Post-War Childhood

by Webb, Simon;

  So great were worries about children sitting for hours in front of a flickering screen that two major surveys were conducted in the late 1950s on children’s viewing habits and the possible ill-effects of excessive screen time. An academic called Heidi Himmelweit produced Television and the Child, which did not really come up with any new or surprising insights. For instance, Himmelweit found that although television stimulated interests, these were of the most fleeting nature and tended to lead nowhere. The survey found one or two disturbing facts, such as that in homes with televisions, three-quarters of 10- and 11-year-olds watched until 9.00 pm every evening, which didn’t leave them much time for doing anything else. It was also discovered that the violence and bloodshed of the American television series and films which were watched had a dulling effect upon the children’s sensibilities and that they hardly cared after a while about the deaths of the characters.

  The second major survey on the subject was undertaken in 1957, by author and teacher Edward Blishen, on behalf of the Council for Children’s Welfare. For a fortnight, 700 parents monitored their children’s television watching and produced written reports about it. Much of what was said reflects precisely the same fears that parents are currently expressing about ‘screen time’ and the use of electronic media. One mother said that, ‘They don’t want to go to the Scouts or any other movement because there is always something they want to watch.’ Another remarked that her child, ‘Had four books for Christmas and hasn’t read them yet.’

  Even more interesting was what the parents had to say about violence on television. Ask any baby boomer about television programmes that they enjoyed in the 1950s and almost without exception, they will mention, among others, the Western series that were so popular at that time, The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Maverick and so on. Viewing these programmes on black-and-white televisions is remembered as being a charming, family pursuit, far removed from the images to which children are routinely exposed these days on the Internet or in computer games such as Grand Theft Auto. But Edward Blishen was under no illusions about the matter when he announced in November 1957 the result of his investigations into children’s viewing habits and their parents; opinions on what they were watching. He told a meeting called by the Council for Children’s Welfare that parents had used words like ‘nasty’, ‘alien’, ‘frightening’ and ‘terror-making’ to describe what they had seen when watching children’s programmes. He went on to say that the objection of most parents was to the great amount of Wild West violence.

  It is odd to think now that people sixty years ago were seriously concerned about the effect on children of watching The Lone Ranger! Nevertheless, Westerns like that were causing the greatest uneasiness among parents, who were afraid that not only were their children being conditioned to accept as unremarkable the death by shooting or stabbing each week of various people on the screen, but also that there was the risk that some children would go on to copy the kind of thing they were shown week after week. We remember at this point that the Walt Disney Davy Crockett television series, which was tremendously popular among many children in the 1950s, was blamed by doctors for eye injuries caused by children firing bows and arrows or airguns at each other. The dangers of children copying what they saw on television Westerns was far from being a theoretical one: it led to many children each year losing their eyes.

  In short, both professionals and parents in the 1950s were starting to feel that there might be serious disadvantages for children spending too much time gazing at screens. It caused them to get less exercise and to disengage from the real world, living vicariously through the characters they saw on the screen. It was also responsible for a decline in the reading of books and harming education by preventing or discouraging schoolchildren from doing their homework in the evening. The idea was also being increasingly voiced that it was not good for children to be watching so many violent deaths every evening and that some vulnerable children might be impelled to copy the actions of actors whom they saw stabbing or shooting people. American Westerns and detective series were thought to be especially suspect in this respect.

  It is not hard to see strong similarities between the fears voiced in the 1950s about the damaging effects of television-watching on children and the modern anxiety that using the Internet or playing violent computer games is causing harm to growing minds. Let’s look at what else was being said on this subject and then compare it with some of the concerns currently being expressed about electronic media.

  Throughout the 1950s, there had been increasing fears, not just in Britain but also in the United States, that a diet of violence in the form of Westerns and police shows was not good for children and might either desensitise them to violence generally or even incite them to commit acts of violence themselves. The Manchester Guardian had no doubt at all about this and in an editorial on 1 April 1960, they set out the case as they saw it without mincing words. Beginning uncompromisingly, by saying that, ‘Violence and brutality on television present a special problem’, the writer went on to detail the harm done by the relatively new mass medium of television: ‘Even if, as it is fashionable to suggest today, shooting, knifing and many forms of sudden death are accepted merely as a form of stylised fantasy, without relation to life, the long-term effect of a diet of violence and brutality can only be harmful. Those who sup on murder may come to think it a normal meal.’ Strange to think that popular programmes of the 1950s could possibly be thought of in this way. Could watching Perry Mason or 77 Sunset Strip really have been harmful to the baby boomers?

