The Baby Boomer Generation

by Paul Feeney

  Our parents had become used to doing without many of the things that we now regard as essentials. During the war, they had learned how to use things sparingly by efficiently managing the government’s endless list of rationed goods, including meat, butter, lard, margarine, sugar, tea, coffee, soap, clothing, petrol and sweets. The end of war, however, had not signalled the end of rationing. In fact, the rules governing rationing were made even stricter in the aftermath of war than they had been during the war. Bread and potatoes had not previously been rationed in the UK but the Ministry of Food put bread and flour on ration from 21 July 1946 to 25 July 1948, and potatoes were put on ration in the autumn of 1947 through until 30 April 1948. Other goods remained on ration until well into the 1950s, with tea coming off the list in 1952, sugar and eggs in 1953 and finally cheese and meats in 1954 when all rationing ended. Our parents had experienced life before rationing first began in 1940 and they had found it hard to get used to living within the strictly enforced limits. The harsh rationing system meant they had to get by on much smaller quantities of the everyday essentials, which they had been used to having in unlimited quantities before the war began. They were forced to adapt their whole way of life to conform to the rationing system and learn to get by with much less of everything; they certainly felt deprived, and they were. By 1954, having already suffered fourteen years of official rationing, they were resigned to the fact that it would be a few more years before they would see a return to the good times, but it was all very different for us children because we had been born into a world of rationing and we didn’t feel deprived because we had never known anything different. Each day, our mothers struggled with the task of how to best utilise the rationed items to satisfy the needs of the whole family and we children came to think of this as being a normal part of housekeeping. In the worst of times, some children will have been undernourished but the majority of us usually had enough to eat and didn’t find it hard to live within the restraints of rationing; we didn’t even think about it. We thought it was normal for our mums to carry ration books with them whenever they went out shopping and as far as we knew it had always been that way. We were used to running errands armed with the appropriate ration book and we considered this to be normal. In the same way, we thought that kids had always spent their childhoods playing on bomb sites and exploring derelict buildings. We didn’t regard our upbringing as being in any way unusual and most of us didn’t really feel deprived of anything. After all, we never shared our mothers’ concerns over how to make a small scrag-end of mutton into a healthy family meal. Mind you, we had no real choice in what we ate; we just ate what was put in front of us. There was no such thing as a fussy eater and phrases like, ‘I don’t like this,’ and ‘I’m not eating that,’ were never used. We had never known what it was like to have a choice. To us it was just food that we needed to eat regularly for nourishment and energy. If we were hungry between meals, we knew that the quickest way to a full belly was a doorstep of bread. As young children, we were aware that sweets were not freely available to buy and so we never got into the habit of nagging our mums to buy them when we were out at the shops. We grew up believing that chocolate and other sweets were luxuries, something you only had occasionally as a special treat. Mind you, we did go a bit mad when sweet rationing was lifted on 5 February 1953. On that day, we all raided our piggy banks and headed off to the local sweetshops. It was a very special day; the shopkeepers were besieged with hordes of neighbourhood kids, all desperate to buy one or two treats from the huge selection of unrationed sweets on display. Penny chews, boiled sweets, nougat and liquorice sticks were all very popular but, surprisingly, it was toffee apples that were the biggest sellers of the day. A firm in South London gave away 800 free lollipops to local kids, while other manufacturing companies handed out free sweets to anyone who turned up at their factory gates. It was all very exciting: a one-off experience that was unlikely to ever happen again. We had an extra special spring in our step that day; it was certainly a day to remember. Knowing that sweets were now available to buy in unlimited quantities didn’t immediately turn us into chocoholics. Having spent our early years doing without sweets, we had no addiction to them and most of us continued to regard them as treats, preferring to buy a comic than a packet of Spangles. Strangely enough, although sweets were now de-rationed, we had to wait another few months before sugar was taken off rationing in September 1953.

  The post-war baby-boomer generation was still at pre-school age when the clocks crept past midnight to herald the arrival of the first New Year of the 1950s. The population of the United Kingdom had just passed the 50 million mark and three-quarters of all families lived in rented accommodation. A quarter of British homes had no electricity and Britain still had an empire, albeit a diminishing one. Everyone, including children, were compelled to carry wartime identity cards wherever they went and this requirement continued right up until 1952, seven years after the war had ended. Trams were still in use on our city streets and they carried on running for another two years. The vast majority of our parents were married before we were born, with only 3% of us born outside of marriage. Abortion and homosexual acts were illegal and capital punishment still existed. The British way of life was very different back then; there were no shopping centres, multiplex cinemas and out of town retail parks. Self-service stores and supermarkets had been popular in America since the 1930s but it took the British a long time to catch up. A handful of self-service shops opened here during the 1940s and J. Sainsbury opened their first one in Croydon in 1950, but other food chains were slow to follow Sainsbury’s lead; by the end of the decade self-service stores were still few and far between.

