by Webb, Simon;
A type of injury seen again and again in children at that time was crushed fingers and hands, which was how Dr Illingworth gained her data on severed fingertips. The chief culprit implicated here was that old favourite, the witch’s hat. Imagine if you will a conical structure made from lengths of steel piping welded together into a rough imitation of a tall witch’s hat. This contraption, about eight feet high, was placed over a stout metal pole planted in the concrete. It was fixed to the pole at the top by a universal joint which allowed it to swing back and forth and rotate freely. Children clung onto the skeleton frame and kicked off with their feet, causing the ‘hat’ to move crazily around the pole. As it did so, the heavy steel construction banged hard against the metal pole from which it was suspended, crushing the hand, and occasionally severing the fingertips, of any child hanging onto that side.
Because the frenetic activity of the playground was led by children, there was little restraint or common sense to be found. An older child might rock the wooden horse back and forth with increasing violence until a child was hurled off onto the concrete, sometimes breaking an arm or fracturing his or her skull. The same thing happened on the roundabouts, which could reach very high speeds. This resulted in four-year-olds being thrown head first onto a concrete surface at 30 miles an hour. Little wonder that some of the injuries seen in British hospitals at that time among children who had been playing in the local park resembled road traffic accidents!
Those who were at school during this period will know that the sight of a child with his or her arm or leg in plaster was a common one. It was a ritual to get all one’s classmates to sign the cast. Today, it is very rare to see a child struggling to school on crutches with a leg in plaster up to the knee. Playgrounds, and life generally, is a lot less risky for children compared with half a century or more ago.
Once again, many older people are sentimental about this awful state of affairs, denouncing efforts to create a safer play environment for children as being symptomatic of the ‘Nanny State’. They reminisce about the swing boats and witch’s hats, bemoaning their loss, while quite forgetting the havoc they wreaked and the misery which was caused to the victims of such dangerous pieces of playground equipment. Gradually though, over the course of a few decades, soft surfaces replaced the concrete and the more dangerous equipment was quietly pensioned off. Playgrounds today are infinitely safer and more welcoming places for children than once they were. These improvements, combined with the fact that one seldom or never sees gangs of 10-year-olds ruling the roost in playgrounds these days and regulating the speed of the roundabouts and swings on which very young children are riding, means that casualty departments are no longer crowded with five-year-olds with broken arms, crushed hands and feet, missing fingers or fractured skulls.
Of course, the injuries sustained in the course of a visit to the local park did not all result from unsafe swings, slides and so on. When children are playing without any adult oversight or supervision, they are perfectly capable of creating mayhem, even in the safest and least threatening of environments. Before looking at other hazards to be found in playgrounds and parks, we pause to consider once again the statement quoted in the Introduction, from Steve Stack’s book, 21st Century Dodos: ‘We should allow our children to play in the streets, climb trees, walk to school, play down the park, cycle round the neighbourhood, go to the corner shop, etc. They will become better adults as a result.’ Let’s think a little more about, ‘playing down the park’ and what this might have entailed for baby boomers as they grew up.
When looking with a jaundiced eye at the leisure activities of modern children, the one thing which always crops up is playing Cowboys and Indians. It epitomizes what many older people feel was right about their own childhoods and contrasts favourably with all that they see as wrong about what they think they know about childhood today. Sexting! Cyberbullying! Accessing online pornography! Honestly, the things that kids get up to these days! Why, when we were their age, we were playing Cowboys and Indians in the local park. Happier, healthier and more carefree times, or so we are supposed to believe.
The image that most of us have of children playing Cowboys and Indians is of cheeky little fellows pointing their fingers, while shouting, ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead!’ Perhaps they had a toy pistol firing harmless caps, but that was about the most dangerous thing one might see in a game of that sort. In the last chapter, we learned of little Iris Dawkins, who was stabbed to death and her body ferociously mutilated in the aftermath of a game of Cowboys and Indians played in the local park. Such deaths were then, as they are now, very rare. Other injuries resulting from the playing Cowboys and Indians were not. In fact they were appallingly common and included children regularly losing eyes, as well as being stabbed and beaten.
One of the things which baby boomers tend to forget when enthusing about the happy days when children went out by themselves, without their parents, and whiled away the hours by playing Cowboys and Indians, is that in all too many cases, these games were played not with toys, but with real knives, real guns and real bows and arrows. This led, unsurprisingly, to the most shocking harm being inflicted on some of the participants of such games, including the blinding in one eye each year of somewhere in the region of 300 children.
In the early 1960s, a British hospital analysed every case of eye injuries suffered by children over the course of the ten years up to 1960 and leading to the child being treated in their hospital; in other words, for the whole of the 1950s. The Wolverhampton Eye Infirmary, which reported its findings in the Lancet in December 1962, under the heading of ‘Some common causes of eye injury in the young’, discovered that 610 children over that period had needed to be admitted to their establishment for trauma to their eyes. When looked at closely, something disturbing emerged, which was that the great majority of the injuries arose not from accidents but rather from deliberate assaults by other children. These ranged from airguns being fired and arrows shot from bows to knife wounds and things such as marbles and stones being thrown or catapulted at children’s faces. Much of this took place while games of Cowboys and Indians were being played. In the course of mimic warfare, children as young as 10 would wave penknives around or fire air rifles at their opponents, with devastating effect. Bows and arrows were also implicated in many eye injuries.
