Post-War Childhood

by Webb, Simon;

  These days, stabbing games such as the one above are more likely to be carried out with felt-tip pens, rather than knives or dividers, which may not be a bad a thing at all. The reason for going into a little detail about knives and the part they played in the average baby boomer boy’s life has been to demonstrate that there was a genuine and pervasive knife culture at that time, which appears to have vanished from their collective memory. This interest in knives extended into children’s fiction. William Brown and his friends, from Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories, were enthusiastic carriers of knives. William’s parents gave him a knife for a Christmas present and when he went to stay with a relative, he was presented with a Burmese sheath knife by a retired army officer. Knives feature in quite a few of the William stories.

  Even in girls’ school fiction, knives make an appearance as quite an unremarkable part of everyday life among children. Autumn Term, a school story by Antonia Forest published in 1948, has as its protagonist 12-year-old Nicola Marlow. She goes off to boarding school, taking with a her a knife with no fewer than sixteen blades. This is openly displayed and none of the pupils nor staff bat an eyelid at the thought of such a young child waving the thing about! Fictional it may have been, but in real life too, there was a general assumption by teachers that boys, and sometimes girls, would be carrying knives. If some minor job in the classroom required a screwdriver, for instance, the teacher might well ask if anybody had a penknife handy, whereupon a dozen boys would volunteer theirs. A boy who never carried a knife during the baby boomer era would have been regarded as something of an oddity.

  The inevitable riposte from baby boomers at this point will be that although penknives and other weapons might have been used for such harmless pursuits as whittling sticks and sharpening pencils, children in those days certainly would never have dreamed of sticking the things in each other with deadly intent, the way that they do these days. Again, we encounter a peculiar type of false memory syndrome. Stabbings by and against children and young people did occur regularly in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, just as they do today. Knives taken to school were used as weapons, sometimes to deadly effect. This point will perhaps be illuminated if we examine some specific cases of this sort of thing from that time.

  We have already seen how Iris Dawkins was hacked to death during a game of Cowboys and Indians. This murder was carried out by a schoolboy wielding an ordinary penknife. In December of that same year, 1960, 13-year-old John Day was taken to hospital in Tilbury after being stabbed in the course of a fight in a school playground. Knives were being used by youths on the streets that month, as well as in school playgrounds. Two weeks after John Day was stabbed at school, 17-year-old Keith Muncy was stabbed to death in a street fight. The 16-year-old boy who was charged with his murder apparently accused the dead boy of staring at him.

  The remarkable thing about knife crime among young people during the 1960s is that it did not make the headlines, being viewed as not especially newsworthy. The stabbing of 13-year-old John Day rated only four lines in the Times, appearing in the ‘other news’ section. An increase of a halfpenny in the price of a loaf of bread was evidently seen as more important, this item appearing before news of the school stabbing. Here is another school stabbing, this time from 1963. A 13-year-old boy at a school in Old Trafford stabbed a fellow pupil during a lesson, ‘to make him jump’. At Manchester County Juvenile Court, he was put on probation for two years.

  Some of this schoolboy knife crime was more serious than simply jabbing a fellow pupil and leaving a superficial wound. In 1966, PC Brian Armstrong was stabbed to death in Gateshead while questioning a 14-year-old schoolboy. The child was later charged with the police officer’s murder. The weapon used was the traditional schoolboy’s penknife. Just imagine the conclusions which would be drawn about the terrible state of childhood in the modern world if we read in tomorrow’s newspaper about a policeman being stabbed to death by a schoolboy! Throughout the 1960s, knife crime among children and young people came in waves. In May 1968, 15-year-old Clive Chambers was stabbed during a playground fight at Holloway Boys’ School in North London. A boy of the same age was arrested after the incident. The following month, 13-year-old Joseph Gil was stabbed in the playground of St Bonaventure’s School. Another pupil at the school appeared in court, charged with wounding. There is not enough space to list every such case from the period at which we are looking, but it is perhaps enough to note that knives were being carried and used as weapons by children and young people, both at school and in the streets. One final example will show how serious were some of these incidents of knife crime, which took place against the background of what can only be described as a ‘knife culture’. At Wandsworth Comprehensive School in South London in 1971, 14-year-old Lee Selmes was stabbed to death in a fight. Another 14-year-old pupil was charged with his murder.

