Post-War Childhood

by Webb, Simon;

  I think Iris fell over . . . I might have been playing with a knife at the time. I fell on top of her. I think the knife went into her shoulder. I had a knife in my hand. The blade was open a little way. I may have stuck it in her more than once. I cannot remember now. She was lying down, her eyes were open and she was breathing normally. I thought she was playing. I said ‘Cheerio’ and went away.

  It will perhaps come as no surprise that after making this statement, the boy was charged with murder. The headline from the report on this case may be seen in Illustration 10.

  This then was a case very like that of James Bulger and yet it has become lost to memory. The similarities are really quite eerie, even down to the way that the newspapers tried to lay the blame for the murder on the supposedly baleful influence of new forms of entertainment. It will be recalled that during the trial of the boys accused of killing James Bulger, reference was made to a videotape of the film Child’s Play 3; Chucky’s Revenge. It was suggested that watching this film might have inspired some of the acts of brutality inflicted on the helpless child. There were even calls to ban the film. Back in 1960, newspapers made much of the fact that the boy who was tried for Iris Dawkins’ murder watched people being stabbed on television thrillers. In one of his statements, he said that: ‘I got excited and stuck it in her. Then I got frightened. I have seen stabbing on television and next week you see them in another part. I watch all the murders. I like the way they track them down and question them.’ The fact that a 10-year-old boy talked of watching ‘all the murders’ on television and of seeing stabbing, led some people to blame television for the murder, just as there are those today who blame violent computer games or the Internet for juvenile crimes of violence. Although the judge at his trial ruled that there was no case to answer, due to procedural irregularities during the police investigation, the boy was eventually convicted of the murder nine years later after making a confession.

  Here then is a concrete instance of what the unsupervised playing of Cowboys and Indians could lead to a little over half a century ago. From an activity such as one might find in the pages of Just William, the scene descends swiftly into something out of Lord of the Flies! It is not of course being suggested that murders of this sort were a common occurrence during the 1950s and 1960s, any more than they are now. What is definitely true though is that such cases were no less frequent than they are today. As far back as one cares to look in British history, there have been children who commit murder. In the early fifteenth century, the death in England was recorded of a five-year-old girl. She had been shot dead by a 10-year-old boy armed with a bow and arrow. Or take William Allnutt from the London district of Hackney, who in 1847, at the age of 12, poisoned his grandfather by sprinkling arsenic on his food. He was sentenced to death, although later reprieved. His case resonates with the trial of another baby boomer at the Old Bailey in 1962. In 1961 and 1962, 14-year-old Graham Young poisoned his father, sister, stepmother and one of his school friends. His stepmother died and when he appeared at the Old Bailey, the diminutive schoolboy was sent to Broadmoor. There were other schoolboys in those early years of the 1960s who tried to kill people. In the same month that Iris Dawkins was murdered, a 15-year-old boy in Leeds was charged with the attempted murder of a little boy of five. He admitted having tied the child up, gagged him and then trying to strangle him. He had done the same thing to an eight-year-old. Again, it is not to be supposed that the 1960s were one long succession of murders and attempted murders by children and teenagers, merely that such things happened in those days just as much as they do today.

  By editing out the gory and distressing parts of the post-war years, the baby boomers have more or less succeeded in creating a wholly fictitious world where children could play safely and with their innocence preserved. Such a time existed in the 1960s no more than in the 1860s or 1760s. There have always been vicious and depraved children and as they grow older, these children sometimes turn to murder. Where the 1950s and 1960s differ from other periods is that many of the ugly and distressing things concerning children which took place at that time have been forgotten, almost as though they have been deliberately and carefully erased from history. This meant that when an event such as the murder of James Bulger took place thirty years later, it was regarded as a manifestation of what some called the ‘moral vacuum’ at the heart of modern, British society.

  Viewing the murder committed by two 10-year-old boys as being something unheard of and a product of a ‘broken’ society had far-reaching effects. The generation of politicians who came to power with Tony Blair in 1997 had been working on the assumption that something would have to be done to roll back what they saw as the tide of anti-social behaviour by children which led, in extreme cases, to the sort of thing which had happened to James Bulger. Here had been truanting children, hanging round a shopping centre with nothing to do but get into trouble. Surely, a new law would be able to put a stop to that sort of thing?

  This whole idea, of a law to control wayward children and ultimately prevent tragedies such as that which had befallen the two-year-old boy in Liverpool, was predicated on the notion that the murder of one child by another was an unheard-of aberration; something which could not have happened when Tony Blair, himself of course a baby boomer, was a child. The result was the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, which introduced the new mechanism of ASBOs to prevent young tearaways from making a nuisance of themselves, and even committing murder, in the future. The distorted perception of the post-war years had far-reaching consequences with which we still live: although ASBOs were abolished in 2015, a similar mechanism still exists.

