by Paul Feeney
At infants’ school we were taught to recite the alphabet and we were shown how to do some basic arithmetic using an abacus. We also learnt how to write short words with chalk on a small, hand-held blackboard. Our teachers read stories to us and we sang lots of nursery rhymes and did loads of drawings and paintings. We were taught how to make easy things using a few basic materials and we learned how to co-ordinate our movements through dance and games. We played loads of throwing and catching games with small beanbags, and we learnt how to kick a ball in a straight line. After spending a year or two in the infant school we moved up to primary school and began to mix with the big kids. By the age of 6, we were using pencils to write, rather than the early learning tools of blackboard and chalk, and within a very short time we were being taught how to write with pen and ink. However, we used a crude type of pen not much better than the old feather quill pen; it was made out of a short wooden stick with a metal nib fixed to one end. We each had an inkwell fitted into the top right-hand side of our desks (we were all expected to be right-handed) and we would dip the nib into the inkwell to load it with enough ink to write a couple of words at a time. The nibs were not at all reliable in controlling the flow of ink and the pages in our exercise books would get covered in splodges of ink, as would our hands. It was very messy and a difficult task to master. Some kids never managed to get the hang of it, always getting more ink on themselves than on the page.
The post-war baby boom meant that there were a lot more families with young children in the 1950s, and families tended to be larger in number than they are today. Accordingly, schools had to accommodate lots of pupils, especially in urban areas, and so it was normal to have a large number of pupils in each classroom (often more than forty to a class and just one class teacher to teach them; there was no such job as classroom assistant in those days). We did loads of creative things like drawing, painting and model making, and we practiced singing a lot. The classrooms usually had large loudspeakers installed high up near the ceiling so that we could listen to some of the ‘Schools Radio’ programmes that were broadcast back then. These included a weekly programme of sing-along songs, mostly sea shanties and the like, and we would all sing along to these using special ‘Schools Radio’ music books that contained all the words of the songs. The radio control switch was usually housed in a cabinet somewhere outside of the classroom in the central part of the school and we were regularly made to jump when it was switched on by mistake, blasting a sudden burst of loud noise into the otherwise quiet classroom.
The amount of exercise we got was not limited to what we did at playtime in the playground; we also did lots of PE, sport, swimming and cross-country runs, usually having to walk long distances to the school playing fields and the council-run swimming baths. We certainly did lots of non-academic things at primary school but we were left in no doubt that school was a place for learning. While we were taught the basics in science and nature, the main emphasis was on teaching ‘the three Rs’: a long-established term used to describe the skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. Our primary school education was always geared towards the ultimate life-changing test we would take in our final year at primary school: the 11-plus examination. The exam was in three parts: Arithmetic and Problem Solving, General English (including comprehension and an essay) and General Knowledge. As the name suggests, we did our 11-plus examinations when we were 11 years old. The results were used to determine which type of secondary school we were most suited to. The idea was that different skills required different types of schooling and there were three possibilities: grammar school, a secondary modern school or a technical school. If you passed the 11-plus then you were expected to go to a grammar school to follow an academic education, which might lead to you going on to university. However, passing the 11-plus did not guarantee a place at grammar school because there was an application process and this included at least one admission interview with the head of the school you were applying to join. Being rejected by three different grammar schools often resulted in the applicant having to go to a secondary modern school instead. Pupils who failed the 11-plus usually ended up going to a secondary modern school with the prospects of leaving school at 15 with little or no qualifications, unless they went on to a further education college afterwards.
As with everything about the 1950s, it is often the simple things that we remember most about our primary school years: the taste of aniseed balls and malted milk tablets we used to buy from the school tuck shop during mid-morning break; the enjoyment we got from swapping stamps, cigarette cards and coloured beads we used to keep in old tobacco tins; the fun we had modelling things with plasticine and papier-mâché; the awful cross-country runs we did in the rain and mud; the dreadful experience of using those brick-built lavatories in the playground. There are a thousand and one everyday things we remember about our 1950s schooldays, like the embarrassment of country dance lessons, motherly dinner ladies, paper-chains and party games, wooden pencil cases and leather satchels, conkers and marbles, and we can all remember shivering by the edge of the pool at the local baths while learning to swim. We can still picture the scene of young girls playing two-balls up the wall while singing skipping rhymes – ‘salt-mustard-vinegar-pepper… ’. We remember the disappointment of being cast in the role of ‘second hump of a camel’ in the Christmas Nativity play. Then there were all of the hopeful ambitions we never did achieve at primary school, like being made pencil monitor with extra responsibility for handing out the paintbrushes, and hoping we might get to play the tambourine rather than the triangle at the next rehearsal for the school orchestra. This small assortment of memories represents a tiny part of our overall primary schooling experience. We all had bad days that we would rather forget, but most of us tend to look back fondly on our early school years. Even those who disliked being at school will remember the contentment we felt in the shelter and safety of our classrooms on cold wet afternoons when our class teacher read short stories to us. The teacher would dramatise the action by using a different tone of voice for each character, just like a play on the radio. We were totally mesmerised by it and nothing could distract us from the plot. Perhaps they were the best days of our lives.
