Post-War Childhood

by Webb, Simon;

  There are several difficulties with just listing various statistics relating to 1957 or 1967 and then comparing them with similar data for 2017 and hoping to be able to see how things have changed over the last sixty years. Sometimes the information is not available and even when it is, the methods used for measuring various things about the condition and achievements of children have changed completely. A few examples will make this clearer. Let us consider first a claim frequently made in the press; that the academic attainments of children today are inferior to those of fifty or sixty years ago. This is often described in terms of the ‘dumbing down’ of our educational system. One aspect of this is that illiteracy is said to be on the rise and indeed to be approaching epidemic proportions. It is often suggested in newspapers, using official figures, that one British adult in five is functionally illiterate; a far higher rate than was believed to exist in the 1950s or 1960s. Surely, this figure alone tells us that something is seriously wrong with modern schools? Why can’t we go back to the old ways of teaching, which reduced illiteracy to practically zero? It is this perception which led several years ago to the officially recommended adoption in most maintained state schools of the use of phonics for teaching children to read. Out went all the trendy, whole-word teaching methods popular in the 1970s, along with the ‘real books’ schemes of the 1980s and instead, the sounds of the alphabet were once again emphasized.

  Appearances are proverbially deceptive and this is very definitely the case with the apparently declining levels of literacy in this country caused, according to some, by sloppy teaching and by others the widespread use of mobile telephones and other digital technology. Until the 1970s, there was a very simple, rough-and-ready means of determining whether or not an individual was literate. Literacy was defined as the ability to read and write a simple note. If one could write, ‘Gone to shops, Back in ten minutes’ or read such a communication from another person, then you were literate. These days, more precise and, it is claimed, scientific methods are used and simply being able to read and write is not considered enough to be described as ‘literate’. People are tested on, among other things, their so-called ‘document literacy’. This is based upon the ability to decipher bus timetables and other tables and charts. There have always been plenty of people who struggle to work out when the next bus is due, the author of this book being one of them! It is this group, those who cannot always extract information from charts and tables or make sense of newspaper articles from the Guardian, who are now officially regarded as illiterate. In short, literacy is defined by the ability to gain a GCSE in English Language of at least Grade C. Using the same method of measurement as that used in the 1950s would reveal that the actual literacy rate in today’s Britain is, just as it was then, virtually 100 per cent.

  Much the same thing happens when we try to work out whether or not children in the 1950s were really leaner and healthier than those at school today. Some readers may be aware of the dramatic rise in obesity which struck the world in 1998, when the Body Mass Index threshold used to calculate whether a person was overweight was arbitrarily reduced from 27 to 25. Overnight, twenty-nine million Americans became overweight or obese. In this country, an ‘obesity time bomb’ was created, with many hundreds of thousands of people, including children, being classified as overweight. When the goalposts are being shifted in this way, it becomes very difficult to know if we are comparing like with like.

  As with literacy and obesity, so too with crime and anti-social behaviour. Take knife and gun crime, for instance. As I write, newspapers are full of alarming headlines which talk of a rise in gun crime, with children as young as 10 being arrested for firearms-related offences. At first sight, this all sounds quite horrifying. Surely we cannot deny that this is a new trend? Children weren’t toting guns in the 1950s, were they? Except of course, they were. Close reading of the articles beneath these terrifying headlines reveal that by ‘firearms offences’, the police are lumping together the figures relating not only to actual firearms, but also starting pistols, air rifles and replica weapons. If we rephrase the question as, ‘Were 10 and 11-year-olds in the 1950s playing around with airguns?’, then the answer is of course that they were; far more than is the case today. The Just William stories often mention William’s affection for airguns and in real life, air pistols and air rifles were all over the place. Boys’ comics carried advertisements for airguns and these were taken out to play with an alarming frequency. Illustration 5 shows an unremarkable advertisement from 1957, designed to persuade fathers to give their 10-and 11-year-old sons air rifles for birthday or Christmas presents. In those days, of course, no policeman would have dreamed of arresting a boy with an airgun. If the thing was obviously being misused, then he might step in and take the boy home, giving a few words of advice to the parents, but other than that airguns were accepted as a fact of life.

  A similar situation exists with knives and knife crime. If a police officer sixty years ago saw a 12-year-old with a knife, then he would not even have bothered to break his step. After all, practically all boys carried knives at that time. We are far less tolerant today of children and teenagers carrying around potentially deadly weapons and so arrests and convictions for the possession of knives and guns have soared. This tells us very little and certainly does not tend to suggest an ‘epidemic’ of knife or gun crime. Illustration 6 shows an open penknife of the kind carried by almost every baby boomer boy at some time or another.