  One more instance of child-murder by other children should be enough to make the point. We have seen a number of reasons why children being out and about on the streets without an adult to look after them are at increased hazard, despite the supposedly beneficial long-term effects of such freedom. Had Iris Dawkins been with her mother or father, it is exceedingly unlikely that she would have been murdered on that fateful Saturday afternoon in 1960. Some of the children we have seen come to harm through being out and about by themselves have really been very young indeed. In Chapter 1, for instance, we looked at five-year-old Diana Tift who was snatched from the street while walking alone to her grandmother’s house in December 1965. Children younger than that were allowed out alone though. So it was that when, on the afternoon of 25 May 1968, four-year-old Martin Brown went alone into a sweetshop in the Scotswood district of Newcastle-upon-Tyne; Wilson Dixon, who served him, thought nothing more about it once the little boy had left the shop. A four-year-old visiting the shops by himself simply wasn’t a remarkable or noteworthy occurrence in those days. The brief sighting by a shop assistant on that Saturday afternoon, almost fifty years ago, was the last time that anybody other than his killer saw Martin Brown alive. Later that day, the little boy’s body was found in a derelict house near the sweetshop. There were no marks on the dead child and no reason to suspect foul play. An open verdict was returned at the subsequent inquest.

  Two months later an even younger child was out without an adult. Brian Howe was just three years old. He was lured to a piece of waste ground by two girls, one of whom was 11 and the other 13. There, the child was strangled and his corpse mutilated. An attempt was made to skin his penis with a razor blade. Eventually the girls were arrested for Brian Howe’s murder and it then became clear that Martin Brown had also died after being abducted and attacked by one or both of the two children implicated in the killing and mutilation of Brian Howe. The younger of the two children had been 10 when Martin Brown died.

  At the subsequent trial, the older of the children was acquitted, but 11-year-old Mary Bell was convicted of the manslaughter of both of the little boys. The first killing had taken place the day before her 11th birthday. Crimes of this sort by children are as uncommon today as they were in the 1960s, but to suggest that they are more common, or that the murder of a little boy by 10-year-olds tells us anything useful abou
t the state of our society, are both untrue. At all times in British history, there have been children who feel the need or desire to kill other children. This was the case during the 1950s and 1960s, just as much as it is in today’s ‘Broken Britain’. Four-year-old Martin Brown was of course one of the last of the baby boomers to be born and one of those whose memories of playing out until teatime we will not be reading about.

  It has been claimed that one of the most frightening aspects of modern youth culture in Britain is the supposed propensity for boys and youths to carry, and even on occasion use, knives. The suggestion is made that this problem is now endemic in certain parts of the country, especially the big cities. In 2015, the law was changed, so that anybody found carrying a knife in a public place would, after a second conviction, face a mandatory prison sentence. This became known as the ‘Second strike and you’re out’ policy. Just as with the creation of the mechanism for dishing out ASBOs, this law was in response to a perceived problem which our legislators saw as being new and alarming. It is not necessary for anything to be done with the knife; it is enough that it is being carried around in somebody’s pocket. Draconian measures of this sort are felt necessary to tackle what is sometimes known as the ‘knife culture’. The carrying of a knife is one of the commonest reasons for exclusion from school and even primary schools are now having to take steps actively to detect and deter pupils from carrying knives.

  All of which sounds most worrying and you would be hard-pressed to find any responsible adult who is not in favour of strong measures being taken to tackle this apparent scourge. Knives in primary schools, indeed! What is the world coming to? Once again, we see laws being drawn up which are predicated on the faulty memories of older people and those who listen to them, who wish to restore the world to the prelapsarian state of innocence which supposedly existed during the youth of the baby boomers. Perhaps it would help if we examined a country in the grip of a genuine knife culture and see what lessons might be drawn from it.

  Imagine, if you will, a time when practically every schoolboy in the land owns or carries a knife. The possession of edged weapons is an accepted fact of life and parents even encourage this unhealthy state of affairs by buying knives and giving them to their sons for birthday and Christmas presents. This knife culture is even reinforced by the Church. Cathedrals across the country sell knives for children in their souvenir shops, with pictorial representations of the cathedral on their hilts. Knives are one of the most popular items for children to bring back from holidays at the seaside. The largest youth organization in the country encourages members openly to wear sheath knives on their belts. In schools, games involving the throwing and brandishing of knives are enormously popular among pupils, even for those below the age of 11. Incredibly, teachers smile indulgently at all this, tolerating the display of weapons. The police make no attempt to discourage the carrying of knives, taking it for granted that most boys will have one in their possession, either at school or in the street.

  This imaginary excursion has taken us not to some remote and dysfunctional foreign country nor to a strange and dystopian future, but rather back to the cosy, childhood world of the British baby boomers. In those days, one would have been hard-pressed to find a boy who did not own several penknives, some with razor-sharp blades four or five inches long. Many of these were souvenirs from the seaside or school trips, with gaily-coloured coats of arms or depictions of townscapes, castles or cathedrals and so on covering the handles. In Illustration 7 we see such a knife, a souvenir from the seaside.

