by Webb, Simon;
It is altogether possible that some readers will be sceptical about much of what has been written above. Surely, they may think, we would have heard of all this, if it was indeed true that knife crime and gang warfare were as common as the author is making out? Part of the explanation is that the history we read can only ever be a selection, not a complete portrait of every single event which happened over any given period. Of necessity, we are only able to consider a limited amount of data and try somehow to fashion it into a coherent narrative. In the present case, we know that the Second World War was a time of the greatest slaughter which the world has ever seen. It would be dramatically satisfying if, after such terrible violence, we had a quiet period with pleasant childhoods for all. Later on of course, we will have the Swinging Sixties and the drugs and political violence of the 1970s, but why not have a peaceful couple of decades separating the war from all this?
It is difficult to know how else to account for the strange mythic narrative which has grown up about the decades immediately following the end of the war. By any objective measure that we can devise, they were not a whit better for children than today and by many standards were a good deal worse. The notion that modern Britain is somehow a terrible place for children to grow up is very much a product of newspapers and television. Frightening people about the prospects of their children dying before them are guaranteed to catch the attention of parents, if nothing else! Before looking at one very awful way that such anxieties are created and promoted, I want to give one last example of gang violence, which suddenly dominated the newspaper headlines in the early 1960s and has now been lost to memory. We read a lot about gangs in our big cities today, on which the police crackdown from time to time. Could we though imagine that the situation with gangs of youths today would grow serious enough to warrant the use of the RAF against them?
In the 1950s, there were the flick-knife carrying Teddy Boys who fought among themselves or with others. A few years later, there were the socalled Mods and Rockers. These were, respectively, smartly-dressed young men, often on motor scooters, and leather-jacketed youths on motorbikes. The two rival groups fought each other on the streets of Britain in the early 1960s. Here is a piece from the Manchester Guardian for 25 July 1964:
A police air lift has been planned to cope with disturbances by mods and rockers over the August bank holiday period. London police will provide a standby force who will be flown by RAF Transport Command to any coastal trouble spots. After talks between the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and chief constables from coastal areas, Mr Henry Brooke, the Home Secretary, yesterday gave his approval to the scheme, which has been worked out in conjunction with the RAF. The RAF has surveyed possible landing strips on the east and south coast within striking distance of coastal resorts.
Now that’s tackling gang violence; calling in the RAF to help in the fight against them! The headline for this piece may be seen in Illustration 10.
The precautions being taken for the August Bank Holiday that year were the result of widespread disturbances on the south and east coast, at places such as Clacton in Essex and Margate in Kent. After some skirmishes in Clacton, the Whitsun weekend in May saw more serious disorder by youths who travelled to peaceful seaside towns, apparently with the sole aim of fighting each other. In Margate, hundreds of youths fought pitched battles on the beach and then surged into the town itself, smashing shop windows and starting fires. There were some stabbings and forty youngsters were arrested. When they appeared in court the following week, the magistrate took the opportunity to make a few remarks about ‘sawdust Caesars’. As he spoke, more violence erupted in the streets outside the court, leading to two young men being stabbed. There was fighting in the Sussex seaside town of Brighton as well at Whitsun, followed by sporadic disorder when the gangs returned to London. On 17 June, a 21-year-old man called George Monk was stabbed to death in a brawl between Mods and Rockers at Grays in Essex. Those charged with his murder included a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old. Anybody who believes that gangs and knife crime are a new phenomenon would do well to research the baby boomer period a little.
Before ending this chapter, I want to look at gun crime, with reference to children and teenagers. It is almost the received wisdom today that the use of guns by ever younger offenders is on the rise. This is often linked to gang-related violence. Surely there must be some way of establishing if this is in fact true? Are children really becoming involved with firearms now in a way which would have been unheard of sixty years ago?