Whether we loved or loathed our time at school, we were always glad to get home when each school day ended, even if only to play outside with our friends. Home life was idyllic, quiet and unpretentious compared to the average family lives of today. As with our schooldays, the memories we retain from our childhood family life of the 1950s are frequently quite simple ones: the wonderful smells of mum’s roast dinners and freshly baked cakes; the cosy nights we spent by the fireside listening to the wireless as dad snoozed in his favourite armchair and mum rolled a fresh ball of knitting wool from a skein stretched between a child’s tiny arms; afternoon tea at auntie’s, patiently watching the clock as mum caught up on all the latest gossip; Sundays spent at granny’s, with talk of drawing rooms and parlours and aspidistra plants; an ashtray in every room and ticking clocks all over the house; rooms filled with brown wooden furniture and comfy armchairs stacked with lots of cushions, all engulfed in a heady mix of musty smells sweetened with furniture polish. Homes were so very different then; there were no flick-of-a-switch sources of entertainment except for the radio, but some of us had the added luxury of a wind-up gramophone and an upright piano; this, however, was the full extent of our home entertainment equipment and there were no fancy electronic gadgets to amuse us. People spent a lot of their leisure time at home reading, listening to the wireless or pursuing one of the popular hobbies of the day. Adult hobbies usually involved practical things to do with the home. The skills of needlework, knitting, darning, cooking and baking were handed down through generations of women and every mum seemed to be an expert and eager to show their daughters how to do it. Men were the gardeners and the fixers – anything that involved an engine or a hammer. As for us kids, when we weren’t playing hopscotch or annoying the neighbours with games of ‘Knock Dow
n Ginger’ and ‘Tin Tan Tommy’, we would be plaiting our plastic scoubidou strings or honing our yo-yo and hula hoop skills. We rarely got bored. Even if we were stuck indoors we would find something interesting to occupy us; whether it was reading books and comics, sorting through our collections of stamps and beads, or constructing something from one of the Airfix or Meccano kits, we always found a way to pass the time. In the evenings, families would often do things together, and not just at Christmas. Board games like snakes and ladders, draughts, Monopoly, and Ludo were very popular forms of family entertainment, and we would play loads of different cards games, from Happy Families and Snap, to Cribbage and Pontoon. We kids liked listening to the wireless as much as our parents and we especially enjoyed radio shows such as The Clitheroe Kid, Dick Barton, Educating Archie, The Goon Show, Paul Temple and Meet the Huggetts. Many of us begged to stay up late so we could listen to the scary science fiction serial, Journey into Space: the stuff that kids’ nightmares are made of.
While teenagers hung out in coffee bars, youth clubs and dancehalls, we children burned up our excess energy playing in the local streets and alleyways, and on any piece of open land available to us. Many of our towns and cities still bore the scars of the Blitz bombing raids that left over a million houses destroyed or damaged in London alone. These bomb ruins and derelict buildings, together with all of the wasteland that was created through post-war slum clearance, became our natural playgrounds. We may have twisted a few ankles and got some bumps and bruises while playing amongst the hazardous rubble but we had some wonderful adventures, and the bomb sites provided the perfect place for us to build our bonfires each Guy Fawkes Night. We also came across an unexploded bomb or two and I suppose we should count ourselves lucky to have survived our childhood exploits.
We spent as much time as we could outside in the fresh air and memories of the long hot summers we loved so much are as indelibly printed in our minds as the cold, smog-filled winters we hated. It was a long time ago and some may think it’s a trick of the imagination, but we did seem to have lots of warm summer days, when the morning lasted all day and we played outside until late into the evening. We had few toys but we managed to get a lot of enjoyment from what we did have, and we learned to share everything. If there was only one pair of roller skates or one bike then we would wait to take our turn or we would do without. We were experts at improvising and we would make our own playthings out of a few unwanted makeshift materials, often rescuing things from the rubbish. Everything had a use; cardboard, string, bits of wood and parts from a broken old pram were all put to work as valuable components for our home-made toys. From bows and arrows and toy guns to go-carts and sledges, we made them all. We would chalk stumps on a wall for a game of cricket and spend hours playing board games like Monopoly on each other’s doorsteps. While boys played football in the empty streets using jumpers for goalposts, the girls would climb and swing from ropes tied to the tops of lampposts. All the girls delighted in playing dressing-up games using mum’s make-up, frock and high heels, but neither boys nor girls had any real interest in fashion and we remained blissfully unaware of each passing trend. Girls were happy if they had a pretty ribbon in their hair, while boys would delight in having shoes without holes in them. We wore what our mothers dressed us in and for boys that often meant wearing the same clothes all the time, in and out of school. Girls generally fared better, usually having at least one other dress they could wear to play out in while their school uniform was neatly tucked away in the wardrobe. It was normal practice for young boys to wear short trousers until they started secondary school at the age of 11, but some would remain in short trousers up to the age of 12 or 13. Sometimes the move up to long trousers was determined by how quickly you grew out of your last pair of short ones; people were prudent with their money and were only inclined to discard clothes when they were worn out and could not be mended any more. Parents also had very different ideas about the way children should be brought up, with many seeking to prolong the childhood of their little darlings for as long as possible. It was