  The penknife was for many years an integral feature of British boyhood. These knives, which are known sometimes as pocket knives, were originally devised, as the name suggests, to be carried on the person and used for sharpening quills into serviceable pens. Even when the nib had been carved, it was still prone to getting twisted or mangled during writing and so it was necessary to mend it from time to time. A folding knife which could be safely carried in the pocket was the very thing for this.

  Because it had such innocuous origins, associated with learning and literacy, the penknife was not viewed in the same way as other knives. A youth armed with a Bowie knife might be up to no good, but having a penknife in one’s pocket was viewed in quite a different light. Due to the various attachments with which penknives typically came, they were often seen as useful tools, rather than knives per se. Bottle and can openers, little saws, screwdrivers, the thing for getting stones out of horses’ hoofs; the list of supplementary gadgets on a good penknife was endless. At the heart of the thing though, its very raison d’être one might say, was a sharp blade.

  When debate in the press turns to the subject of knife crime, it is as well to recall the state of affairs which once existed in this country regarding the carrying of knives by children and young people, for it helps to put modern views in context. Worries about the carrying of blades and the legislation which has imposed such savage penalties on the practice of boys having knives in their pockets are all based on the assumption that children today are somehow different and far more ungovernable and wild than those of sixty years ago. It might have been safe for those who are now members of the judiciary or who sit in the legislature to carry knives around all the time when they were youngsters, but such a state of affairs can certainly not be tolerated with today’s youth! Why, there’s no telling what they’ll get up to with the things; they’ll be stabbing each other to death all over the place. Once again, we see the myth clearly set out that children today are different from those of their parents and grandparents’ generation. Children in the 1950s could be trusted with edged weapons, but that was because they were a different breed. These days, young people are not to be relied upon to act sensibly and laws have to be passed to ensure that they cannot even buy so much as a butter knife until they are able to prove with photographic evidence that they are at least 21 years of age. Times have changed and nobody wishes to see schoolboys with knives in their pockets, which because the inferior and degraded sate of modern youth now represents a clear and present danger to others.

  Of course, it was not only penknives which were carried by children in the past. Boy Scouts often carried larger sheath knives, which they wore at their hips. When attending camp or sometimes out and about on other events, it was quite the thing for scouts to have fearsome-looking knives dangling from their belts. These sometimes had ornamental handles and were definite status symbols, the boys boasting of who had the largest or sharpest knife.

  Larger knives were expensive and were often given by parents or uncles as Christmas or birthday presents. These knives, and others of various kinds, were played with, used to sharpen pencils, brandished, displayed and sometimes used to inflict injuries or even mortal wounds on other children. It was common for boys to have a whole collection of knives knocking about in their rooms; souvenirs from school trips, sheath knives from when they were in the Scouts, large penknives with a dozen blades, old army clasp knives that some relative who had been in the forces had passed on to them and half a dozen other types. Knives were a background to baby boomer boyhood.

  Knives had many purposes, other than just being used for whittling sticks. They were often used in games in the school playground or park. Here is an example of the sort of game commonly played by schoolboys, and sometimes girls, in the 1950s and 1960s. The object of Splits, as the name suggests, was to cause your opponent actually to perform the splits and then try to stretch his legs even further. Two people stood facing each other, one of them holding a knife. A penknife could be used for this; but sheath knives or even a kitchen knives were not unknown. In short, children at primary school would sometimes smuggle their mother’s bread knife into a primary school.

  The first person would throw the knife, so that it stuck into the ground near their opponent’s feet. If it did not stick in by the blade, then this go did not count; the knife had therefore to be hurled down with great force. If it did stick in, then the other person would need to place his f
oot where the knife was and it was then his turn. Accidents were inevitable and it was not altogether unknown for children to end up with knife wounds to their feet or shins! In essence, the game was a little like twister and the wonder of it is that not one adult ever seemed to find anything disturbing or even unusual about seeing children playing with blades in this way.

  Here is another popular game involving knives, one which resulted in many minor injuries and not a few visits to the casualty department of the local hospital. Girls had clapping and skipping games, which involved clapping or jumping over a skipping rope to a rhythm, usually accompanied by some chanted rhyme. No boy would have been seen dead playing such games, but they had their own version of games involving rhythmic movements, which used knives or other sharp implements such as dividers or compasses. In its simplest form, this game consisted of spreading one’s left hand on a desk or, if outdoors, on the grass and then stabbing round the outstretched fingers as fast as one dared; the object being or course to avoid chopping off a finger in the process. Sometimes, more complex patterns would be attempted. The boy might stab first between the first two fingers, then the next two and then back to the first pair and so on. This required great dexterity and cool nerves. Of course, all the boys wished to show that they were quicker and more adept at their use of the knife than any of the others present, and so there was always the need to go faster and engage in more complicated patterns than anybody else in the group. It was very rare for a game of this sort not to end ultimately in bloodshed!