This is what I described earlier as an awful example of the way in which anxieties are manufactured by politicians and newspapers with a view to persuading us that the country is in a deplorable state compared with how it was in those first couple of decades following the end of the war. At the time of writing, the news media are full of reports about a supposed rise in gun crime in Britain, with particular reference to the number of children who have been arrested for carrying or using firearms. The BBC, for instance, reported in March 2015 that ‘Children as young as 10 were among hundreds of youngsters held over suspected firearms offences between 2013 and January 2015’. Newspapers linked all this to ‘gangs’. In April 2016, the Office for National Statistics reported that there had been a rise in ‘firearms offences’.
Here surely is solid evidence that childhood has changed since the baby boomers were children. It would have been inconceivable sixty years ago for a 10-year-old to be handling firearms or for a girl of 13 to have shot somebody, both incidents which were covered by the alarming figures obtained from various police forces by means of freedom of information requests in 2016. If this does not show how modern childhood is going off the rails, then nothing will!
There is a good deal more going on here than meets the eye and the claim that ‘children as young as 10’ are being arrested for ‘firearms offences’ is horribly misleading. The truth is that the offences which are being cited here were all far more common in the 1950s than they are now. Once again, we are being led up the garden path and in a most interesting fashion. At the back of it all is once again that fatal image of the happy childhood of the baby boomers, so different from life today.
Could we simply look at the statistics for this to make up our minds? Perhaps trying to find out how many young people under the age of 18 were arrested or convicted for offences associated with firearms in 1956 and then comparing them with last year’s figures, say? There must be an objective measure of how many children were involved in ‘gun crime’ then and now, one would have thought. We come now to another of those tricky points that were mentioned in the Introduction; the nearimpossibility of just placing one set of figures next to another and seeing which is the larger. To see why this would be, we must look at how ‘firearms offences’ were treated in the baby boomer years. First, some modern figures. Roughly 7,000 firearms offences are recorded each year in Britain. This figure is without doubt far higher than it was in the 1950s or 1960s. In the year ending March 2015, 7,866 firearms offences were recorded in England and Wales. At first sight, this sounds horrifying, as though we are living in the Wild West. A close look at the statistics, though, is more reassuring and has a bearing on our examination of crime and disorder among young people in the post-war years.
‘Firearms offences’ covers a very broad spectrum, ranging from firing a machine gun during a terrorist attack to covering a stick with a plastic carrier bag and telling the cashier in a local off-licence that you have a gun pointing at him. For most of us, ‘guns’ means firearms which use explosive ammunition and are capable of killing somebody. That is certainly the definition used by the Crown Prosecution Service and, before that, by the Director of Public Prosecutions. Only a minority of the 7,866 ‘firearms offences’ recorded in England and Wales in the year ending 2015 involved proper guns of this sort. In the main, they were associated with replica weapons, airguns and claims by somebody to be carrying a firearm, even if this was impossible to verify. Interestingly, despite the public h
ysteria over gun crime, only nineteen people were actually killed by guns that year, the lowest figure since records began in this form in 1969. Fewer people are currently being killed each year by guns than during the 1960s.
The case of the 13-year-old girl who ‘shot’ somebody, according to the figures released in 2016, is particularly interesting as an example of the way that a fear can be worked up from almost nothing. In this case, not even an airgun was used. This child had fired an American BB gun, which projects miniature ball bearing by means of a spring-powered action. A BB gun might sting a little if you’re hit by the ball from one, but they are little more than toys. If figures for ‘firearms offences’ had been collected and categorised in this way during the 1950s, with every child firing an air rifle or BB gun in public being classified as a dangerous criminal, then it is a fair guess that the statistics would have gone off the scale!
