Post-War Childhood

by Webb, Simon;

  In short, the real reason why modern parents do not let their children go out and about by themselves from an earlier age has nothing to do with any supposed change in the hazards and risks which beset them. It is because they know perfectly well on one level that it was not safe for them to be out so much without adults when they were younger and they know the dangers inherent in such a course of action. ‘Playing out’ was born of necessity, not desire. Now that it is no longer necessary to chuck the children out of the house so that mother can spend an entire day boiling up water, scrubbing clothes on a washboard and then putting them through the mangle, and there are also so many things to amuse children in their own homes, children do not show any inclination to go wandering off in this way.

  All this leaves us with a puzzling question. The ‘playing out’ of the baby boomers was, in effect, thrust upon them and their families by force of circumstance and not an option freely chosen on its merit. Britain was not some demi-paradise sixty years ago, no matter what the baby boomers would now have us believe. Why then do many people younger than the baby boomers seem happy to go along with this misleading picture of the past? Instead of treating the reminiscences of older people with the proper level of caution, there appears to be an uncritical acceptance among many people, even those in their 20s and 30s, of this whole myth of the golden age of childhood. In the next, and final, chapter, I shall explore one possible explanation for this, enlarging upon an idea at which we have already looked briefly.

  Afterword

  In this book we have looked at the strange myth which has been sedulously propagated over the last few years by baby boomers about the idyllic nature of their childhood. That they should themselves half believe this nonsense is perfectly understandable: it is, after all, a delusion to which people in late middle or old age have fallen prey for the whole of recorded history! They persuade themselves that things were far better in their youth and that this modern world cannot hold a candle to the times in which they grew up. What is a puzzling at first sight though, is why so many younger people, who were not even born in the 1950s and 1960s, should go along with all this. This requires a little explanation. The natural reaction of men and women in their 20s and 30s to their grandparents’ tales about the enchanted realm in which they dwelt as children should be frank disbelief. We certainly don’t expect younger adults to take these fairy stories at face value and start passing laws or formulating policies for health authorities based upon these old wives’ tales!

  When it is suggested that all schoolchildren should chant their times tables out loud, as was done in schools sixty years ago, those putting forward and arranging this scheme are not people in their 60s and 70s, but rather young professionals who grew up in the modern world. When a Chancellor of the Exchequer who wasn’t born until 1971 introduces taxes on sugar which are aimed at slimming down children to the proportions they supposedly had in the 1950s, it is evident that he too has been persuaded that children’s lives were genuinely better when the baby boomers were growing up. It looks as though the mania for the vanished world of the 1950s has begun with pensioners and then spread out and engulfed the nation.

  There is an historical precedent for people in this country becoming possessed in this way of an affection for a mythical past era. This was the reaction among many artists, writers and intellectuals in mid-Victorian Britain to the Industrial Revolution. As the nineteenth century progressed, there was a widespread feeling that the pace of life was becoming intolerably fast, due largely to technological innovations. Steam trains and the telegraph were two very noticeable manifestations of this trend. For almost the whole of human history, the fastest way for people to travel and for information to be spread was either on foot or by means of a galloping horse. Now, somebody could be transported from one end of the country to another in a matter of hours and the transmission of news was, to all intents and purposes, instantaneous. When Victoria came to the throne in 1838, it took a month for information to reach England by ship from New York. By the 1870s, news was being carried over a transatlantic telegraph wire at the speed of light. For millennia, Britain had been an agrarian society, with labour following the rhythm of the seasons and the rising and setting of the sun. Now, every minute counted as people rushed to catch trains and hurried to be at the factory or office on time. Time was suddenly at a premium.

  This change of pace was disturbing to older people and not universally attractive even to those who were younger. A distaste for the modern way of life grew; not only at the hectic speed with which things were now being done, but also at the commercial attitude which was the distinguishing mark of Victorian Britain. If only, it was thought, we could return to a simpler and gentler pastoral life, where things happened at a more leisurely rate and people were motivated by notions of justice and chivalry, rather than how quickly a profit could be made on this or that investment. A reaction to the perceived ugliness and mercantile values of the Industrial Revolution had been gathering momentum since the end of the eighteenth century. Gothic architecture had come into fashion, attempting to recreate the buildings of the Middle Ages in nineteenth-century civic and industrial buildings, ranging from railways stations to the Houses of Parliament. Artists and poets joined in with enthusiasm, depicting a sanitized and largely imaginary world of medieval heroism and love.