A word might not come amiss here about bows and arrows. It is rare these days to see children playing with bows and arrows which, when they are seen, are invariably flimsy plastic things with arrows tipped with rubber suckers. Bows and arrows for the baby boomers tended to be a lot more robust and dangerous. A popular type consisted of a steel rod covered with black plastic tubes and bent to accommodate the string. These were sold in toy shops and were capable of propelling arrows with considerable force. The arrows themselves were tipped either with brass points or suckers. The suckers, though, were easily removed and the tip of the arrow sharpened with a penknife, which left the child with a deadly weapon, quite capable of taking out somebody’s eye.
Doctors in casualty departments in the late 1950s believed that there was a direct and strong link between the popularity of television programmes such as Robin Hood and Davy Crockett and the number of injuries to eyes caused by arrows. Something should be said about the Davy Crockett craze which swept the country during the 1950s. In 1954 and 1955, the American television channel ABC produced a mini-series about the life of Western frontiersman Davy Crockett. There were five episodes, each lasting an hour. Davy Crockett became a cult, both in America and Britain, with sales of imitation coonskin hats, which the hero wore, reaching astronomical levels. There cannot be a child who grew up in the 1950s who will not at once be able to sing along with the show’s signature song. ‘Davy, Daaavy Crockett, King of the wild frontier . . .’! All of which sounds marvellously redolent of another era and will bring back memories for baby boomers of the days that they didn’t need to look at a lot of sex and violence on the Internet, but were able to play thrilling outdo
or games, as they re-enacted the life story of Davy Crockett.
In the 1950s, for those whose parents could not afford to buy them a bow and arrow from the local toyshop, there was a free alternative, which was to make one’s own. This is an art which was widely practiced sixty years ago, but is now unknown. One needs a slim and springy straight shoot of a bush; hazel is perfect. It is simply necessary to cut this shoot off about four feet in length and then make notches in the end. Bending it and attaching twine to the ends will give you a most serviceable, if not particularly accurate, bow. All that is then needed is to cut and sharpen some arrows and you are ready to go. One can achieve precisely the same effect with garden canes; bamboo is very bendy and makes a great bow.
That playing with real bows and sharp arrows was once nothing at all out of the ordinary may be seen from a children’s book written a little earlier than the baby boomer years in 1930. Swallows and Amazons, by Arthur Ransome, tells the story of children sailing and having various adventures in the Lake District, ten years before the start of the Second World War. The children in this book are left largely to their own devices as they play around on the water and fire arrows at each other, using homemade bows of the sort described above. When a film was made of the book in 1973, arrows were shown being fired with very little care for Health and Safety. At that time, the idea of children using bows and arrows which were capable of injuring others was still not outlandish. These days though, when the film is shown on television, the scenes involving arrows thudding into woodwork near a child’s head are edited out.
The account of the findings from the Wolverhampton Eye Infirmary, just one hospital in an average British city, make chilling reading. ‘The greatest number of injuries were caused by missiles, assaults and arrows’, ‘the commonest cause of blind eyes were arrows, airguns and assaults’. The Registrar at the hospital made some comments which indicated his own views on children playing Cowboys and Indians. Blaming lack of parental supervision for many of the injuries seen at the hospital, he remarked that children needed instruction, full-time supervision and training while they were growing up. Obviously, he was not a believer in the virtues of their playing Cowboys and Indians in the local park without any adults about to watch over them! He also suggested that it would be a good idea if the sale of airguns, bows and arrows and catapults could be banned to those under the age of 14, which indicated that many shops were at that time selling such potentially lethal weapons to younger children.
Bows and arrows were not the only ‘real’ weapons used when playing games of Cowboys and Indians. Penknives were often used in play fights, sometimes with the natural consequence that somebody ended up getting stabbed. Guns too, specifically airguns, were a regular accompaniment of such games, with awful consequences. In May 1956, a number of surgeons signed their names to a letter sent to the British Medical Journal. They were drawing attention to what they saw as the irresponsible nature of the Davy Crockett films which were then being shown on British television. The surgeons claimed that eye injuries among children had risen dramatically since the screening of the programmes which had caused children to play Cowboys and Indians with even more enthusiasm than usual. One surgeon, Mr Dykes Bower, said that there was always at least one child in his own hospital with an eye injury, having fallen victim to this new craze.
What are known technically as ‘penetrating injuries’ to the eye are now very rarely seen in children, so-called ‘blunt trauma’ being far more commonly recorded. The decline in use of bows and arrows, catapults and airguns by children has been responsible for this trend. A study in Scotland some years ago found that penetrating injuries to the eye were now almost unknown when children turned up at A&E. In the course of a year, only one child in the whole of Scotland lost the sight of an eye and this was due simply to tripping up at home, rather than being assaulted. A child losing an eye from an arrow wound would probably be headline news in today’s Britain, rather than the run-of-the-mill affair it once was.
