by Abrams, Fran
Not that this was fully appreciated by the children of the day, of course. In November 1944, Time and Tide magazine printed a letter from a schoolgirl named Phillis Cannell, on the subject of the school meals which were supposed to be so beneficial to children: ‘As one of these children I venture to protest. Being one of those who have rebelliously partaken of grey badly-peeled potatoes, an over-abundance of partially cooked parsnips and turnips, and thick cold gristly slabs of meat, I find myself incapable of enthusiasm for this payment in kind. At tea time . . . one often remarks rather forcibly the conspicuous absence of the jam ration. Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today . . .’
Schools, too, were set to change: an Education Act passed in 1944 raised the school leaving age to fifteen, introduced free secondary education for all and heralded the advent of the grammar school and the secondary modern. As the war came to an end, there was a strong feeling that education would provide one of the major keys to rebuilding the nation. ‘Rab’ Butler, the President of the Board of Education, was in an expansive mood as he introduced the Bill:30 ‘An educational system by itself cannot fashion the whole future structure of a country, but it can make better citizens . . . Such is the modest aim of this Bill . . . We today have the responsibility for laying the foundation for the nation’s future, and we dare not fail,’ he said.
The war in Europe would end sixteen months later, with those high hopes for the future held firm in most people’s hearts. In Pakefield, near Lowestoft, the young Michael Foreman would watch as residents built victory bonfires on the mined, barbed-wired beach. Later, a wrecked landing craft would become a pirate ship in which he and his friends could play. Others would return to peacetime with heavier hearts. Bernard Kops, in London when the war ended, found it hard to celebrate when most of his Dutch Jewish relatives were dead: ‘Suddenly the bells were ringing and everybody was cheering and dancing and kissing and I went down to the Embankment with the crowd, but amongst them I thought of those other crowds, those of my family and people like them who had perished; who had suffocated, gone up in smoke. I thought of all the young men like me who no longer had dreams, who lay rotting under the earth.’
For many the victory would be tinged with regret, not just for those who had died but for what had been lost at home, as well. Jim Porter, arriving back from New Zealand with his sister, Joyce, had never had a very warm family life. But now his parents were virtually strangers: ‘We met my mother and the lodger at Temple Meads Station. Dad was still somewhere overseas. Over five years had passed and we did not know each other. Mum had moved to Bath so we still had a bit further to travel, wondering at the immense bomb damage everywhere. Late that night, Joyce and I went to bed and the world was never the same.’
6 Born in the Ruins
It was with mixed feelings then, but primarily with a sense of relief and even optimism, that Britain’s families began the job of reassembling the scattered jigsaw that war had made of their lives. Children returning from rural and foreign billets, fathers and even mothers returning from whence the war had flung them, refugees from elsewhere putting down roots in their new surroundings. For Hana Kohn, who had arrived in Britain on the eve of war on the Kindertransport, there was a slow realization that almost all her family were dead. Looking back, she found it strange that she had not asked more questions earlier.1 ‘I’ve often thought: “Well, when did I become aware of it?” I wonder why I didn’t read the newspapers more. I seemed to have my nose to the grindstone with books and things I needed for study . . . I don’t think I was encouraged too much. But I think by about 1949 it became quite clear that there was no hope.’
It was to be many years before Hana would be able to piece together sketchy details of the fate that had befallen her parents, sister, grandparents, aunts and uncles. ‘We have details of how some died horribly, like my uncle Arnold – because he was a slight hunchback he was one of the first. And Grandpa, who never hurt a fly . . . Oh, I don’t know. Treblinka, one of these places. They were just lined up and shot. In a way I’m glad I don’t know the details.’ Hana and her brother, Hans, who was later adopted by his English foster-family, threw themselves into preparations for university and for a life in which both would become pillars of their communities – Hans as a doctor, Hana as a teacher.
There were grim discoveries nearer home, too. Just three weeks after VE day, the government published an official report by Sir Walter Monckton on a boy called Dennis O’Neill who, like so many others, had been separated from his parents in wartime. For Dennis, though, the war had been merely incidental in this separation. His parents, Thomas and Mabel, had married in 1918 in the Welsh town of Newport and had nine children – one of whom died – before being convicted of child neglect in 1933. Dennis was finally removed from the family home in 1938, and spent the war years being shunted between a series of children’s homes and foster-families. In June 1944, he was placed with a farming couple named Reginald and Esther Gough, at Minsterley in Shropshire. To the social workers who visited, the couple seemed ideal foster-parents. They were young and childless, and promised to bring Dennis and his brother Terry up as their own. And at first the boys seemed to be fine. In September 1944, Dennis wrote to another brother, Tommy, in an apparently cheerful mood: ‘Dad and I will be off to the auction next week to take a bull. Terry and I have got two new rabbits . . . we have been blackberrying and kept the money for a new suit for best.’ In January the following year, the Goughs called the doctor to say Dennis seemed to be having a fit. When the physician arrived at the remote farm, more than two hours later, Dennis was dead. He had died of heart failure after being struck repeatedly in the chest. His back bore the scars of beatings with a stick, he was painfully thin and he had septic ulcers on his feet. Both the Goughs were charged with manslaughter. Terry told the court he and his brother had lived mainly on bread, along with milk they could suck from the cows’ teats. On the day before his death, Dennis had been beaten for taking a bite from a swede which was being kept for cattle fodder. Gough had thrown him out of the house, saying if he was going to eat the cows’ food he could stand out in the field too. Even after the boy had finally been allowed to return to the house and go to bed, he had followed him to his room and beaten him again.
