Post-War Childhood

by Webb, Simon;

  One is forced to ask, whatever possessed mothers and father to allow their children to be placed in such dangerous situations? Were they blind to the hazards or did parents in those days simply not care as much about their offspring as we do today? In a previous chapter we read of Martin Brown, a four-year-old boy going to the local shop alone in 1968, who was abducted and killed on his way home. We saw also a six-year-old girl who was sent to school by herself and was, as a consequence, snatched from the street and murdered. Surely, common sense would tell us that four, five and six-year-olds cannot safely be permitted to wander the streets alone and that at the very least, they are liable to be knocked down while crossing the road? We know very well that allowing children of that age out on their own or even in the charge of their 11-year-old brothers or sisters, is not a brilliant idea. Robert Elms, mentioned in Chapter 1, tells us that by the age of nine or ten, it became common for him to be allowed to travel alone into central London by public transport and wander around all day. There can be very few mothers today who would think this a good idea and yet it was common enough fifty years ago. Is there a single mother today who would give her nine-year-old child a travel pass and send him off to explore central London by himself? Why didn’t parents in the 1950s and 1960s see how undesirable these things were?

  To understand the whole concept of ‘playing out’ and sending children off for the day with instructions no to come back until teatime, a state of affairs which generates so many wonderful memories in older British adults, we have to put ourselves in the position of parents in the early 1950s, the beginning of the baby boomer heyday of playing out and childhood independence. Although, in retrospect, those who were children at the time talk of the marvellous freedom which they enjoyed, the truth is that they really had little choice at all in the matter: they were very often forced to spend a lot of their time outside the home without any adults to take care of them. This puts rather a different slant on the childhood ‘freedom’ of which such a fetish is now made. It was not so much that they particularly wished to roam the streets all day, but that their mothers often sent them out of the house in the morning and told them not to return until teatime. Even when they were not actually sent from the house in this way, there was so little to do at home in those days, that walking the streets was often preferable to remaining cooped up indoors.

  One point which needs to be borne in mind when thinking about childhood for the baby boomers, particularly in the early years of the period, that is to say the 1950s, is that mothers at that time were almost invariably synonymous with housewives. Few went out to work. They were tied to the home and both caring for this and looking after the children took a great deal of hard work. Not only did homes lack most of the domestic gadgets and facilities which we now take for granted such as washing machines or even hot water on tap, but standards of cleanliness were also in general much higher than they are now. Being a housewife for most mothers meant ensuring that not only the house was spotless, but that the outside of their home and, in cities, even the nearby pavement was also clean and tidy. Behaviour of this sort would these days be seen as verging on the obsessive. In working-class city streets though, it was very much the rule that all the women would clean the front doorstep and window sills once a week with a block of abrasive, synthetic stone called donkeystone, all at the same time, and then wash down the pavement as well. All of which, along with the many other chores, took time; a lot of time. The average mother in the early 1950s spent an astonishing eleven hours a day working at home. Illustration 9 shows housewives in the 1950s donkeystoning their front steps.

  There were implications for children in this frantic, never-ending round of domestic drudgery. It was not easy to get on with the chores with small children underfoot. A family with three children would mean the mother making twenty-eight beds a week, to give but one example. These days we have duvets which can simply be smoothed down in a few seconds, but sixty years ago, sheets, blankets and counterpanes were the order of the day. This daily chore alone was a tiring and time-consuming one. Almost all homes were heated by coal at the beginning of the 1950s and one of the first tasks for any housewife on rising would, from September to April, be to rake out the ashes of the previous day’s fire and carefully build a new one in the fireplace. Even in the summer, many homes would need a coal fire to be built, so that the family had hot water. With no supermarkets, a shopping trip each day on foot was necessary. The lack of a refrigerator meant that only enough food for that day was usually purchased.

  Some days were entirely taken up with domestic work to the exclusion of all else. Monday was washday in the 1950s and 1960s. There was no question at that time of popping a load in the washing machine and getting on with something else. In 1950, fewer than 5 per cent of households had a washing machine and doing the wash was a major operation, involving boiling up copious quantities of hot water and filling a copper. It was backbreaking work, because all the clothes then needed to be scrubbed by hand on a washboard, rinsed several times and then put through a handoperated mangle. Not only clothes, but also sheets and towels had to be laboriously washed by hand. It was hard work which would have tired out an able-bodied man. If it was raining, then clothes would need to be dried indoors, in front of the fire, draped on clothes horses or even hung from the picture rail. Doing all this with children running about would be impossible. If the clothes horse, laden with clean shirts, were to be accidentally knocked into the fireplace, everything on it would need to be washed again.

