THIS week in 1965 it was barely possible to turn a page of the Adver without finding a Christmas story or festive advertising feature.

The most prominent among these features extolled the virtues of the Fleet Street area and Old Town.

Among the public, almost total employment, increasingly decent salaries and ready access to HP set tills jingling as cheerily as sleigh bells.

Delights awaiting purchase at the bottom of town included a wide range of cameras.

Among the most exotic was something called the GEC Transistomatic Radio Camera, which cost nearly £20 - about a week's wages for many working people.

We said: “Imagine the kind of picture it would take of you as you tune into the Budget speech!”

People were bemused 51 years ago at the notion of a camera which was also a radio. It’s interesting to wonder what they would have made of a camera, radio, telephone, TV set and encyclopaedia of all the world’s knowledge crammed into a device slimmer than a cigarette packet.

There were even more exciting and expensive cameras available.

“If you are really lashing out on your relatives,” we said, “they would love a Polaroid camera. They are £55 apiece, but you take and develop a picture with it before you’ve finished writing out the cheque.”

The list of advertisers included The Co-operative’s toy department, Smith’s Pram Shop, Swindon Camera Centre, Clifford’s Modern Menswear, Western Cycles and the John Kane bike shop.

Among the children’s bikes on offer that year were new penny farthings for just under £10. Presumably whoever had the idea of marketing them forgot that the Victorian ones had a dangerous tendency to pitch riders over their handlebars.

In Old Town the wares included jewellery from Deacon’s and Mann in Wood Street and FM Morse and Sons in Victoria Road. There were fairy lights at Lidbury’s in Victoria Road, Russian dolls at My Baby Shop in Bath Road, and ironmongery from GW Handy in Victoria Road.

Hickman’s Rentals in Victoria Road was offering TV sets for as little as 8s6d (about 43p) a week, with a free turkey or hamper for all who signed up.

A national company decided it had such a large stake in the festivities that it was worth paying the huge cost of a full-page colour advert.

That is how we ended up carrying a striking image of a mass of Oxo boxes, which today wouldn’t look out of place in an exhibition of 1960s pop art.

We managed to find room for news stories among the Christmas cheer, including one about the end of steam on Britain’s passenger rail services.

That had taken place about five months earlier, when 7029 Clun Castle hauled the last steam service from Paddington, but at the end of November the locomotive hauled a special service called Farewell to Steam along the main line.

It travelled to Swindon, Gloucester, Bristol and back to Swindon, and an Adver reporter called Kevin Carew was among the passengers.

He wrote of sad-faced enthusiasts clutching specially-printed menus, taking countless photographs and getting the driver’s signature.

He added: “Mr Reg Williams of Acton, London, must have thought he had suddenly become a member of The Beatles as he signed dozens of autographs.”

They need not have grieved for Clun Castle. Sold days later, the machine was preserved and went back to work on nostalgia trips.

The week saw us report a high honour for a Lechlade resident.

We said: “An emblem representing the United Nations Association has been designed by Madeleine Anderson, the Lechlade artist.

“She has received a personal message from the Pope, thanking her for designing the emblem, which incorporates symbols for Heaven and earth and life used by the Roman Catholic Church.”

The design had been accepted by the UNA as its official one in 1961.

Following the Pope’s message, the artist told us: “I used shapes that occurred to me to symbolise the elements of life and the world, and then I was told afterwards that I had used the Catholic symbols for these things.

“I had unconsciously, I think, used symbols that have represented the basic factors of life to mankind for many thousands of years, and which have been adopted by the Catholics.”

We can find no further information about the artist or her design. Can Rewind readers enlighten us?

Our most prominent story as the week came to an end was about Harold Wilson’s Government looking at the possibility of making Swindon the core of a new city.

Had the idea come to fruition, the town would have been home to 300,000 people by the end of the decade, and possibly with tendrils extending as far as Hungerford.

A regional planning study of the era called for far more housing well away from London.