The connection between these statistics and life for the baby boomers as they were growing up is simple. Then, as now, airguns accounted for a huge proportion of firearms offences. These days, it is all but unheard for a child to have in his or her possession an air rifle or air pistol. No shop would dream of selling such a thing to a child and there can be few parents who would even think of giving an airgun to their children as a present, at least unless it was only to be used under the strictest of parental supervision. How very different the situation was sixty years ago. Illustration 5 shows an advertisement for airguns from the 1950s in which it is suggested that a rifle of this sort would make the ideal present for a child. How old is the boy in this advertisement; 11 or 12? Illustration 8 is from the Webley catalogue from the same period. At the bottom of the page, we can see a group of young boys playing with a pistol. There appears to be no adult in sight and the boys cannot be more than 11 or so.
Because they are not commonly seen in public now, a word or two about the nature of airguns might be timely. What one might call ‘real’ guns use a small explosive charge to propel a bullet, made of lead and sometimes jacketed with a harder metal, down the barrel. Airguns use compressed air to achieve the same end, which means that the little lead pellets leave the barrel with considerably less velocity than is the case with a genuine firearm. This does not mean, despite the claim in the advertisement in Illustration 5, that they are somehow ‘harmless’; far from it. At close range, the pellets can penetrate the skin and need to be removed surgically and at a much greater range are capable of blinding somebody if they hit an eye. Hundreds of children under the age of 16 were blinded in one eye each year during the 1950s and 1960s and airguns were the main culprit.
It is not that ‘firearm offences’ are more prevalent now than they were a few years ago – there were almost certainly more airguns being discharged at people in 1959 than there are today – but rather that we take the misuse of these weapons more seriously today than we once did. For the baby boomers, shooting somebody in the face with an air rifle and blinding them in one eye was simply not a big deal. Even the courts treated such incidents as trifling mishaps. One or two real life cases might make this a little clearer.
On a Sunday afternoon in April 1950, two 16-year-old boys were walking along the banks of the canal running through the town of Bilston, on the outskirts of Wolverhampton. One of them felt a sharp pain in his back and when he turned round, he saw three boys: two were 13 and the other 12. All of them were carrying air rifles. Not unnaturally annoyed by being shot at, the two older boys gave chase and a running battle developed, with them firing catapults at the youngsters, who returned fire with their airguns. Eventually, the three boys with the rifles reached a low wall, which they crouched behind as they fired at the 16-year-olds. The youth who had been hit in the back was now hit again in the stomach. The other young man was less fortunate. He was shot in the face and spent five weeks in hospital. He was permanently blinded in one eye.
If something of this kind happened today, it would be viewed in a very dim light and those responsible would almost certainly be charged with GBH and, in addition to finding their way into the firearms-related crime figures, would in all likelihood sent to a young offenders’ institution. As it was, the police confiscated the rifles and issued each of the three schoolboys with a summons for carrying the guns without a licence and also discharging a missile and causing injury. It was when the case reached Bilston magistrates court that the very great difference in attitude to guntoting children in 1950 and today was revealed. The three boys were fined four shillings (20p) each on the first charge and two were fined £2 and the other £1 on the charge of firing a missile and causing injury. Having treated them with astonishing leniency, the magistrate then ordered that the police return their air rifles to them, warning that they should only be used in future in their back gardens.
There were few boys in the 1950s who did not at some stage handle or use an airgun. They circulated freely, with nobody taking much notice of them, as long as people were not badly injured. Boys lent them to their friends, sold them, swapped them for model yachts, tinkered with them to increase the muzzle velocity, drilled the front of pellets out to make dum-dum bullets and generally treated them as a natural accompaniment to normal boyhood. As the piece from the Internet quoted in Chapter 1 said, ‘We were given air guns and catapults for our tenth birthdays’. Airguns were all over the place in those days.
The problem of airguns being widely carried and frequently used by children and young people grew steadily worse over the next ten years or so after the incident at Bilston. In February 1959 the police in the northern town of Oldham were growing tired of the number of children carrying and firing airguns on the streets. It was decided to make an example of one of these boys, a 13-year-old who was seen by the police firing an airgun in public. He was summoned to appear at the Juvenile Court, where he was fined £2 for firing his rifle in the street. Deputy Chief Constable John Kerin gave a statement after the boy’s conviction, saying that the case had been brought to draw attention to ‘the large number of boys between 10 and 15 having air rifles and ammunition in the street’.
