The Baby Boomer Generation

by Paul Feeney

  Ignoring problems with the housing market, inflation and high interest rates of the early-1990s, the average standard of living in Britain during the 1990s was quite high and it was light years away from the lifestyle we experienced back in the post-war austere Britain of the 1940s and 1950s. We now enjoyed possessions and a way of life that was beyond anything imaginable to us forty years earlier. Things that we now took for granted were in fact luxuries but we no longer regarded them as such. The passage of time had turned televisions, telephones, stereos, fridges and domestic freezers into essential household items that we now thought we could not live without. Certainly, the younger generations could not imagine what it was like to live without these items. Each year the choice of luxury goods got bigger and there was now a huge variety of lifestyle-enhancing products and services available to us. We were bombarded with adverts and promotional literature every minute of our waking days. From adverts on hoardings to junk mail, television campaigns to nuisance phone calls; it seemed as though every company in the world was canvassing our business and teasing the money from our pockets.

  Having no money was a minor hurdle to overcome because the banks, credit card companies and other moneylenders were falling over themselves to lend us as much as we wanted. If your credit card was already spent up to its limit you could just get another one, or two, or three. In fact, consumerism and money lending was getting out of hand; it seemed as though nothing was beyond reach and anyone could get credit in one form or another. People were collecting credit cards like we used to collect cigarette cards back in the 1950s, in bundles. We stuffed them into special credit card wallets that had lots of individual pouches to hold them all – and of course we paid for these special wallets using one of our credit cards. In every retail park around the country you would see carpet and furniture stores offering interest-free credit with nothing to pay for the first year and then payments spread over three or four years. The furnishings would wear out before they were paid for. Sales staff accosted us in large department stores offering us special discounts if we filled in an application form for one of their own-brand credit cards there and then. It seemed impossible for us to avoid credit. It was being rammed down our throats all of the time. This was difficult for most strong-minded people to deal with but almost impossible for the weak, especially the hard up and vulnerable. From the latest mobile phones to holiday homes in the sun, we wanted as many luxury items as we could get to make our lifestyles better and better. However, to maintain this high standard of living we needed a regular source of income and so it was more important than ever for us to keep our jobs, and even find ways to earn more money doing second jobs, working longer hours or gaining promotion. The desire to have nice homes, motorcars and holidays was greater than it had ever been, as was the pressure to finance them.

  At work, the culture of working long hours began in the 1980s but it picked up a pace in the 1990s as we became even more fearful of any fall in income. Many of us turned into workaholics, not necessarily because of an insurmountable workload but often just to be seen as hardworking and thereby protect our jobs. The traditional 9–5 culture in office jobs was disappearing, as were lunch breaks and being home for tea at 6.00 p.m. Often, although office workers and managers were being paid to work a 9–5 day, they were in fact working much longer hours at the office and many were even taking work home. This relatively new form of work ethic was infectious and it was becoming the norm for workers to work longer hours for no extra money. It was turning into a contest between work colleagues as to who could stay latest in the office and who could get there first in the morning. By the late 1990s, a quarter of workers in Britain were working more than forty-five hours a week. Employers revelled in the benefits of this new culture and many now expected office workers to take on extra workloads and work longer hours without being paid for it. Companies began building this extra resource into their calculations when assessing staffing levels. Office workers didn’t realise it but they were actually adding to the risk of losing their jobs through redundancy because employers could now make do with fewer staff members. This created an unhealthily competitive atmosphere in offices with everyone trying to impress the boss with their willingness to work harder and for longer, even giving up holiday time to put in more hours and meet deadlines. This new culture meant that people were now living to work rather than working to live. The 1990s lifestyle we craved came at a tremendous cost to anyone caught up in this workaholic madness, and the trend was gaining in pace. There seemed to be no way of stopping it. If you were fortunate enough to have a good and well-paid job then you had to work hard to hold onto it. These days of must-have goods and easy credit facilities significantly increased the number of bills we had to pay each month and few of us were debt free. Families were often reliant upon the income from two wage earners, and women with young children were finding it hard to fit into the culture of working long hours; somehow, they had to find ways to maintain a reasonable standard of family life while managing the increasing demands of their working life. The more senior their job, the harder it was and they became increasingly reliant on others to care for their children while they put in the extra hours at work.

  The culture of hard work and long hours meant that employers could keep staffing levels lean, but this only worked if everyone was suitably qualified and they all pulled their weight. Consequently, employers were becoming more discerning in their choice of employees. By now, in the main, it was our generation of baby boomers who were the employers and we were not finding it easy to track down suitable job applicants, especially when looking for young employees. Despite the supposed increasing standards of education it was surprisingly difficult to find suitably well-educated young people to fill jobs. In the early 1960s, the number of students in higher education hovered around 200,000, about 5% of the UK school population. By the mid-1990s, 1.6 million young people were in higher education; about 14% of the UK school population, and the numbers were heading upwards. Doubts were being raised as to how so many students could be clever enough to get into higher education. Had teaching standards really improved that much? Were young people brighter than they used to be? In 1992, John Major’s Conservative government had made it possible for the old-style polytechnics to become new universities and so almost overnight, students who were previously not good enough to get into a university found themselves attending one of the new ex-polytechnic universities. People were also questioning whether the authorities were dumbing down modern-day examinations to ease the way for more students to enter university, keeping them off the dole and out of the unemployment figures. It was puzzling how so many graduates could leave university with a degree, expecting to get a good job, when they lacked the basic skills of spelling and simple arithmetic; many were unable to compose a letter because they had such a poor grasp of English grammar and some were only able to speak in a series of grunts. Increasing numbers of employers were distrusting modern-day qualifications and setting their own tests for job applicants.

