Even in my day 1:2 was the standard, and 1:3 was more common than 1:1. As a PhD student (teaching fellows got paid the same, once they went beyond the minimum required hours that were part of their salary) the payment structure was designed to discourage you from doing 1:1 supervisions (in the late 80s/early 90s you received about 8 pounds per hour for 1:1, 12 pounds for 1:2 and 14 pounds for 1:3). I don’t think I did more than a couple of 1:1 supervisions in 3 years even when I had an odd number of students.
But no one got a grade. Your only grade was the classification on the final exam, and if you didn’t learn the material then you wouldn’t get a good result. People who didn’t show up were reported to the Director of Studies and that was exceedingly rare. The most interesting thing was that no solutions were provided, so you had to work them out too, and that wasn’t always possible for hard problems.