DIY: With a pot of glue and a jam jar of drill bit my father made anything

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Back in the summer of 1961, my dad built a terrace at the back of our house. It was a magnificent edifice, extending the full width of the building and some way down a good-sized back garden, and it became known as the Terrace Of Kings. Some years later though not, regrettably, before Gran had fallen off it he added a neat brick surrounding wall, complete with decorative pillars, and a handsome set of stone steps down to the lawn.Being a matter of months old at the time it was built, I dont, sadly, remember much about this particular paternal project. Nor does my sis, who wasnt yet born; a photograph exists somewhere of Mum heavily pregnant with Claire mixing cement.

Brand: John BullYear: 1947Decade: 1940sOrigin: UKNeither of us can imagine how Dad got 450 paving slabs round the side of the house (hes not a big man) or how he raised a foundation to lay them on: it was a good 2ft drop from the Terrace Of Kings to the lawn. He did it, though. Thats what dads did in the 1960s. I, on the other hand, get the builders in. And go to Ikea.Here are some other things my dad did: in my bedroom, he designed, made and fitted a wardrobe, bookshelf and desk in smart mahogany-finish Contiboard. In Claires, it was a vanity unit in white melamine.In the living room, he built again of that ubiquitous 1970s particle board a splendiferous (his word) assemblage of open display units along one wall, for books, photos and knick-knacks, plus a nifty little wheeled cabinet for his record collection and turntable (the only bit of the hi-fi system that wasnt DIY: he built the speakers and the amp).

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He spent innumerable hours on his back with spanners and wrenches under the family Vau! xhall Vi ctor, adjusting this and tightening that, and removing then replacing the other. He built an attractive rustic fence and rose-arch feature in the garden. He performed tree surgery. The double glazing panes, heat-sealed plastic edging strips, ingenious patented clip system was all homemade, put up each winter and taken down in spring.When, during the wettest winter in living memory, Mr Barnet, the so-called builder, and his incomparably incompetent shower of workmen took the roof off our bungalow, added a first floor and put the roof on again, Dad would come home from work and spend most of the evening redoing (or making good) whatever they had done that day, from brickwork to plumbing, paintwork to tiling.

'Today its difficult to imagine the pitch of the DIY fever that gripped the nation during the 60s'My childhood memories of my father are overwhelmingly of Dad Doing ItHimself. I see him, stripped to his string vest, sweat coursing down what few (certainly not he) would call a manly chest, installing a full electric ring main and rewiring all ten rooms at my aunts pre-war housein Devon.I hear him whistling tunelessly, clicking his tongue in concentration, muttering incantations: Offer it up (to see if it fitted); Purge it (for anything involving water); Slap it on(for paint, wallpaper paste, cement); Eejit (for me). Such memories are now, of course, a source of some discomfort. Whenever I get someone in to fix a dripping tap and the bloke smiles to himself and simply sticks a new washer in, or I buy a new bedside lamp rather than confrontthe demons that might be unleashed were I to try taking the old one to bits to figure out why it wasnt working, I think of Dad and squirm.Thankfully,Im not alone. According to a survey last summer, half of all under-35s (and, if Im anything to go by, a lot of well-past-45s) havent the faintest clue how to go about rewiring a plug. Also, 54 per cent dont know how to bleed a radiator, 63 per cent wouldnt dream of hanging wallpaper and 45per cent couldnt put ! up a she lf.

Father and son: A 1959 copy of John Bull magazine. Its cover illustrations came to encapsulate post-war BritainMost tellingly, though, two-thirds said their fathers were far better at DIY than they were, and 42 per cent said they would rather pay a professional. (Although that might have something to do with the fact that when an under-35 does try a bit of DIY and it goes wrong, it apparently costs an average of 2,498 to put right.)My dad, on the other hand, could do virtually anything for virtually nothing. But then he was part of a movement, a sudden and massive post-war explosion of hitherto unexploited talents that left few families and even fewer homes in the country untouched. It was nothing less than an epidemic and in the 1950s and 60s it was at its peak. A whole series of factors coincided to turn us, almost overnight, into a nation of DIYers. First, we started buying our own homes. Before 1945, more than 70 per cent of British families lived in rented properties. And by the end of the 60s, when more than half of us had become proud house owners, many of the homes we had bought were well over half a century old and in desperate need of modernisation. Plus, wed got used to wartime make-do-and-mend, and labour was suddenly prohibitively expensiveAdd to all this the rash of companies keen to find a profitable peacetime use for wartime advances in fields such as glues and plastics Araldite, for example, the super-strong adhesive I so vividly remember mixing for Dad, was first developed for use in planes and DIY quickly became not just the most appealing but the only option for the would-be home-improver.And then, of course, there was our love affair with Formica, the brightly coloured, heat, scratch and stain-resistant resin-impregnated paper which DIY enthusiasts could cut how they wanted and stick on what they wanted, which turned out to be every kitchen worktop and table in sight.Today! its dif ficult to imagine the pitch of the DIY fever that gripped the nation. People like Dad were rebuilding the country, in every sense. The editor of Do It Yourself magazine, David Johnson, was able to declare in 1960 that it was, perhaps, no mean achievement to have reached a monthly readership of 3.75million within three years of its launch.

It was all change. Out went that heavy old Victorian furniture, those dark-brown varnished doors and green distempered walls, the fireplaces and the picture rails. In came clean-lined, Scandinavian-style chairs, tables and sofas, light, bright interiors and open-plan living with dividing walls knocked through.