  The royal family became caught up in the craze for the medieval, posing for paintings and statues which portrayed them as historical and semihistorical characters from the Middle Ages. Towards the end of the century William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement emerged, deliberately opposing industrial production and championing cottage industries and individual craftsmen. The inspiration for much of the architecture, art and poetry associated with this trend was to be found in Sir Thomas Mallory’s fifteenth-century masterpiece, Le Mort d’Arthur. This was a retelling of the myth of King Arthur and his court, set in medieval England. It was reworked in verse by Tennyson, who dedicated the epic to Queen Victoria. Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Holman Hunt and Rossetti used themes from the Arthurian legends in their paintings. Sometimes there were crossovers, so that Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shallot, a spin-off from the Arthurian legends, was turned into a masterpiece of Pre-Raphaelite art.

  Something very similar to the cult of Medievalism which swept Victorian Britain seems to be happening now in this country, driven by precisely similar advances in technology and just the same dislike of the modern world. The inspiration for many of those who long to turn the clock back is now to be found not in the medieval romances of Thomas Mallory, but rather a strange confection of images which seem to be drawn largely from the books of authors such as Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton.

  Just as the Victorians found that the world seemed to be turning a lot more quickly than it had when they were children, so too with today’s middle-aged baby boomers. A man or woman who was 50 in the 1870s, when the transatlantic telegraph line began operations, could remember the days before steam trains and electrical communication. Everything really was moving faster for the Victorians and it wasn’t always a pleasurable experience. The youngest of the baby boomers are now in their early 50s and will recall that when they were a little younger, sending a family snapshot to a relative in Australia was a pretty complicated, expensive and time-consuming business. One had to buy a film from the chemist’s, take the photographs, go back to the chemist’s with the film and have it developed and then wait a week or so before getting the pictures. After that, it was a question of getting an envelope, putting the photographs in and going down to the post office to send them to Australia. From taking the pictures until their receipt on the other side of the world would therefore take a minimum of about two weeks. This fortnight’s delay has now been reduced to a fraction of a second, the time it takes to press ‘send’ and transmit a photograph just taken, all the way to the recipient in Australia or pretty much anywhere else in the world.

  When the baby boomers were born, most people did not
even have a telephone in their home. It was not until 1975 that the proportion of British homes with a telephone exceeded 50 per cent. Now, almost everybody carries with them their own personal telephone: wherever you are, you can be reached. Readers will probably not need to stretch their minds very much to supply another dozen or so examples of the way in which everything has speeded up enormously during the lives of the baby boomers.

  Just as thoughtful Victorians sought refuge in the imaginary world of chivalrous knights and their ladies, so the baby boomers look back to their own mythical land which is so much more pleasing than the real one which they inhabit. It is a place of smiling, happy children, all of whom are slender and healthy. They leave their homes alone in the morning to go to school and return by themselves in the late afternoon. At weekends and during holidays, it is either warm and sunny or the world is covered in a blanket of picturesque snow and all the children can go tobogganing and build snowmen. In this charming age, there are no grey, drizzly evenings, where life drags and children are fed up with having to drift aimlessly round the streets, wishing that there was some other way of spending their time. Nor are there any real hazards for the children, as long as they are sure to be home for tea.

  Of course, it is not only the baby boomers who have seen startling changes in the speed with which we conduct our lives; which explains perhaps why even younger people of 30 or so are keen to accept the version of the past which the baby boomers are peddling. Articles in newspapers and magazines extolling the joys of baby boomer childhood are often written by people in their 30s. Young people too have seen the digital revolution gather pace and change their lives in a hundred different ways. Let us take the case of a man or woman born in 1987, who is now 30 years of age. When these young adults started secondary school in 1998, the majority of them were living in homes without computers. At that time, only a third of British children lived in homes which had computers. Only a quarter of homes were then connected to the Internet and there were no smartphones. Facebook was not launched until 2004, when most of this generation had left school. At that time, there were no such things as Twitter or Youtube.

  In short, it is not just the baby boomers who grew up in a very different world: 30-year-olds grew up themselves at a time before the digital revolution had really got going and much of what we today take for granted had not even been thought of. Today, these people are at the mercy of their smartphones and tablets, feeling obliged to check Twitter, Facebook or their emails at least a hundred times a day. Many feel trapped by this endless cycle of constantly needing to access the Internet, hence the growing popularity of the ‘digital detox’.

