by Webb, Simon;
• In 1947 there were 8,000 cases of polio in England and Wales.
• Tuberculosis was a big killer throughout the 1950s. In 1950 alone, over 11,000 people died from this disease.
• Three-quarters of a million cases of measles struck Britain in 1961, the vast majority among children.
• Even smallpox outbreaks were not unknown. In Bradford in 1962, six people died after contracting smallpox.
Many of the most contagious diseases which were rife in Britain during the years at which we are looking affected a disproportionate number of children. Some of them, polio and measles for example, were accepted childhood illnesses at that time. Not for nothing was poliomyelitis known also as ‘infantile paralysis’. The number of children actually dying from polio and other infectious diseases was relatively low: during the measles epidemic of 1961, although 750,000 cases were recorded, only 150 children died in the outbreak. However, this does not tell the full story. Apart from those who died, many more were left with brain damage or rendered deaf. Despite so many children being left disabled or even dying from catching it, measles was one of the milder illnesses to afflict the baby boomer children. Infinitely worse in many ways was polio.
The death rate from polio, which chiefly affected children and young people, was running in the 1950s at a little under 10 per cent. So we find that in 1953 there were 320 deaths in England, resulting from a total of 4,547 cases of the disease. This is itself shocking. There are no common diseases in Britain today with anything like a 10 per cent mortality rate. For the survivors though, the thousands of children who were not killed by the disease, life could be unbelievably grim. These are adult men and women today whom we seldom hear from when magazines and newspapers run pieces lamenting the fact that childhood for today’s children is not a patch on what it was sixty years ago. Not only would these thousands of children not be staying out until teatime, they would not be going out at all for months or years at a time. In some cases, they never went out again after they fell ill, even though they might have lived on for decades.
One of the reasons that parents today do not think it a particularly good idea for their children to go swimming in dirty canals is not that they have become obsessively concerned with Health and Safety, worrying neurotically about trifling dangers that yesterday’s children took in their stride. It is rather because we know that many germs thrive in dirty water and that children swimming in such water might swallow these germs or become infected with them through cuts and grazes. It’s common sense really. These days, anxieties about dirty canals might focus more upon things such as Weil’s Disease or leptospirosis, a bacterial infection spread via rat’s urine. For the baby boomers, the greatest fear of parents was polio, which was also transmitted most readily by contaminated water. This is one of the chief reasons why swimming pools began to use chlorine as a disinfecting agent: it reliably destroys the polio virus.
Throughout the 1950s tens of thousands of children in Britain caught polio. More than 90 per cent of them survived, but many suffered varying degrees of paralysis. This could cause limps and wasted muscles; the sight of children with their legs in metal callipers at that time was not an uncommon one. Far worse though was when the muscles most affected were those in the chest which allow us to breathe. In such a case, a child could literally suffocate, a terrible death. Developments in the 1930s had saved countless lives when the respiratory system was paralysed in this way, but this saving of lives came with its own cost.
In the 1920s and 1930s, artificial respirators were developed which mimicked the effect of the chest muscles. These became known as iron lungs. One may be seen in Illustration 14. The pressure within the iron lung was alternately lowered and raised, which caused the lungs to expand and then shrink again. In this way, a victim of polio whose muscles were paralysed could be kept breathing indefinitely. The obvious disadvantage was that the patient had to be altogether enclosed in what amounted to a metal coffin, with only the head projecting from the apparatus.
During the polio epidemics of the 1940s and 1950s, entire hospital wards were crammed with iron lungs, each containing a helpless child. There were over a thousand iron lungs in use in this country. Illustration 15 shows a hospital ward of polio victims in iron lungs in the United States at that time, identical to those in Britain. For some, only a week or two would be needed in the contraption. For others, months or years were needed before their own muscles could take over the function of the electric bellows which ceaselessly pumped air in and out of the machine. Until that time, they were compelled to lay helplessly on their backs, quite unable even to feed themselves, let alone play out all day long. There were those, though, who never recovered the use of their chest muscles. For them, the iron lung was a life sentence and even now there are a handful of people still dependent upon such antiquated machinery. In 1948, 11-year-old Martha Mason fell ill with polio and was confined to an iron lung. She remained in it until her death sixty-one years later. There are still elderly people in iron lungs to this day.
Here then is one strand of childhood from the time of the baby boomers which those who grew up at that time have chosen to erase from their memories. When expressing enthusiasm about playing out all day, nobody ever troubles to mention the children with leg callipers who were unable to keep up with their playmates, let alone those trapped in iron lungs. Such things are of course unknown today, one way in which the health of British children in the twenty-first century is incomparably better than it was sixty years ago.