much easier in those days to protect a child’s innocence because they were not being seduced by adult themes at every twist and turn in their lives. Sex was rarely discussed in the home and there was no sex education whatsoever at school. Celebrity idols of the day always dressed and behaved modestly in public and there was no risk of children ever hearing bad language on the radio or television. Children were not exposed to any sexual images in magazines or on street hoardings as they are today, and there were no agony aunts writing about sexually explicit matters in any of the publications we read. Most of us learned the facts of life by exchanging snippets of knowledge in the school playground and reading rude postcards on day trips to the seaside. The absence of any proper sex education didn’t lead to an uncontrollable spread of venereal diseases among the young and we didn’t see any pregnant 13-year-old schoolgirls in the 1950s classrooms. Any influences the 1950s media had over children were usually harmless, apart from the tobacco adverts that portrayed smoking as being sexy and relaxing. The fact that we had little or no opportunity to travel outside of our own communities also helped to limit the amount we knew of how other people lived their lives; this meant that we were much less worldly wise than children are today. We were, however, given a great deal more freedom to roam the local streets and in doing so we learned how to assess situations and make decisions for ourselves, independent of our parents. Although we enjoyed a more lengthy childhood than you might expect today, being allowed out on our own without any supervision helped to make us streetwise from a very young age. Most of us walked to school unaccompanied each day and many of us were even allowed to travel alone on the buses and trains, reading maps and planning journeys for ourselves. Grandma’s half-a-crown (2s and sixpence) birthday money would often be spent on a child’s Red Rover Ticket, which allowed unlimited travel anywhere you wanted to go on any of London’s red buses. We may have been immature, scrawny young things but we were not completely naïve.
The austere times we grew up in taught us to be pennywise and enterprising. The little pocket money we were given was always inadequate and many of us used our wits to earn extra. The few child-labour laws that existed at the time were not properly enforced and so we were able to do various trivial and cheap-labour jobs even though we were underage, from helping the milkman on his early morning round to shunting boxes around in the markets at weekends. Some of us did the traditional early morning newspaper rounds while others used their initiative to create entrepreneurial money-making jobs like selling coal door-to-door from an old pram. In those days, nobody was interested in saving the planet and everything went into the dustbin, but 1950s kids were experts at recycling and we made money by rummaging through dustbins to find stuff we could collect and sell to the local scrap merchant: everything from old newspapers and cardboard to rags and bits of metal. We specialised in collecting empty beer and lemonade bottles and returning them to the off-licence to get back the 3d a bottle deposit that people had paid when they first bought them. Nothing we did made us rich but it gave us a few extra pennies to spend and it broadened our education. We may have only earned enough to pay for our ticket to get into Saturday morning pictures, to buy a comic and a few sherbet lemons, but it taught us the value of money and we learnt that nothing in life is free; that is if you don’t count the odd Saturday when we used to bunk in the cinema through the exit doors at the back.
We grew up in the midst of a 1950s rebellious youth culture that was enacted mostly through the dress and activities of Teddy Boys, Beatniks and Greasers. Weapons of violence such as flick-knives and knuckle-dusters were openly displayed and sold in high street shops and there was no age restriction on who could buy them. We did not feel at all threatened by their presence and we still felt safe walking the streets, even after dark. The bad behaviour of angry and unruly teenagers, however, was usually bought into line when they were called up to do their compulsory two years of National Service at t
he age of 18. Prior to this, teenagers would hang out in any public place that had a jukebox installed, from coffee bars to skating rinks. The radio stations only played a limited range of music and playing jukebox records was about the only way young people could get to hear the latest music loudly and with good quality Hi-Fidelity sound (Stereophonic sound from 1959). During the 1950s, jukeboxes started to be manufactured to take the new style 7in 45rpm vinyl singles and each machine could take up to 200 record selections. They, especially the Rock-Ola and Wurlitzer jukeboxes, fascinated everyone; groups of people would stand around them to watch the coloured lights and the automatic record-changing mechanism. Teenagers would push each other out of the way so they could be next to put their money in the coin slot and choose their own favourite records at a cost of sixpence a play or three for 1s. If you didn’t like the record that was playing then a sharp thump on the side of the machine would dislodge the needle and an automatic arm would lift the record off the turntable and return it to its filing slot at the back of the machine; the next record would then be played. This was the cause of many a fight.
We may have only been in our pre-teen years but we still shared in the thrills and excitement that surrounded the ground-breaking films and record releases. They heralded the arrival of what was to become the biggest ever change in popular music culture: rock and roll music and the acrobatic rock and roll version of ‘lindy hop’ dance that came with it. It arrived from America in the mid-1950s, pioneered by artists like Bill Haley and his Comets, and Elvis Presley the ‘King of Rock and Roll’. Around the same time, we began to hear recordings of a new style of British skiffle music, which had started in London’s basement jazz clubs through bands like Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen and in particular his banjo player at the time, Lonnie Donegan. At last we had some new exciting music we could listen to as an alternative to the crooners, balladeers, jazz and big show bands of old.
