Post-War Childhood

by Webb, Simon;

  In addition to his denunciation of superhero comics (Wonder Woman was clearly a lesbian according to Wertham), the genre known colloquially as ‘horror comics’ came in for condemnation, featuring as they did scenes of graphic violence and gore. If Batman contributed to children becoming confused about family structure and Superman caused them to embrace ‘Un-American’ attitudes, then it was the horror comics which made sex maniacs and violent criminals of them. This particular type of comic gave rise to one of the greatest moral panics involving children in 1950s Britain. These so-called horror comics were being imported from the United States in the years following the end of the war and after Seduction of the Innocent became famous, a campaign started in Britain to stamp out the dangerous new publications.

  In November 1954 the National Union of Teachers staged an exhibition in London of what they considered to be some of the more harmful material being circulated. A reporter from the Manchester Guardian went along and reported on what he saw there: ‘Skeletons embracing young women, scaly monsters doing appalling things to brunettes in tight dresses, and barely clad target girls – ringed by knives – watching the approach of axes thrown by blue hands. There is a morbid preoccupation with death and rotting corpses . . .’ Truly the video nasties of the time! On a nearby table were placed copies of comics which the NUT regarded as being harmless: Beano, Dandy, Eagle and so on.

  The one question about which everybody seemed a little vague was what harm these comics showing skeletons and murderers actually caused to children. Reporters were told that: ‘Statistics painstakingly acquired over several years by a master in a secondary modern boys’ school show that bright children soon become bored by horror comics and reject them. But the less intelligent are more susceptible and read them over a much longer period – this is the danger.’ From this reading of the situation, the danger appeared to be simply that unintelligent boys would waste their time reading these comics, but why that would be a bad thing was not at all clear to anybody.

  It is in the nature though of moral panics that reason tends to go out of the window as everybody gets caught up in the rush to condemn whatever it is that is threatening society. It was the same with horror comics. Whether action should be taken by the government or on the other hand if parents should take the initiative, the plain fact was that millions of these comics were floating around and something had to be done about them. On 21 October Mrs C. Frankenburg, a magistrate and social worker, warned that urgent action was now needed and that parents had a duty to see that their children were not reading horror comics. She claimed that 60 million copies of such comics were being sold each year in Britain. Once again, the actual danger from all these comics about skeletons, murders and so on was not made clear. A few weeks later, the Archbishop of Canterbury had a meeting with Home Secretary Lloyd George, during which he talked of the strong public feeling aroused by horror comics.

  Once the Archbishop of Canterbury had joined the fray, it was only a matter of time before legislation was framed which would protect children from American comics. The Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Bill was duly drawn up and by the early spring of the following year was making its way through Parliament. There was much debate about the best way to define a horror comic and at one point it looked as though newspapers too would be included within the scope of the bill. Common sense prevailed and the possibility of press censorship sank into oblivion. Prosecutions under the act were rare and within a year or two, everybody had forgotten all about the fuss.

  Despite all the hysteria about imported horror comics, the primary objection to comics in Britain had always been educational, rather than moral. It was perfectly possible to follow the stories in the strip cartoons without reading any of the words and this was, according to some teachers, a disincentive to the acquisition of literacy. If a child could leaf through a comic and make sense of it without being able to understand a single word, might he or she be content to remain at this level of restricted understanding and not feel any need to learn to read? The vocabulary of the average comic was in any case meagre and they could not really be said to stretch children’s comprehension. It was also claimed that children in comics tended to be aggressive, sneaky and prone to disregarding the authority of parents and teachers. The Bash Street Kids, who appeared in the same year that the nation was in a frenzy about horror comics, might be setting a bad example to the nation’s youth.

  The chief problem was seen to be that if children spent all their time staring at rubbishy comics, then they might never get round to reading real books and would be intellectually impoverished as a consequence. What if they never grew out of the Beano and felt the need to move on to more challenging fare? It was an alarming prospect, but there is no evidence that this fate ever befell any children as they were growing up. The visceral dislike felt by many educated professionals for comics extended to educational material presented in the format of a comic. Even a general-knowledge magazine, beloved of middle-class baby boomers and their families, did not escape censure.

  In 1962, a new magazine for children began publication. The cover was brightly coloured and inside were illustrated articles on everything from the Grand Canyon to the life of Vincent Van Gogh. The humorous classic Three Men in a Boat began to be serialized in that first issue as well. Some fifty-five years later, Look and Learn is still spoken of with reverence as an illustration from the distant past showing just how things have gone downhill intellectually for children since those days. Let us see what educationalists were saying about Look and Learn at the time though.

