by Mark Easton
On 12 February 1993, 2-year-old James Bulger wandered off from his mother in a Liverpool shopping mall. In the minutes that followed, security cameras captured him being led by the hand out of the New Strand Shopping Centre by two ‘youths’ as his mother frantically searched for him. Forty-eight hours later, the badly beaten body of the toddler was found on a railway line two miles away.
The Daily Star newspaper offered a £20,000 reward ‘to trap the beasts who killed little James’. In the Sun, one commentator wrote: ‘This is no time for calm. It is a time for rage, for blood-boiling anger, for furious venting of spleen.’ The Prime Minister John Major, emphasising his tough stance on crime, told one tabloid that ‘society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less.’ Within days his government announced plans to incarcerate children as young as twelve.
When police charged two 10-year-olds for the murder, Britain’s anxiety over its relationship with its young boiled over. ‘We will never be able to look at our children in the same way again,’ said The Sunday Times. ‘Parents everywhere are asking themselves and their friends if the Mark of the Beast might not also be imprinted on their offspring.’
The circumstances of James Bulger’s death were highly unusual, but the crime prompted a political sea change in the treatment of children by the state — not only of those who offended but of those who simply misbehaved. Conservative toughness was matched every step of the way by Labour, a response later characterised as an arms race to control the nation’s youth. Among Tony Blair’s first acts upon entering Downing Street was to give adults access to legal sanctions for dealing with local children who didn’t do what they were told.
The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 meant that any person over the age of ten in England and Wales who acted in a way likely to cause ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ could be subject to an ASBO — an antisocial behaviour order that, if breached, might see that youngster locked up. Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for a zero-tolerance approach to youth nuisance saw the introduction of electronic tagging of 10-year-olds, dispersal orders, exclusion orders, referral orders and penalty notices.
A campaign demanding that young people show more respect to their elders and betters saw the Labour leader refer to what he saw as a pre-war golden age. ‘My father, growing up,’ Mr Blair said, ‘didn’t have as much money as we have, he didn’t have the same opportunities, he didn’t have travel or communications, but people behaved more respectfully to one another and people are trying to get back to that and most people want it.’
At around the same time, a UNICEF report found that Britain’s young people were the unhappiest in any of the world’s rich nations. One of the authors blamed the UK’s ‘dog-eat-dog’ society. The Archbishop of Canterbury described a nation gripped by panic, ‘tone-deaf to the real requirements of children’.
The last few years have seen much hand-wringing as to how Britain has allowed the relationship between adult and adolescent to become so dysfunctional. In 2009 an independent inquiry panel made up of academics and child experts published a ‘Good Childhood’ report arguing for a significant change of heart in our society. It railed against the unkindness shown towards teenagers and of the need for ‘a more caring ethic and for less aggression, a society more based upon the law of love’.
In government, David Cameron dismantled some of the legal architecture around antisocial behaviour in the hope that communities might re-engage with their young people, but I don’t think it fanciful to suggest that generational segregation in Britain may actually have become a greater risk to the fabric of our nation than segregation by race, religion or class. A recent Whitehall report warned ministers that inter-generational prejudice and discrimination could become ‘more directly hostile’. The little old lady shuffling to pick up her pension at the post office is intimidated by the group of youths ‘hanging around’ because she doesn’t know any of them. Her grandchildren live miles away and the sinister teenagers in their caps and hooded tops look just like the ‘gangs of yobs’ her newspaper has been warning about.
I went to Burnley in Lancashire a few years ago to talk to the groups of young men loitering in barren shopping arcades. What emerged was a story of teenagers and adults living separate lives.
At a youth club where he does voluntary work, I asked 17-year-old Steven Jones how much time he spent with his parents. ‘None,’ he replied with a shrug. In the evening, he was out with his mates, returning home after his parents had gone to bed. And in the morning? ‘No, because I just get up and go out.’