In the next chapter we shall look a little more at the use of airguns by the baby boomer children. If ‘firearms offences’ had been pursued with as much vigour as they are today and properly collated statistics kept in the 1950s as they are today, there can be little doubt that the number of people injured by being shot at would be far higher than today. As for criminal damage caused by airguns, which makes up a large chunk of the modern figures for what we now refer to as ‘gun crime’, this was endemic. Shooting out streetlights, firing at passing cars or pedestrians, these things were part of the background of life at the time, especially in rougher neighbourhoods.
The closer we look at the world of baby boomer childhood, the more nearly it resembles the way of life of children and youths today. We see the same hooliganism, fears of gangs, knife culture, gun crime and so on. To be fair to the baby boomers, much the same picture would emerge from a close examination of any period in British history. The particular folk devils who give concern to respectable people might change in name, but the essential order of things remains the same. Whether we call them ‘hooligans’, as was done in the late nineteenth century, ‘juvenile delinquents’, which is what they were known as in the 1950s, or today’s ‘disaffected youth’ or ‘feral children’, the phenomenon is the same. In each generation, a fair proportion of children and young people run riot, committing crimes which range up to and include murder. Always, the fear is the same, that this is some terrible contagion which is spreading and threatens to engulf civilized society.
It is to be suspected that not a few baby boomers, as well as those who have swallowed their fairy tales, will be shaking their heads at this point and while conceding that there might have been a few tearaways around, even sixty years ago, will insist that the great majority of children at that time were just high spirited and perhaps given to occasional bouts of mischievous behaviour. Most children did not associate with gangs or use knives agai
nst each other, they will say, being more likely to play out with their friends or go trainspotting. This brings us neatly to the subject of our next chapter, which will focus upon what ‘playing out’ actually meant for children growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. Articles in newspapers about childhood in the post-war years are almost invariably accompanied by black-and-white photographs of children trainspotting on a station platform or playing Cowboys and Indians. The overall impression given is that childhood was a much better time in those days, with innocuous hobbies and healthy, outdoor games. This is very misleading.
The truth is that many of the baby boomer children were running wild when they were ‘playing out’; they were at least as likely to be throwing stones at trains or trying to derail them as they were to be carefully noting down their serial numbers in exercise books. Even toddlers were to be found trespassing on railway lines and accompanying their brothers and sisters when they engaged in bouts of vandalism. ‘Feral’ children and youths are nothing new. We shall be seeing a lot of this in the following chapter, which examines the practice of ‘playing out’.
Chapter 4
Playing Out and Walking to School:
The Facts Behind the ‘Freedom’ Enjoyed by Young Baby Boomers
It is time now to look in detail at one or two of the ‘freedoms’ which children born during the baby boomer years enjoyed and which have largely withered away, freedoms such as walking to school alone and playing outdoors without the presence of adults. Quotation marks have been used because in a later chapter we will be examining the extent to which these things can really be thought of as freedoms. Before looking closely at what activities like ‘playing out’ actually entailed, we might first ask ourselves why so many children at that time were permitted, even encouraged, to vanish from adult oversight for many hours at a time, at a very early age. We have seen some of the hazards which attended the practice of ‘playing out’ or walking to and from school, and pretty grim reading they make too. Almost a thousand deaths a year from children knocked down by cars and many thousands of injuries from the same cause, many of them serious. A large number of girls were the victims of sexual abuse because they were out and about by themselves at a very young age, this abuse ranging all the way from indecent exposure up to rape and murder. We shall see in this chapter the dreadful injuries caused by the use and misuse of playground equipment. Fractured skulls, broken arms and teeth, even death, resulting from small children commonly being sent off in the care of older brothers and sisters; children who might themselves only be 11 or 12 years old.