  It was in the 1990s, as 40-somethings, that many of us began to show the first signs of aging, and it wasn’t just that policemen were looking younger as we got older. We pioneers of the so-called 1960s ‘permissive society’ were quietly maturing and most of us accepted the fact that we were no longer the social revolutionaries we once were. Whole new generations had grown up behind us and the world had moved on. Social attitudes had changed a lot in twenty-five years and we, the once carefree rebels of the 1960s, were finding ourselves shocked at how much youth rebelliousness, drug use and sexual freedom had escalated over the years. We began to moan about bad manners and lack of respect, and we despaired at the amount of graffiti we saw daubed on buildings everywhere we went. It was becoming unfashionable to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ or to hold the door open for someone else to pass through; people stopped forming queues at bus stops and the common courtesy of giving up one’s seat for an old person or a pregnant women seemed to be abandoned alto
gether. The media blamed the liberal 1960s generation for the collapse in traditional values and perhaps they were right; after all, it was our generation that let the genie out of the bottle and broken all of the time-honoured rules. However, as 1960s teenagers, for as much as we sought to break with conventionality, we did maintain a reasonable standard of good manners and although we thought that anyone over the age of 40 was ‘past it’ and close to ‘knocking on heaven’s door’, we did have respect for our elders and there was certainly no evidence of old people being mugged in the street. Since the 1960s, there has been a noticeable decline in standards of behaviour and as we moved through the 1990s there was no sign that things were getting any better.

  A few years had now passed since we first began to admit that our fitness levels were not what they used to be, and despite the promising advertising slogan, ‘Philosan fortifies the over forties,’ we found that health supplements didn’t actually roll back the years. The picture we saw in the mirror each morning wasn’t quite as perfect as it had once been – lo and behold, another decade had gone by and many of us baby boomers were creeping ever closer to the big 5-O landmark. Yes, we would soon be 50-somethings and not quite as fabulous anymore. We were already developing some of the typical tell-tale signs of aging. Products like Sanatogen and Steradent now infiltrated our bathroom cabinets. We were becoming more aware of our health and some of us were even monitoring our own blood pressures and heart rates. We no longer burned off the calories as easily as we used to and so we began to watch our weight more carefully, avoiding fatty foods that were loaded with cholesterol. We moaned about the quality of modern-day newspaper print, refusing to accept the fact that our eyesight was failing and we needed to purchase some reading glasses. The smokers among us took to chewing gum as they desperately tried to kick the smoking habit and some were using the recently invented nicotine patches that promised to help overcome the craving to smoke. In the 1970s and 1980s it had become acceptable for young men to wear make-up and to colour their hair in the name of fashion, but in the 1990s those once young men were finding their natural hair colour turning to grey and they were now colouring their hair to preserve their youthful looks. The fashionable tints of the past were no longer of interest to aging baby boomer men. They were now using more functional male hair-colouring products like Grecian 2000. Meanwhile, the women were dieting like mad and heading back to the gym in a desperate attempt to regain their trim 1960s figures. We may by then have been starting to show signs of aging but we had one thing going for us and that was the fact that we were the most youthful generation of 40-somethings there had ever been and we were determined not to turn into replicas of our grandparents. We were once the ultramodern generation of the 1960s and although more than two decades had passed since then, most of us still felt young at heart. We might have been fast-approaching 50 and a bit knackered but we weren’t ready to give up wearing the t-shirts and jeans of our youth. The clues of our middle age were all around us but still we refused to accept the label. By now, some of us had grandchildren of our own but that didn’t mean we had to take on the appearance of being old fogies. We had no intention of growing old gracefully as our grandparents had done – there would be no grey cardigans and slippers for us. Okay, so we were no longer going out to all-night raves in draughty warehouses and head banging to the sounds of drum’n’bass. Yes, we did by now prefer to be locked inside our cosy homes rediscovering the simple joy of Ovaltine at bedtime. That didn’t mean we were getting old – we were just maturing nicely, accepting the fact that for us discothèques were a thing of the past and that night-time was a time for sleeping.

  Older and Wiser

  The New Year Millennium celebrations, headlined by events at the newly constructed Millennium Dome in Greenwich, South East London, were bigger and better than we had ever before seen. Speaking about the celebrations at the time, Prime Minister Tony Blair said that he observed a ‘real sense of confidence and optimism’. ‘You just wanted to bottle it and keep it,’ he said. London’s Thames-side festival of fireworks, light and music certainly inspired our optimism. We were entering the twenty-first century, turning a new page, and we were all hopeful of better times ahead.