British teenagers spend more time hanging around with their mates than almost anywhere else in Europe. A survey of 15-year-old boys found that in France and Switzerland just one in six said they spent most evenings out with their peers. In Italy and Germany it was roughly one in four. In England and Scotland it was about one in two. Perhaps it should not be a surprise that the teenage pregnancy rate is so high here. British adolescents often don’t seem welcome in their own homes. While one in ten Italian and French teenagers said they rarely had a meal with their parents, in the UK the figure was one in three.
I would understand all of this more if British youth were going through a particularly defiant and unruly phase. But a recent government-commissioned report found that standards of behaviour in English secondary schools were at their highest level for thirty years; teenagers apparently do more charity work than any other age group — ten times more likely to volunteer in their community than behave antisocially; the chance of being a victim of youth crime is put at its lowest level since records began in the early eighties. Where are the modern-day equivalents of rebellious Mods or Hippies or Punks? In their bedroom, apparently, revising for the Biology exam.
On a British question and answer site on the Internet, 13-year-old Ellen asked: ‘Why do people hate teenagers…?’ When you’re twelve everyone likes you but then the minute you turn thirteen everyone hates you. I want people to like me, I’m nice!’ Below, Bethanne answered: ‘This is because ages ago teens were smoking and vandalising things (i.e. in the 1990s perhaps) and it has just carried on through the years. I couldn’t care less if the occasional ignorant adult hated me: their loss. ’
It is ‘their loss’. Britain has looked for someone to blame for the breakdown in its community life and, frightened to look in the mirror, has consistently pointed its accusatory finger at ‘youth’. It should not be a surprise that sometimes ‘youth’ hits back.
As the young man’s swinging foot connected with my leg, I winced. He had hurt me. But not nearly as much as our society hurts some of its children.
Z is for Zzzz
And so to bed, as Pepys would have put it. My alphabet concludes with the soft hypnotic hum of sleep — the song of the winged god Hypnos, its notation a string of zeds.
The British have a paradoxical and troubled relationship with sleep. We spend probably twenty-five years in the Land of Nod, a third of our lives, and yet we are suspicious of the territory, anxious that others might think us indulgent for spending too long strolling its quiet bye-ways, afraid to admit we fancy a snooze. The work ethic of our Protestant heritage associates sleep with sloth.
Simultaneously, we fret that we don’t get enough. A survey by pollsters MORI recently found that four out of ten Brits thought they suffered from too little rest, a figure that rose to more than half of those aged between thirty-five and forty-four. The results pointed to a frenzied subset of British society, desperately trying to keep functioning amid fears they were suffering severe sleep deprivation. The kind of person most likely to be trapped by this sleep paradox, it turns out, is a female executive juggling family life with a full-time career in London: ‘superwoman’, it appears, is constantly knackered.
Other nationalities and cultures don’t share our hang-up about sleep. The Spanish siesta, the German mittagspause, the Chinese wujiao, the Indian bhat-ghum — rest has a revered place within the daily routine of millions. Often it is about avoiding the hottest part of t
he day, but by embracing and celebrating slumber, sleep loses its association with idleness or indolence. For the British, however, there is shame in being caught napping.
The association between sleep and sloth was cemented in the furnace of nineteenth-century industrial expansion. The Scottish surgeon and philosopher Robert Macnish noted in his book of 1830, The Philosophy of Sleep, how ‘the sluggard wastes the most beautiful period of life in pernicious slumber.’ He identified a class divide, contrasting the ‘rich, lazy and gormandizing citizen who will sleep twelve or thirteen hours at a time’ with ‘the hard-working peasant’ who was content with seven or eight.
Macnish’s Protestant Glasgow upbringing infused his passionate patronage of the early riser. ‘The husbandman is up at his labour, the forest leaves sparkle with drops of crystal dew, the flowers raise their rejoicing heads towards the sun, the birds pour forth their anthems of gladness; and the wide face of creation itself seems as if awakened and refreshed from a mighty slumber.’
