My late Father, a native of Glasgow, used to speak of Gratispool in the '50's. He considered it almost revolutionary then when the usual practice was to spend a large amount of your wages on film and processing at your local chemists. Contact prints were the name of the game and enlargements were for truly special occasions only.
It's only when you look at the timescale of analogue photography that you realise that it had only really come of age for the ordinary enthusiast when it suddenly fell off a cliff, commercially speaking, within probably less than a 5 year span due to digital photography.
pentaxuser