by Webb, Simon;
Post-War Childhood
Post-War Childhood
Growing up in the not-so-friendly ‘Baby Boomer’ years
Simon Webb
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by
PEN & SWORD HISTORY
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd,
47 Church Street,
Barnsley,
South Yorkshire,
S70 2AS
Copyright © Simon Webb, 2017
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 47388 601 8
eISBN 978 1 47388 603 2
Mobi ISBN 978 1 47388 602 5
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Contents
List of Plates
Introduction
Chapter 1
The Land of Lost Content: Childhood in the Good Old Days
Chapter 2
‘Dumb But Pretty, Like a Schoolgirl Should Be’: The Sexual Abuse of Children in the Post-War Years
Chapter 3
Of Moral Panics and ASBOs: Juvenile Crime and Disorder in the 1950s and 1960s
Chapter 4
Playing Out and Walking to School: The Facts Behind the ‘Freedom’ Enjoyed by Young Baby Boomers
Chapter 5
Falling Life Expectancy: Are the Baby Boomers More Healthy than their Grandchildren?
Chapter 6
Back to Basics: Has Education Been Dumbed Down Since the 1960s?
Chapter 7
There Was Nothing Like That When I Was a Boy!: The Older Generation’s Fear of New Media
Chapter 8
From Janet and John to the Famous Five: Baby Boomer Childhood in Fiction
Chapter 9
Limited Choices: How Much Freedom Did the Baby Boomers Actually Have as Children?
Afterword
Bibliography
List of Plates
1. A road sign from the 1950s.
2. Boys trainspotting at a railway station.
3. A playground in 1950s Britain.
4. The playground rocking horse, cause of many serious injuries.
5. A 1957 advertisement for air rifles.
6. An open penknife.
7. A knife as a souvenir from the seaside.
8. An air pistol in the Webley catalogue.
9. Housewives cleaning their front steps in the 1950s.
10. Newspaper headlines from 1960 and 1964.
11. Children playing on a bomb site in the 1950s.
12. Children on a bomb site fool around with a pickaxe.
13. A remaining bomb site in London.
14. An iron lung.
15. A ward full of children in iron lungs.
Introduction
We are all of us familiar with old people who contend that when they were young, everything was a great improvement on the present day. Children in the past, for instance, were better behaved, healthier, more polite to, and respectful of, their elders, showed greater courage and resourcefulness, read more and generally had a higher level of educational attainment into the bargain. This type of false-memory syndrome has been a traditional affliction of the elderly since time out of mind. The latest generation to fall prey to such distorted views of the past is of course that of the so-called baby boomers; those born roughly between 1946 and 1964. Enormously entertaining though it is to observe the Flower Power children of the 1960s turning into querulous old men and women who complain that the country is going to the dogs and that childhood isn’t a patch on it what it was when they were themselves youngsters, there is a more serious side to the matter.
The childhood years of the baby boomers have not only become the object of immense and unremitting nostalgia, but the practices and customs of those days as regards children are now being widely advocated as the perfect model of childhood. In newspapers, magazines, books and websites, the way of life for children in the 1950s is now viewed as a desirable pattern to follow. It is as though schooldays in the 1950s and 1960s have become universally accepted as some Platonic ideal of childhood; the yardstick and touchstone against which all other childhoods, especially those of today, are to be measured. If children are obese, it must be because they no longer walk to school and play out of doors as they did in the 1960s. That reading is no longer a popular pastime for children can only be because they spend all their time glued to electronic screens. There was nothing like that in the 1950s, and just think how much children used to read in those days! Are educational standards falling? Might this be remedied by getting children to chant their multiplication tables out loud as they did in the 1950s and perhaps altering schools until they are more like those of the post-war years? Or consider all the knife crime and gang warfare that we read about in the newspapers. In the decades following the end of the Second World War, youngsters were too busy playing Cowboys and Indians to even think of becoming feral youths. In those days, juvenile crime and disorder was unheard of, apart from playing knock-down-ginger on people’s front doors or occasionally scrumping apples. Wouldn’t it be marvellous if we could turn back the clock and make childhood once more a time of innocence, where children pursue such harmless and wholesome hobbies as stamp collecting and trainspotting?
Illustrations 1 and 2 sum up and encapsulate how many older people feel about baby boomer childhood. The first shows two children, neatly and appropriately dressed and obviously on their way to school, striding confidently across a road. This reminds us that in the 1950s and 1960s, it was the almost universal practice for young children to make their own way to school unescorted by adults, let alone driven there in a car. The second illustration shows a group of boys trainspotting at a mainline railway station in the 1950s. This photograph typifies for many the uncomplicated lifestyle of children in those days. Here are children who are not ‘sexting’ or accessing indecent or violent material on the Internet. If only modern children could spend more time outdoors in this way, engaged in such an innocuous pastime!
