment was also low, though it was creeping up. The five-day week was standard for office and many factory workers, with Saturday work still common in shops. Married women were increasingly in paid work, often part-time, though most jobs were still sharply divided by sex, and pay for women was commonly lower for similar work, openly so in many cases.
Pay packets in Britain were often handed over in cash in a small envelope, and plenty of households had no bank account. Britain still used pounds, shillings and pence, which made small sums a minor exercise in arithmetic; decimal coinage was several years away. The government’s troubles over the exchange rate came to a head in the autumn with the pound devaluation, which did not change shop prices overnight but dominated the news and made many people anxious about the cost of living. In the United States, a rise in the minimum wage took effect in February for workers covered by federal law, a reminder that the lowest pay was set by statute and that many workers were not covered at all. Banking itself was about to change: a cash machine was installed at a London bank branch in June, though it would be years before such machines were common.
Shopping and food
Shopping in 1967 was in transition. The supermarket was well established in the United States and growing quickly in Britain, but many British households still bought bread, meat and vegetables from separate local shops, and shopping was often done daily because refrigerators were small. Self-service stores, trading stamps and the first out-of-town shopping centres were all part of the shift. Dress shops and boutiques, especially in London, catered to younger buyers, and the high street varied between the old-fashioned and the very fashionable.
Food was changing too. Frozen foods, instant coffee, tinned goods and convenience meals were increasingly familiar. Fast food was already a feature of American life, and one burger chain’s new sandwich, the Big Mac, appeared at a franchise in Pennsylvania that year. In Britain, restaurants serving foreign cuisines, such as Indian, Chinese and Italian, were becoming more visible, but the majority of people ate traditional meals at home most of the time. Pubs remained central to social life for many men, and licensing hours were more restricted than today.
Getting around
Car ownership was growing fast. In the United States, the car was woven into everyday life, and buyers were being courted by sporty compact models, the new pony car being one example. In Britain, ownership was rising but remained far from universal, so buses, trains and bicycles mattered a great deal. Government attention to the roads shows how much the car had become a daily concern: in October Britain began using breathalyser tests on drivers suspected of drinking. Air travel was still a luxury for most people, although package holidays to Spain and other Mediterranean destinations were attracting British families for the first time in large numbers.
Leisure, television and radio
Television was the centre of leisure time. Most British households had a set, with a choice between BBC and commercial channels, and the BBC’s second channel began regular colour broadcasts in July, initially for a limited number of viewers. In the United States, color television was spreading, though many families still watched in black and white. Programmes such as comedy, variety shows and westerns drew huge audiences, and evening viewing was a shared family activity because there was usually only one set.
Radio was where young people found their music. British teenagers listened to pirate radio ships until the government forced most of them off the air in August, and the BBC launched a new pop network in September. In the United States, AM radio dominated the charts, and FM radio was only beginning to build a distinct audience for album music. Cinema attendance had fallen from its postwar peak, but films still played a major part in a night out, and dances, youth clubs and record shops were the focus of teenage social life.
Smoking was widespread, indoors and out, and few people thought twice about it. Holidays for many British families meant a week at a seaside resort, with caravan parks and holiday camps still popular. Pastimes such as gardening, football on Saturday afternoons, bingo and board games remained everyday staples.
Law, morality and changing attitudes
Daily life was also affected by attitudes that were in flux. In Britain, Parliament passed reforms on abortion and on male homosexuality, and a new road-safety law changed how people thought about a drink before driving. Those changes mattered to individuals’ private lives rather than to the political headlines. Many people experienced them indirectly, through newspapers and conversation, and views were sharply divided by age, religion and region.
The same was true of the countercultural scene that gets so much attention. For a few thousand young people in San Francisco and London, the Summer of Love was an immediate reality; for most of their contemporaries it was something seen in magazines and on the news, at a safe distance, often with a mixture of curiosity and disapproval. Looking at 1967 through ordinary routines is a useful corrective to the idea that everyone lived through a revolution, while also showing how many small changes, in appliances, television and shopping, were quietly altering how people lived.