  As clocks struck noon on New Year’s Day 2000, church bells began to peal all over the country as more than 2,000 churches rang in the third millennium. Little did we know that those church bells were in fact heralding in an era that would forever be remembered as the time of the world’s worst ever terrorist mass-murders. The early years of the twenty-first century would also bear witness to the worst ever financial crisis the world had ever know, one that would lead to the British government having to fund a £550 billion banking rescue package in loans and guarantees to help stabilise the British banking system.

  The first decade of the twenty-first century was given the name ‘noughties’. Once again, we found ourselves in a period that was packed with a series of life-changing events; there were many good things happening as well as some downright awful ones. Unemployment was hovering around the 1.5 million mark for the first half of the decade but then it began to rise and by the end of 2009 the number had risen to just under 2.5 million, the highest figure for fifteen years. The numbers fell back slightly in 2010 but then began to rise again and by the end of 2011 there were 2.67 million people unemployed in the UK, 8.4% of the workforce – a seventeen-year high. We also suffered with health problems, in both humans and animals; there was the ongoing issue with mad cow disease (BSE) and by August 2000 the British pig industry was in crisis with an outbreak of swine fever. In February 2001, we were hit with a foot-and-mouth crisis, which resulted in 10 million sheep and cattle being killed, and in 2009 we humans suffered an outbreak of swine flu (H1N1 influenza).

  We had grown used to public unrest in Britain and we had plenty of that during the early years of the twenty-first century. We had all sorts of protesters on our streets, some peaceful but many violent; from the high fuel price protesters to the anti-capitalist protesters, government budget cut protesters to students demonstrating against student fees – we had them all. Sometimes it was hard to establish the core subject of a protest because the banners often carried a choice of messages and slogans. We also had to put up with general rioting, looting and arson, as was the case with the August 2011 riots that took place in several London boroughs and other towns and cities across England. The scenes of rioting were horrific, with burning buildings, frenzied looting and hundreds of thugs running amok. At least five deaths were reported as being linked to this outbreak of rioting and there were 206 people listed as injured, mostly police officers (186). Five police dogs also suffered injuries and there was an estimated £200 million worth of property damage. There were a number of other outbreaks of disorder and also some race riots from 2000 to 2012, mostly in the London area, West Midlands and the North of England. The level of violent disorder we saw on our streets during that period was awful but the acts of terrorism we witnessed during the early 2000s were shocking beyond words.

  The world as we knew it changed forever on 11 September 2001 when nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger planes over the United States and used them as weapons in their suicide mission of mass-killings and destruction. We watched replay after replay of these horrific events on television for days and weeks afterwards, and it was still hard to accept the reality of what had happened. We asked ourselves over and over again, how could anyone, let alone a whole group of people, be so wicked? It was like watching computer-generated images; we had never before witnessed such graphic scenes of wilful killing and destruction. The hijackers intentionally crashed two of the passenger planes into the landmark Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, and another into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth passenger plane was targeting Washington but it crashed into a field near Shanksville in Pennsylvania after passengers tried to overcome the hijackers. In all, 2,977 innocent victims were killed, including all of the 246 plane passengers. The n
ineteen hijackers also died. These shocking events have come to be known as the September 11 attacks, and often referred to as 9/11. By now, here in the UK we were well used to high levels of security because of the frequent IRA terrorist attacks, but the CCTV security cameras that littered all of our main streets and in particular those that had been used to form a 6.5-mile ring of steel around the City of London since 1993, were all put there to protect us against car bombers. We were used to dealing with terrorists who would leave explosive devices in public places and then make their escape, people who wanted to get away without being identified. We were now dealing with a whole new security problem: fanatical suicide killers who didn’t care if they were identified. Following the September 11 attacks, security measures were strengthened around the world and none more so than here in the UK. It now seemed as though everywhere we went, whether out on the street or inside buildings, CCTV cameras monitored us. If we drove into the City of London our vehicle registration plates were automatically photographed, traced and tracked, and the police were even stopping people from taking photographs that might capture the image of a public building, even if only in the background. Our bags were routinely being searched when we entered public buildings and even business premises. We became very aware that ordinary, innocent people were now much more vulnerable to terrorist attacks than ever before. We became very suspicious of people, especially anyone carrying a holdall or something suitable to transport an explosive device. There was a great feeling of insecurity, especially in the towns and cities. Sadly, our worst fears were realised on 7 July 2005 (7/7) when there was a series of co-ordinated terrorist bombings on London’s public transport system during the morning rush hour. The terrorists had planned for all four bombs they were carrying to explode at exactly the same time. Three exploded within the same minute on three London Underground trains, and the fourth exploded one hour later on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square, London. Fifty-two innocent people were killed and more than 700 were injured in the attacks; the bombers also died. What made the attacks even more shocking was that the killers were home-grown Islamic terrorists who were all living in England at the time of the attacks, all harbouring extreme views and beliefs and willing to carry out indiscriminate mass-killings. Their victims were innocent civilians travelling on public transport; most were just on their way to work.