Post-War Childhood

by Webb, Simon;

  In May 1959, the management of British Railways appealed to parents and teachers to warn children about the danger of attacking and trying to derail trains. In the northern county of Lancashire, the situation had become particularly grave. There has been many incidents of stones and bottles thrown at passing trains, which smashed windows and had injured a driver and passengers, but this was nothing compared to what had happened at Orrell, near Wigan. Heavy beams of wood had been laid across the line there, with the evident intention of derailing a train, and the line had had to be closed for a time. At Bolton, points had been jammed with stones, while at Eccles an oil drum had been rolled down an embankment and onto the line. At Manchester’s Victoria Station, somebody had released the brakes on a stationery parcel van, causing it to roll into the sidings, where fortunately it hit the buffers. There was a very real fear that if this vandalism were not checked, then a serious train crash might be caused.

  Four years later, the situation had deteriorated dramatically and on 30 May 1963, British Railways Divisional Superintendent Charles Steed called a press conference in Manchester to draw public attention to what was seen by some as a crisis. An engine driver, invited by the police to address the meeting, said that the points at Newton Heath were known among drivers as ‘Sabotage Corner’, due to the number of attacks on trains and attempts to derail them. All this was carried out by children. Quoting part of the statement read out by Inspector Steed will give some idea of what the engine drivers were having to put up with: ‘Last year in this division we had 1,717 complaints of children trespassing on railway property and 569 complaints of stones and other missiles being thrown at trains. Every year children are killed and injured because they trespass on railway property. Some of them are young toddlers.’ Thomas Hinley, the engine driver who talked about ‘Sabotage Corner’, revealed that his stoker had been knocked unconscious by a brick thrown into the cab by a child.

  These dangerous actions by children were the dark side of the enthusiasm for steam engines and trainspotting which was such a wellknown feature of 1950s boyhood. Once they had gained access to the tracks, some children would follow the harmless but dull hobby of trainspotting, while others would try and cause accidents. As usual, a number of these boys were burdened with much younger siblings, some of them, as Inspector Steed said, being only toddlers. The solution for the older boys was plain: they took the small children with them onto the land running alongside the railway line.

  Various games would be played when trespassing on the railways. There was for example what we would now call an urban myth that a train could be derailed if a penny was laid on the rail. The experiment was conducted many times, without success. Another game, one which could easily lead to death, was called ‘Last Across’. This was a forerunner of the modern game of ‘Chicken’. A group of boys would engage to run across the tracks in front of an oncoming express train. The winner was the one who delayed longer than any of his playmates in crossing the tracks. It was not particularly uncommon for children to be killed by trains while playing this game, which accounts for all the posters and public information films produced at this time in an effort to discourage children from playing near the railway.

  It was not only on the railways that vandalism was being carried out by children who were playing out. A couple of years before the attacks on trains in Manchester were getting out of hand, there had been trouble at Manchester Airport. On 9 May 1961, the police announced that they were stepping up patrols at the airport because engineers had reported that the landing lights which guided aeroplanes into the airport were being smashed in increasing numbers by stones and airguns. The police believed that children gathering to watch the planes landing and taking off were the culprits. Still in the vicinity of Manchester, there was more trouble with vandalism being caused with airguns in September of the same year. The Crompton district was plagued with youngsters shooting out the streetlights and the borough surveyor, Mr J. E. Gledhill, announced that he had posted lookouts with binoculars to try and identify the children who were behind the spate of attacks, the latest of which was in Buckstones Road.

  In the same year that children were shooting out the lights on the runway of Manchester Airport, vandalism was a serious problem in other parts of the country. A council meeting at Ashton-under-Lyne on 12 April 1961 discussed recent damage caused to Stamford Park by children. This included breaking into the refreshment room and trashing it, digging up the putting green, sinking a boat and destroying swans’ nests and smashing the eggs they contained. Alderman J. Booth, Chairman of the Parks Committee, said that, ‘The 60 MPs who voted for the return of corporal punishment were right’. To which Councillor J. Eason responded that, ‘It is the fathers who should be flogged. Some parents take absolutely no interest in their children.’ The following month, the local council at Haydock, near Liverpool, announced that the parents of children found engaging in vandalism would be evicted from their council-owned homes. Lights had been smashed, garden walls pushed over and gates torn from their hinges. This sort of vandalism was caused by children ‘playing out’, that is to say, running riot without any adult supervision.

  Returning to trouble caused by children on the railways, we note that on 16 March 1961, the same year that patrols were instituted to combat the shooting out with airguns of the lights at Manchester Airport, the driver of a train was shot by an air rifle. A freight train was passing through Rose Bridge, when the driver, Tom Abbotts of Wigan, felt a sharp pain to the side of his head. When he removed his cap, he found that there was a hole through it. Had the pellet hit him in the eye, then he would certainly have been blinded. Mr Abbotts said after the incident, ‘I’ve had mattresses, tin cans and even iron bedsteads flung at my engine, but this is the first time I have been shot at.’ The fireman, who was in the cab with the driver, said that when they stopped to take on water, he saw three boys nearby, one of whom was carrying an air rifle. On the same day that somebody fired at the train driver, a wooden sleeper was laid across the line near Huyton Station. The driver of a train from Liverpool to Manchester had to stop in order to remove it.

