Mrs Appleby's Christmas

Just when you thought you'd got Mrs Appleby's measure, she'd suddenly spring something wild and wonderful on you. Take her shopping column in the Christmas 1960 issue of The Dalesman, the Yorkshire-in-your-pocket magazine that still casts a warm, friendly glow over the county.

Towards the end of the Christmas issue, opposite an advertisement extolling the "simple dignity" of the Pateley Book-Case ("obtainable only from HA Roberts of Bradford"), she suggests "Some Solutions to the Gift Problem". She has been out and about round Yorkshire's big stores – Hammonds of Hull, Leak and Thorp of York, Gregory and Sutcliffe of Huddersfield, and Brown, Muff's of Bradford, on the lookout for interesting presents.

She finds them and they're a snapshot of their time. There are children's cowboy outfits – very popular, she points out, thanks to TV Westerns (cue Rawhide theme). There are teenager-dolls wearing high heels and nylon stockings (one for the dads there, perhaps).

There are bedside clocks shaped like footballs, clothes brushes shaped like boomerangs, reversible cravats, telescopic umbrellas, shoe horns, perfumed notelets called Seduction ("stationery is far from being a dull subject") and headscarves printed with famous paintings. "Bags," observes Mrs Appleby, "are spacious and attractive."

All very safe and reassuring... and then, whoosh, there's a wild and wonderful moment: "The tribes of central Kenya produce wood carvings of animals in a wide range of prices..."

For a surreal half-sentence we zoom across continents to join the wood-carving tribes of Kenya, sitting cross-legged outside their huts turning out antelopes with spindly legs, and then it's safely back to the West Riding and Parker fountain pens, mittens and slippers. "Sheepskin," she confides, with a palpable sense of relief, "is becoming increasingly 'the thing'."

So who was Mrs Appleby? I ring Bill Mitchell, the veteran journalist who was working on The Dalesman at the time and subsequently became its editor for many years. It was a pseudonym, he says, for Janet Gower, whose husband Edward was the magazine's advertising manager. She wrote a monthly column between 1956 and 1988 and her recipes are still reprinted today and still go down well.

"She was a homely sort of person," he says. "Full of recipes and sensible advice on how to run a home. She kept it delightfully down-to-earth."

But she was also a keen observer of consumer trends. Her Christmas round-ups are a treasure trove of practical nostalgia. "Plastic flowers are growing more and more realistic," she notes. And they were. Whole Sixties childhoods were built on the delusion that flowers were plastic. Only posh people had real flowers in their homes. As a child, I often wondered why the enormous red and yellow chrysanths in the vase on top of the front-room bureau never faded.

When my mother finally sat me down and explained, it was a bigger blow than my father's revelations when he took me out for an afternoon of sex education and explained where babies came from as we gazed at a window display of rucksacks at our local Army and Navy Store.

We never took The Dalesman in those days. It seemed, on the odd occasions we saw it in the doctor's waiting room, to be about a very different Yorkshire from the grimy, noisy, smoky, foggy, brick-built, backyard industrial Sheffield where we lived.

It belonged to the world of craggy sheep and changing seasons and dialect societies and weathered "characters" full of North Country lore, and endearing, if sometimes unintelligible, "wit and wisdom". It was the Yorkshire of hills and coast that we only saw on holiday.

Since then, I've caught up with what I missed, most recently by browsing six Christmas issues of the magazine I discovered in a second-hand bookshop. They date from 1960 to 1965 and capture that era, and the spirit of its Christmases, with instant poignancy.

The articles are classic, timeless Dalesman fare – Hornsea Pottery, choral society Messiahs, A Yorkshire Farmer's Notebook, Ripon High Street Then and Now.

There are reports from camera clubs in Otley, Hull and Scarborough, and a line-up of York Light Opera Society, photographed by "Madame Beryl". There's Old Amos, and Jimmy Clitheroe playing Tom Thumb in the Bradford Alhambra panto. And classified ads for Mr Rollo, Magic and Punch Entertainer, from Yeadon and his fellow artiste, Stanley Leo from Leeds 8, who offered "Merry Magic and Live Doves".

What's most striking about these Christmas issues, however, is their covers, drawn by the legendary Ionicus, the illustrator JC Armitage. They show archetypal Northern Christmas scenes: a festive kitchen spread, with sandwiches (cut diagonally, as on Sundays and special occasions), blancmanges, white-iced cake with plaster model Santa.

The ceiling is festooned with streamers twisted from crepe paper, the kettle is on the hob of the Yorkshire range, and an elderly woman in a pinny greets a crowd of guests. She looks a bit apprehensive, as though thinking: "There won't be enough blancmange to go round."

Subsequent covers show carol singers, and postboxes bulging with Christmas cards, and a slide show of summer holiday memories, the screen propped up on the Welsh dresser. They capture the homely, welcoming ideal of Christmas, but it seems, rather strangely, to be the Christmas of the late 1940s rather than the early 1960s. Only in 1965 do we come bang up to date with a cover showing a smartly dressed woman wheeling a gift-laden trolley out of one of those new-fangled supermarkets.

It was an inspired choice of image. Supermarkets were as much a symbol of the new convenience culture of the Sixties as Stag furniture, string vests, sheepskin coats ("Huge purchase from Bulgaria, every size, all lengths, many qualities") and the classic PVC-covered rattan shell chair from Ferncraft's Progress Works in Huddersfield. (We had a purple and white one).

And there's a whole sociological thesis to be written about the Kenwood Chef. Dalesman adverts show a sleek young couple – he with neatly slicked hair, she wearing pearls – embracing behind their new Chef.

Just so the sexual stereotypes are clear, she's wearing the chef's hat. "I'm giving my wife a Kenwood Chef," announces another ad. The gift ads also reflect the DIY fever that infected the nation's husbands: every man his own Barry Bucknell, revelling in the fun of Formica, the perfection of peg board. There are Surform tool kits and do-it-yourself parquet flooring (promising "dance floor perfection").

Under his overalls, the Surform-worshipping parquet-floor enthusiast may have been snug in Chilprufe pure wool underwear, long johns worn in the ads by suave men making masterful telephone calls. "Chilprufe does not chafe or restrict," the ads assure, obliquely.

And, whatever the year, Mrs Appleby is still roaming Yorkshire, on the lookout for presents. Non-drip plant pots. Hand-carved Swiss cheese boards. A nutcracker that can also open crabs' claws (made in Morley). Bri-Nylon shirts. Glass-topped coffee tables. Preserves dishes from Haiti, Balinese woodcarvings imported by a company in Sedbergh.

Preserves dishes from Haiti? Balinese woodcarvings? There she goes again. Ooh, Mrs A, you are a one.

YP MAG 18/12/10