Post-War Childhood

by Webb, Simon;

  Successive innovations in technology have always been viewed with suspicion by the older generation; especially in as far as they affect children and their studies. Socrates did not like the idea of written works of science or philosophy. When children could read papyrus scrolls, instead of memorizing poetry and history, it was seen as weakening their mental powers and making them intellectually lazy. After all, their parents and grandparents had had to learn by heart entire texts; surely it was cheating to have the things written down, where they could look at them whenever they pleased? The baby boomers, having not had the advantage of access to calculators and the Internet, are now similarly outraged at the thought of children not memorizing a whole lot of things, but rather having them available on tap, so to speak. One quite sees their point. In the early 1950s, children were compelled to learn the names of the royal houses of England, starting with Normandy and going all the way through the Plantagenets and Tudors to Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Now, any children wishing to know who followed the Normans need only glance at their smartphone and there it is. To an awful lot of baby boomers this smacks of laziness or even cheating!

  We shall look next in detail at the mistrust and dislike which older people have regularly evinced for any new medium which their children take a fancy to, from printed books to Internet sites. This is relevant to our main theme and will tell us something about the reason why the childhood of the baby boomers has come to occupy such a place in the perception of the public.

  Chapter 7

  There Was Nothing Like That When I Was a Boy!:

  The Older Generation’s Fear of New Media

  It is probably fair to say that very few readers will be familiar with, or even have heard of, The Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955. This piece of legislation, though, is worth considering both for the light which it sheds on the baby boomer years and also the insight it furnishes into the neuroses of our own age, of which more later.

  In a previous chapter, we looked at one or two of the moral panics which have gripped the country over the last sixty years or so; those relating to what was once called ‘juvenile delinquency’. We saw that there is nothing new about fears that children and young people today are running wild and that such anxieties are more a psychological disorder of adults, rather than a sociological phenomenon of actually increased violence and criminal behaviour among those under the age of 18. Other types of moral panic about childhood and adolescence are also to be found in our newspapers, although they are not generally recognized as such. It is in the nature of such things that we tend to realize only in retrospect that this or that fear was really groundless. Looking at a couple more of the moral panics from the post-war years might help us to place modern worries in perspective; such things as ‘sexting’ and the supposedly negative influence of the Internet, social media and electronic devices generally on developing minds.

  A recurring theme so far has been the way in which children of earlier generations are seen by adults as having been more active, virtuous and innocent than those of modern times. The 1950s are often seen as a more innocent and healthy time for children and teenagers, who spent their days playing in the park instead of ‘sexting’, becoming obsessed with violent computer games or accessing inappropriate content on the Internet. There is an underlying fear here, which links worries about obesity with the moral development of children. If they are laying on their beds looking at tablets and mobiles, then they won’t be out of doors and engaging in healthy pursuits. It seems clear to us that this is a recipe for idleness, combined with an undesirable obsession with violent or sexual imagery. Their childhood is being stolen from them; they are losing both their innocence and their physical health. It is all so very different from the way in which we ourselves grew up!

  Apprehensions that children are becoming lazier and more prone to think about sex than was once the case are nothing new. As far back in British history as we care to go, we find similar concerns about the moral welfare of youngsters and the material to which they are being exposed. Frequently, this goes hand in hand with the fear that not only are their characters being harmed by a preoccupation with unsuitable matters, but that this also causes a physical decline in strength and vitality. Before exploring this topic as it affected the baby boomers, let’s have a look at a very modern example of the current hysteria about a new medium which is apparently causing out children to become enervated and weak.

  In December 2015, Bob Drew, the head of an infants’ school in East London, claimed that children were starting at his school with hands too weak to grip a pencil. Not only were their muscles too feeble to hold a pencil, they also had poor upper body strength as well. The handwriting of children at his school, Gearies in Barkingside, was as a result spidery and uncertain. For Mr Drew, appointed OBE in 2009 for services to education and an adviser to the government on the subject, the cause of the problem was plain. It was digital technology. Specifically, it was small children being allowed unlimited access to ipads and other tablets; what Mr Drew described as ‘soft touch’ technology. Children spending their time using such gadgets, he suggested, ended up not getting sufficient exercise; with muscles consequently remaining under-developed.

  This of course is really nothing at all to do with childhood development and everything to do with fear of a new medium. Books are the ultimate in ‘soft touch’ technology, requiring only the occasional light brush with one finger to refresh the page. Would this headmaster have been so concerned had his pupils been spending a lot of their time reading? It seems unlikely. Just imagine a school head who was complaining publicly of the harm being done to his pupils’ handwriting and general development by the pernicious habit of reading! He would soon be identified as something of a crank. In fact, he is not a crank, just a man following in an ancient tradition of rejecting and denouncing new ways for children and young people to spend their leisure time or acquire information. This custom, and we shall shortly look in detail at its manifestation during the baby boomer years, may be noted as far back as 500 BC. This was when the Greek philosopher Socrates was complaining about a modern medium which he believed was, although he didn’t of course use these actual words, rewiring the brains of children. Readers will perhaps be aware that this is currently a fear among many adults that new methods of acquiring information and communicating with each other are having a deleterious and harmful effect upon children’s neurological development. Socrates was not worried about mobiles and tablets: his anxiety centred around quite another medium.