The reason that life expectancy has risen so sharply in the last four or five decades is because children, by and large, no longer die before they reach adulthood. This effect is glaringly obvious to anybody who cares to examine the relevant statistics and then compare them with modern figures. Consider for a moment the year in which the post-war baby boom actually began. Today, the death of a baby before his or her first birthday is a rare tragedy. The infant mortality rate in Britain stands at fewer than four deaths per 1,000 for children under the age of one. In 1946, the year that the baby boom begun, ten times as many babies were dying, the infant mortality rate being 45 per 1,000 that year. We reflect again on what was said earlier, about history being written by survivors. One in twenty of those first British baby boomers failed to live even twelve months after their birth.
Infectious diseases were not the only cause of disability and death among children born during the baby boomer era. We looked in an earlier chapter at some of the many grave hazards involved in the practice of playing out, sometimes suggested as a sovereign remedy for the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ with which our children and grandchildren are constantly threatened. Other factors to be taken into account when deciding whether children in those days were genuinely healthier than todays’ youth are diet and air quality, which, oddly, were associated in causing one particular health problem for the baby boomers.
Until the late 1940s and early 1950s, the deficiency disease of rickets was endemic in this country, particularly in the larger cities. It was said that 80 per cent of British children suffered rickets to a greater or lesser extent at that time. The consequences of rickets could be lifelong and also life-limiting. For those unfamiliar with this scourge, rickets was caused by a lack of calcium and Vitamin D in the diet; it was also greatly exacerbated by a shortage of sunshine on the skin. In order to become rigid and hard, the bones of our bodies need two ingredients. One is calcium in the diet and the other Vitamin D. Without this essential vitamin, the calcium in the diet cannot be utilized for the building of healthy bones.
Many baby boomers suffered from rickets as they grew up. This can cause all manner of difficulties in later life. Sometimes, the external manifestations of childhood rickets are trifling and pose no problems in adulthood. The weight of the child’s body on the supporting bones of the legs can make them bend outwards, for example, causing bow legs. Then again, soft bones can result in twisted spines, a condition known as scoliosis. Sometimes the ribs are forced
out of shape and the child develops a pigeon chest or hunchback. Deformities such as these, especially combined with scoliosis, can mean that the heart and lungs do not have enough room to operate effectively in the thoracic cavity. This can shorten the life of a sufferer. Those who were children in 1950s Britain might recall that their mothers were given bottles of cod liver oil by health clinics. This is a rich source of Vitamin D.
The body can synthesize Vitamin D when ultraviolet light falls on the skin in sufficient quantities. This happens of course when we go out of doors and expose our skin to the sun. Considering how much time that the baby boomers spent out of doors as children, one would think that they were surely receiving enough sunlight to provide them with all the Vitamin D they needed, without resorting to the expedient of cod liver oil. That they were not and that rickets was commonest of all in cities, brings us neatly to another point about the supposedly robust health which children in those days enjoyed.
The main reason that children in Britain’s cities didn’t get enough sunlight to stave of Vitamin D deficiency and the rickets which it caused, was that there wasn’t nearly as much sunshine in British cities and towns as there is now. In 1950s London, there was an average of thirty-eight hours of sunshine in November. Today, there are seventy hours of sunshine in that month, almost twice as much as there was sixty years ago. The reason for this has not, as might at first be guessed, anything to do with global warming. It is simply that the sunlight was often unable to penetrate the clouds of smoke which hung perpetually over cities at that time.
Children growing up in the 1950s were always enveloped in smoke of one sort or another, whether they were indoors or out. This had, as might well be imagined, a terrible effect upon their health. In fact the smoke even had a bad effect upon children who had not even yet been born. Recent research on the Great Smog of 1952, in which atmospheric conditions combined to trap coal smoke over the capital for four days revealed something surprising.
In December 1952, cold weather in London and a lack of wind meant that smoke from the many thousands of coal fires used to heat people’s homes at that time collected over the city and turned into what was known as a ‘smog’. The severe air pollution caused many deaths from respiratory disorders. Government statisticians at the time calculated that 4,000 people had died prematurely that winter, although modern research suggests that this was a serious underestimation of the true death toll. A figure of 12,000 has been mooted as being closer to the mark. The very young and very old were the chief casualties of this environmental disaster. One ill effect which has only recently come to light is the effect of this pollution on babies still in the womb.
In March 2016 a paper was presented to the annual conference of the Royal Economic Society. Drawing upon studies of those born after the 1952 smog, it strongly suggested that adults whose mothers were pregnant with them at the time and living in London were 5 per cent less likely to have a degree. Men were 4 per cent less likely to have a job at the age of 50. These may sound like minor effects, but they are nonetheless significant for all that. It seems almost certain that the frequent air pollution from coal fires, which were the almost universal means of heating homes at that time, harmed children who had not even been born and not just during extreme cases of smog. These harmful effects might be elusive, but the difference that smoke made to the health of children at that time was very noticeable. It must be borne in mind that in 1950, 98 per cent of British homes were reliant upon open coal fires to heat their homes. As those millions of fires reduced the coal to ashes, by-products in the form of smoke and soot were simply discharged from chimneys and sent straight into the homes and the atmosphere outside. In addition to this, there were a number of coal-fired power stations operating in London at Battersea, Bankside and Fulham. During the Great Smog, 2,000 tons of carbon dioxide, 370 tons of sulphur dioxide and 140 tons of hydrochloric acid were being pumped into the air over London every day. Because of the meteorological conditions, these injurious substances simply remained suspended in the atmosphere to be breathed in by the city’s inhabitants.