Compare that with his description of the sluggard:
He yawns, stretches himself, and stalks into the breakfast parlour, to partake in solitude, and without appetite, of his unrefreshing meal — while his eyes are red and gummy, his beard unshorn, his face unwashed, and his clothes disorderly, and ill put on. Uncleanliness and sluggishness generally go hand in hand; for the obtuseness of mind which disposes a man to waste the most precious hours of existence in debasing sleep, will naturally make him neglect his person.
Victorian Britain, eagerly building an empire, endorsed the idea that sleep was the potential enemy of industry. The bedroom, previously a domestic showpiece into which visitors would be invited, became a private retreat for the seven or eight hours of rest required to prepare for the morrow. The bed itself, once an opportunity for the wealthy to exhibit their status with magnificent drapes, luxurious feather-filled pillows and decorative frames, shrunk down to a modest and functional object. To this day, UK bed sizes reflect nineteenth-century attitudes. A standard double is an inch narrower than most European equivalents, and the width of a British king-size bed is a full fifteen inches less regal than its continental cousin. The bed was stripped of anything that could be regarded as indulgent: a practical solution to the inconvenient necessity of sleep.
The shift from a rural to urban lifestyle, coupled with a culture that imbued sleep with a moral dubiety, meant Britain found it increasingly difficult to nod off. Charles Dickens would observe the nocturnal fretfulness of city inhabitants as he wandered the streets of London suffering from his own insomnia. Dickens’ personal remedy was a bed that pointed northwards, in which he would sleep exactly in the middle, his arms outstretched and with each hand equidistant from the edge. More conventional Victorian insomnia cures included quantities of gin, laudanum (opium mixed with alcohol) and cannabis, prescribed for the Queen herself by the Royal Physician to assist sleep.
In 1894 the British Medical Journal worried at the nation’s sleeplessness.
The hurry and excitement of modern life is held to be responsible for much of the insomnia of which we hear; and most of the articles and letters full of good advice to live more quietly and of platitudes concerning the harmfulness or rush and worry. The pity of it is that so many people are unable to follow this good advice and are obliged to lead a life of anxiety and high tension.
As if to emphasise the point, the following year the Prime Minister, the Earl of Rosebery, resigned, blaming chronic insomnia as the main reason. ‘I cannot forget 1895,’ he would write later. ‘To lie, night after night, staring wide awake, hopeless of sleep, tormented in nerves… is an experience which no sane man with a conscience would repeat.’
It is often suggested that contemporary Britain is suffering a similar waking nightmare, that the rigours of our 24/7 culture have left us bleary-eyed victims of sleep deprivation. As on so many issues, newspapers are prone to argue that if only we were to return to the habits of the days of empire, when British adults spent a healthy nine hours a night between the sheets, all would be well. And as so often, it is nostalgia for a myth.
It turns out that the key piece of research, trotted out again and again as proof that our recent ancestors slept much more, was actually published in 1913 by two psychologists at Stanford University in California, Lewis Terman and Adeline Hocking. The clue to why their paper might not provide a complete picture of early twentieth-century sleeping habits is in its main title: ‘The Sleep of School Children’. Yes, this was a piece of work trying to find the optimum amount of shut-eye for kids. It measured the sleep of American 6-year-olds (average 11 hours 14 minutes) and college students (average 7 hours 47 minutes), figures that match up pretty closely with the amount of sleep children and young healthy adults get in Britain today.
The belief that we are a nation reeling from an increasing epidemic of sleep disorders is too widely held to be undermined by mere evidence. The results of a survey published by the Mental Health Foundation in 2010 were held up as further proof in the papers: ‘Sleep-deprived Britain: Two thirds of us suffer from debilitating insomnia’; ‘How worn-out Britain finally woke up to its chronic sleep problem’. The poll appeared to confirm the accepted wisdom that our twenty-first-century lifestyle was destroying our slumber. More than a cursory glance at the research, however, revealed that the headlines were nonsense.