  In the dialogue entitled Phaedrus, recounted by Plato, Socrates and Phaedrus bump into each other on the outskirts of Athens and have a long conversation about various topics. One of these is writing and Socrates criticizes the practice, especially when used educationally, explaining that dead words which are captured on parchment in that way are pretty useless for learning. They are, he asserts, no substitute for human dialogue and live teaching. Elsewhere in ancient writings, we find complaints that the habit of writing things down is harming young minds, by damaging the memory. Instead of remembering huge chunks of poetry or scripture, children can now ‘cheat’ by having it all written down in front of them. These are the earliest instances of people trying to persuade us that a new medium will harm young minds, although one would be hard-pressed today to find anybody who felt that way about writing!

  Returning to this country, we find that in the early sixteenth century; not long after William Caxton introduced printing to this country, there began the proliferation of printed matter, sheets of paper which many older people now argue are far better for young and developing minds than words appearing on electronic screens. One of the results of setting up printing presses in Britain was that for the first time, cheap printed material became available to ordinary people, including children. Some of this related to religious and educational matters, an awful lot was designed to be pure entertainment. Among the most popular productions were chapbooks. These were little leaflets of
very poor quality, illustrated with crude woodcuts, which contained ballads, songs, myths and fairy tales. Some were also published about famous crimes and there were smutty sexual adventures as well, the forerunners of pornographic magazines. Inevitably, chapbooks fell into the hands of children and adolescents, who often found them more interesting than the religious texts that they usually encountered, there being no clear division in the early days of printing between works for adults and those intended for children. In 1528 William Tyndale, the religious reformer who translated the Bible into English, complained about the increasingly common practice of allowing young people to read what they pleased: ‘Robin Hood and Bevis of Hampton, Hercules, Hector, and Troylus, with a thousand histories and fables of love and wantons and ribaldry, as filthy as heart can think, to corrupt the minds of youth withal.’ It is difficult to imagine anybody today who might disapprove in such strong terms of children reading tales from Greek mythology! The new medium, in this case printed books, was clearly thought to pose a moral threat to youngsters, causing them to read ‘filthy’ stories and so be corrupted.

  Fast-forward 300 years to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and we find serious concern being expressed about the habit of reading novels, which were now becoming widely available. This was believed to be particularly damaging for girls, leading as it did not only to idleness, but giving rise also to an unhealthy interest in romance and sex. Experts warned that girls and young woman became so absorbed in novels that they lost touch with the real world and were eventually unable to distinguish between fact and fiction.

  As the nineteenth century drew on, a new menace to the psychological health of young people appeared. These were the so-called ‘Penny Dreadfuls’, which were similar in many ways to the Tudor chapbooks. These were serialized stories in the form of magazines: the adventures of highwaymen, supernatural thrillers, true crime and various other types of publication. On the covers were lurid, sometimes gruesome illustrations. An enormous industry grew up to provide youngsters with a ready supply of this Victorian pulp fiction and it was blamed for everything from the idleness of errand boys to rapes and murders which had taken place after youths had been reading them. There were demands for ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ to be prohibited by law, as they were responsible for so much misery.

  By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the ‘Penny Dreadful’ scourge had faded away. At its height, youths charged with murders had blamed their crimes on the reading of ‘Penny Dreadfuls’, an eerie foreshadowing of what became known in the USA in the early years of the twenty-first century as the ‘Grand Theft Auto defence’. This was the claim that the constant playing of the violent computer game Grand Theft Auto had blurred the boundaries of some young people’s perceptions of reality, to the extent that they had not realized the seriousness of real-life murder. The next menace to the mental stability of the more easilyinfluenced young person had emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century and was also to be blamed for all manner of ills, from stealing cars to a decline in reading among children. This was the cinema.

  In 1913, it was claimed that children’s libraries in the city of Nottingham were seeing 50 per cent fewer books being borrowed. The reason, it was alleged, was that children were now spending all their spare time at the cinema and no longer had any time to read library books. Within a few years, the majority of British children were keen cinemagoers. In Edinburgh in the 1930s, 70 per cent of children went at least once a week to the cinema and in London, 63 per cent of under-fives went regularly. Cinemas were blamed for a rise in criminal activity by children, partly because they were emulating the scenes that they saw depicted on the screen. Youngsters brought before the courts for theft claimed that they had stolen money so that they could spend more time at the cinema.