  It may be objected that offences such as those above were rarities during the 1960s, whereas today they are commonplace. This is a fair point and leads us neatly to a point made earlier in this book; the difficulties encountered when trying to prove that this or that phenomenon is increasing, decreasing or, as is often suggested of knife crime, reaching epidemic proportions. Obviously, newspapers do not report every incident of the use of knives at school and so we must look elsewhere if we wish to discover an objective estimate of the rate of such crimes. We can hardly rely upon the memories of those who were themselves children at the time, because as we have seen, there is a distinct tendency to play down any unfavourable aspect of childhood in the distant past. Perhaps we can turn to the records from the courts or the Home Office? Here we come to the problem of analysing and examining statistics from the past which might have been gathered or recorded in different ways than they are now. In this instance, the possibility of establishing how many children were being stabbed or convicted of wounding or killing others with knives in the 1960s and then comparing these data with those being collected today, is remote in the extreme.

  For one thing, only in the last few years has the Home Office begun to collect the figures for how many people are stabbed each year in Britain. This is of course because ‘stabbing’ is no more a specific criminal offence than is ‘mugging’, another offence whose incidence is hard to determine. Statistics often relate to what the police call ‘knife-enabled crime’, which covers domestic murders, robberies and a host of other things. Not all the crimes in this catch-all category actually involve people being injured by knives. If a boy robs somebody by threatening him with a knife, that too is listed as a ‘knife-enabled crime’. During the 1950s and 1960s, the use of a knife might be mentioned in the original charge, but actual convictions were listed as offences such as causing Grievous Bodily Harm and so on. Without trawling through the records of every court in the country, it is therefore impossible even to hazard a guess as to how many stabbings were being carried out by or against children. All that we can state with certainty is that such things were taking place during the 1960s, just as they are today. There are also indications, from the amount of news coverage given to these cases, that they were not regarded as being as serious fifty years ago as they are now.

  The above crimes involving the use of knives by schoolboys are mainly from the 1960s, but as far back as one cares to look, the same kind of thing may be found. On 24 June 1954, for instance, a Shepherds Bush schoolboy was sent to an approved school when he appeared at the West London Juvenile Court. It was stated that he had been running what the prosecution described as a ‘protection racket’ at the school he attended. When four boys refused to pay up, he carved his initials onto their arms with a penknife. It is the same however far back we look in our quest for the mythical world of wholesome, happy and uncomplicated childhood. In every age, there are schoolboys and schoolgirls who behave in savage and violent ways. Whenever we see such things, for example in the murder of James Bulger or Damilola Taylor, we are shocked and try to persuade ourselves that this never used to happen in the old days an
d that something must in recent years have gone wrong with society to breed such monsters. Just to underline the point, let us look back to the halcyon era of the years ‘before the war’. Let’s take a random twelve-month period and see what turns up.

  In the quiet Cheshire town of Nantwich in February 1926, a schoolboy was stabbed in the back by another pupil. The wounding apparently resulted from two other boys pretending to fight each other with penknives and the injured schoolboy simply got in the way. Less than a year later, in Castleford, a town in the north of England, two schoolboys stole a couple of penknives from a shop. They then walked down the street, stabbing girls in the legs as they went. The boys were later charged with unlawful wounding. In that same month, January 1927, a 14-year-old schoolboy called Arthur Edward Shillibeer appeared at the Old Bailey in London, charged with murdering a 13-year-old boy by stabbing him. This was a gang-related killing. A group of boys in the south London district of Bermondsey, all aged between 12 and 15, were terrorising the neighbourhood by their violent activities. Eleven of the gang cornered Arthur Shillibeer and in defence he took out his penknife and used it to kill the leader of the gang. Because of the nature of the crime, the charge of murder was dropped and a plea of manslaughter accepted by the prosecution. Here is a tale of teenage gang violence in the inner cities which could have come straight from today’s newspapers. It happened less than a decade after the end of the First World War.

