Post-War Childhood

Growing Up in the Not-So-Friendly 'Baby Boomer' Years

Simon Webb

• Publisher: Pen & Sword History
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473886032
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Many British baby boomers are very nostalgic about a supposed golden age; a vanished world when children were generally freer, happier and healthier than they are now. They wandered about all day; only returning home at teatime when they were hungry. Nobody worried about health and safety or 'stranger danger' in those days and no serious harm ever befell children as a result.In Post-War Childhood, Simon Webb examines the facts and figures behind the myth of children's carefree lives in the post-war years, finding that such things as the freedom to roam the streets and fields came at a terrible price. In 1965, for example, despite there being far fewer cars in Britain, 45 times as many children were knocked down and killed on the roads as now die in this way each year.Simon Webb presents a 'warts and all' portrait of British childhood in the years following the end of the Second World War. He demonstrates that contrary to popular belief, it was by any measure a far more hazardous and less pleasant time to be a child, than is the case in the twenty-first century.

Chapter 1

The Land of Lost Content:

Childhood in the Good Old Days

For most of recorded history, older people have been in the habit of claiming that everything was a good deal better during their own childhoods than is now the case. The summers were longer, the fruit sweeter, the food more wholesome and the world an altogether happier and less complicated place when they were young. Not only that, but the children themselves were different in the old days. They were more obedient, industrious, well-behaved, polite, happy and healthy. Such sentiments were being expressed centuries before the birth of Christ and the notion is still going strong; that this modern world is not a patch on the one which existed fifty or sixty years ago and children not what they once were. The Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes was composed in the third century BC, perhaps 2,300 years ago. Its author wrote, ‘Never ask, “Oh, why were thing so much better in the old days?” It’s not an intelligent question.’

This imaginary world, very different from our own and the children much happier, has always lingered tantalisingly on the edge of living memory, so close that we feel that our generation has only just missed it. It is generally the time in which our parents or grandparents grew up. In the last century of so, the golden age was the Edwardian Era before the First World War and then later, the years before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Today, it is the 1950s and 1960s which were such a wonderful time to be young. Children at that time had, according to some of those who were children in those days, unlimited freedom to roam a world which was safe and inviting; a strange and magical land where no serious harm ever befell children, as long as they made sure to be home by teatime.

A. E. Housman summed up perfectly this yearning for a vanished, enchanted world, when he wrote:

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

Most of us, at least when we are young, tend to take this sort of thing with a pinch of salt. When Granny tells us how much healthier everybody was in the old days, with all the fresh air and exercise that they got, and the food eaten wasn’t contaminated with all those dreadful additives and other chemicals, we listen politely but without placing too much credence upon her tales. Similarly, when we are informed that children in the past were better behaved, stronger, healthier, happier, more polite, pluckier, possessed of greater reserves of initiative and studied harder at school or that the summers were longer and the winters snowier, we treat these assertions with caution. After all, memory can be faulty and there is no reason at all to suppose that recollections of this sort from over half a century ago are wholly accurate and objective. It is hardly likely that the world really was a better place when our parents and grandparents were little children, nor that children were really all that different, whatever we might now be told.

There are a number of factors at work when we see older people constructing fantasy worlds of this sort; some physiological, others psychological. Beginning first with the way in which physiological deterioration as we grow older helps shapes our memories of childhood, it must be borne in mind that once we pass our mid-twenties, our faculties and senses usually begin to decline and fail. We have fewer taste buds and those we do have shrink and are less efficient. The range of sounds we are able to detect shrinks; our eyesight is seldom as keen in later years as it was in our youth. All of which means that our earliest memories of tastes, for instance, will seem more vivid and rich than those we actually experience in middle and old age. Few of us wish to confront our own failing faculties and declining vitality and it is therefore more reassuring and satisfying to pretend that the fault lies with modern food, rather than our own bodies. It’s not that our tongues are gradually becoming less sensitive, the blame lies rather with this awful stuff that the shops sell now. When we were children, you could buy apples which tasted like apples. Everything today is so tasteless and bland!

Another reason why childhood experiences are remembered as being richer and more enjoyable than those in middle or old age is psychological, rather than physiological. The first time we encounter something, whether it is eating an ice cream or walking through snow, will always make more of an impression upon us than the hundreds or thousands of subsequent times we go through the experience. There is the exhilarating sense of novelty about early childhood experiences which cause them to stand out as being particularly vivid and memorable. From swimming in a river for the first time to sliding down a hill on a toboggan, the first time is always likely to be recalled in the future as the best of all. This is another of the factors at work when older people claim that their childhoods were marvellous, far more exciting than the way things are now. For them, this is perfectly true, but it tells us little about the objective state of the world, either then or now.

Human memory is not a passive process of simply pointing our eyes and ears at a scene and recording faithfully all that is seen and heard. It consists rather of an active and continuous mechanism of editing and enhancing the original sense impressions, discarding some and enlarging others. Why would we wish to retain memories of disappointment and sadness when we were little, in preference to images of pleasure and enjoyment? This too contributes to our skewed perspective when looking back at our schooldays from the perspective of fifty years or so of subsequent life. How else are we to explain why so many older people recall the past with such enthusiasm, claiming that their schooldays were the happiest of their lives? It is curious, and more than a little suspicious, that one never meets a 14-year-old who believes this to be true.

