Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

372 Mountnessing Road, Billericay, Essex

This was a large semidetached house with 4 bedrooms, which sold for around £7650 in the late 1960s. 

Sandy, Stuart, and Blondes

My two eldest brothers, Sandy and Stuart, married ‘blondes’. Blondes were all the rage during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; the list of blonde movie stars is too long to include here. 

My two eldest brothers already had blonde girlfriends when they were in their late teens and living in Culcheth. I can remember my mother being worried that Sandy was dating a blonde working class girl. My mother tended to equate blonde girls, especially working class girls, with women of ill-repute.

Ironically, Sandy admired Joe Lampton in the novel and film, “Room at the Top”. Joe Lampton was a northern working class boy who married an upper class girl. I seem to remember that Sandy would sometimes adopt a working-class persona – although he was certainly not working class. He had a thick northern accent, which is judged to be working class in the south of England (at that time, and possibly also today). Stuart, on the other hand, liked blondes from the class above him; he dated one such blonde in Culcheth – who even drove a convertible – aping the role of the upper class Jack Wales in the film “Room at the Top”.

As a young teenager, I was quite impressed that my brothers were able to hunt down ‘blondes’; later in life, I would also continue this quest – hunting down ‘blondes’. I even moved to Scandinavia in my early twenties in search of this ‘holy grail’.