  The generation which followed the baby boomers are now finding that things have changed dramatically since they were children, and the preelectronic era which the baby boomers describe, where they went out all day and nobody could contact them, appeals strongly to such people, who are aged roughly between 30 and 50. They feel that they only just missed the happiest era of all. Because we are still in the midst of the revolution in electronic communication, which is shaping our lives in so many different ways, there is a general uncertainty about the future; nobody knows how the Internet, virtual reality, social media and education will change in the coming years. The simple, healthy and uncomplicated lives which children are said to have enjoyed in the 1950s are calculated to strike a chord with people of this age. They can recall a time when all their friends were people known to them in real life and where coming home from work meant that you could relax with your family and not be pestered with work emails even while you ate your dinner. It is not surprising that they find the vision of the baby boomers’ world attractive.

  Whether this is the correct explanation, it is impossible to say. What is certain is that many of the initiatives aimed at improving the health, educational attainment and general character of the nation’s children are predicated on the assumption that the 1950s were the best of times for children and that the more closely our children’s lives are modelled on that period; the happier and healthier they will be.

  We have looked at the childhood years of the baby boomers and found them wanting. Far from being a golden age for children, that period was really rather a dreary and hazardous one for children, with far more of them failing to survive to adulthood than is now the case. Their lives were in general a lot duller and lacking in interest than those of modern children. Baby boomer childhood has become mythologised though; to the extent that it is now taken as axiomatic that children’s lives in the 1950s were far better than those of children in early 21st-century Britain. As long as this mistaken idea is limited to the reminiscences of old people, little harm is caused. When governments and professionals begin acting upon such false beliefs, as now regularly happens, it is time to stop and think about what is going on.

  Bibliography

  Blyton, Enid, The Six Bad Boys, London, Lutterworth Press, 1951.

  Buchanan, Alexandrina, Gothic Glories, Norwich, Jarrold Publishing, 2005.

  Cunningham, Hugh, The Invention of Childhood, London, BBC Books, 2006.

  Furedi, Frank, Paranoid Parenting: Abandon Your Anxieties and be a Good Parent, London, Penguin Press, 2001.

  Furedi, Frank, and Bristow, Jennie, Licensed to Hug, London, Civitas, 2010.

  Gill, T., No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society, London, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2007.

  Guldberg, Helene, Reclaiming Childhood; Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear, Abingdon, Routledge, 2009.

  Hennessy, Peter, Having it so Good: Britain in the Fifties, London, Penguin Books, 2006.

  Horn, Pamela, The Victorian and Edwardian Schoolchild Gloucester, Alan Sutton Publishing, 1989.

  Huntington, Robert, The Nanny State, London, Artnik, 2004.

  Jones, Steve, Capital Punishments, Nottingham, Wicked Publications, 1992.

  Kynaston, David, Family Britain 1951-57, London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009.

  Kynaston, David, Modernity Britain 1957-62, London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

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  1. A road sign from the 1950s; note the young schoolchildren confidently crossing the road alone on their way to school.

  2. Boys trainspotting at a railway station; other children were sabotaging and attempting to derail trains at this time.

  3. A playground in 1950s Britain; the presence of adults was often the only thing holding dangerous behaviour in check.

  4. The playground rocking horse, cause of many serious injuries.

  5. An open penknife. Such knives were almost universally carried by baby boomer boys.<
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  6. A 1957 advertisement for air rifles, encouraging fathers to equip their young sons with such weapons.

  7. An air pistol in the Webley catalogue. Note the age of the boys firing a pistol unsupervised at the bottom of the page.

  8. A souvenir from the seaside. Knives were a ubiquitous accompaniment to baby boomer boyhood.

  9. Housewives cleaning their front steps in the 1950s. Housework took up the entire day, leaving little time for playing with children.

  10. Newspaper headlines from 1960 and 1964; a child who murdered a little girl and rioting youths whom the RAF was called in to help control.

  11. Children playing on a bomb site in the 1950s, something about which many older people have happy memories.

  12. Little wonder that more children were admitted to hospital for accidental injuries sixty years ago! Children on a bomb site fool around with a pickaxe.

  13. A surviving bomb site in London. Attractive to children as they were, they were hardly safe or desirable places for children to play.

  14. An iron lung. Some children spent the rest of lives in such contraptions after contracting polio in the 1940s and 1950s.

  15. A ward full of children in iron lungs. There were a thousand of these machines operating Britain in the 1950s.