  All of which makes it extraordinarily difficult to obtain a rounded picture of childhood and adolescence in the decades following the end of the Second World War, one that may profitably be compared with the situation today. Nevertheless, the attempt will be made, drawing upon newspaper reports, contemporary observations and what records do exist. The result might be more than a little surprising to anybody who has formed a view on the childhood experiences of the baby boomers relying only on their own recollections in late middle age, or what is worse, from reading what is said about this era in newspapers and magazines.

  Chapter 1

  The Land of Lost Content:

  Childhood in the Good Old Days

  For most of recorded history, older people have been in the habit of claiming that everything was a good deal better during their own childhoods than is now the case. The summers were longer, the fruit sweeter, the food more wholesome and the world an altogether happier and less complicated place when they were young. Not only that, but the children themselves were different in the old days. They were more obedient, industrious, well-behaved, polite, happy and healthy. Such sentiments were being expressed centuries before the birth of Christ and the notion is still going strong; that this modern world is not a patch on the one which existed fifty or sixty years ago and children not what they once were. The Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes was composed in the third century BC, perhaps 2,300 years ago. Its author wrote, ‘Never ask, “Oh, why were thing so much better in the old days?” It’s not an intelligent question.’

  This imaginary world, very different from our own and the children much happier, has always lingered tantalisingly on the edge of living memory, so close that we feel that our generation has only just missed it. It is generally the time in which our parents or grandparents grew up. In the last century of so, the golden age was the Edwardian Era before the First World War and then later, the years before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Today, it is the 1950s and 1960s which were such a wonderful time to be young. Children at that time had, according to some of those who were children in those days, unlimited freedom to roam a world which was safe and inviting; a strange and magical land where no serious harm ever befell children, as long as they made sure to be home by teatime.

  A. E. Housman summed up perfectly this yearning for a vanished, enchanted world, when he wrote:

  Into my heart an air that kills

  From yon far country blows:

  What are those blue remembered hills,

  What spires
, what farms are those?

  That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain,

  The happy highways where I went

  And cannot come again.

  Most of us, at least when we are young, tend to take this sort of thing with a pinch of salt. When Granny tells us how much healthier everybody was in the old days, with all the fresh air and exercise that they got, and the food eaten wasn’t contaminated with all those dreadful additives and other chemicals, we listen politely but without placing too much credence upon her tales. Similarly, when we are informed that children in the past were better behaved, stronger, healthier, happier, more polite, pluckier, possessed of greater reserves of initiative and studied harder at school or that the summers were longer and the winters snowier, we treat these assertions with caution. After all, memory can be faulty and there is no reason at all to suppose that recollections of this sort from over half a century ago are wholly accurate and objective. It is hardly likely that the world really was a better place when our parents and grandparents were little children, nor that children were really all that different, whatever we might now be told.

  There are a number of factors at work when we see older people constructing fantasy worlds of this sort; some physiological, others psychological. Beginning first with the way in which physiological deterioration as we grow older helps shapes our memories of childhood, it must be borne in mind that once we pass our mid-twenties, our faculties and senses usually begin to decline and fail. We have fewer taste buds and those we do have shrink and are less efficient. The range of sounds we are able to detect shrinks; our eyesight is seldom as keen in later years as it was in our youth. All of which means that our earliest memories of tastes, for instance, will seem more vivid and rich than those we actually experience in middle and old age. Few of us wish to confront our own failing faculties and declining vitality and it is therefore more reassuring and satisfying to pretend that the fault lies with modern food, rather than our own bodies. It’s not that our tongues are gradually becoming less sensitive, the blame lies rather with this awful stuff that the shops sell now. When we were children, you could buy apples which tasted like apples. Everything today is so tasteless and bland!

  Another reason why childhood experiences are remembered as being richer and more enjoyable than those in middle or old age is psychological, rather than physiological. The first time we encounter something, whether it is eating an ice cream or walking through snow, will always make more of an impression upon us than the hundreds or thousands of subsequent times we go through the experience. There is the exhilarating sense of novelty about early childhood experiences which cause them to stand out as being particularly vivid and memorable. From swimming in a river for the first time to sliding down a hill on a toboggan, the first time is always likely to be recalled in the future as the best of all. This is another of the factors at work when older people claim that their childhoods were marvellous, far more exciting than the way things are now. For them, this is perfectly true, but it tells us little about the objective state of the world, either then or now.