It is often expressly stated that fewer children were being abducted or murdered by strangers during the 1950s and that children were able to play freely out of doors without the risk of falling prey to predatory paedophiles. This is quite untrue, as a quick trawl through newspaper archives soon reveals. The reason for this particular misconception is not hard to find. These days, news of a murder will spread around the Internet before it even reaches the newspapers. It would be all but impossible to prevent a child with a mobile telephone from finding out about all sorts of horrors, including child abuse and murder. This was not the case fifty or sixty years ago. Few children at that time were avid newspaper readers and if they didn’t listen to the news on the radio or watch it on television, then they would be most unlikely to hear about murders involving children.

There is a natural, widespread and understandable tendency for parents to shield and protect their children from unpalatable or distasteful aspects of life, in case they become distressed or frightened about the terrible things which have befallen some child of similar age to them. For this reason, and because it was easily accomplished in the pre-electronic media years of the baby boomers’ childhoods, there was a tacit conspiracy among adults to conceal news of dreadful murders or child abuse. It was felt that there was no need to draw attention to such things in any case, having a bearing as they sometimes did upon sexual depravity, sexual activity of any kind being a taboo subject for discussion in most families at that time. It is for this reason that many baby boomers did not realize then, and have never taken the trouble in later years to find out, about the child murders and sexual abuse of children at the time that they were growing up. One or two especially dreadful cases might have filtered through to them, the so-called Moors Murderers being one of these, but in general child abuse or murders were unknown to children at that time.

The baby boomers are merely the latest generation to wax wistful about their wonderful childhoods. The term ‘baby boomer’ itself might perhaps need a little explanation. During the Second World War, with many husbands away fighting, the birth rate, for obvious reasons, dropped. At the end of the war in 1945, the large-scale resumption of connubial activity resulting from the return of the servicemen who had been away from home led to a surge in births nine months later. This rise in the birth rate lasted for nearly twenty years and became known facetiously as the post-war ‘baby boom’. Children born between roughly 1946 and 1964 are therefore popularly known as baby boomers.

The baby boomers, who now range in age from their early fifties to perhaps 70 years of age, enthusiastically promote the idea that the past was a glorious place, particularly for children, who were of course all happier and healthier than kids today as well as enjoying far more freedom. So far, so good, and in proclaiming their affection for a lost world of childhood where everything was better than it is now, the baby boomers are doing no more than their parents and grandparents had done before them. Here is a piece which sums up this view of childhood during the thirty years or so which followed the end of the Second World War. It is worth quoting this account, which in various forms has been circulating for several years on the Internet, at length, for it contains a number of themes at which we shall later be looking in detail. In 2012, the Daily Mail described this as ‘the new online sensation’. The newspaper went on to say that it was, ‘A lyrical evocation of growing up in the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, when children were safe to play where they liked’. Again, we note the curious idea that children were safe when they played out of doors sixty years ago, in a way that is no longer the case. By implication, the streets and fields of Britain have become more dangerous with the passage of time.

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1940’s, 50’s, 60’s! First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes or cancer. Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking. As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds, KFC or Subway. Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn’t open on the weekends, somehow we didn’t starve to death! We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drinks with sugar in it, but we weren’t overweight because . . . WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back by teatime. No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K. We built tree houses and dens and played in river beds with Matchbox cars. We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii, Xboxes, no video games at all, no 999 TV channels, no video/dvd films, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms . . . WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them! We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. You could buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns only at Easter time. We were given air guns and catapults for our tenth birthdays and rode bikes to our friends’ houses.

Our teachers used to hit us with canes and gym shoes and bullies always ruled the playground at school. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!

And YOU are one of them! CONGRATULATIONS! You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good. And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were!

We note that the children born in the post-war years were apparently in the habit of leaving their homes in the morning, at weekends and during school holidays, spending all day in the streets or fields and only returning for their tea. This particular claim has become something of a leit motif for baby boomers; it regularly crops up whenever discussion turns to the difference between childhood in those days and the situation now. Here is Robert Elms, the writer and broadcaster, describing his own childhood in the 1960s: ‘By the time I was nine or ten it became a ritual to be given the money for a one-day bus pass known as a Red Rover and the instruction to come back in time for tea.’ The memory of playing out all day, without the presence of any adults, from breakfast until teatime is a powerful one for many adults born between 1946 and 1964. It invariably crops up when they are talking about their childhood. Going out by themselves to play, and walking to and from school without their parents, has come to be seen as a desirable way of life, one denied to modern children, with dreadful consequences such as the likelihood of developing life-limiting diseases in later life.

