It just so happens that we only know our grandparents once they’ve reached their senior years. This can quite easily give the impression that our grandparents have always been the sort to spend all day knitting, watching TV, drinking cups of tea and trading neighborhood gossip.

It might be hard to imagine a time when your grandparents were as young as you are now, but it did happen! If you want an idea of what your parents were like when they were young, just ask them to bring out their old photo albums – you’ll find all the proof you need that they were actually pretty cool.

In many ways, the era that our grandparents grew up in was much cooler than ours. Teenagers and young adults didn’t spend hours practicing TikTok dances or watching rom-coms. There was more glamor, danger and excitement than most of us could even begin to imagine.

If you need some convincing that your grandparents were cool when they were younger, these 45 photographs should speak for themselves…