WWII obviously played a huge part, but the level of protectionism is quite hard to even understand from the perspective of 2020, and the same applied in the USA, but it was a HUGE internal market. 

If you could imagine a USA where if a washing machine was made in say Texas, you had to pay a large tariff and set up a subsidiary in NY to sell it there and comply with a whole raft of different technical standards, that were designed to keep competitors out, that's how Europe was well into the 1970s. 

Even after Brexit, it's highly unlikely to ever return to that level of protectionism.

There were all sorts of smaller manufacturers of laundry appliances in most countries, and the majority of them were absorbed and disappeared. If you look at the UK or France for example, the domestic machines vanished and those brands like Hotpoint, Creda, Hoover UK (although that was a multinational to begin with), Laden, Vedette, Scholtès, Brandt etc all disappeared into bigger groups as the market consolidated through the 1970s, 80s, 90s.

Other European companies that were big players abandoned white goods : Philips for example selling that division to Whirlpool. The most recent is Siemens, which has given up on consumer goods and is just licensing its brand to BSH, which it no longer owns.

Basically from a European perspective, all that's left now is:

The Electrolux Group (Sweden) - Electrolux, AEG*, Zanussi (and several other brands)

BSH (Germany) - Bosch, Siemens*, Neff etc

a number of smaller independents, notably Miele (Germany),  SMEG (Italy) etc and the rest of the big brands are multinational.

*brand under licence.

Indesit (Ariston (IT) /Hotpoint (GB) /Scholtès (FR) / Merloni (IT)) (Italy)- is owned by Whirlpool (US)

Hoover/Candy (Italy) is now owned by Haier (China)

Groupe Brandt (includes De Dietrich name under license, as well as several other French brands and Spanish brand Fagor) is owned by a conglomerate called Cevital (Algeria)

Blomberg - Beko/Arçelik (Turkey) 

ASKO (Sweden) -> Gorenje (Slovenia) -> Gorenje - Hisense (China)

Samsung, and to a lesser extent LG, have made a big splash in the laundry market in Europe and I would say Samsung is now dominant in refrigeration in many countries in Europe. To be fair to both companies, they pushed in on innovation and actually did drive a lot of interesting features. I would say Samsung in particular has changed the shape and size of European fridges and has definitely pushed out some of the more conservative designs of washers, much as it had a big impact in the US too in a similar way.

Most small appliance manufacturing, regardless of who owns the brands, is gone to the far east, notably China but elsewhere too. It's relatively rare to find a small appliance made in the EU (or UK or anywhere in Europe) anymore. There are some noteworthy, mostly high end exceptions, but the vast majority of those kinds of goods are no longer made in the EU.

This was produced as part of the Rural Electrification Scheme, which was still very much running as an active programme in the 1960s:

The presenter, or at least the presentation style they used, would make Hyacinth Bucket seem a little rough around the edges - filmed at the RDS in Dublin, which is a bit of a horsey institution, but is still a major exhibition centre for various events.

Frances Condell went on to be Mayor of Limerick City twice, and met JFK, granting him Freedom of the City. Pic: www.independent.ie/irish-...

Some nice footage of their model rural cottage. It's a little twee, but interesting - there's a lot of show jumping stuff before it gets going, but some insight into 1961 domestic appliances follows...

UK viewers might notice the use of continental type 'Schuko' socket outlets here in the 1960s - and quite different cooker isolators and so on.

The current rectangular pin plugs were only adopted here after that period.

It’s possibly they’re off by a few years, unless they’d some preview of a model before it was released for the sake of an “ideal homes expo”? Perhaps it was an English Electric prototype of upcoming models used for demo purposes or something odd. Not sure how long the lead time would have been on those machines, but wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility that it wasn’t an available machine but was a preview: Just seems to make little sense based on what the presenter was up to in the mid 60s. She’s have been a sitting Mayor, I’d assume would have been introduced with the title. They could be out by 3 years but, just seems odd that they would be, especially with a film they would have commissioned themselves. That being said, not a lot of people pay that much attention to the details of appliances.

The plug/socket thing in Ireland is kinda hard to date. There was a crossover period in the 1960s when BS1363 and Schuko were being installed and were largely down to the preference of the contractor. I think similar happened in the UK for a period too, even though BS1363 actually dates from 1947, it seems there were still plenty of BS546 round pin installations going on in the 50s and 60s.

The 15amp BS546 round pin UK plug did find some use here in the 1950s/60s, but I guess in much the same way there was a bunch of standards used in the UK for a while .. Wylex plugs and all sorts of weird stuff before BS1363 was mandated.

The change over to BS1363 was long complete before I was born, so I've actually never seen an old installation in use, other than just the old dead relic of a Schuko socket still on a wall somewhere. You'd certainly see installations from the 1960s that already had it in use, so I guess it just phased in.