60 year old lights

Along time ago, 60 years to be precise a young father (he was only 29) went down to the local electrical shop and spent the equivalent of a WHOLE WEEKS wages on a set of Christmas lights. They cost him
£1 10s 6p, that's £1-50 in today's money, and going on to some special money conversion site which takes in to account inflation they equated to about £500, which would be a good week's wage today.
Here is the actual box, just in the yellow bit on the right hand side the price is on.

He bought them to celebrate his daughter's first Christmas and as you'll have guessed that was me! 

Inside the box looked like this

As a child these lights were always on the tree and had to mended several times by my dad who could turn his hand to anything. I remember moving the shades around so the green one had the red bulb in and the blue had a yellow one in - it drove my Mother mad! 

One Christmas, despite all my Father's efforts they just would not work and it was impossible to get any bulbs to fit (no internet to find whatever you want in those days) so the lights were put up in the loft and left there until the Christmas after my Father died when I decided that there must be a away to rescue them.

I took them down to a nearby Homebase where one of their more 'elderly' assistants found me a set of lights which had the same shaped bulbs which the shades would fit on - BRILLIANT. The box was duly wrapped and put under the tree and given to my Mum on Christmas Day, who as you might imagine just burst in to tears. The following year they were back on her tree and for several after. 10 years ago I had a very familiar shaped present for Christmas and on opening it I found the lights. Each year since then they have been put up, not on our tree but on the stair banister where they were admired by many and young children could see the pictures on the shades. 

You might think that that is the happy end to the story but unfortunately not, as last year half the bulbs were out. The saving grace was that the set from Homebase were a 20 set and we only had 11 shades (one had got broken years ago) so we were able to put the shades on all the bulbs that worked and used them like that. I started to look for more bulbs after Christmas last year but didn't get very far so left the search till a few weeks ago. Amazingly I found what I needed and they arrived. Now I had had the lights on and knew exactly which bulbs needed replacing. I did that, switched them on and the total reverse happened. All the bulbs with shades were off and the un-shaded bulbs were on. What had happened there? David, bless him spent a couple of hours trying to sort them out but failed. We tried putting the shades on the lighted bulbs but some wouldn't fit properly - nothing seemed to be working. I was really disappointed but couldn't help thinking that there must be a way to get them going. It was then that I had the idea of trying to fit the shades somehow onto some other lights. By careful wriggling I was able to push two bulbs through the hole in the top of the shades and IT WORKED. Not ideal but it doesn't matter they work and here they are on the banister