CHRISTMAS postings in Glasgow on Monday, December 20, 1954, totalled 1.9 million letters and greetings cards. In the week ending that day, postal traffic was up 27.5 per cent on the same week the previous year. So when you were working in a hectic Post Office, like this one in Waterloo Street (pictured), the last thing you needed was for various parcels to burst open and disgorge their contents. Among the presents visible are Richard Dimbleby’s book on the young Queen Elizabeth (the book, incidentally, can be bought online today for just £1.23) and The Robe, Lloyd C Douglas’s bestseller about the crucifixion of Jesus. The book was published in 1942 but a film adaptation, starring Richard Burton and Jean Simmons, was released in 1953, which might account for the book’s renewed popularity. The other book, Louise Baker’s Her 12 Men, about a woman who teaches in a boys’ boarding school, was also made into a film.

Other Christmas snippets from 1954, as noted in the Evening Times: a Cathcart fish-shop owner was giving away a bottle of whisky, a half-bottle of sherry and a pair of nylons to customers who bought one of three “lucky” wrappers; and out of 2,000 people who at a foreign missions rally in Glasgow were asked if they could give festive lodgings or a night’s entertainment to an overseas student, only seven responded. It would mean “a poor kind of Christmas for many of the university’s 700 students from other lands,”the paper lamented.