It is very right and proper that older people should believe that their own childhoods were richer, more stimulating and generally an improvement on the lives lived by modern children and if they wish to pretend that their lives as children were like one long Enid Blyton adventure, then this does not hurt anybody. It is a harmless-enough piece of make-believe. In recent years though, rather than merely listening indulgently to these stories, we are increasingly being expected to treat the fanciful reminiscences of men and women in their sixties and seventies as being reliable data, upon which we should act, or even use to formulate government policy. Books are being published with titles such as Toxic Childhood, which purport to show that modern children really are worse off in many ways than their older relatives were at a similar age, suffering from mental health problems, physical ailments, restricted liberty and various other awful consequences of being born into this modern world. Even more bizarrely, government agencies and health trusts are now writing policies, and even framing legislation, which seemingly acknowledge that childhood today is somehow failing and in need of rescuing to make it more like the way of life enjoyed by children in the 1950s. All of which is a little disconcerting, to say the least of it! This peculiar trend is best illustrated by looking first at one of the most popular manifestations of this trend, the idea that today’s children do not get enough exercise and that if we could only recreate the conditions under which children grew up during the 1950s and 1960s, then we would see a tremendous and beneficial change in the physical and mental health of British children. This is thought to be a good idea for several reasons, not least of which is that such a radical change of lifestyle is necessary to tackle what is sometimes called the ‘obesity epidemic’ or ‘obesity time bomb’. All such ideas are predicated on the assumption that children in previous generations were healthier and fitter than young people today and that the best way to improve the health of the rising generation is to take steps to replicate the experience of the baby boomers.

In 2014 the British government published a draft Cycling Delivery Plan, designed to increase the number of people who travel on bicycle and by foot. One of the targets was that within the next ten years, the percentage of children aged between five and ten who walk to school should rise to 55 per cent. A laudable enough aim, one might think and just the sort of thing to get children to exercise more. Surely, a return to the days when children walked to school, rather than being driven by their parents, could only be a good target to strive for? After all, forty years ago, the overwhelming majority of children did walk to school and were in consequence much fitter and healthier than today’s youngsters. This, at least, is the received view.

There can be no doubt at all that children in the first three decades after the end of the Second World War spent far more time out and about in the streets without adults. This included playing with their friends after school and at weekends, as well as walking to and from school. In 1971, for example, over 80 per cent of seven- and eight-year-olds walked to school alone. Twenty years later, this figure had fallen below 10 per cent and today it would be surprising to see any seven-year-old arrive regularly at school having walked there alone. Indeed, so unusual would this be that it would almost certainly be the object of unfavourable remark by other parents and probably teachers as well. If a child of that age continued to arrive at school unaccompanied by an adult, then it is entirely possible that Social Services would be notified. At which point, many baby boomers will begin muttering things like ‘The Nanny State!’ and ‘Health and Safety gone mad!’ Surely it makes sense that children should be given the chance to become independent without a lot of mollycoddling and fuss? After all, the baby boomers themselves didn’t come to any harm, did they? Why shouldn’t today’s children be accorded a similar amount of freedom to that which was enjoyed fifty years ago? It definitely made for a more healthy lifestyle, didn’t it?

The description of baby boomer childhood from the Internet, which we saw above, contains this claim ‘we weren’t overweight because . . . WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!! We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back by teatime. No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.’

‘We were O.K.’ How true actually is this statement? If we wish to know what childhood was like in the 1950s and 1960s, we shall sometimes have to look at records and statistics from that time and use those as the basis for our investigations, combining them where necessary with newspaper reports and other contemporaneous accounts. This is the method used in this book and using such sources to examine the hazards to health faced by the baby boomers reveals a number of shocking facts, facts which nobody seems anxious to acknowledge today. Looking at the genuine situation of the baby boomer children shows just how healthy and safe, or otherwise, their lives actually were.

As a woman remarks sadly on the Netmums site, regretting the restricted circumstances of her own child’s experiences: ‘I miss the carefree childhood. I could play out from 8 am to 6 pm and my Mum never had to worry I would be snatched.’ This is an interesting idea. Were children safer from being ‘snatched’ a few decades ago? It was not of course only seve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Land of Lost Content: Childhood in the Good Old Days
• Chapter 2: ‘Dumb But Pretty, Like a Schoolgirl Should Be’: The Sexual Abuse of Children in the Post-War Years
• Chapter 3: Of Moral Panics and ASBOs: Juvenile Crime and Disorder in the 1950s and 1960s
• Chapter 4: Playing Out and Walking to School: The Facts Behind the ‘Freedom’ Enjoyed by Young Baby Boomers
• Chapter 5: Falling Life Expectancy: Are the Baby Boomers More Healthy than their Grandchildren?
• Chapter 6: Back to Basics: Has Education Been Dumbed Down Since the 1960s?
• Chapter 7: There Was Nothing Like That When I Was a Boy!: The Older Generation’s Fear of New Media
• Chapter 8: From Janet and John to the Famous Five: Baby Boomer Childhood in Fiction
• Chapter 9: Limited Choices: How Much Freedom Did the Baby Boomers Actually Have as Children?
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Plate section