Nonsense of this kind about a past golden age of childhood would be harmless and amusing enough if it were limited to grandmothers reminiscing to young relatives about how the world was when they were at school, or were it to be found only in letters written to the newspapers which bemoan the behaviour of modern youth. What we are now seeing, though, are NHS trusts and government departments vying with each other to see who can be most zealous in praising the childhood enjoyed by the baby boomers and trying to come up with schemes to encourage children to emulate those days by walking to school, giving up television and computers in favour of books, playing out of doors more and eating a diet more like that of children sixty years ago, before the ‘obesity crisis’ began. Doctors, teachers and politicians are now acting as though childhood in the time of the baby boomers really was healthier, both physically and intellectually, than that experienced by British children of the twenty-first centur
y.
Often, this longing for a vanished past is inextricably associated with the supposedly greater freedom which children enjoyed until as late as the 1970s, ‘playing out’ on their own and walking to school, without the supervision of adults. Little wonder that without all that exercise, they have grown flabby and overweight, just waiting to fall victim to Type 2 diabetes! This must also be why today’s youth have not developed sturdy self-reliance; they spend all their time at home and never have the chance to learn about coping with minor emergencies or tricky situations without their parents hovering around, ready to step in and help them.
Here is a fairly typical example of the claims made about both the superiority of childhood in the past and also some of the probable ill effects for modern children of not experiencing a childhood similar to that of those born during the baby boomer years;
Forgive the rant, but I fear for the sort of mollycoddled children we are raising today. Danger and risk are a part of life. Exposure to them helps us to judge and react to them. It builds our common sense. They are, I would argue, essential to growing up. We should allow our children to play in the streets, climb trees, walk to school, play down the park, cycle round the neighbourhood, go to the corner shop, etc. They will become better adults as a result.
This, at least, is what Steve Stack claims in his book 21st Century Dodos and it is to be suspected that many adults who grew up in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s would agree with him. Perhaps it would help to look briefly at the ideas which Stack propounds, and to which many of that generation subscribe, to see if there might be more to this than meets the eye.
We shall cover some of these things in greater detail later in this book, but let us consider for now just one or two of the suggestions which Stack makes, which he claims would create better adults. What about the idea that danger and risk are a part of life and that exposure to them helps us build our common sense? One often sees this idea expressed by older adults and it is invariably made by those who survived the risks and consequently lived to become better adults in later life. Not all children have been as fortunate. It is sometimes said that history is written by the victors and in the case of childhood reminiscences, the history is written by those who overcame the various risks which some of them now view in such a cavalier way.
Take, for example, the assertion made above that we should allow children to play in the streets and walk to school alone. A lot will be said of these two ideas later, but for now it is enough to note that in 1965, forty-five times as many children were killed by cars each year while walking alone to school and playing in the streets as are currently dying in this way. Or what about another hazard when walking to school unescorted by a parent or other adult, one which is seldom encountered by modern children? In 1965, the same year that almost a thousand child pedestrians were killed by traffic, a little girl of six set off to school alone in the Midlands. She was snatched from the street by a homicidal maniac and turned up dead in a ditch a few weeks later.
Other things which will evidently produce ‘better adults’ are apparently children playing in the park and going to the corner shop by themselves. Both activities can, and did in the 1960s, end in violent death. Here are two more children who did not grow up to be better adults as a result of these experiences; indeed, they did not make it to adulthood at all. Take the nine-year-old girl playing Cowboys and Indians in the local park and also an even younger boy visiting the corner shop alone.
In 1960, a child of nine was playing with her friends in a park in Southampton. No adults were around to supervise their play or even keep an eye on them. Later that day, the little girl’s hideously mutilated body was found in undergrowth; she had been stabbed thirty-eight times. The killer was one of the children present in the park that day. Eight years later, in 1968, a little boy popped into the corner shop near his home in the northern English city of Newcastle. After leaving the shop alone, he was abducted and murdered by a 10-year-old girl.