  Much of what has been said in this chapter will conflict sharply with the generally-recognized picture of children’s play in the 1950s and 1960s. A lot of us see vandalism as a relatively modern scourge and the idea of young train- and planespotters taking part in systematic sabotage of railways lines and airport landing lights is a startling one. Many readers will have a vague idea that the ‘feral’ child or youth is a relatively recent phenomenon, caused perhaps by soft parents and trendy teachers. One hears it said in all seriousness that the reason that youngsters behave so badly today is that they no longer face the threat of the cane at school or sharp retribution if and when they are hauled before the courts. Such arguments do not really hold water when we look at exactly the same conduct by children at a time when the slipper and cane were being freely wielded by teachers and the courts were all too ready to send those convicted of anti-social behaviour to approved schools or Borstal.

  Before turning to another aspect of life for the baby boomers when they were growing up, a word or two must be said about one more serious hazard to children who were ‘playing out’, one which has now been all but eradicated. The sight of children playing in the streets with fireworks is practically unknown in this country; ‘Health and Safety gone mad’ has, mercifully, seen to that. Nobody under the age of 18 can buy fireworks, a law which is in the main sedulously adhered to, with shopkeepers requiring age-related identification. Fireworks are fairly expensive too. Apart from boxed selections costing at least £10, there are larger setpieces, which cost more than the average child would be able to afford. The firework as plaything for children has effectively ceased to exist. This is very different from the way things used to be and readers under the age of 40 will probably be astounded and shocked to learn that fireworks were, well within living memory, very popular toys for children of 10 or 11 and sometimes younger.

  The laws whi
ch limit and restrict what we can and cannot do seem to change with dizzying swiftness these days and even though most are ultimately for our own good, it can be tricky to keep track of them all. It was not always like this. Until the 1960s, the law relating to the sale and use of fireworks was the 1875 Explosives Act, which had been originally brought in to control the supply of gunpowder being used by Irish terrorists operating in Britain during the reign of Queen Victoria. Nobody had ever thought of changing or amending this law, which seemed quite adequate for the regulation of the fireworks sold in the run-up to Guy Fawkes Night. After all, it had worked perfectly well for almost a century; why alter it? Under the provisions of the 1875 Act, fireworks could only be sold to children over the age of 13. This meant of course that in practice, 11- and 12-year-olds were buying them and then giving them to their younger brothers and sisters.

  In real terms, fireworks in the twenty years following the end of the Second World War were incredibly cheap. They were sold individually, many costing only a penny or two: well within the financial reach of most children. If they didn’t have the money, then this could usually be raised by begging, under the time-honoured expedient of ‘Penny for the Guy’. How cheap were fireworks at that time? Small Roman Candles could be bought for 1d or 2d. This equates to less than 1p in modern currency. Even taking into account the inflation since that time, this would still work out at no more than 15p or 20p. Not only were the fireworks at that time inexpensive, they were also horribly dangerous, both to the children and to those around them. Take the ‘banger’ for instance, a little tube filled with gunpowder which exploded with a loud bang when lit. These were thrown, dropped into empty milk bottles, fixed to people’s cats with rubber bands, emptied out into other containers in order to make a larger explosion and misused in a hundred other ways. They are now illegal in this country. Or what about the jumping cracker; a handy little firecracker which jumped all over the place when lit, emitting bangs as it did so? Small children jumping back in fright from these squibs had been known to leap into bonfires. The jumping crackers also routinely jumped into boxes of fireworks and detonated the whole lot at once. The failure to bring in new legislation to supplement the 1875 law which covered fireworks and children came at a dreadful cost. In an average year today, fifty people are hospitalized through accidents involving fireworks. In the early 1960s, the rate was eight times as high, with most of the victims of firework-related injuries being children.

  We have looked in some detail at the practice of ‘playing out’ and found it wanting. Children were losing eyes, breaking limbs and even being killed, because they were allowed out of the house by their parents at an early age, without any adults accompanying them to see that they remained safe. This was a terrible way to carry on, but social and economic necessity was at the back of it and most families had little choice but to pursue this dangerous and unsatisfactory way of doing things. Today, parents know better and are no longer compelled by circumstance to put their children at hazard in this way.

  Having disposed of the notion that ‘playing out’ was good for the health of children in the 1950s, it is time to consider the health of children at that time generally and see how it compares with the modern world. We are often told that children today are less healthy than those of a few years ago. This strange and counter-intuitive idea will be explored in the next chapter.

  Chapter 5

  Falling Life Expectancy:

  Are the Baby Boomers More Healthy than their Grandchildren?

