“Memory Lane UK REMEMBERING the right ones” At 9.16 p.m. that same day – just one Christmas movie later – a second meme was posted, this time a collage of old grainy photos of smiling binmen, persistently asking the same question: “WHO REMEMBERS the right bins?” At the time of writing, these two Facebook posts have attracted nearly 7,000 likes, 3,000 shares and 900 comments. They weren’t the first “proper binmen” posts, but they were the first to find a wide audience and inspire countless imitators. The first thing you notice in these images – most of which are in black and white – is the proper menswear. They wear flat caps, donkey jackets and dark trousers or dungarees, instead of yellow vests or overalls with reflective stripes and subcontractor logos. The post-war Britain they inhabit also looks different: from the heavy old bucket trucks to the smaller cars in the background. And then there are the bins themselves: cylindrical, metal, plain. Unlike their plastic, colorful modern counterparts, these buckets are hoisted on men’s shoulders. To their admirers, proper binmen embody a lost post-war romance – and the decline of the national character can be seen in the appalling state of their modern counterparts, rotten in spirit, character and service. “proper binmen” memes are so popular that they can feel confusing at first. They attract amazing interest and excitement from older Brits on Facebook, where a whole constellation of meanings and memories are projected onto them: pride, anger, resentment, fatigue, irritation and love, sometimes a very moving, personal memory. The right binmen protect against a wider galaxy of social media nostalgia. The birthplace of the binmen meme, the Memory Lane UK Facebook page, is the sepia sun at the heart of this galaxy, a community of 500,000 followers, created on December 30, 2017 by a reclusive Yorkshireman called David Rowding. At the time of writing, Memory Lane UK has a photo of two 1970s Mini 1275 GTs as their Facebook profile picture and a header photo of claymation icon Morph and his friend Chas. While there’s nothing uniquely generational about wanting to enjoy the banalities of your past, these nostalgia communities have flourished on Facebook as its user base has grown ever larger over the past decade. There are many rival Facebook groups dedicated to celebrating the same mundane aspects of life: The Yesteryears Revisited, Do You Remember This?, I Grew Up In The 1970s, The British Nostalgic Bible, One Hundred and Ten Percent British. Together, these Facebook groups have nearly 2 million members: more than the official Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem pages combined. The baby boomer nostalgia industry is booming. This world, in addition to its binmen, is filled with a fascinatingly boring array of nostalgic memes. Some are simple commands, some capitalized words – “SHARE IF YOU REMEMBER” – over a photo of Steptoe and Son. Some are presented as questions: “When you were a child, did you have to ask permission to leave the table at the end of a meal?” etched over a black and white image of a 1950s family table, Dad in his suit and Mum wearing a smart hat. Others are bold statements of fact: “Back in the day, you only had Lucozade when you were sick.” Such posts get levels of engagement that official brand accounts like Lucozade could only dream of. Many posts have no words, just an artifact from the reliquary of lost everyday objects, rituals, and saints: three-stick electric fires, blackboard erasers, ginger cliff, pistols, Rod Hull, and Emu. They form a confusing tableau. Who remembers the mockingbird?, ask the memes. Who remembers a dripping sandwich? Who remembers men of rags and bones? one pound notes. Drinking water from a pipe. Ballads. The saying “act your age, not your shoe size”. Queue to use phone box. Playing in the street and shouting “car!”. French cricket. Jam sandwich. Scabies knees. Bypass. Routemasters. Salt and Vinegar Chipsticks. Hot chocolate from the vending machine after swimming lessons. coal fires. The slipper. The cane. The ruler. To get a fat ear. Concentrated orange juice. Unwieldy lawnmowers. Traditional curtains. Base pumps. Ink cartridges. Duffle coat. Gypsy baths. Marbles. Jack Charlton. Stevie Nicks. Forget the PE kit. Bus conductors. Bob-a-job week. Wooden ice cream scoops. Snakes and ladders. Poncho. Composite: Rex/Getty/Alamy/Guardian Design Who still eats beans on toast? Who remembers turning an old bed sheet into a ghost costume? Who remembers the sleepers? Do men open doors for women? Slow Dance to Nat King Cole. Beech gum. Worzel Gummridge. Sweets