  Shopping in individual specialist shops was still the norm here. With many families living hand-to-mouth and few homes having refrigerators, there was an essential need for daily shopping and the corner shop was at the centre of the local community. They usually sold everything from newspapers to sliced ham, but unlike today, most of them didn’t open in the evening and they shut for a half-day during the week, with some shutting all day on Mondays. Our mothers did their weekly shopping in the local high street, nipping in and out of many different shops, including the butcher’s, baker’s and greengrocer’s. There was also a busy local pub on nearly every street corner of the land where noisy singsongs could be heard bellowing out on a Saturday night.

  For most of the 1950s, the wireless (radio) was our main source of entertainment in the home. At the turn of the century, two out of three people in Britain had never seen a television programme let alone owned a television set. Television ownership only started to take off in 1953, prompted by the public’s desire to see the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, which was planned to be broadcast live on BBC television in June that year. There was another surge in sales of television sets when Independent television (ITV) first began broadcasting commercially funded television programmes to the London region in September 1955, and sales continued to increase each year as ITV gradually rolled out its regional broadcasting coverage. By the end of the 1950s, three-quarters of the population had access to a television set.

  Throughout the 1950s, cinema was our main source of entertainment outside of the home. With only limited access to television programmes, it was the only way we could see what was going on outside of our own little cocoons. It also provided us with the means to escape from our usual humdrum existence: for a few hours we could enter a world of pure fantasy. There were so many wonderful British and American films for us to enjoy and even us kids liked to watch the Pathé newsreel with its dramatic voice-over narrations. We were so captivated by these films that three-quarters of us went to the cinema at least once a week and we would happily queue for up to an hour outside in the rain for the one-and-nine-penny seats, and then, at the end of the main film, everyone would stand while the National Anthem was played. As time went by we noticed that cinemas were beginning to interrupt the films’ end credits and starting the National Anthem early to
catch those who were looking to get away immediately. The distinctive sound of the anthem’s intro usually stopped them in their tracks and kept them fixed to the spot until it ended.

  Any ideas of things like telephone cold calling, junk mail, email, credit cards and Internet shopping and banking would have been pure science fiction in the 1950s. Instead, we had door-to-door salesmen selling everything from insurance to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and tallymen selling all sorts of goods for 1 shilling a week on the never-never. In the 1950s, the postman would deliver letters and postcards twice a day and each morning the milkman would deliver milk to every house on the street; each wore a smart uniform including a shirt and tie and a peaked cap. Our parents paid for gas and electricity in advance through ‘shilling in the meter’ boxes that were fitted in our homes. Most people didn’t have a bank account and so workers were generally paid in cash at the end of each week, sometimes on a Thursday. This meant that the majority of purchases were paid for in cash, including all the routine household bills. All of the main services and goods suppliers had local offices or shops where you could go to pay your bills in cash. People didn’t need to have a bank account; many preferred to put their savings in a Post Office account and buy postal orders for any payments that had to be sent by post.

  Healthcare was nowhere near as advanced as it is today and we lacked the benefits of modern-day medical treatment, but the healthcare system we did have seemed very efficient and somehow more personal than it is today. The National Health Service was still in its infancy, having only been formed a few years earlier in 1948, and there seemed to be much less red tape than there is nowadays. It was very easy to see a doctor when you were ill and there was no need to make an appointment to be seen at the surgery. You only had to ask for a home visit and the doctor would be there the same day, seven days a week; they would even come out in the middle of the night if required. Of course, the population was much smaller in the 1950s and so there was less pressure on the health service, but there were a lot of chronic and incurable diseases to contend with and medical care was much more labour intensive, especially in hospitals. From a patient’s point of view, the hospital nurses seemed to be much more hands-on in the wards and they had much less administration to contend with.

  There were no prescription charges in the early days of the National Health Service, but this was later reviewed and in 1952 a charge of 1s per prescription form was introduced together with a flat rate fee of £1 for any dental treatment. In 1956, prescription charges were reviewed again and thereafter patients had to pay 1s for each item that appeared on a prescription form.

  The overall pace of life in Britain was much slower than it is today, with buses and bicycles being the most popular modes of transport. In 1952, there were no motorways in the UK and only 2.5 million cars on the road (compared to 26 million in 2011), with most working-class families relying on public transport for any long journeys. We frequently walked rather than use buses, and the majority of schoolchildren walked to school on their own each day. Street crime was quite low and we felt it was safe to walk the streets, even at night. The total number of all crimes recorded by the police in 1952 was about 10% of the number reported in 2010. People were more inclined to report crime back then because the police were more likely to investigate anything that was reported to them. It was also quite legal for anyone to carry a knife and it was common practice for young schoolboys to have a penknife in their pocket, but such penknives were regarded as tools rather than weapons. Children had great respect for their elders but at the same time their disciplined upbringing also made them slightly fearful of adults, especially of anyone in authority. You never heard stories of old ladies getting mugged in the street for their pension money. It would have been hard to comprehend such a wicked crime being carried out back then. As young kids, we were all told not to talk to strangers but we never heard of any children being abducted. We would secretly carve our initials into tree trunks and on park benches, but there was no such thing as graffiti as we now know it and there was very little else in the way of vandalism. Mobile phones didn’t exist and few people had a telephone installed at home because it was really expensive to have one and it was considered a luxury item. They would normally only be found in business premises and in some well-off households. The majority of people used public telephone boxes when they needed to make a call and for most that was not very often, the preferred method of communication being letters and postcards. If you did need to use a telephone then you rarely had to walk far to find a public phone box; when you did, the telephone would be in working order with a pay-box full of pennies and not looted. Each box was fully glazed with a light inside so you could read the telephone directories that were stored next to the telephone. The boxes were completely enclosed and weatherproof with heavy spring-closing doors, and they were capable of holding two people (or six kids as all baby boomers will know). Inside, they may have smelt a bit musty or damp but there was no smell of urine and you were very unlikely to find anyone sleeping in them.

