Post-War Childhood

by Webb, Simon;

  In the Introduction, it was remarked that baby boomer childhood has been officially adopted as the yardstick by which we measure anything at all relating to children in twenty-first century Britain. If we find that fewer children are walking to school than was the case in 1959, that is a problem. If children spend less time reading books than they did in 1955, something must be wrong with modern childhood. When we learn that today’s children weigh more or are taller than those sixty years ago, alarm bells should start ringing. It is this instinctive and negative reaction to any aspect of childhood which deviates from the perceived norm, meaning the way things were when senior politicians, judges and doctors were themselves children, which has triggered the ‘obesity crisis’. To understand the fuss being made today about children’s weight, we must look back once more to the past.

  The first thing to realize is that claims that there are more overweight children in Britain than there used to be, are nothing new. This idea was certainly about when the baby boomers were growing up. In October 1960, the radio programme Any Questions was broadcast from St Mary’s Hall, Arundel. Then, as now, the questions from the audience reflected current anxieties. One of the questions that evening was about how to tackle the growing problem of childhood obesity or, as it was put in those days, what to do about overweight children. This was a very topical subject. Since the end of rationing in the 1950s, sweets came off the ration in 1953, it had been noticed that there were an increasing number of children who appeared to be overweight. Many people believed that the strict rationing during and after the Second World War had been healthy for children and that the large amounts of sugar, in the form of sweets, was now being consumed was creating what we today call an ‘Obesity Time Bomb’.

  In 1964, the increase in the number of fat children was causing concern for British doctors. On 13 November that year, Dr Otto Wolff, a specialist in child health, told a seminar in Birmingham that overweight children tended to grow into overweight adults and that there was a link between obesity and social class, an idea that is regularly appearing in the media today. Dr Wolff, who was Reader in Paediatrics and Child Health at Birmingham University, said that obesity was the most common nutritional disturbance in the developed world. Interestingly, he raised precisely the same fears about the risk to long-term health among overweight children that we are hearing now, telling the seminar that about four-fifths of obese children would go on to become obese adults and that this had serious implications for an increased mortality rate. The doctor went on to talk of the need for children to engage in more physical activity.

  The themes touched upon at the seminar in Birmingham over half a century ago are all very familiar to us; the need for children to get more exercise and the danger of their life expectancy being shortened unless something was done about the problem. Curious indeed to see that such things were already being said when the baby boomers were children.

  Worries about weight were still going strong a few years later. If anything, they had intensified. A survey in 1967 found that when asked if they felt that they had weighed more in the last three months than they would like to, 62 per cent of adults replied that they had. In other words, almost two-thirds of those questioned were worried about their weight. Of those who weighed more than they liked, a third said that they first considered themselves overweight as children. In that same year, a clinic for overweight schoolchildren opened in the northern town of Salford. The aim was to help children lose weight by dieting and regular exercise. The medical officer for health of Salford, Dr J. Burn, said that, ‘The problem of overweight in the 11–15 age group is increasing’.

  We can see by all of this that concerns about overweight children are hardly a new phenomenon. For at least the last sixty years, ordinary people have been fretting about losing weight and worrying that their children weigh too much. Even at the height of the baby boomer era, it was being claimed that children were growing increasingly and unhealthily fat.

  What then is the truth of the matter? Can we use the baby boomers’ childhood years as a benchmark and try to recreate the lifestyle then in order to reduce the seemingly unstoppable march of childhood obesity? Might it be worth trying to get children to walk to school, turn off the television and play outside more, as a means of saving them from Type 2 diabetes and the blindness and amputation of their limbs which that illness can cause? We saw earlier that life expectancy in Britain has been going up steadily for many years. So too has the height and weight of both children and adults. This is scarcely surprising. The main dietary problem in this country historically has not been being overweight, but malnutrition. During the first half of the twentieth century, the need was to build children up by providing them with nutritious and enriched food, so that they would not suffer from deficiency diseases such as rickets and scurvy. Children tended to be skinny and undersized and this led to all sorts of health problems. With the burgeoning prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s, they began to put on weight, which really should have been a cause for rejoicing, rather than anxiety! As the baby boomers grew up, it became, for the first time in British history, rare to see a seriously underweight and malnourished child. The increasing weight of the baby boomer children went hand in hand with better health and rising life expectancy. That the average child now weighed more than in the 1920s was recognized to be a good thing: they would as a result live longer than their parents and grandparents.

  Although it is not strictly relevant to the examination of baby boomer childhood which we are undertaking, it is interesting to see how the present-day ‘obesity crisis’ among children has been created. It is customary when discussing obesity to mention that in some year in the past people weighed less than they do today. So we are told that the average man in the late 1950s weighed 10.2 stone, as opposed to today’s average of 13.2 stone; the inescapable conclusion being that we are a nation of porkers! Of course, if we go back another fifty years or so, we find that the average weight of recruits to the British army in 1900 was less than 9 stone. Perhaps this, rather than the 1950s average weight should be used as our standard when thinking about obesity? What is it which leads us believe that 10.2 stone and not 8.7 stone should be the ideal weight upon which we should found all our hopes and expectations for the future of the nation’s children? Why should anything over this be regarded as dangerous?