  In October 1965, the Advisory Centre for Education in London published an analysis of educational comics which were available for children. They were scathing about all of them. A panel consisting of a college lecturer in English, a scientist and an illustrator examined two issues of each of the educational comics on the market at that time, Elizabethan, Treasure, Wonderland, The New English Encyclopaedia and of course Look and Learn. The members of the panel ferociously denounced every one of these supposedly educational comics. There were individual criticisms of each comic, but a general disapproval of the very idea of comics permeated their judgements. Comics, they said, could never replace or even compare to ‘that primary material which lies in books and provides imaginative nourishment and enlargement of the mind’. The panel went on to say that none of the comics examined offered, ‘a single area of experience which is within the capacity of any good book, whether a legend of King Arthur or a biography of Freud’. Of Elizabethan, a magazine for teenagers, it was noted that there was an absence of sex and political discussion, which was ‘surprising in a magazine for this age range’. Similarly sharp remarks were made about the other comics.

  In view of the affectionate regard in which Look and Learn is now held by older adults, it is fascinating to read the criticisms made by professionals at the height of its popularity. ‘Look and Learn,’ we are informed, was printed on ‘rather poor paper, with a number of crudelydrawn illustrations and a cramped presentation of material’. The report went on to say that although plenty of colour was used in the pictures, the overall effect was not good and much of the material did not seem particularly designed to appeal to children. A feature on mercury was said to be the worst scientific article the panel had ever seen.

  The overall conclusion of the three people commissioned by the Advisory Centre for Education was that nothing could compare with books for stimulating and informing children and that comics like Look and Learn were trashy and inferior substitutes for the real thing. All of which goes to show how standards change. These days, most parents would be thrilled if their children were to display as much interest in magazine articles on the Grand Canyon as they do in watching Youtube clips about kittens behaving cutely. However, times change and back in the 1960s reading Look and Learn was treated as a time-wasting activity which distracted children and prevented them from reading proper books or engaging with the real world.

  Acco
rding to the Spanish philosopher and essayist George Santayana, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. The truth of this aphorism has been neatly illustrated in this chapter. The generation of young people who grew up after the First World War were thought be obsessed with visiting the cinema and no longer bothering to visit the local lending library because they had lost interest in reading. Their parents couldn’t understand why they weren’t content to visit the music hall or read ‘Penny Dreadfuls’, the things which had satisfied them when they were themselves young. The young cinema-goers of the early 1920s went on in turn to criticize their own children, the baby boomers, for wanting to watch television and waste their time reading comics.

  When they grew up and became parents and grandparents themselves, one might have thought that the baby boomers would remember all this and adopt a slightly more laid-back attitude to the latest media to be denounced for harming children; things such as video nasties, violent computer games and sexual imagery on the Internet. Instead, the baby boomers follow dutifully in their own parents’ footsteps and bemoan the fact that children today can’t be satisfied with watching Dixon of Dock Green on the television or curling up with a copy of Eagle or Look and Learn! It is amusing to speculate what new entertainments today’s young people will find to criticize their own children for enjoying. One thing is quite certain and that is that is that we have not yet reached the end of the road in this particular cycle of human behaviour. From Socrates complaining about written language to William Tyndale and his disapproval of the ‘filthy’ printed chapbooks which were corrupting children in the early sixteenth century, all the way to the evil effects of novels on Victorian girls; current worries about online porn and so on are just the latest manifestation of an extremely ancient tendency for older generations to find fault with those who are much younger.

  Chapter 8

  From Janet and John to The Famous Five:

  Baby Boomer Childhood in Fiction

  When reading children’s books written for or enjoyed by baby boomer children, one is struck by something very curious; that almost every one of the children who feature in children’s books which were popular in those days attended private schools, most of which are boarding schools. Whether we look at Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, the Narnia stories of C. S. Lewis, the William books written by Richmal Crompton, Jennings, Molesworth or any of the other children’s books popular at that time; the picture is the same. All except for William went to fee-paying boarding schools. William attended a private school: his father complains at times of the amount of money which his son’s education is costing him. There must be something inherently attractive to children about the idea of boarding schools, because of course the latest and most spectacularly successful children’s books, those featuring Harry Potter, are also set in an establishment of this kind.

  One point which stands out when looking at the children’s books of this period is the more or less complete absence of parents. This may well have a bearing on the feelings of adults who grew up at that time, that children being out and about by themselves was in the first place quite normal and secondly perfectly safe. It is almost as though they had been indoctrinated into this strange and counterintuitive point of view from a very early age by the books which they read. If so, then this brainwashing began very young, and was given almost, as one might say, with their mother’s milk or, at the very least, when they started school and first acquired the rudiments of literacy.

  The very first baby boomers, those who began school in 1950 or 1951, learned to read from a new reading-scheme which was published in 1949; the Janet and John books. These, the first books which many children ever encountered, set the tone for much of the subsequent reading in childhood. They were attractive, with full-page coloured illustrations following the adventures of the eponymous children as they explored the world. There was something enchanting about the Janet and John books, and they were not at all like previous and generally dull reading-schemes which had been many children’s first encounter with the acquisition of literacy until the 1950s. In a sense, Janet and John reflected the lives which the baby boomers would experience as they grew up.