  On school days, mothers had a clear run at things like washday, but during the school holidays and at weekends, it was a different matter. Some way had to be devised of keeping the children out of the way, so that the housework could be done. In a world bursting with electronic entertainment such as televisions, tablets, games consoles, mobile telephones and all the other paraphernalia of modern childhood, it is hard to imagine how empty and bleak most homes were sixty years ago. After all, the average home in Britain now boasts no fewer than five colour televisions; in 1950, perhaps one home in ten had just a single black-andwhite set. There was only one channel and programmes were not broadcast during the day. There really was nothing much to entertain or occupy children. Of course, most homes had a radio, but the only children’s programme during the daytime was Listen with Mother. Many homes would have a few books, board games and toys, maybe a piano. There were hardly any record players. In short, there was nothing at all for children to do indoors when their mother was too busy to give them her undivided attention. The obvious, indeed for many the only, solution was to shoo the children out of the house in the morning and tell them to stay out until teatime. Sometimes, as Robert Elms says, a Red Rover daily bus pass might be bought for the child if the family lived in London, but this would be an exceptional treat. Mostly, the children would be expected to find their friends and then amuse themselves in any way they saw fit.

  Even if one’s mother did not actually chuck one out of the house so that she could get on with things, there was little incentive to stay indoors. Only those who grew up during this period can have any conception of just how dreary and grey life could be in those far-off times. In the autumn and winter only one room in the house would typically be heated. This meant that if a child wished to stay warm, he or she would be compelled to stay in that room. There was little to do indoors and even if their mothers did not want them out of the way so that they could get on with things, many children saw leaving the house and drifting about the streets, parks or fields as preferable to being cooped up in the house with nothing to do. We looked in some detail at the murder of Iris Dawkins in Southampton in 1960 and readers are reminded that this took place on a chilly, damp Saturday afternoon in February. She and her friends were playing Cowboys and Indians in the local park because there was simply nothing else for a group of children to do in those days.

  Quite apart from the idea of a parent allowing a child of nine to go off and play in a park without any adults aroun
d, we need to ask ourselves what would motivate children themselves to hang round a cold park all afternoon in that way. The answer is that there was absolutely nothing else to do. No inviting indoor shopping malls to visit, no money to spend, nothing to do at home and nothing else to do outdoors, other than play in a park in winter. In many ways, this was a pretty grim world for ordinary children, who had to entertain themselves as best they could.

  One feature of the baby boomer years which has come to be seen as part of a desirable lifestyle for children is of course walking to school, instead of being driven there by a parent. As we have seen, children walked to school alone from a very early age up until the 1970s. In 1971, 80 per cent of seven and eight-year-olds were still walking to school by themselves. The reason for this dangerous custom is pretty much the same as that responsible for the popularity of ‘playing out’.

  According to the National Travel Survey in 2013, the average primary school pupil now lives 1.6 miles from his or her school. We do not have comparable and accurate figures for the 1950s, although it was probably a little less. Let us work with the present-day distance and consider the implications for taking a child to school on foot and then collecting him or her at home time in the afternoon. Each journey there and back to the school would be about three miles, which at a brisk walking pace, an adult may cover in an hour or so. This would mean that, walking at a reasonable pace, the two trips would take about two hours. Of course, for half that time, one will be walking with a young child, who might only be able to walk at about half an adult’s speed. This will have the effect of doubling the journey time for half the total time spent walking to and from the school. Which in turn means that any parent wishing to escort a child to primary school in this way, must on average allow three hours a day in order to do so.

  Incidentally, these figures show precisely why all current efforts to encourage primary school children to walk to school are doomed. They mean either that parents will have to spend an extra fifteen hours a week walking or that children under the age of 11 will be sent off by themselves each morning, with all the unfortunate side-effects of increased injury and death from road accidents which this would inevitably entail. Neither is likely. Sixty years ago, the prospect of taking three hours each weekday from the frantically busy schedule of the average mother and housewife was unthinkable. It was not an ideal solution, but allowing small children to walk to school either alone or being looked after by an older brother or sister seemed to most parents the only sensible option. Few people would wish to see a return to those days.

  Entrusting very small children to the care of their older siblings was a very common custom as the baby boomers grew up. They were often used as escorts to take younger siblings to school in the morning. If there were no older brothers or sisters around then, at a pinch, four-, five- and six-year-olds would be sent to school alone or on errands to local shops, but if a 10-year-old brother or sister could be dragooned into helping, that was preferable. The sight of children who were barely out of nappies trotting around after nine-year-olds who had been given the job of taking care of them was not an unusual one. This may have been marginally better than leaving the smaller children to fend for themselves when they were out and about, but it was hardly ideal. It was not until the mid-1970s that objective and clinical data came to light which perfectly illustrated one of the particular dangers produced by this practice.

