Post-War Childhood

by Webb, Simon;

  And YOU are one of them! CONGRATULATIONS! You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good. And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were!

  We note that the children born in the post-war years were apparently in the habit of leaving their homes in the morning, at weekends and during school holidays, spending all day in the streets or fields and only returning for their tea. This particular claim has become something of a leit motif for baby boomers; it regularly crops up whenever discussion turns to the difference between childhood in those days and the situation now. Here is Robert Elms, the writer and broadcaster, describing his own childhood in the 1960s: ‘By the time I was nine or ten it became a ritual to be given the money for a one-day bus pass known as a Red Rover and the instruction to come back in time for tea.’ The memory of playing out all day, without the presence of any adults, from breakfast until teatime is a powerful one for many adults born between 1946 and 1964. It invariably crops up when they are talking about their childhood. Going out by themselves to play, and walking to and from school without their parents, has come to be seen as a desirable way of life, one denied to modern children, with dreadful consequences such as the likelihood of developing life-limiting diseases in later life.

  It is very right and proper that older people should believe that their own childhoods were richer, more stimulating and generally an improvement on the lives lived by modern children and if they wish to pretend that their lives as children were like one long Enid Blyton adventure, then this does not hurt anybody. It is a harmless-enough piece of make-believe. In recent years though, rather than merely listening indulgently to these stories, we are increasingly being expected to treat the fanciful reminiscences of men and women in their sixties and seventies as being reliable data, upon which we should act, or even use to formulate government policy. Books are being published with titles such as Toxic Childhood, which purport to show that modern children really are worse off in many ways than their older relatives were at a similar age, suffering from mental health problems, physical ailments, restricted liberty and various other awful consequences of being born into this modern world. Even more bizarrely, government agencies and health trusts are now writing policies, and even framing legislation, which seemingly acknowledge that childhood today is somehow failing and in need of rescuing to make it more like the way of life enjoyed by children in the 1950s. All of which is a little disconcerting, to say the least of it! This peculiar trend is best illustrated by looking first at one of the most popular manifestations of this trend, the idea that today’s children do not get enough exercise and that if we could only recreate the conditions under which children grew up during the 1950s and 1960s, then we would see a tremendous and beneficial change in the physical and mental health of British children. This is thought to be a good idea for several reasons, not least of which is that such a radical change of lifestyle is necessary to tackle what is sometimes called the ‘obesity epidemic’ or ‘obesity time bomb’. All such ideas are predicated on the assumption that children in previous generations were healthier and fitter than young people today and that the best way to improve the health of the rising generation is to take steps to replicate the experience of the baby boomers.

  In 2014 the British government published a draft Cycling Delivery Plan, designed to increase the number of people who travel on bicycle and by foot. One of the targets was that within the next ten years, the percentage of children aged between five and ten who walk to school should rise to 55 per cent. A laudable enough aim, one might think and just the sort of thing to get children to exercise more. Surely, a return to the days when children walked to school, rather than being driven by their parents, could only be a good target to strive for? After all, forty years ago, the overwhelming majority of children did walk to school and were in consequence much fitter and healthier than today’s youngsters. This, at least, is the received view.

  There can be no doubt at all that children in the first three decades after the end of the Second World War spent far more time out and about in the streets without adults. This included playing with their friends after school and at weekends, as well as walking to and from school. In 1971, for example, over 80 per cent of seven- and eight-year-olds walked to school alone. Twenty years later, this figure had fallen below 10 per cent and today it would be surprising to see any seven-year-old arrive regularly at school having walked there alone. Indeed, so unusual would this be that it would almost certainly be the object of unfavourable remark by other parents and probably teachers as well. If a child of that age continued to arrive at school unaccompanied by an adult, then it is entirely possible that Social Services would be notified. At which point, many baby boomers will begin muttering things like ‘The Nanny State!’ and ‘Health and Safety gone mad!’ Surely it makes sense that children should be given the chance to become independent without a lot of mollycoddling and fuss? After all, the baby boomers themselves didn’t come to any harm, did they? Why shouldn’t today’s children be accorded a similar amount of freedom to that which was enjoyed fifty years ago? It definitely made for a more healthy lifestyle, didn’t it?

  The description of baby boomer childhood from the Internet, which we saw above, contains this claim ‘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 were O.K.’ How true actually is this statement? If we wish to know what childhood was like in the 1950s and 1960s, we shall sometimes have to look at records and statistics from that time and use those as the basis for our investigations, combining them where necessary with newspaper reports and other contemporaneous accounts. This is the method used in this book and using such sources to examine the hazards to health faced by the baby boomers reveals a number of shocking facts, facts which nobody seems anxious to acknowledge today. Looking at the genuine situation of the baby boomer children shows just how healthy and safe, or otherwise, their lives actually were.