  There are two reasons why Britain has fallen prey to a childhood ‘obesity epidemic’ and neither have anything particularly to do with the health of the country’s children. The first reason that we are reading a lot in newspapers about overweight children is of course that following the trend for the last century or so, children in Britain now weigh more than once they did. This has been a constant process since 1900 or so. Because modern children do not seem to spend as much time out of doors as they did, older politicians, doctors and others have convinced themselves that the increase in weight of their own children and grandchildren must somehow be tied in with an unhealthy lifestyle and that something must be done to get these children to start climbing trees and playing in parks again.

  The clinical evidence that children are now unhealthily fat and likely to die at an earlier age than their older relatives is sparse and unconvincing. The main cause of childhood obesity has nothing to do with diet and lifestyle and everything to do with a decision taken in the United States two years before the dawn of the new millennium. One of the easiest and most misleading ways of measuring obesity in a population is by working out the Body Mass Index (BMI) of individuals and then arbitrarily deciding whether this exceeds a certain number and the person is therefore overweight. The BMI is found by dividing the weight in kilograms by the square of the height in metres. This figure is then divided by the height again to yield a number which is typically between 20 and 35. The higher the number, the more likely the person is to be overweight or obese.

  This method, which is a notoriously crude way of measuring anything and does not alone yield anything much in the way of objective clinica
l data, shows once again the difficulty in comparing the situation with childhood now and the way that it was in the 1950s or 1960s. To begin with, nobody in Britain at that time was using the metric system, let alone using kilograms and metres to work out BMIs. Even the term Body Mass Index was unknown before 1972. This means at once that we have no real idea how many fat children were around in this country in 1957, say. We know that there were some, because people were expressing concern about this, but we have no idea if there were more, less or about the same number of overweight children as there are today.

  There is another great problem with using BMI as the basis for claiming that there is an obesity crisis and that is that the definition of obesity is not a fixed one, but changes dramatically from one decade to the next. In 1997, for instance, one was officially overweight if the BMI was 27 or over. Then, acting on dubious evidence, America’s National Institute for Health decided to lower the threshold from 27 to 25. On Wednesday, 17 June 1998, the new guidelines were introduced and overnight, 25 million Americans became overweight or obese. In Britain too, millions of adults were officially reclassified as being too fat for their own good.

  To show the absurdity of this new method of defining obesity, it is only necessary to look at professional athletes such as the American basketball star Michael Jordan. When Jordan was at the peak of his career and a supremely fit player, his waist was just 30 inches. Nevertheless, his BMI ranged between 27 and 29, making him, technically at least, overweight and verging on obese. BMI makes no allowance for muscle to fat ratio or ethnicity. This has led to the parents of slim, healthy schoolchildren being sent letters which warn that their child is in danger of becoming overweight.

  On 29 April 2016 Mrs Claire Margeson of Hull, in East Yorkshire, received a disturbing letter from Humber NHS Foundation Trust. As part of the sinister-sounding National Child Measurement Programme, her 10-year-old son Bradley’s height and weight had been measured and recorded. The conclusion was stark: the little boy was overweight. The odd thing about all this was that Bradley Margeson certainly did not look in the least overweight in photographs and nor did his weight seem out of the ordinary. The 4ft 8in (143.2cm) high boy weighed just 6st 8lb (41.6kg). Who in their senses could possibly think that this indicated a fat or even chubby child? Fortunately, both mother and child laughed at the absurdity of the thing and so no harm was done. Here is a child who would fit into any photograph of healthy boyhood in the 1950s and yet he has been officially classified as being overweight, presumably one of those poor wretches who will be going blind or having his arms or legs sawn off in later life.

  The explanation for this and similar claims that children are overweight or even obese is simple. A child is defined as being overweight if he weighs more than most other children of the same age and sex. This is so obviously a strange way to go about the business, as a brief thought experiment will show. Let us suppose that we are able to travel back in time with all our charts and calculators to the medieval period and measure a large number of children’s height and weight. Having calculated the average BMI for the group, we would then, using the current methodology, be obliged to define any child in the 91st centile, that is to say a child whose BMI was greater than 90 per cent of the other children, as being clinically overweight. Never mind that this child, if taken from a hungry or emaciated population might look as skinny as a rake by modern standards; by using modern methods, he would be overweight. What we have is a system which will automatically define a proportion of the children in any population, even those starving to death during a famine, as being clinically overweight or obese.

  A comparison of old school photographs of classes of children from the 1950s are very similar to more modern pictures. Both show groups of average-looking children, one or two of whom look a little larger than their classmates. There is really no reason at all to think that more British children are morbidly obese or even just a little tubby than was the case a few years ago. In fact, there is strong evidence to suggest the opposite.

  In 2004, the year that the report of the Health Select Committee was published, the one which warned of a generation of overweight children likely to die before their parents, another publication also appeared. This was a government report called the Health Survey for England 2003. It shed light upon the obesity epidemic which was about to engulf the country’s children by revealing that in 1995 the average weight of English boys under the age of 16 was 32kg (5 stone 1lb). In 2003, it had dropped slightly to 31.9kg (5 stone). The average weight of girls under 16 had indeed risen though; from 32kg to 32.4kg. There may well have been some overweight children in England, there always have been, but the average weight of children had remained almost unchanged, despite the feverish media attention about an epidemic of morbidly obese children.