  The last case mentioned above has a very topical feel to it. ‘Gangs’ and ‘feral’ children and youths are popular folk devils of modern Britain. Fears of juvenile knife crime often go hand in hand with talk of gangs and ‘postcode wars’. Such things too, we are led to believe, are ugly manifestations of modern society. Once again, the memories of the past have become sanitized and unwelcome facts artfully erased from history. Gangs and postcode wars are also nothing new, being an accepted part of life in Britain’s big cities fifty or sixty years ago. For those unfamiliar with the expression, ‘postcode war’, the idea is that young people in some parts of cities such as London and Birmingham are so fiercely territorial and violent that they cannot leave the area of their own postcode and visit neighbouring districts for fear of being attacked. Newspapers treat this too as yet another alarming symptom of the degenerate state of modern society, with feral youths running riot through the streets. Just fancy, these youngsters cannot visit houses only a mile or two from their own home, or they will face mindless savagery. That was most definitely not a feature of children’s lives as the baby boomers were growing up. Except, of course, it was.

  In 1966 a book was published which studied boys growing up in East London at that time. In Adolescent Boys in East London, Peter Wilmott drew heavily upon interviews with, and extracts from the diaries of, boys living in London’s East End, specifically the Bethnal Green area. In one interview, a teenage boy discusses the difficulties of moving freely around the East End at that time:

  We don’t go up towards Brick Lane because they’d come down and jump on us. We don’t start on them. Anyone who wants to come in our area, they can as long as they don’t start on us. We don’t even go over to Stepney, because if we went over there, one night they would come over here, and they’ve got so many more than we have got that we wouldn’t have a chance.

  Which sounds uncannily like the postcode wars that one hears about today. Brick Lane and Stepney are only half a mile or so from Bethnal Green and yet some of the boys interviewed were reluctant to travel that far from their own homes, in case it triggered a violent response from others.

  The thesis that our society is in some way ‘broken’ and producing large numbers of disaffected youths who will prey on respectable people, terrorising and even killing them if they get in the way, is a popular and widely-accepted one. Many people believe that there is something uniquely rotten about our society and that it has a toxic effect on some of the children born into and brought up in it. Sometimes the Internet is blamed, at others the breakdown in stable family life, combined with slack and trendy educational techniques used in our useless schools. Others believe that immigration, the precipitous decline in church attendance or the use of drugs play a part. Whatever the cause, all are agreed that it never used to be like this when they and their parents were at school. It is a modern phenomenon which has only really taken hold in the last twenty or twenty-five years.

  The idea of feral youths or even feral children is a captivating one. The term ‘feral’ is chosen because this is the condition of formerly domesticated and biddable animals who have returned to the wild and begun to live again by their teeth and claws. It conjures up a marvellous image of semi-human children who although they live in our midst, conduct themselves as though they were characters from Lord of the Flies, living on a remote desert island. It might help to make sense of this myth if we were to see how large numbers of children and young people were actually behaving in this country during the 1950s and 1960s and to see if there was any appreciable difference between the conduct of wild young people in those days, compared with now.

  On 9 May 1956, the Manchester Guardian, forerunner of today’s Guardian, contained an article by a schoolteacher and youth club leader, headed, ‘Children in Gangs; The Bond of Secrecy that Holds the Initiate in Thrall’. There had been a lot of talk in the newspapers in previous weeks about the extent to which juvenile delinquency and violence in Britain was associated with membership of gangs and the thrust of this article was that belonging to gangs was enormously common among boys from a very early age. Now of course there are gangs and gangs. William Brown, from the Just William stories, might be said to be the leader of a gang known as, ‘The Outlaws’. That sort of thing was all pretty harmless, although some of William’s activities these days would probably be enough to see him and his friends branded as feral youths! The gangs about which there was such concern in the early summer of 1956 were a very different matter.