In the last days of the war, the papers were full of the case. The reports of the diminutive ten-year-old Terry, standing in the courtroom recounting how he had seen his brother, stripped naked and freezing, being beaten with a stick by a stranger into whose care he had been delivered; how he had returned from school just before the boy’s death to find him locked in a cupboard, brought tears to the eyes of thousands – particularly those who had been separated from their own children. There were numerous offers of adoption for Terry, who later wrote a book about his experiences.2
Reginald Gough was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years; his wife Esther received a lesser sentence of six months for neglect. The court heard that in 1942, not long after their marriage, Esther had left her husband and had accused him of cruelty. But Newport Corporation, which had asked Shropshire County Council to check on the boys, had never discovered that fact before it placed them with the couple. The resulting Monckton inquiry led to tighter rules governing the fostering out of children. There was nothing new in child cruelty, of course, but the fate of Dennis O’Neill had touched a very raw nerve. ‘Billeted Boy’s Death’, read one headline, reminding parents everywhere of how the imperceptible thread that bound them to their children had been stretched thin by war.
Dennis’s death marked a sea-change in attitudes to child abuse. Earlier cases which came to the public’s attention had usually involved cruelty by parents or employers. There had, until now, been a general assumption that if a child’s home was less than perfect the best solution was to remove him from it. There had also been a view that it was always better for a child to live in the healthy, wholesome surroundings of rural England than amid the crowds and miasmas of the city. This case – along, per
haps, with tales told by returning evacuees – exploded those theories, and not just because it laid bare the depths of rural poverty and dysfunction.
But the fate of Dennis O’Neill, or rather the public reaction to it, had an even wider significance. It underlined a huge change in public attitudes to children and to family life, and it signalled the way to the next half-century of public policy.
In one sense, what set the death of Dennis O’Neill apart from the countless deaths of neglected, abused children that went before was the new sense of collective responsibility it demonstrated. There was somehow a feeling that it was not only Dennis’s parents, nor even just his foster-parents, who had let him down. The central failure, in the eyes of the world, was not that of the individuals involved – though that had indeed been grievous – but of the state. Some of the most condemnatory reports were those of the evidence given in court by Newport Corporation, which had seemingly contracted out its duty of care to Shropshire, and of Shropshire County Council itself, which had failed to discover what was happening on that remote farm. By the time the Monckton inquiry reported in May 1945, most of the building blocks of the new Welfare State were in place, and huge policy changes were under way. In a broad sense, the case helped to cement the feeling that in future, the government would play a much greater part in the nation’s life – and its involvement would not stop, as it had continued largely to do up till now, on the front doorstep of the family home.
In a specific sense, it gave rise to legislation that would radically change the lives of Britain’s most vulnerable children over the next half-century. The 1948 Children Act,3 brought about in large part through outrage over the O’Neill case, passed the power of the old Poor Law authorities to assume parental responsibility over a child to local authorities. The Act was followed by a series of further legislative measures which gave new powers to the state over children’s lives: in 1952, the right to remove children from the family home even if their parents had not been prosecuted for cruelty; and, in 1958, the right for judges to order children to be taken into care in divorce disputes. Later, the tide would begin to turn and more emphasis would be placed on preventive work to help families stay together – but in some respects the broader effect was the same: when family life went awry, it was increasingly the state’s job – in particular the job of social workers – to step in and sort out the mess.
But the O’Neill case also highlighted something more fundamental, something political with a small ‘p’ rather than a large one. Perhaps it was just the simple desire, held by so many, to return to a life with family at its heart after years of separation and war. Perhaps it was the coming to fruition of years of gradual change during which children had been handed the gift of individuality, a promise that they actually mattered. Perhaps it was that children were gaining scarcity value, as families continued to shrink. Perhaps it was just part of that wider post-war optimism – the feeling that now, if ever, things really would get better. But suddenly, the family was at the heart of the nation’s consciousness in a way that it probably never had been before. The case reminded the nation that blood was, after all, thicker than water.
It helped, of course, that Britain had a newly married heir to the throne in Princess Elizabeth, who wed Philip Mountbatten in November 1947. The couple, along with their children – Charles was born a year later in November 1948 and Anne in 1950 – became a sort of national symbol of domestic and familial bliss, photographed often in poses which underlined the joy of family life.