  Human memory is not a passive process of simply pointing our eyes and ears at a scene and recording faithfully all that is seen and heard. It consists rather of an active and continuous mechanism of editing and enhancing the original sense impressions, discarding some and enlarging others. Why would we wish to retain memories of disappointment and sadness when we were little, in preference to images of pleasure and enjoyment? This too contributes to our skewed perspective when looking back at our schooldays from the perspective of fifty years or so of subsequent life. How else are we to explain why so many older people recall the past with such enthusiasm, claiming that their schooldays were the happiest of their lives? It is curious, and more than a little suspicious, that one never meets a 14-year-old who believes this to be true.

  It is often expressly stated that fewer children were being abducted or murdered by strangers during the 1950s and that children were able to play freely out of doors without the risk of falling prey to predatory paedophiles. This is quite untrue, as a quick trawl through newspaper archives soon reveals. The reason for this particular misconception is not hard to find. These days, news of a murder will spread around the Internet before it even reaches the newspapers. It would be all but impossible to prevent a child with a mobile telephone from finding out about all sorts of horrors, including child abuse and murder. This was not the case fifty or sixty years ago. Few children at that time were avid newspaper readers and if they didn’t listen to the news on the radio or watch it on television, then they would be most unlikely to hear about murders involving children.

  There is a natural, widespread and understandable tendency for parents to shield and protect their children from unpalatable or distasteful aspects of life, in case they become distressed or frightened about the terrible things which have befallen some child of similar age to them. For this reason, and because it was easily accomplished in the pre-electronic media years of the baby boomers’ childhoods, there was a tacit conspiracy among adults to conceal news of dreadful murders or child abuse. It was felt that there was no need to draw attention to such things in any case, having a bearing as they sometimes did upon sexual depravity, sexual activity of any kind being a taboo subject for discussion in most families at that time. It is for this reason that many baby boomers did not realize then, and have never taken the trouble in later years to find out, about the child murders and sexual abuse of children at the time that they were growing up. One or two especially dreadful cases might have filtered through to them, the so-called Moors Murderers being one of these, but in general child abuse or murders were unknown to children at that time.

  The baby boomers are merely the latest generation to wax wistful about their wonderful childhoods. The term ‘baby boomer’ itself might perhaps need a little explanation. During the Second World War, with many husbands away fighting, the birth rate, for obvious reasons, dropped. At the end of the war in 1945, the large-scale resumption of connubial activity resulting from the return of the servicemen who had been away from home led to a surge in births nine months later. This rise in the birth rate lasted for nearly twenty years and became known facetiously as the post-war ‘baby boom’. Children born between roughly 1946 and 1964 are therefore popularly known as baby boomers.

  The baby boomers, who now range in age from their early fifties to perhaps 70 years of age, enthusiastically promote the idea that the past was a glorious place, particularly for children, who were of course all happier and healthier than kids today as well as enjoying far more freedom. So far, so good, and in proclaiming their affection for a lost world of childhood where everything was better than it is now, the baby boomers are doing no more than their parents and grandparents had done before them. Here is a piece which sums up this view of childhood during the thirty years or so which followed the end of the Second World War. It is worth quoting this account, which in various forms has been circulating for several years on the Internet, at length, for it contains a number of themes at which we shall later be looking in detail. In 2012, the Daily Mail described this as ‘the new online sensation’. The newspaper went on to say that it was, ‘A lyrical evocation of growing up in the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, when children were safe to play where they liked’. Again, we note the curious idea that children were safe when they played out of doors sixty years ago, in a way that is no longer the case. By implication, the streets and fields of Britain have become more dangerous with the passage of time.

  CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1940’s, 50’s, 60’s! First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes or cancer. Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints. We had no childproof lids on medicine b
ottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking. As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

  Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds, KFC or Subway. Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn’t open on the weekends, somehow we didn’t starve to death! We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drinks with sugar in it, but we weren’t overweight because . . . WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!

  We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back by teatime. No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K. We built tree houses and dens and played in river beds with Matchbox cars. We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii, Xboxes, no video games at all, no 999 TV channels, no video/dvd films, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms . . . WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them! We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. You could buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns only at Easter time. We were given air guns and catapults for our tenth birthdays and rode bikes to our friends’ houses.

  Our teachers used to hit us with canes and gym shoes and bullies always ruled the playground at school. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!