‘Some caution should be used when discussing the results of this survey,’ the researchers themselves advised, adding that the sample ‘cannot be truly representative of the UK population’. The reason for extreme circumspection was that the poll had been conducted on the website of Sleepio, an online resource specifically aimed at people with sleep problems. ‘Take just five minutes to answer our survey and you’ll get a free tailored report on the state of your sleep,’ worried readers were informed. What seems surprising (given the likely users of the site) is not that two thirds of those who filled out Sleepio’s questionnaire thought they had a problem sleeping, but that a third did not!
The evidence that Britain’s sleep patterns are much worse than they were a century ago is thin. The bulk of research shows that, on average, UK adults get a healthy seven-and-a-half to eight hours a night. Middle-aged, middle-class professionals juggling stressful jobs and demanding children probably manage a bit less, and that, of course, is the demographic of the people who edit national newspapers.
There are plenty of people out to convince us we should feel guilty about not getting enough sleep, just as two centuries ago there were plenty of people out to convince Britain it should feel guilty about getting too much. Our relationship with slumber has been turned on its head.
When the economy was primarily agricultural and ruled by the sun, the rhythm of sleep was in simple time — two beats in the bar, up at dawn and down at dusk. Variation was orchestrated by the four seasons. As Robert Macnish explained, ‘some of the circumstances which induce us to sit up late and rise early in summer, are wanting during winter; and we consequently feel disposed to lie longer in bed during the latter season of the year.’
With the birth of the metropolis, the rhythm became more complex, a syncopated beat that drifted away from the natural tempo of the rising and setting sun. On 28 January 1807, the world’s first street lighting with gas was illuminated in London’s Pall Mall. Three years later, Humphry Davy demonstrated the first arc lamp to the Royal Institution, as British inventors competed to achieve the light bulb moment.
We can argue whether it was Scotsman James Lindsay’s electrical device demonstrated to a public meeting in Dundee in 1835 that constituted the first incandescent light bulb, or if Sunderland inventor Joseph Swan should get the credit for developing the first successful ‘filament electric lamp’ publicly demonstrated on Tyneside in 1878. History books will tell you it was American Thomas Edison who patented the first practical and commercial design in 1879, but most overlook the fact that the world’s first light bulb factory was established by Swan at Benwell in Newcastle. In the late nineteenth
century, it was Britain that was doing its best to disrupt the sleep patterns of the world.
The United States, however, can legitimately claim to have invented ‘24-hour convenience’, an oxymoronic concept which would soon cross the Atlantic to meddle with British body clocks. Its origins can be traced to Austin, Texas in the autumn of 1962, when the local college football team, the Longhorns, was having a successful season. One Saturday night after the game, a 7-Eleven store nearby found itself so busy with jubilant young fans that it never closed. The manager spotted a gap in the market and began opening the shop twenty-four hours a day, an idea that quickly spread to other outlets in Dallas, Fort Worth and Las Vegas, before sweeping the planet.
Defying the conventions of sleep became part of the youth revolution of the 1960s. Californian teenager Randy Gardner made the point by staying awake for eleven days in 1964, the longest anyone has been recorded going without sleep. ‘Mind over matter,’ he told reporters as he shrugged off to bed. In Britain the same year, the Beatles sang of ‘working like a dog’ when they should have been ‘sleeping like a log’ — ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was the flip side of rocking around the clock.
Teenagers sought to overcome the demands of sleep; the Mod drug of choice was amphetamine, used to fuel all-night dances at clubs like The Twisted Wheel in Manchester. But they still had to go to work on Monday morning so, along with the uppers, were the downers, as a generation attempted to recalibrate their body clocks.
In the consumer revolution that followed, sleep came to be regarded as a commodity like any other. Science had begun to unlock its secrets: in 1971 the New Scientist magazine reported on the ‘trendy’ research being conducted by Ian Oswald at Edinburgh University — ‘sweeping away a lot of myths which for a long time surrounded sleep and dreaming’. The man who would become known as a founding father of sleep research had spent much of the 1960s unravelling the mysteries of dreams and the effects of sleeping tablets, slimming pills and recreational drugs.