  For at least 500 or 600 years, the life expectancy of people in Britain has risen inexorably. In the Middle Ages, the average life expectancy at birth was perhaps 35 or so. This was due in part to the very high infant mortality rates at that time; many babies did not live to see their first birthday. Childhood was a hazardous business, with around a quarter of children dying before they reached adolescence. By the middle of the eighteenth century, life expectancy had gone up slightly and was about the 40 mark. It was in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that life expectancy really soared. By the 1930s, men could expect to live until the age of 60 and twenty years later, this had risen to 65. In 2015, the most recent year for which figures are available at the time of writing, men in this country are expected at birth to live to 79 and women to 83. At the beginning of the twentieth century, only 20 per cent of babies born would live past their sixtieth birthday; today, the figure is 80 per cent.

  In short, until ten or fifteen years ago, the news for life expectancy in Britain has been increasingly optimistic with each passing year, each successive generation living longer than those preceding it. There seemed no reason to suppose that this happy state of affairs would not continue with the children of the so-called millennials, those born between the early 1980s and the year 2000, living longer than either the baby boomers or their children. The picture was rosy.

  According to many newspaper reports, based upon statistics from the NHS and other authoritative sources, this trend towards ever higher British life expectancy is about to be thrown into reverse. Not only will the life expectancy of those born in this country begin to fall, this effect will be dramatic enough to mean that children today are likely to die before their own parents. That such an implausible scenario should be uncritically accepted by many people illustrates once more the powerful grip that the myth of the baby boomers’ childhood has upon so many people, including those in the government and National Health Service. In Chapter 3, we saw how laws had been passed which were founded upon a false vision of childhood in the 1950s and 1960s, the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, which introduced the new mechanism of ASBOs, being a direct response to the perceived menace of children and young people who were believed to be running out of control in an unprecedented fashion. Taking as their model the supposedly less savage children who were around during the 1950s, the new Labour government attempted to tackle what they saw as dangerous and disturbing trends in children’s conduct, which could be checked by new laws. Always in mind was the notion of the carefree, happy and inoffensive lives that government ministers had themselves enjoyed. The whole aim was to bring back the pattern of baby boomer childhood, a time when anti-social behaviour and hooliganism were negligible problems. Of course, as we also saw in that same chapter, this vision of childhood in the years after the end of the Second World War is an almost wholly false one. Precisely the same process, that of using a distorted and unrealistic version of the past as a yardstick and deciding that the present is failing in comparison to it, is currently taking place in medical circles, aided and abetted by the government.

  Once again, the goal is somehow to recreate the baby boomers’ childhood experiences and thus stave off the terrible threats faced by modern children; this time on the health front. The chief fear is of what is sometimes called the ‘Obesity Time Bomb’, and so relentlessly has the idea been peddled in recent years that there will probably be few readers who doubt that children today are far less healthy than they were fifty or sixty years ago. Indeed, this is taken as almost axiomatic, the starting point for any debate about the welfare and health of children in twenty-firstcentury Britain. If only the lifestyle enjoyed by the baby boomers could be magically imposed upon the nation’s boys and girls, then their health would undergo a miraculous and beneficial transformation.

  We shall return shortly to the question of obesity and its deleterious effects upon British children, but first we must consider the strange proposition that children were in any way healthier in the 1950s than they are today. The history of childhood in the baby boomer years is written by those who survived it and flourished. It is time to look at those who either failed to make it to adulthood at that time or whose lives were so wretched that they have no desire to write perkily about the pleasures of staying out until teatime, sometimes because they were physically incapable of achieving any such feat.

  In a book entitled A Mobile Century? Changes in Everyday Mobility in Britain in the Twentieth Century, the authors interviewed, a
mong others, baby boomers. There are reminiscences about how much fun these people had as children, before ‘Health and Safety went mad’ and spoiled the enjoyment of simple childhood pleasures like swimming in dirty canals. One woman actually cites swimming in dirty canals, playing in old airraid shelters and not telling her parents about men who indecently exposed themselves to her as being positive aspects of her childhood. We saw earlier what happened to one little girl who played in an old air-raid shelter; she became an early victim of the paedophile serial killer Robert Black. In the same chapter, we looked also at the advantages or otherwise to children of concealing sexual abuse by adult males. Time now to consider the idea that that swimming in ‘dirty canals’ might have been a harmless way to while away the hours for children in the post-war years.

  One of the recurring features of baby boomer childhood which appears to have been quite forgotten is the terrible epidemics of infectious diseases which swept across the country before the widespread use of vaccines and antibiotics. Today, we regard outbreaks of poliomyelitis, smallpox, TB and diphtheria as tragedies in far-off lands which only affect us when the occasional holidaymaker returns from India or Africa and later manifests some unusual symptoms. They are not something about which we need to worry in the general way of things. It was not always so. Here are one or two statistics which might give readers food for thought. All are taken from the period when the baby boomers were born; that is to say between 1946 and 1964;