  Another point to bear in mind is that all the available evidence suggests that being a little overweight by today’s standards; that is to say having a BMI between 25 and 30, is actually associated with lower mortality rates than for people who are of ‘normal’ weight! In other words, even if the nation’s children were all found to be officially overweight, then their life expectancy would actually go up rather than down!

  Once again, when examined calmly and rationally, another of the ways that modern childhood is apparently failing in comparison with the childhood of the baby boomers is shown to amount to nothing at all. The idea that the present generation of schoolchildren will all be stumbling around in a few years, blinded by obesity, parts of their bodies having been surgically removed, before dropping dead in front of their parents, is absurd.

  The health of British children is far better than that of their grandparents in any measureable way. They are less likely to die in childhood, will live on average longer than their parents and are less likely to suffer from any number of disorders; from tooth decay and rickets to measles and cancer. No doubt the health of their own children will be better still. Having disposed of another of the popular myths associated with the baby boomers, we turn now to perhaps the most popular misconception of all: that children in the twenty years or so following the end of the Second World War were better educated than children who are at school today.

  Chapter 6

  Back to Basics:

  Has Education Been Dumbed Down Since the 1960s?

  The one thing upon which everybody seems to agree when talking about the baby boomers is that they received a much better education than that which their grandchildren are likely to get at modern schools. Grade inflation at both GCSE and A level, together with the general dumbing down of education which has taken place over the last fifty years or so are both standbys of lazy journalists, appearing regularly each year as the latest examination results are published. At other times of the year, newspaper headlines trumpet forth the astounding information that one British adult in five is functionally illiterate. Invariably, articles on this subject are illustrated with old examination questions from the 1950s or 1960, compared with the sort of thing found in this year’s GCSEs. Not only are young British adults illiterate, they are also innumerate, probably because of all these calculators, computers and mobile telephones! This is an easy game to play and a little later we will see how it is done, but for now let us look at a question from an 11 Plus paper from the 1950s:

  3,755 is multiplied by 25 and the result is divided by 125. Write down the answer.

  Only think, this question was set for 10- and 11-year-olds! Most adults today would have to stop and think pretty hard about such a poser and in the 11 Plus, there were whole pages of this kind of thing. Surely this tells us something about educational standards as they were sixty years ago? For contrast, here are a couple of questions from 2014’s mathematics GCSE paper for 15- and 16-year-olds:

  The mountain K3 is eight thousand and fifty one metres in height

  Write the number eight thousand and fifty one in figures

  Work out ¼ of 24kg

  Put like that, it appears plainly obvious that 11-yea
r-olds of sixty years ago were doing more complicated sums than today’s 16-year-olds, surely? Talk about dumbing down!

  This attitude, that educational standards were far higher in the 1950s than they are today, is at the root of many of the changes in governmentdictated practice in schools today. It was the reason that that the National Curriculum was introduced in 1988 and also why reading is now mostly taught by the use of phonics, rather than the whole-word, ‘look and say’ method which was once very widely used in British schools. More recently, we have seen the return of memorizing multiplication tables by heart being officially endorsed as part of the government’s ‘war on innumeracy and illiteracy’. All these policy initiatives are predicated on the assumption that the old ways of teaching are best and that we are about to be engulfed in a rising tide of illiteracy or surrounded by adults who are unable to multiply two times two without whipping out their mobiles.

  Before examining the myth of the high standards of education achieved in the post-war years, another part of the legendary world of the baby boomers, it might be instructive to see what was happening to the educational system in Britain while the baby boomers were growing up. There are still those who yearn for the return of the selective system which was put into place the year after the first of the baby boomers were born in 1946 and many people seem to think that bringing back streaming or grammar schools would be a good way of tackling what are routinely said to be the appallingly low educational standards in many schools. As usual, the years that the baby boomers were growing up are treated as some sort of gold standard to which we should aspire.

  In 1946, when the first batch of baby boomers made their appearance in Britain, the school leaving age was 14. Somewhere in the region of 90 per cent of British children left school at this age without any qualifications at all. They had little choice in the matter. Almost all children attended elementary schools which only taught children up to the age of 14. If you wished to take the School Certificate, the 1930s and 1940s equivalent of GCSEs, you would have to go to a secondary school, the majority of which were private fee-paying establishments. True, the grammar schools, although private, set aside a quarter of their places for scholarship pupils, but these were almost all taken up by middle-class children. The reason was that their entry exams were so stiff that only children who came from well-educated homes or whose parents could afford private tuition really had much chance of passing them and so securing a place at a grammar school. It was, as almost everybody agreed, a grossly unfair system and one which was heavily weighted against working-class children. Not only was there no chance of getting into further or higher education without the School Certificate, it was required for many jobs in offices. The lack of it meant that an awful lot of young people were condemned immediately to a life of manual work, with little prospect of advancement.