Remember your first tie?

[Texas]

The first time I went down the City Hall my best gear was a Harris Tweed jacket with vents and grey flannel trousers with regular 18'' bottoms. The shoes were brown leather with a thick sole. Oh, and yellow socks. My tie was a regimental diagonal stripe of which regiment I've no idea. Smart eh?

Drape suits were just coming in and a little clique had formed in one corner and they all had full drapes from Barney's and these ties. Man those ties. Very bright and loud, American to the max. It was 1948, I'd only just left school and I just had to have me a tie like that.

After much scraping and borrowing/begging and, may I say earning, I managed to get together the grand sum of £2. and went straight to Neville Reeds and chose me a tie.

It was generally brown, gold and silver in a wavy pattern, with a over motif of diagonal wavy lines in red. I hadn't got the bottle to get something really loud.

The knot was the problem. Windsor knots were de rigueur. In Neville's window was a card that showed you how to do one. As I hadn't got a photographic memory I had to invent my own, and it worked, nobody knew the difference.

[grinder]

Can't remember my first one, but I remember being given one when I was about 11.

It was scarlet and there was a cricket match with the players in black on it, you knotted it with the wicket keeper at the top and the figures got slightly bigger down to the baller..

It was quite a conversation piece as I remember it.

I got it from a cousin who was much older, he didn't want it because the style had changed, it being a wide tie as you can imagine, and the in style back then called for much thinner ones....

[fleetwood]

You can't forget the old knitted tie, sometimes with horizontal stripes. Then the 'Slim Jims' became quite popular sometime later, I think, if my memory serves me right.

[Jim Hardie]

Then the 'Slim Jims' became quite popular sometime later, I think, if my memory serves me right.

 

.....with a matching three corners stuck to a piece of cardboard for your top pocket. A very good selection in Woolies for about 3/6d.

[Jacko 1]

Not my first tie, but, I asked my uncle for the loan of a tie so that I could attend a wedding, at the wedding my uncle asked where his tie was that he had posted through our door one night while we were out. My Mum coloured up and said that when they returned home she saw this tie on the floor by the letter box and thinking it was kids fooling about she had burnt it, my uncle never loaned me another tie !!!!!!

[grinder]

They did make good belts mind in an emergency ....