Down in the dumps

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Oh, those lovely old Look at Life short films! Made for screening in 1950s and 1960s cinemas prior to the main feature, they offer a view of everyday life in the UK at the time like no other. This is a still from a particularly interesting episode entitled Down in the Dumps, dated 1965.

“All over the country hundreds of derelict cars have been dumped by the roadside every week. And it’s going to get worse. By 1970 there may be 700,000 cars a year being dumped,” the voiceover tells us. The main subject is an abandoned black Vauxhall J-type looking pretty sorry for itself opposite a restaurant entrance on a London street. It is taken to a Croydon breaker’s yard where there’s an incredible variety of British bread-and-butter cars waiting for their end—namely the arc torch after they’ve been set on fire. Health and safety rules were clearly different all those decades ago…

We also get to see “a huge scrapyard at Waltham Cross, believed to be Europe’s biggest,” where a new crushing machine is being tried out. Quite a place. We found this comment on a forum: “That’s Jones's scrapyard at Waltham Cross in the ’60s. There were mountains of cars you could clamber over to your heart's content. Then he bought a huge machine called a fragmentiser and within a short while they were all gone.” Does anyone here have vivid memories of the place, too? We would all love to have a look at Jones’s pre-fragmentiser yard now…

Words: Jeroen Booij
Picture: The Rank Organization

Originally published on October 5, 2022

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