The Great Smog was an extreme example of what happened regularly in every city and town in Britain at that time. The air that urban children breathed in was laced with a deadly cocktail of chemicals which did their lungs no good at all. Whether indoors or out, the air was full of sulphur and soot. Added to this was the all but universal habit of smoking. In 1948, 82 per cent of men in this country were smokers and almost every home was filled not only with the smoke from open fires, but also by clouds of tobacco smoke. Not just homes, but shops, cinemas, trains and even doctors’ waiting rooms were smoky. It will hardly surprise anybody to learn that respiratory problems for baby boomer children were a serious concern.
It is sometimes claimed that childhood asthma and allergies are on the rise and that this trend is something new and alarming. Yet another disorder of modern life that baby boomer children did not have to contend with! It will perhaps not surprise readers unduly by this time to discover that there is more to this than meets the eye. In the 1950s, as we have seen, the urban air was loaded with substances such as a sulphuric acid, which had no business finding their way into the lungs of children. Every day throughout the winter, 1,000 tons of soot was also entering the atmosphere in London alone, which was duly breathed in by those living in the capital. This is to say nothing of the many tons of hydrochloric acid, suspended in a fine aerosol, which also entered everybody’s lungs, along with the ever-present and copious amounts of tobacco smoke. Little wonder then that the irritation of the lungs known as bronchitis was very common in children.
So common was bronchitis that unless it was particularly severe, no parent would have thought to visit the doctor for such a minor ailment. It was just one of those things that one took for granted. It was known throughout the world, after all, as the ‘English disease’. The symptoms of bronchitis are almost identical with those of asthma; both are characterized by wheezing and shortness of breath. It seems likely that among the many cases of acute bronchitis seen in children during the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of asthmatics were hiding, their symptoms mimicking almost precisely those of the bronchitis sufferers. The point to bear in mind about bronchitis is that it can, if persistent, cause permanent damage to the lungs. Children growing up in the smoky atmosphere of mid-twentieth century Britain were having their lungs wrecked and their lives shortened, even if it would be decades before anybody was even aware of the fact.
The picture of the health of the baby boomer children so far has not been encouraging. They certainly do not look to have been in better shape than modern children and in many cases, their health was demonstrably worse. What about all the exercise though? Surely this was good for them and prevented them becoming lazy and fat, which is likely to lead to Type 2 diabetes in later life? It is undeniably true, is it not, that in that respect at least, the children of half a century or more ago were doing a good deal better than those born since the millennium?
We come now to one of the greatest of modern myths about childhood; that compared with children of a generation or two ago, today’s children are so overweight and get so little exercise that their long-term health is at serious risk. So fixed has this idea become, that it is now accepted as being almost an article of faith, not only among the general public but also with politicians and health professionals. There is an increasing sense of urgency and the feeling that something must be done to save the lives of children at risk of dying prematurely due to their idle and pampered lifestyle.
The feeling that there a crisis in the weight of the nation’s children began to become noticeable in the first few years following the turn of the millennium. Articles appeared in newspapers warning that children were heading for disaster in later life. By 2004, MPs were becoming very worried about the fate of British children in the future. In May 2004, the House of Commons Health Select Committee published a report on obesity, which repeated a warning which had already been floating about for tw
o or three years. They claimed that, ‘The sight of amputees will become much more familiar. There will be many more blind people.’ As this were not alarming enough, the report went on to say that, ‘Indeed, this will be the first generation where children die before their parents as a consequence of childhood obesity.’ It was all very scary and the thought of all those obese adults stumbling round the streets in a few years’ time with wooden legs or carrying white sticks, was enough to provoke several successive administrations to action.
In the 2016 budget, controversy was provoked by the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s insistence on the imposition of a ‘sugar tax’, designed to reduce the consumption of sugar by children. This was allegedly motivated by a strong desire to save the lives of children by preventing them from succumbing to the terrible scourge of obesity and thus having their lives unnecessarily shortened by heart disease and diabetes. Once again, the imagined pattern of baby boomer childhood was being used to dictate policy in the twenty-first century, in this case a perceived need to make modern children as wiry and fit as the baby boomers had been in their youth.
One of the strange things about the obesity ‘crisis’ among children is that unless we were continually being reminded of it by newspapers and television, most people would not even be aware that such a thing was supposed to exist. Looking at the average class of primary-school children, it does not immediately strike one that they are, on the whole, overweight, let alone morbidly obese. Of course, there are one or two fat children in most classes, but surely that was always the case? The fictional Billy Bunter was based on the fact that there were fat British children about, even a century ago. Despite what is drummed into us relentlessly by the mass media, there is no sign in real life that that there are more fat children than there were a few years ago.