  As a woman remarks sadly on the Netmums site, regretting the restricted circumstances of her own child’s experiences: ‘I miss the carefree childhood. I could play out from 8 am to 6 pm and my Mum never had to worry I would be snatched.’ This is an interesting idea. Were children safer from being ‘snatched’ a few decades ago? It was not of course only seven- and eight-year-olds who walked to school alone in those days; even six-year-olds were sent off by their mothers every morning to make their own way to school and back. On 8 September 1965, six-year-old Margaret Reynolds set off alone for school. She lived in the Aston district of Birmingham. Little Margaret didn’t arrive at school that day and nothing more was heard of her for four months. Five-year-olds too were allowed to travel the streets on their own back in 1965. On 30 December that year, five-year-old Diana Tift was walking to her grandmother’s house in Bloxwich, when she too simply vanished. The following month the corpses of the missing little girls were found lying side by side in a ditch. They had been murdered.

  This then is one of those things that happened during the childhood years of the baby boomers about which we seldom hear. Obviously, little girls of five and six are far more likely to be abducted if they are walking the streets alone than when they are accompanied by their parents. Still, it may be argued, such murders must surely have been freakishly rare? This is true, although we might ask ourselves how often a wandering maniac would be likely to encounter a little girl whom he could snatch off the streets today. It is hard to recall when last a child of five was kidnapped and killed in this way in Britain by a random stranger; there simply aren’t that many opportunities for such crimes these days.

  If the murder of a child by a complete stranger is today a very unusual occurrence, so too is being killed crossing the road. In an average year in this country
, only about twenty young people under the age of 16 are knocked down and killed by cars. Of course, as any baby boomer will tell you, there were far fewer cars about during their childhood, which must have made the streets safer for them, or so we are supposed to believe. In 1965, the same year that Margaret Reynolds and Diana Tift were murdered, over 900 child pedestrians were killed by traffic in Britain. Somewhere in the region of forty-five times as many children died crossing the road that year as are likely to be killed by cars this year. It can hardly be doubted that this was mainly due to the fact that so many young children were out and about, crossing roads by themselves. This was part of the human cost of the baby boomers walking to school alone and playing out until teatime. In fact, the raw data for traffic accidents are a little misleading; the situation was even worse than at first appears. There were only a third as many cars on the roads fifty years ago. This means that a car in 1965 was 135 times as likely to knock down and kill a child as a car today. A sobering thought indeed and one which causes us to raise our eyebrows at the idea that it will improve the health of modern children if they are encouraged to walk to school, rather than travelling in cars. If children started playing out all day and walking to school by themselves, the first thing we would see, before any fall in obesity levels, would be soaring statistics for deaths and serious injuries among child pedestrians. Despite this, there is a concerted effort throughout Britain to try and get more children to walk to school, because this kept children fit and healthy in the 1950s and 1960s.

  The results of such official nostalgia for 1960s childhood may be seen in Wales. In 2009, the Welsh Assembly government launched a walking and cycling initiative, a flagship policy to get more adults walking and cycling to work, along with children using these methods to travel to school. The following year, the number of children walking to school had risen and this was hailed as a triumph in the battle against obesity. Four years later, those collating statistics for child casualties on the roads noticed a disturbing trend. For two years running, in 2013 and 2014, a rise in the number of child pedestrians being seriously injured on the roads was noted. In 2014, there was a 12 per cent increase in children under 16 suffering serious injuries. For a policy designed to improve health by reducing obesity, this was a regrettable side-effect.

  The baby boomer years were not really safer and more healthy for children in any respect, on the roads or elsewhere. In 1970, deaths from accidental causes for children were running at 17.5 per 100,000 in England. Thirty years later, this had dropped to 4.5 per 100,000; it is now about 2.7 per 100,000. In other words, about seven times as many children were being killed accidentally in the 1960s as are now. Compared with the years when the first baby boomers were born, the situation is even more striking. Ten times as many children were being killed in accidents in the mid-1940s compared with today. When baby boomers complain, as regularly happens, about Health and Safety, they do tend to forget how many children’s lives are being saved by it.

  What of the health generally of children of the baby boomer generation? It has to be said that the picture is consistently and unremittingly grim. Looking back at the document taken from the Internet, we see that: ‘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.’ Again, this sums up the point of view of an awful lot of baby boomers. These things didn’t do them any harm, so why all the fuss now? Of course, the adults today who were born during that period certainly did survive; that much is indisputable. What though of the babies and children who did not? We seldom hear about them. The statement, ‘we survived being born to mothers who . . .’ is, to say the least of it, misleading. The infant mortality rate in 1960, the proportion of babies who died before their first birthday, was five times what it is today. The percentage of babies who died in infancy in Britain that year is roughly the same as a modern-day Third-World country such as Egypt. Nor was the situation very good for older children.