‘The central theme would be the same if wireless had never been invented,’ gushed The Times in its preview of the King’s Christmas message from Sandringham in 1950. ‘It is of kinsmen and kinswomen, grandparents, parents and children, assembled under their own roof to keep the Christian feast . . . Sandringham, as is the way with homes in which children have been happy, has gone from strength to strength.’
Richard Cannon, born in Sevenoaks, Kent, in 1948, kept a scrapbook into which he pasted pictures of the young Prince Charles and Princess Anne, along with beautifully presented displays of food – which was, of course, still scarce – and sweets, which were rationed. The book contained a particularly striking picture of a little boy, not unlike the golden-haired child who illustrated the Frederick Truby King childcare book which had bestraddled the first half of the century. But in this picture the boy, shining-haired, gleaming and rosy-cheeked, is transplanted from his mother’s Edwardian knee to a perfect suburban garden, where he sits playing happily alone with a bucket and spade. Instead of the formal shirt and shorts of Truby King’s day, this boy has short dungarees, perfect for doing practical, boyish things. The picture speaks volumes about the joys of post-war family life, Mother presumably inside baking cakes and other delicacies in a shiny new cooker while Father commutes to a white-collar job in town, returning in the evening to a spick house and a wholesome meal.
It was all an illusion, of course, as Richard Cannon’s own memories of childhood demonstrated. The second of five children, he felt looking back that there had been a sort of national post-war dash for matrimony, of which his parents had been part: ‘They married six or seven months after the war. I think there was a bit of a rush to find a wife or a husband,’ he said. ‘It was a time of relief at the soldiers coming home, and there was the need to marry and have children. That’s often at the back of my mind, that it was a bit of a rush job.’4
Outwardly, the Cannon family home fitted perfectly into the 1950s image of domesticity. Richard’s mother stayed at home in Kent while his father commuted to a job with British American Tobacco in London and was a member of the local cricket club. The house had flowerbeds in the front garden, a lawn and an allotment garden at the back, a bay window in the lounge. But Richard, who was one of five siblings, thought later that his father’s bad wartime experience as a very young soldier under Montgomery in the desert – he had been eighteen in 1939 – must have left scars.
‘I think the positive side he saw was that he was a part of something very big, that had achieved something . . . but I think a lot of the men of that age had six years of their lives stolen, really. I think it really affected the personality, and so it affected the household. When my father was at the cricket club, with all his mates around, it would be: “Oh yeah, what a great bloke.” But at home he had a really violent temper. I have to say he was not a good father.’
That said, fathers were still quite remote figures in most families in the years after the war – as Mr Cannon’s semi-residence in the bar of the local cricket club demonstrated. Most were out at work during the day, and the only adults the young Richard usually met when visiting friends after school were mothers. Yet in the public imagination of the day, the nuclear family – complete with father, of course – reigned supreme. The new Welfare State could be seen almost as a hymn to the nation’s children – certainly to its hardworking, respectable families. Bohemianism was out, respectability was in. In short, the ideal child of the popular imagination had come in from the woodlands where he had spent the pre-war years building dens and climbing trees. In future, his natural habitat was to be a garden or a purpose-built playground in the suburbs.
The pressure to conform was enormous, especially on young women who had often experienced undreamed-of freedoms during the war, only to find themselves imprisoned by domesticity shortly afterwards. The papers were suddenly full of articles about children – their winsomeness, how to ensure they ate properly, what to do with them in the holidays, the dangers of ill-fitting shoes. And the responsibility for ensuring these children were nourished, appropriately clothed and shod, and adequately entertained fell to this army of women who had married during or shortly after the war. An air of martyrdom hung around the new, full-on style of motherhood, as one correspondent – a full-time mother herself – confessed: ‘It took time, as a mother, to acquire a sense of proportion. Nothing, I vowed, breast-feeding an undernourished infant for a full nine months, was to deprive my child of his birthri
ght.’ But this mother was absolutely sure she was doing the right thing – her own mother had worked, and she had been scarred by the experience: ‘While we are tired and frustrated and hard up, other less conscientious women appear to be getting the best of both worlds . . . Few of the children growing up today in homes where both parents follow full-time careers will consider as adults that their upbringing was ideal, no matter what their mothers may be saying now to the contrary.’
Guilt, then, lurked around every corner for the women of the 1950s. And to make matters worse, the psychologists of the day were starting to observe that children needed to bond with their mothers. This was the period, for instance, in which John Bowlby formulated his theory of attachment, which said children tended to form strong bonds with their main care-givers early in life. In an article for the News Chronicle in 1952, headed ‘The Mother who stays at home gives her children a better chance’, Bowlby wrote: ‘Babies need mothers because a child’s emotional development depends on his relationship with his mother in his very early years. If she neglects him when he is small there will be trouble afterwards. So the mother who stays at home is giving her children a surer foundation for mental health than costly equipment and an expensive education can provide.’5