  As children, we spent as much time as possible playing outside in the fresh air and we were quite healthy, but we still got all of the usual childhood illnesses and we lived in fear of catching dreadful diseases like polio, diphtheria and tuberculosis (or TB as it was generally known). There was no such thing as children’s rights and we were expected to obey any rules that were imposed upon us without question. We were taught that children should be seen and not heard and it was common practise for us to be physically punished for any wrongdoings, and not just by our parents; anyone in authority, such as a policeman or park warden, would give us a clip around the ear if they caught us up to mischief. Most of the painful beatings were done at school as corporal punishment was still lawful, and teachers were allowed to used various flogging tools to beat you with, including the traditional school cane and a leather strap with its serious end split into a number of tails to provide that extra-painful whipping action; some favoured the use of a slipper, but the cane was the thing that was most commonly used in schools, especially in England.

  The children we grew up with came from families who shared the same cultural background as ourselves. They most likely grew up in the same local area as we did and their families had probably lived in the same district for generations before. The country had a rich mix of regional traditions and customs and people were proud to boast their own distinctive local accents. It was very easy to tell what part of the country someone came from by the way he or she spoke. Similarly, the British people had a recognisable identity at home and abroad. People from other nations found it easy to recognise and describe the British, albeit the image of us was sometimes over caricatured. The country had always been a magnet for immigrants and refugees from all over the world, but 1950s Britain was not the multicultural society it is today. Immigrants had previously come to Britain in relatively small numbers and so the population remained overwhelmingly British-born, white and Christian. There were, however, a fairly large number of baptised Christians who were non-churchgoers and non-believers. As a consequence, many 1940s baby boomers went right through their childhood without coming into contact with anyone from any other ethnic group, even in some of the most densely populated inner city areas. This was probably due to the fact that immigrants tended to feel more comfortable living among people from similar cultural backgrounds as themselves and so they would form their own communities in specific areas of large cities. People of different races didn’t tend to mix very much except when work brought them together, otherwise preferring to stay within their own communities. This suited most of the white indigenous population who were quite apprehensive about immigration and not too keen to encourage integration. There was a lot of suspicion and discrimination born out of a fear that the increasing numbers of West Indian and Asian immigrants would steal other people’s jobs by working for lower pay. At the time, there were no racial discrimination laws in existence and some businesses and individuals openl
y discriminated against certain groups of people. Discriminatory notices like ‘No Irish. No Dogs’ were already a familiar sight outside boarding houses and these were rewritten in the 1950s to read, ‘No Irish. No Blacks. No Dogs,’ and in some areas Jews were also added to the list of unwelcome patrons. With more and more non-white immigrants coming into the country, the feeling of hostility towards the Irish began to soften and the discriminatory signs were modified to read, ’No Blacks, No Dogs.’ Some public houses operated a straightforward colour bar by displaying signs brandishing the words, ‘No Blacks’. All women of any colour or race were also discriminated against in more subtle ways, mostly relating to employment, but in other areas as well, such as in obtaining membership of clubs and getting credit facilities. To get something on credit or hire purchase terms, a man was usually needed to act as guarantor, preferably their husband. It was also considered unladylike for a woman to go unaccompanied into a pub, but this was more to do with respect for women rather than discrimination.

  In the 1950s, Britain was still a nation of manufacturers and shopkeepers with more than 70% of the British working population doing hands-on manual jobs. It was the heavy industries like coal mining, iron and steel making, ship building and engineering that were the big employers and more than 9 million workers were members of a trade union. There were plenty of jobs around and the majority of people who wanted to work had full-time jobs. Those who were working usually got one week’s paid holiday each year and it was up to the employer to determine when that holiday would be taken. There were only 178,000 men and 64,000 women receiving unemployment benefit, compared with 1.01 million men and 483,700 women in May 2011. There were another 100,000 people registered as being unemployed who did not qualify for benefits under the 1946 National Insurance Act. Some of these were unable to work because of disabilities or sickness, and there were others who were only classed as short-term unemployed.