  We saw in a previous chapter that the video of Child’s Play 3: Chucky’s Revenge was thought by some newspapers to be implicated in the murder of a toddler, in much the same way that Iris Dawkins’ death in 1960 had been linked to television-watching. Once computer games became popular, they too were blamed for encouraging murder. In July 2004, 17-year-old Warren Leblanc pleaded guilty to the murder of a 14-year-old boy. Leblanc had been an enthusiastic player of the Playstation game Manhunt and it was widely claimed in the press that the game had precipitated the murder itself, the Daily Mirror carrying a headline which proclaimed, ‘Obsessed teen guilty of brutal copycat murder’.

  The fear of what watching violence on television might lead children and young people to get up to, grew after 1960, until on 29 March 1962 Home Secretary Richard Austen Butler, known affectionately as ‘Rab’, announced the setting up of an enquiry into the effects of television on young people. The catalyst for this move was the furore about a graphic portrayal of a murder during a BBC production of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. This resulted in so many protests that the Postmaster-General, Reginald Bevins, was obliged to make a statement to the House of Commons. He described the scene in the television adaptation, which showed Bill Sykes killing Nancy, as ‘brutal and inexcusable’. What caused particular outrage was that this had been a children’s programme, broadcast at 5 pm on a Sunday afternoon.

  We should perhaps stop here and think about what an extraordinary situation we are witnessing. It is a common lament among older people that families all sitting down to watch the same television programme is very much a thing of the past. Parents will instead watch one thing, while their children are in different rooms viewing catch-up TV or some film streamed from the Internet. One hears parents talk of the days when they were themselves teenagers and the whole family would be watching some favourite programme in each other’s company, a popular sitcom, perhaps. It is also thought by many parents that both the quality and content of much of what their children are viewing leaves something to be desired.

  With all this in mind, it is almost beyond belief to see what the reactions were sixty years ago to things like Davy Crockett and The Lone Ranger, or even BBC adaptations of novels by Charles Dickens. This was all radical and alarming stuff in the late 1950s and early 1960s and thought to pose threats to the psychological health of vulnerable children. How happy we would be today if our children wished to watch a television version o
f Oliver Twist with us! In 1962, though, it was enough to cause the Home Secretary to launch a government enquiry. Television programmes of this sort were honestly believed to be as bad as anything which our own children and grandchildren are now accessing on the Internet.

  There was among both ordinary parents and also many professionals a fear that television was responsible if not for actually causing violence and deaths, then at least exacerbating problems among children. In some instances, violent images seen by children on television were directly blamed for subsequent deaths. In August 1963, the inquest was held in East London of an 11-year-old boy called Russell Sudbury. He had died of hanging at his home in Hainault. The dead boy had been found by his uncle, James Banks, who gave evidence at the inquest. Mr Banks had no doubt at all what had been responsible for his nephew’s death and after telling the court of how he had given the child the ‘kiss of life’, in a vain attempt to revive him, he continued, ‘I understand he had seen a television drama in which –’, but was swiftly interrupted by the Coroner, Mr Kenshole.

  Because of the controversy surrounding the possible role of television in promoting violent or dangerous behaviour, the Coroner investigating the death of Russell Sudbury devoted some time to trying to dampen down speculation about whether television could be blamed for the boy’s death. He said;

  There’s no lesson we can learn from this because it’s quite impossible to say, ‘Little boys should not be allowed to play with ropes.’ You can’t stop them, even if you want to. I don’t think you should bother too much about whether he learned this by watching television, it’s quite impossible to come to a conclusion. I have my doubts as to whether television did, in fact, play any part in this. This is an idea about which coroners’ views have been sought as to whether violence or death, as in this case, in youngsters is brought about as a result of what they see on television.

  Still, not all children at that time were slumped on the sofa, staring vacantly at the TV screen. One medium which was hugely popular in the years at which we are looking was comics. Reading of course played an integral part in the enjoyment of comics, some of which were actually educational. Many baby boomers, especially those from middle-class homes, have very strong memories of magazines like Look and Learn. Show some 60-year-olds an old copy of Look and Learn and they are likely to declare roundly that modern children would not have the patience to read something like this, with its informative articles on everything under the sun, from how radar works to the history of the Roman Empire. The early issues of this children’s magazine, which began publication in 1962, had a weekly circulation of a million copies. It is hard to imagine such a magazine being as popular these days. Could this be evidence that children fifty-five years ago were more curious about the world and had the staying power to read quite complicated articles about pretty obscure and complex subjects?

  Strange to say, there was very strong opposition throughout the 1950s and 1960s by many teachers and not a few parents to the reading of comics, which were believed to harm children mentally in a number of ways, not least by making them unable to focus on and absorb longer printed texts. There was a widespread feeling that the reading of comics tended to shorten children’s attention-spans and harm their vocabulary, some of the worries that we currently have in fact about textspeak and the use of tablets. The captions and speech bubbles in comics were usually composed of simple, short words and some people worried that this did not stretch a child’s ability to read. Comics were discouraged at school and forbidden in many middle-class homes. Even so-called ‘educational’ comics such as Look and Learn were frowned upon by a lot of teachers. It was not only educational considerations which were causing alarm, however; other, and graver, fears were being expressed at that time about comics.