  There is a common thread running through fears about chapbooks, novels, ‘Penny Dreadfuls’, cinema films and tablets, one that has very little to do with any real anxieties that are expressed, but is more about the general uneasiness that adults feel about what children are getting up to amuse themselves. It is a general, rather than particular anxiety. One is irresistibly reminded of a cartoon which appeared in the magazine Punch many years ago. A mother is sitting on a beach and saying to a girl aged about 12, ‘Go and see what your little brother is doing and tell him to stop it!’ It is not so much that William Tyndale in the sixteenth century or Bob Drew in our own have really thought about the harm caused to children by ipads or chapbooks, but that they felt a visceral distrust of and antipathy towards new media that were not available to them when they were themselves children.

  All of which brings us to the baby boomer years. Today, we know that the use of relatively new technology such as computers, tablets and mobile telephones is often cited as a contributory factor to everything from obesity and decline in reading standards to violent or prematurely sexualised behaviour in children. We look back to the time within living memory when children spent the whole day out playing and then came home and read the Narnia books or The Famous Five with a torch under the bedclothes. How things have changed; and not for the better!

  In January 1950 Hephzibah Menuhin, sister of the world-famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin, announced that she was very pessimistic about the future of American children, because as she said: ‘Children in America have lost the art of entertaining themselves. They sit by the television set watching horrible, blood-curdling series, and chewing gum. They are lazy, lethargic and completely lacking in initiative.’ Alter a few words here and there and this could have been taken from today’s newspaper; a description of the ill effects of the Internet, ipads or computer games.

  In Britain, people were beginning to say much the same about television, especially as more and more homes acquired television during the 1950s. There were three principal objections to television as a means of entertaining children and young people. In the first place, as Yehudi Menuhin’s sister had remarked, this was an essentially passive medium. No imagination was necessary, one did not need to use creative powers to conjure up a picture, as is necessary when reading books or even listening to the radio. With television, the whole thing is done for us. This was said to harm children’s natural development and actively work against their ability to think for themselves. To use a modern expression, it was thought that this new medium was in some way ‘rewiring’ children’s brains. Another perceived problem was the time being spent slumped in front of the television screen. This reduced levels of physical activity and some experts said that such a sedentary lifestyle would lay the children open in later life to a raft of disorders including obesity.

  Much of this will sound uncannily familiar to modern readers. A nation of couch potatoes who are not using their imagination and cannot be bothered even to read. It is of course precisely what we are now being told every day in our newspapers about the dangers of digital technology. A third aspect of television’s effects will also resonate with what is now being said about the Internet and computer games and their effects upon children. Studies in America by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters drew attention to the number of murders and the amount of violence shown on television, in fictional police shows for instance. This coincided with a rise in violent crime and anti-social behaviour by teenagers and older children. A causal link was suspected between the amount of violence seen on television and the propensity of a young person to indulge in aggressive behaviour. We saw this being suggested when the boy accused of the murder of Iris Dawkins was questioned by the police. That he talked of all the murders he had seen on television was thought by some people to be sinister and highly indicative of the malign influence of this new medium on children.

  To those people who have bought into the cosy, traditional picture of baby boomer childhood, it might come as a bit of a shock to discover that quite a few adults at the time were already fretting then about what they saw as the deteriorating quality of life for children in the post-war world. Where America leads, Br
itain invariably follows, at least on cultural matters. It was not long before the supposed link between the spread of television-watching among children and the surge in juvenile delinquency, what we would today call anti-social behaviour by children and youths, was noticed and causing alarm in this country. Older people recalled the days before there were cinemas, radios and television sets and told anybody who would listen how childhood in the 1950s was not what it had been in the 1890s or the Edwardian period.

  Television in the 1950s was strongly suspected to be making Britain’s children lazy and unimaginative, to say nothing of feeding them a diet of violence and sex and also making them prone to anti-social behaviour. This was bad enough, but as more and more homes acquired television sets, there emerged another fear. Again, it is one which will be familiar to modern readers. Television was said to be harming academic achievement, as well as being responsible for a decline in reading and a loss of interest in activities outside the home. All that children wished to do was slump in front the screen all evening. This was sufficiently worrying that several surveys were undertaken, which examined the views of both children and parents about the increase in television-watching. By 1959, 60 per cent of homes in this country had television sets and within another two years, the figure had reached 80 per cent.

  Writing in the Sunday Times in 1958, anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer was alarmed that ownership of television sets appeared to be proliferating among the working classes. This was a bad thing, he thought, because unlike middle-class viewers who watched ballet, serious music and documentaries, the working classes seemed to prefer serials and films. Not only that, more than half of them were what Gorer classified as addicts; people who watched for more than four hours a night. This ‘gross indulgence’ led, at least according to Gorer, to a life ‘emptied all nearly all its richness and warmth’. This was because, as a survey that year revealed, in 60 per cent of the homes where there were children and televisions, the set was switched on all evening. As Gorer remarked in his series of articles in the Sunday Times, this was not a good thing educationally because, as he put it, it resulted in, ‘children’s education often imperilled by the absence of any quiet place to do homework.’