There are a number of points to think about here. First, it is not being suggested that murders of the sort we have just looked at were very common in the 1960s, merely that they happened and that unaccompanied children, out and about in public places, faced a definite risk of death. In other words, some of them would not have their ‘common sense’ increased or be given the opportunity to grow up to be ‘better adults’ by these experiences; instead, visits to the park, popping to the local corner shop and walking to school alone were, quite literally, the death of them. This is sometimes forgotten when discussing childhood at that time. Those who claim that children today should be able to play in the park and visit the corner shop alone are presumably saying that a certain number of avoidable deaths are a reasonable price to pay for such increased freedom on the part of those who will not be murdered or knocked down and killed by cars. Obviously, the three deaths at which we have just looked would not have happened if the children had not been out by themselves, but were rather accompanied by their parents or other responsible adults, as many of us now feel is desirable and wise.
Secondly, it was not only the danger of sudden death which was faced by children playing out in the streets and parks without adults. In 1975 Cynthia Illingworth, a doctor in Sheffield, published a paper which analysed injuries to children using playground equipment such as swings, roundabouts and slides. This was at a time when it was common practice for parents to send an older child to the park in charge of younger siblings. One might perhaps have a boy of 10 or 11 sent to the park with his fiveyear-old sister. This again is part of the golden age about which so many baby boomers now feel nostalgic. Dr Illingworth found that thousands of small children were suffering fractured skulls, broken arms and various other serious injuries; some were even being killed. Staff at the casualty departments at hospitals to whom she spoke likened the injuries seen from such accidents to those encountered in road-accident victims. Many of these children had been playing in parks, usually without their parents. One of the chief causes of such injuries was that, to quote the report which Dr Illingworth later produced, ‘The younger children were at particular risk on equipment such as the wooden rocking horse or roundabout, when the speed of operation could be controlled by older children.’ Yet one more disadvantage of leaving children in the park to play by themselves! We shall explore the dangers of playgrounds and parks in detail in Chapter 5. Illustration 3 shows a British playground in the 1950s. In this photograph, adults are present, which ameliorated some of the hazard for smaller children. Illustration 4 is of the kind of rocking horse about which Cynthia Illingworth wrote. It will be very familiar to older readers, some of whom might remember their own mishaps while playing on this iconic piece of playground equipment.
Another random statistic: in the 1950s, 300 children a year in Britain permanently lost the sight in one eye. This blindness resulted almost entirely from assaults by other children, using catapults, bows and arrows, airguns, stones, fireworks and bottles. Today, a single child being blinded in this way is likely to be reported in the press. These injuries were almost invariably inflicted when adults were not around to intervene when things were getting out of hand. The 3,000 British children who were blinded in one eye in this way during the 1950s are presumably to be regarded as yet more collateral damage. It seems a heavy price to pay, so that the other children who had not lost an eye while ‘playing out’ could grow up to be better adults and have their common sense increased.
The book by Steve Stack, a quotation from which we examined above, is by no means exceptional. Precisely the same sentiments are to be found in many other books, newspapers, magazines, television programmes, Internet discussions and personal conversations with those who recall the baby boomer years fondly. All tend to illustrate the difficulties in finding out what the past was really like. There is no doubt that the middle-aged and elderly men and women expressing these view are perfectly honest and telling the truth as they understand it, but this does not necessarily mean that they are right. It is,
for instance possible genuinely to think that the fruit which one ate as a child was sweeter and tasted better, even though the true explanation has more to do with the declining number of taste buds in mature years. The same might well apply to memories of eternally sunny summer holidays and snowy Christmases. Memory can be an unreliable thing. For this reason, we must delve a little deeper than merely listening to and recording the subjective impressions of people who were children at the time.
This is not a trivial matter of disputing the recollections of this or that pensioner. Collectively, the reminiscences of the baby boomers have somehow ended up being treated as clinical data upon which government policy should be founded. The wholly erroneous belief that the streets of fifty or sixty years ago were free of what we now call ‘feral’ youths has led to laws being passed which forbid young people even to walk along certain designated streets. The idea of the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ leads to a ‘sugar tax’; worries about an apparent lack of exercise by children has resulted in an official policy to encourage school pupils to walk to school; misleading ideas about a rise in illiteracy causes governments to champion educational techniques which are said to have been successful in the 1950s, although there is no real evidence that this was so. In short, the supposed superiority of childhood during the formative years of the baby boomers over modern childhood has become an official doctrine which is shaping our society.
Other than the fanciful and distorted tales which older people traditionally tell of their childhood days, what reason do we have to believe that childhood in the 1950s or 1960s really was better in any way than today? Moving beyond just anecdotal evidence, which for one reason and another may not be wholly reliable, takes us into deep waters. On the face of it, nothing could be simpler. Why not just analyse the facts and figures from the years following the end of the Second World War and then compare them with what is happening now? Surely in that way, we will be able to build up a detailed and objective picture of the two periods and see just how they shape up against each other? Unfortunately, this is quite impossible.