  The article in the Manchester Guardian focused upon an aspect of the gangs to which many schoolchildren and teenagers belonged, which will ring a bell with readers today. It will be remembered that 10-year-old Damilola Taylor was stabbed to death in 2000 for refusing to join, or have any connection with, a gang of schoolboys in south London. The boys who killed him were aged just 12 and 13. In 1956, this sort of thing was a great worry and boys who refused to join gangs or tried to leave them, were also being threatened with violence, as were their relatives. The woman who wrote the piece described how on being released from approved schools, some gang members tried to ‘go straight’. They were not allowed to escape from the influence of the gang though and, to quote the author of the article:

  Boys coming out of approved schools and Borstals and trying to go straight got beaten up and finally in despair rejoined the gang, and eventually were picked up by the police again. In court if asked by the magistrates what had made them take to crime again they were silent. It was said that certain members of the gang attended the trial seated where they could watch the prisoner’s face, fastened behind their coat lapels were razor blades which were thumbed back so they could catch the wretched prisoner’s eye.

  It was also claimed that the grandmother of one gang member who tried to break away from the gang kept an axe by the front door, as she was so terrified of reprisals against her or other members of her family.

  A few weeks before this article appeared, a group of chief constables had announced that three-quarters of all juvenile crime was committed by children working together in groups. Gang culture was seen as a serious and growing problem that year. In July, 16-year-old Patrick Corr had been convicted at the Old Bailey of having stabbed to death an 18-year-old member of a rival group of young men with whom he had had an altercation. It was the sudden eruption of mindless violence which frightened ordinary people. This was in the main a problem of the larger cities, although, as we shall see, it could just as easily began in seaside towns like Margate or Brighton. Here is a typical example of the kind of thing which happen
ed the year following Patrick Corr’s conviction for little or no reason when the gangs at that time were looking for trouble.

  In September 1957 two young men were stabbed in the space of a few hours, one aged 20 and the other just 17. They were random victims of a gang of youths on the rampage that night. In smaller towns too, gangrelated savagery was simmering below the surface. Littleborough is a peaceful town which lies at the foot of the Pennine Hills, 12 miles from Manchester. On the night of 24 November 1957 fighting broke out between two groups of youths in the town. A bystander, Douglas Henderson, was struck on the head by a bottle, which left him seriously injured with a fractured skull. A young man who went to his aid, 17-yearold Derek Uttley, was stabbed twice in the leg. He was also struck round the head with a length of rubber hose which was being wielded as a weapon. Bricks were thrown, one of which hit the conductress on a passing bus. The incident ended as abruptly as it had begun, rating only a few inches in the next day’s papers. It was not anything out of the ordinary for the late 1950s.

  It would tedious and unnecessary simply to list the stabbings, beatings and fights in which gangs of young men, women and children were involved in the late 1950s. Exactly the same picture would emerge if, instead of the 1950s, we looked at the 1930s or indeed 1830s. Groups of young people banding together to fight and cause fear and alarm to older citizens are a scourge which, like the poor, will always be with us. Every shocking news item today about feral youths or vicious and disaffected schoolchildren can be matched by one from the years when the baby boomers were growing up.

  The gangs of the 1950s and 1960s consisted largely of teenagers, some still at school and others who had left school, as one could at that time, at the age of 15. There were younger members, often the brothers of gang members who found a thrill in a tagging along on their older brothers’ adventures. Then, as now, there was sometimes the feeling among the older boys that it was necessary to initiate youngsters into the life on the streets that they would soon be expecting to participate in.