  Comics for children were a relatively new medium in the 1950s and although they are now remembered favourably as just one more of those relics from a gentler time, they were felt then by many professionals to be undesirable and even dangerous. There had been story papers for children for many years; things like the Magnet, which of course introduced Billy Bunter to the world. In the early 1920s and early 1930s, new magazines for children came along. Hotspur and Wizard carried exciting and fantastic serials for boys. Although illustrated with the occasional picture, these papers consisted of pages covered with densely printed text. True, they were sometimes dismissed as trashy in content, but it was undeniable that children were actually reading when they leafed through Hotspur and the content of the stories was largely unobjectionable.

  All this changed just before the beginning of the Second World War, when comics as we now understand them appeared on the market simultaneously in Britain and America. There had been much earlier incarnations of the format, Comic Cuts having been published as earlier as 1890, but children’s comics as we know them really began circulating in the 1930s. In June 1938, Superman made his debut in America in the first edition of Action Comics. The following month saw the publication of what would become one of the most popular British comics, the Beano, which introduced Lord Snooty and his pals to the world. The very different characters of Superman and Lord Snooty thus appeared for the first time within weeks of each other. The previous year had seen the first issues of Dandy in Britain and Detective Comics in America, the comic in which Batman was first featured in 1939.

  It is difficult in retrospect to understand what a menace comics were thought to be to the baby boomers in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, we see them as representing all that was harmless and good about childhood at that time. The idea that comics featuring Superman and Lord Snooty could have been seen as subversive, insidiously promoting homosexuality, damaging to education and likely to incite crime and disorder must seem vanishingly unlikely to modern readers! Never the less, concern about comics and their effects upon children and young people began in the United States and spread to this country, resulting eventually in yet another moral panic which led to a hastily-enacted piece of legislation aimed at tackling what came to be seen as a terrible scourge.

  Before looking in detail at what was being said about comics in the 1950s, it might be useful to look both backwards and forwards at other media which were believed at one time to pose a threat to children. We saw that the cinema was thought in the years following the end of the First World War to be implicated in the decline of children’s use of public lending libraries. It was also said that some children were so addicted to this form of entertainment that they would steal money to ensure that they could visit the cinema as often as they wished. There was talk too of children copying what was seen on the screen and committing criminal acts based upon what characters in the films were doing.

  Fast-forward eighty years and we see similar concerns being voiced about ‘video nasties’ and their bad influence on children, even, as in the case of the James Bulger murder, apparently being associated with crimes of extreme violence. Computer games and the Internet are also spoken of by some older adults in the same terms. All these worries and anxieties are essentially a consequence of adults fretting about new media which were not around when they were themselves youngsters. Today, the baby boomers are alarmed at the use of computers and tablets because they did not have such things as this when they were children and cannot imagine that a childhood centred around electronic gadgets can possibly be healthy or fulfilling, so they hunt around for bad things which they can blame on what they do not fully understand. Thus we see a head teacher criticising the use of tablets and claiming that they are preventing children from being able to write properly or even climb trees. What the baby boomers have quite forgotten is that their own childhood amusements were the subject of just this kind of uninformed attack by adults. Far from being a fairly unobjectionable way for children to pass some of their leisure time, both watching Western series on black-and-white televisions and reading Superman comics were widely believed at one time to be incredibly damaging to developing minds.

  In 1954 a book was published in Am
erica which summed up the fears that many parents and teachers had about the new medium of children’s comics. Comics, in the accepted modern format, had only been around for fifteen years or so and thus qualified as a modern phenomenon. Seduction of the Innocent, by psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, set out on its cover the theme which Wertham expounded in the book, ‘the influence of comic books on today’s youth’. Wertham was not concerned with this or that type of comic: he condemned them all wholesale, even Superman, whom he described as a Fascist, and Batman, who was, according to Wertham, enjoying a flagrantly open gay relationship with his young ward Robin.

  Reading through Seduction of the Innocent today is an eerie experience, for the entire thesis could have been taken from a modern newspaper denouncing the perils and ill effects of the Internet on children. The main thrust of Wertham’s argument was that repeatedly seeing images in comics could cause children to view such behaviour or events as being somehow normal. This was, he suggested, a major cause of juvenile delinquency. Attention was also drawn in the book to the fact that scenes of violence were accompanied by advertisements for air rifles and knives. It was, according to Frederic Wertham, as though those producing the comics were setting out to promote anti-social behaviour. We must remember that British comics too carried advertisements for airguns, to which nobody at the time took exception.