  In the early 1970s a doctor called Cynthia Illingworth was working at the Sheffield Children’s Hospital. She began to be concerned about the dreadful injuries suffered by young children attending the hospital, injuries which she said were comparable to those seen in the victims of severe road accidents. Severed fingers, crushed limbs, shattered skulls, broken legs and eye injuries were among the most noticeable ones that Dr Illingworth encountered. The picture was pretty much the same at other hospitals across Britain at that time. The strange thing was that most doctors and nurses simply took this carnage for granted, seeing nothing at all out of the ordinary about the numbers of casualties among the under-11 age group. It had, after all, been like that for as long as anybody could remember.

  One of the discoveries that Cynthia Illingworth made was that when children under the age of 11 lost the tips of their fingers, these would regrow without any medical intervention. This is in itself curious; wherever did she find so many children with parts of fingers that had been cut off? It is, after all, an incredibly rare childhood injury today. The answer lies of course in the habit of playing out in playgrounds and parks. These days, you would probably not have much scope for investigating the re-growth of chopped-off children’s fingers, but in the 1960s there were plenty to look at. Dr Illingworth wanted to know why that was.

  Before looking at Cynthia Illingworth’s findings, a word or two about playgrounds and parks might not come amiss, otherwise nobody under the age of forty will be likely to understand what follows. There were two factors in the accidents that Cynthia Illingworth investigated. The first of these was that the majority of the injuries seen were a result of accidents taking place during play, particularly in playgrounds. The second was that in most cases, the accidents had taken place when no adult had been present.

  Modern British playgrounds are safe and inviting places, where few children come to harm. The equipment is, wherever possible, made of or covered with plastic, nylon or rubberized material and the surfaces beneath the roundabouts and swings are almost invariably soft and a little springy. Roundabouts have governors fitted to them which prevent them from travelling too fast and all moving objects present plastic surfaces in the direction in which they are travelling. In 1974, when Dr Illingworth was conducting her research, playgrounds were very different places. Much of the equipment had remained unchanged for almost the whole of the twentieth century and there was little plastic to be seen. The playgrounds and parks of the baby boomers were constructed of concrete, steel and wood.

  These days, when children trip up in a playground, they are likely to land on a rubberised surface whose specific purpose is to soften the impact of a fall. Even a grazed knee is a rare occurrence. Until the 1970s, the ground in playgrounds was as likely as not to be an expanse of concrete. Not just any old concrete, but that strange mix containing many pebbles and stones was a popular foundation for playground equipment in the years at which we are looking. Falling onto this from more than a couple of feet meant running the risk of a broken bone. Stumbling onto it with bare knees, which all children displayed then, often drew blood. This was a minor inconvenience compared with the results if a child landed head first on the concrete at high speed, something which was sure to happen to at least one child during an afternoon of playing in such an environment.

  The equipment in children’s play areas has changed out of all recognition since Cynthia Illingworth carried out her research. Illustration 3 shows a playground in the 1950s. The swing boats are no more, gone are the rocking horses – even the witch’s hat has been consigned to the dustbin of history. These devices were seriously dangerous. Take the swing boat, which consisted of a quarter of a ton of steel and wood, suspended from a metal frame. Along the centre ran a wooden beam, with rungs attached to it. Some children sat on this, while others hung on the side. Others pushed the massive structure back and forth, slowly at first, but with gathering speed and force. Sometimes, children ran in front of the moving swing boat and had teeth knocked out or broken. On other occasions, they would be struck on the head or arm and bones would break. Sometimes, smaller children would lose their grip and fall off. If they were not careful, the swing boat, with its cargo of children, would then swoop down and knock them over.

  On the face of, the rocking horse was one of the gentler rides to be found in the playgrounds. A long, wooden box, with metal seats which one straddled and a crude metal representation of a horse’s head at the front. One may be seen in Illustration 4. This was essentially something for the smaller children, half a dozen of whom could sit in a line on top of the ro
cking horse. The mechanism which was hidden beneath the base allowed the thing to move backwards and forward with a swinging and bouncing action. Once it was going, the rocking horse could move very quickly and there was always the chance that the child riding at the front would be hurled forward over the horse’s head and onto the concrete. One recalls Cynthia Illingworth’s shrewd observation in her 1975 report on playground injuries: ‘The younger children were at particular risk on equipment such as the wooden rocking horse or roundabout, when the speed of operation could be controlled by older children.’

  The playground environment and equipment was hazardous enough in itself, but this could have been ameliorated by the presence of responsible adults, ready to step in and call a halt to especially reckless actions on the part of the older children. Unfortunately, many of the very small children were being looked after only by siblings who were themselves of primary school age, that is to say 11 or under. It was a recipe for disaster. If the rocking horse were pushed to its limit, it was very difficult for the small children to hold on. Remember that there might well be three- and fouryear-olds sitting on the rocking horse and there was a certain amount of competition on the part of the older children, especially the boys, to see who could make it buck the most.