of the ounce. Icicles hanging from the window frame (“Before central heating!”). Miss World (“All natural. Doesn’t look a bit botoxed”). The blackouts of 1972-4 (“we endured, we were strong”). Sanding and polishing your front steps (“That was when people were proud of where they lived”). Outside toilets. Cigarette machines. flares. Playing in bombs. Jumping in puddles. Roland Ratt. There are no births, marriages or deaths here, no wars, no world-historical events, no great men and women of history. There is no post asking “who remembers the Cuban Missile Crisis?” or “who remembers the sinking of the Belgrano?” These questions are far removed from ordinary life. Here, we have abacuses and Listen With Mother to talk about. Banality is the point. This is a world where a picture of three butter knives can attract 1,300 comments of fond memories and reflections. When we talk about the past, we always reveal something about the present. It is hard to imagine a more compelling or neglected body of evidence for assessing recent British social history than these Facebook groups: they have given us something of a more chaotic 21st century version of Mass Observation. They may not be “representative” in any measurable way, but the sample size is huge, and these memes are a canvas for a whole range of contemporary insecurities and collective memories. The story is written by the winners, but anyone can share a post on Facebook. Read the thousands of comments below the numerous relevant binmen posts and you will find an impressive consensus. Back then, in an unspecified period between 1950 and 1980, binmen were stronger, more industrious and kinder. Not only that – then, the binmen were happy. Everyone remembers them the same way: always cheerful, always smiling, often whistling. They always had a good word for you, never complained and always closed the gate. They took pride in their work, which was hard work, but honest work. These judgments are expressed with absolute certainty. Back then, “It was always a very friendly crowd you could have a good laugh with,” writes one commenter. “Not like the bucket men of today, you’re very lucky if they answer a ‘good morning.’ The historic shift in bin collection is seen as signaling a wider crisis in masculinity. “Men were men back then, not the dudes we have today,” writes one Facebook commenter. “Everyone missing work with PTSD these days,” chimes in another. Proper binmen “didn’t care about Health and Safety Shite,” writes another. The plastic wheelie bins we have today – with their uncanny pastels, often color-coded for recycling, and the demeaning labor-saving wheels – are just further indicators of our moral, social and spiritual decline. The correct binmen memes are a powerful distillation of a sentiment common to contemporary British politics and culture, where politicians have given up on offering a positive vision of the future and where the idea of what constitutes progress is bitterly contested. Affectionate nostalgia for hard times is, of course, not new. In the Monty Python sketch known as The Four Yorkshiremen (classic British comedy), the named characters, dressed in bow ties and white dinner jackets, reflect on how far they have come. “Who would have thought that 30 years ago we would all be sitting here drinking Chateau de Chassilier wine?” “Always. In those days, we were glad to have the price of a cup of tea.” “A cup of iced tea.” “No milk or sugar. “Or tea!” “In a dirty, cracked cup.” “We never got a cup. We used to have to drink from a rolled up newspaper.” As the sketch continues, the men come up with increasingly absurd scenarios to meet each other: “We used to have to get out of the lake at three o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, Go to work at the t’mill every day for a tumble a month, come home and dad would hit us over the head and neck with a broken bottle if we were lucky!’ The prevailing feeling from hours of wandering Facebook nostalgia groups is of a generation that didn’t see this sketch entirely as a joke, so much as a generally accurate account of hard-won triumph over adversity. There are many grim reports of the old-school bin collection job being “breaking” and some apparently first-hand binman accounts specifically mention that it “paid [the job] with bad backs in later life’. However, there is a strong anti-health and safety component throughout Memory Lane UK looking back – against stalking, against rules and bureaucracy, against the easy ride of modern youth. “Remember when your mom would let you lick the egg tarts without anyone freaking out about salmonella?”…