  The Janet and John books show a world which the baby boomers came to think of as the natural order of things; which is to say small children wandering around in hazardous circumstances without any adults to protect them from harm. Looking at Here We Go, the first book in the series, we are at once confronted with the question of where the action is taking place. The children seemingly live in some sylvan paradise, neither town nor country. There is no sign of any habitation, nor yet of farmland. A bridge is visible in one picture, which might suggest a park, except that everything is a little too wild for that. The two children can be no more than four or five and yet they are quite alone in this place. A river and lake are featured and both children get in the water and start larking about. John climbs up a willow tree with the evident intention of leaping into the water. We are left with the impression that it is OK for children of kindergarten age to be playing in deep water by themselves, without any parental supervision. In later books, we see the two small children on a bridge over a railway, with John pulling himself onto the parapet in a most hazardous fashion, just as a steam train is approaching. There are no adults in sight. They also wander round an airfield, also unaccompanied. As far as can be made out, these children are at large in the world with nobody at all keeping an eye on them.

  It looks very much as though the normalization of young children being out and about without adults was being pushed from the first days at school, with books like Janet and John portraying it as being the most natural thing in the world for little boys and girls to be jumping into wide rivers or climbing up onto railway bridges whenever they felt like it. Needless to say, there were never any unpleasant consequences when Janet and John run about on heaps of jagged boulders, play with a dog, climb trees or stand up to their necks in flowing water. What could possibly go wrong? They certainly don’t get abducted by child molesters, run over by trains or end up catching polio from the contaminated water in which they are playing!

  It has to be suspected that the literature which baby boomers read when young went a good way towards encouraging them in the notion that children would be fine if they were to be wholly separated from their parents and left to their own devices. After the Janet and John books, we see the theme enlarged upon, as children grow a little older, in various Ladybird books. Here, we see the Golden Age of baby boomer childhood in all its glory. There can be no doubt that these books both showed how children lived during the 1950s and 1960s and also, by implication, endorsed the lifestyle. They may not inaptly be said to be both descriptive and prescriptive, portraying a happy world in which children go about by themselves as a matter of course. In 2007, a compilation of images and text from Ladybird books was published, a celebration of both the books and the childhood which they depicted. Various celebrities such as Alan Titchmarsh and Tony Robinson contributed essays, talking of their early lives and what Ladybird books had meant to them. The introduction to this book, Boys and Girls; A Ladybird Book of Childhood, explicitly and unashamedly plugged the myth of baby boomer childhood. Headed A Golden Age, it begins, ‘Boys and Girls is a celebration of childhood – a golden age of childhood…’ Leafing through the Ladybird Book of Childhood is a fascinating experience; particularly for those who were around when the images first appeared in print. Tony Robinson illustrated his own essay with pictures from the Ladybird book The Party, published in 1960. One of the pictures shows two children, brother and sister, walking to a birthday party to which they have been invited. The boy and girl can be no more than five or six and yet we see them making their way along a long, deserted suburban street. It would have been a common enough scene then: today it looks like a case of criminal neglect! It is precisely the same as the Janet and John books: little boys and girls out and about without anybody to take care of them. Elsewhere in the book we se
e two children aged perhaps seven or eight, being helped onto a bus by a cheerful and smiling conductor. They too are out by themselves. This too would have been perfectly normal in 1960.

  Once again, just as with the Janet and John books, we ask ourselves whether or not this is a case of art imitating life or the other way round. Did these constant images to which children and parents were exposed have the effect of leading them to believe that it was natural and safe for children to wander the streets alone? It may have been convenient for mothers to turf the children out during washday, so that they could get on with a long and difficult task without the kids under their feet, but surely at the back of their minds they must have realized that sending five-yearolds out to play by themselves was not really a good idea? Perhaps seeing the smiling, happy children in the Ladybird books and so on lulled them into a false sense of security.

  In the Famous Five books, by Enid Blyton, are children, the oldest of whom is just 12 years of age, who travel in horse-drawn caravans, go to sea in a dingy, tackle spies and robbers, outwit the police and generally carry on in a way which would leave most adults feeling a little nervous. We see here the tradition at which we have already looked, of the older child being left in charge of younger siblings. Julian is 12 and yet he assumes complete responsibility for three younger children, his own brother and sister and also a cousin. This arrangement was of course calculated to strike a chord with child readers of the time, many 12-yearolds would have had similar experiences, if not in such exotic circumstances.

  It is hard to overestimate the influence of books such as the Famous Five on the children growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. As adults, their frequently-expressed views that children should be allowed to walk to school alone and visit parks by themselves are shaped by such fantasies. They were not told of the horrific numbers of children killed by cars, nor of those who had died from other accidents or been abducted, abused and even murdered. In all the books which they read, from Janet and John onwards, nothing bad ever befell children out on their own. Of course, sometimes Julian, Dick, Ann and George might be kidnapped by crooks or locked in a cellar or dungeon, but their resourcefulness always enable them to resolve such minor difficulties.