  Most of the great killer diseases in modern Britain, things such as cancer and heart disease, tend to strike almost exclusively at adults. The death of a child under 16 from illness is a terrible, but thankfully rare, occurrence. These days, we view the death of even a single child from an infectious disease as being a shocking tragedy and if two or three die in an outbreak of disease, we are alarmed and demand answers from the medical authorities. For the baby boomers though, the death of children from illness, especially infectious diseases, was routine. In 1947, the year after the birth of the first baby boomers, an epidemic of polio swept Britain. There were 8,000 cases that year, resulting in the death of many children and the crippling of a very large number of those who survived the illness. As late as 1960, there were eighty deaths in Britain from polio and many children left with varying degrees of disability, ranging from slight limps to being permanently confined to wheelchairs. In that same year, there were 750,000 cases of measles, leading to the deaths of 150 children. A much larger number were left deaf or with brain damage.

  Younger readers might not be aware of the dreadful epidemics which swept the country with monotonous regularity during the 1940s and 1950s. Measles, polio, whooping cough, scarlet fever, diphtheria, German measles and mumps: all these killed children and left others crippled, sterile, deaf, blind or with irreversible brain damage. In 1953, there were 46,546 cases of tuberculosis in Britain, which resulted in over 8,000 deaths. Even smallpox was still a hazard for the baby boomers. These random figures might give some idea of the risks faced by children at that time. Often, such infectious diseases struck hardest against young children, who were far more likely to die of them than were healthy adults. Sometimes environmental disasters struck the country, hitting babies and children the hardest. In December 1952 came London’s Great Smog, which killed over 5,000 people. During that winter, the infant mortality rate in the capital doubled.

  The more closely we examine the ‘land of lost content’ in which the baby boomers grew to adulthood, the less appetising it appears! Almost a thousand children a year being knocked down and killed by traffic, child murders, epidemics of infectious diseases which killed hundreds and left thousands crippled for life, rampant knife and gun crime, unchecked sexual abuse: these are just a few of the hazards facing children born between 1946 and 1964. Far from being golden age of childhood, as is sometimes claimed, it was a dangerous time for children to be alive.

  We saw that the yearning for a vanished and happier world for children has been around for many years, but the current obsession with the childhood of half a century or more ago does seem to be qualitatively different in some ways from the general and traditional feelings about childhood in the past. When a country’s politicians and professionals work together to try and recreate some kind of facsimile of the past, enacting legislation and imposing policies upon hospitals, schools and the general public in the process, then there is clearly something a little strange going on. Successive governments, along with countless older people. and even those who weren’t even born until a couple of decades after the baby boomers, all seem convinced that opportunities for a joyously happy and fulfilling childhood somehow came to an end round about 1980, at the time when the last baby boomers, those born in 1964, were leaving school. This is exceedingly odd.

  1980 is of course significant for more than the fact that it marked childhood’s end for the baby boomers. It was also the time that computers, electronic games, compact discs, videos and a host of other things which were to make the world such a different place began to be seen in Britain. In short, it signalled the onset of what one might call the electronic era and the beginning of the digital revolution. This digital revolution is still in full swing and it has had every bit as great an impact on life in this country as the Industrial Revolution did in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Not everybody in Victorian Brita
in was wildly enthusiastic about the visible manifestations of the Industrial Revolution, such things as factory chimneys belching smoke, noisy railway trains, the rapid growth of urban slums, the increasingly frantic speed with which people could communicate by telegraph and so on. They yearned for a gentler, pre-industrial world, with finer values than those they saw in the present day. Such people turned to the Middle Ages for their inspiration, a time when chivalry, stability and old-fashioned values were still, or so it was claimed, to be found in the world. This mania for the medieval period spawned the revival of Gothic architecture, the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, poetry such as Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and William Morris and the Arts and Craft Movement. Even Queen Victoria became a fan of medievalism, she and her husband posing for statues and paintings showing them as historical figures from the era such as Edward III and Queen Philippa.

  The craze for the medieval was essentially a rejection of the modern world of mid-Victorian Britain, especially the ugliness of industry, and a desire to embrace a more attractive-looking past. Something very similar appears to be happening today with what looks rather like a longing for a pre-digital past. Whenever twenty-first-century childhood is under discussion by baby boomers, it seems to be the digital technology with which children are so familiar which excites the greatest unease. Somebody will be sure to mention that when he or she was at school, they had to use long division and there were no calculators to help them. Somebody else will observe that it’s all computers today and that children and teenagers now spend their whole time talking on mobiles or connected to the Internet, with all its attendant perils. To listen to some politicians too, one gets the impression that most of the problems faced by today’s children are somehow bound up with digital technology. The various screens are making them lazy and causing them to become overweight and develop diabetes, the calculators on their phones are harming their ability to do sums, textspeak is damaging their literacy skills, the Internet is making them obsessed with violence and sex: everything seems to be mixed up with digital devices of one sort or another. We will look more at this idea later on.