'My dad, as is only natural in an 84-year-old, occasionally has difficulty these days remembering exactly what he has had for lunch, buthe remembers Barry Bucknell all right'Panelled doors, in particular, were the bugbear of the DIY modernisers: the look you were after was smooth, clean, flush and ideally white (bar the avocado bathroom).Cometh the hour, though, cometh the man, and the hero of this particular hour in Britains domestic history was a certain Barry Bucknell. My dad, as is only natural in an 84-year-old, occasionally has difficulty these days remembering exactly what he has had for lunch, but he remembers Bucknell all right. The TV DIY man, he cries, the minute I mention the name.Bucknell, a trained mechanical engineer, first appeared on the nations black-and-white TV screens in 1956 in a popular afternoon programme for practical housewives, About The Home. He got his own show, Do It Yourself, in 1958, and was soon receiving upwards of 35,000 letters a week from viewers desperate for top tips on putting up shelves, papering ceilings and building plywood porches.(Boosting its audience, no doubt, was the fact that the programme went out live, resulting in a regular flow of amusing mishaps. At each of them, Barry would cheerily cry: Ah! Well, thats how not to do it.)Barrys monument, however, was without doubt Bucknells House, a 39-part (yes, 39! -part) w eekly series in 1962 and 1963 in the course of which he completely renovated a derelict Victorian house in Ealing that the BBC had acquired for the purpose. The building, at 79 The Grove, had not been touched for decades, suffered from extensive dry rot, wet rot and woodworm, and a surveyor had strongly advised against purchasing it. But Barry, with the nation watching open-mouthed, transformed it into a bright, attractive family home featuring every modern gadget and design idea.We, Im happy with hindsight to say, lived in a rather more modest modern bungalow, near Watford, that required no modernisation whatsoever. But it took more than that to stop Dads DIY.

Pioneer: Barry Bucknell, a trained mechanical engineer, first appeared on the nation's black-and-white TV screens in 1956 in a popular afternoon programme for practical housewives, About The HomeHis shed, in a far corner of the Terrace Of Kings, was lined with shelf after shelf of neatly labelled jamjars filled with nuts or bolts, fuses or washers, drill bits and rawlplugs and carpet tacks and zinc-coated nails and, above all, screws: slotted and Phillips, round-headed and countersunk, quarter-, half- and one-inch wood, masonry, self-tapping.There was a tool for every job, and in later years a much-loved Black & Decker Workmate, a Christmas present from Mum. One Christmas, he built my sister a four-storey dolls house from scratch, complete with decoratively papered walls, working doors and curtained windows (wallpapering on a rather grander scale was, of course, a cinch). For my 10th birthday he made me a canoe, of plywood panels cut to shape from a plan, drilled, sanded, stitched together with copper wire, then glued with glassfibre tape and resin and given seven coats of varnish. (To the extreme annoyance of my mother, this took gradual and increasingly unignorable shape over three long winter months on two trestles in the midd! le of th e kitchen.)Throughout it all, as my willing childhood self was called upon most weekends to stir paint, mix cement, pass spanners, assemble matching sets of nuts and bolts, and generally be of vital moral and perhaps even practical assistance, my dad would say to me: Son, I hope youre watching and learning. Because one day, itll be you wholl be doing all this.

'DIY was one of this countrys great family activities. . . It was practical, wholesome, money-saving, jolly useful and just, well, fun' He was wrong, of course. I just wasnt into it. Too much like hard work. Sure, some things stuck: I have been known to put up the odd shelf, assemble the odd flatpack and repaint the odd bedroom. But I couldnt really tell one end of a spanner from the other. I have a toolkit, but I dont know what half of its for.And Id never dream of constructing a kitchen unit from scratch, rewiring a house, building a Terrace Of Kings or (heaven forbid) looking under the car bonnet.Thats my loss, obviously. Its also a shame for my son, whos unlikely ever to know the joy of finding and passing to me precisely the right screw for the job at hand or bravely holding a safety lamp underneath a car on a freezing Saturday afternoon in February or, indeed, paddling a canoe that his father built for him in the kitchen. But times, sadly, have changed.DIY is still immensely popular in Britain part of the national culture, even particularly in periods of economic uncertainty and hardship (which is why sales at DIY stores have picked up again). We all have friends or neighbours who are mad-keen DIYers. But its become something of a hobby, not something that we all do as a matter of course. There are perfectly good reasons for this: we have Ikea and its equivalents, and the flatpack revolution means our furniture and other essential household kit are a) loads cheaper, relatively speaking, than in Dads day, and b) satisfy our deep DIY instincts without obliging us to do much ourselves. DIY-lite, if you like.Plus, masses of technolo! gical th ings (the mechanisms of modern cars, MP3 players, digital radios) are just so damned advanced that not even Dad would know where to start. And for the more heavyweight jobs? Well, theres a plentiful supply of cheap and competent labour these days, not least in the form of all those cheery builders and decorators from eastern Europe.Nonetheless, in the land of Barry Bucknell and my dad, a staggering number of us no longer have a DIY clue. Which is sad. Because for a brief few decades, DIY was one of this countrys great family (and certainly father-and-son) activities.We all pitched in, happily engaged in something practical and wholesome and money-saving and jolly useful and just, well, fun. Whereas now, for a great many of us and, I suspect, for even more of our children the thought of doing it ourselves doesnt cross our minds. What, do it myself? I cant. Besides, DIY was what Dad did. I dont want to be like Dad, do I?Except that now, oddly, I think I actually kind of do. Guardian News and Media 2011