Reading the report published about the Wolverhampton research sheds a good deal of light on the reality of playing out in 1950s Britain from people who were in an excellent position to know just what children were getting up to when they were out and about without their parents. The 6– 10 age group suffered the most injuries from having things thrown at them. As the registrar explained, if there was nobody of his own age to throw stones or marbles at, ‘then a helpless younger child is often a convenient target’. Writing in the Manchester Guardian on 1 May 1963 about the Wolverhampton findings, Betty Jerman observed: ‘How few of the accidents are due to the cheerful rioting of children at play. Instead one has a picture of children with lethal weapons in their hands and no understanding of the menace which can bring tragedy to a playmate.’ This is not, to say the least of it, the image most of us have about children ‘playing out’ in the baby boomer years!
A regular feature in newspapers each autumn is the claim that some school or other has either banned the playing of conkers or imposed stringent safety measures, requiring, for instance, that those playing conkers should wear protective goggles. Just as regularly, one may rely upon elderly baby boomers to write to the papers, complaining of either the ‘Nanny State’ or ‘Health and Safety gone mad’. It is interesting in this context to see conkers being specifically listed in the report in the Lancet in 1962 as being among the missiles which had caused children to be admitted to hospital with lacerations and bruising to their eyes. Perhaps a little more ‘Health and Safety’ might not have come amiss fifty years ago!
Of course, fighting games such as Cowboys and Indians or the even more popular one of Germans and English, re-fighting the recently-ended war, did not take place just in parks. Bomb sites were the almost exclusive domain of children in the first ten or fifteen years after the Second World War and they provided a valuable space where all manner of wild and undisciplined play could take place. There are very few bomb sites left and so the expression might need a little explanation.
The bombing by the German air force of many British cities led to the destruction of a lot of houses and other buildings. Some of these were so badly damaged that nobody bothered to repair them and they were left standing empty for years. Sometimes, the unsafe buildings would be demolished and just an expanse of bricks and rubble would be left. So you would have a half-ruined house surrounded by a rubble-strewn wilderness.
Children had great fun on bomb sites. Old pieces of glass could be shattered, bits of rusty metal hurled, bricks thrown at each other and fires started. Adults, glad that the streets were not being taken over by ‘feral’ children and youths, were only too happy to leave the youngsters to their own devices on the bomb sites. At least while they were on the rampage there, they weren’t smashing windows in people’s homes or starting fires where they could do any real harm. The only ones who were harmed by the fighting and destruction were the children themselves.
In Illustrations 11 and 12, we can see children playing on a London bomb site. There is a decided lack of Health and Safety to be observed in these pictures. Just look at the boy with the pickaxe! And what about the fire that is burning in the other photograph? These pictures show exactly what bomb sites were like in the years following the end of the Second World War. They were enormously attractive places to children, for the simple reason that no grown-ups interfered with what was going on when they saw children playing there. There was little harm that they could do to anybody’s property and it was felt that they might as well let off steam in such places as anywhere else.
There are very few bomb sites left today, but one was tracked down for this book! Illustration 13 shows perhaps the last remaining bomb site in London, which is to be found in Noble Street, near London Wall. Its survival is due to a curious trick of fate. When the Luftwaffe was pounding Britain in the early 1940s, many buildings in central London were destroyed by the bombing. Occasionally, the destruction wrought in this way revealed things which had been hidden from view for cent
uries or even millennia. When a row of Victorian buildings in Nobel Street was demolished by a bomb, it was found that it had been erected on the remains of a Roman fort. Once the rubble was cleared away, the site was left unmolested, so that the base of the Roman wall was visible. Nothing else was done and so a Second World War bomb site has, in effect, been permanently preserved.
Looking down at the bomb site in Noble Street it is, even many years later, possible to see the attraction of such locations for children who had nothing else to do. What might be found if we were to dig down a little? Treasure? Would it be possible to climb up those walls, by hanging onto the ivy growing there? There is something wild and untamed about spots like this. They are quite different from the neat and regulated parts which make up the rest of the city, a patch of wildness and romance, an escape from the real, mundane world.
We have looked at some of the dangers of playing out, things which killed hundreds of children and led to 300 losing eyes each year, to say nothing of all those fractured skulls, lost fingers and broken arms and legs. What else did the baby boomers get up to when there were no adults around to keep an eye on things? The railway was one perennial source of entertainment, both for the hobby of trainspotting, as well as other less desirable occupations. Trespassing on railway lines and the surrounding land was something of an institution among the baby boomers; hence the films made which warned against the practice. The thundering steam trains exercised a terrible fascination for children, which led to a number of deaths and presented something of a problem for the authorities. Trainspotters could be a nuisance, but were in the main a fairly lawabiding bunch. Any newspaper article about 1950s childhood is almost certain to include a photograph of a group of boys standing on a platform with notebooks in their hands. Such a scene is shown in Illustration 2. A sharp contrast, we are invited to believe, with the kind of things modern boys of that age might get up to. Except of course, children were just as prone to dangerous mischief then as they are now.