The Baby Boomer Generation

by Paul Feeney

  Margaret Thatcher featured prominently in events of the 1980s as you would expect with any prime minister of any political persuasion, but Margaret Thatcher was not just any prime minister; she was our first female prime minister and she was proving to be the strongest leader we baby boomers had seen running the country in our lifetime. The British public had chosen a tough and decisive prime minister with all of the qualities needed to move the country forward from the darkest days of the 1970s, sort out our economy and get the country back on its feet. Some may question her methods and achievements but she was certainly a tough and decisive leader. People from coal-mining areas will remember her for the tough stance she took over the 1984–85 miners’ strike and the subsequent closure of coalmines. Many of those who belonged to the coal-mining industry will blame her for destroying their livelihoods, breaking up communities and turning their villages into ghost towns. However, there was never going to be an easy outcome to the miners’ dispute. The National Coal Board was heavily subsidised by the British taxpayer and most mines were unprofitable. Despite the subsidies, British coal was said to be costing more than coal could be bought from other countries.

  Thatcher was also committed to reducing the power of the trade unions. She managed to shrink the authority of the militant union bosses with tough new laws requiring pre-strike ballots and an end to ‘closed shop’ policies, and the unions would now also be held responsible for any illegal strikes. She introduced measures to bring down the high cost of state welfare and control benefit abuse by tightening the rules for welfare state benefit and carrying out more means testing. Her priority had been to get inflation down and she expected private employers to create the majority of jobs. She encouraged people to stand on their own two feet and not expect the state to be a universal provider.

  Before becoming prime minister, Thatcher was known to the general public as ‘Thatcher, Thatcher, Milk Snatcher’: the woman who did away with free school milk in 1970 when she was secretary of state for education in Edward Heath’s government of the time. As prime minister in the 1980s, she made more fundamental changes affecting children’s education, including replacing GCE O levels and CSE exams with new GCSE examinations, and abolishing all forms of corporal punishment in state schools. Some might say these changes added to the damage already done by the Labour government when they began dumbing-down education and discipline standards in schools during the 1970s. The combined effects of these policies would lead to serious repercussions in years to come when education and discipline standards would be seen to be broken and it would be recognised that we needed to go back to basics. Possibly the most controversial thing Thatcher did while in government was introduce the short-lived Poll Tax in 1989; more formally known as the Community Charge, it replaced the traditional local authority rates system with a single flat-rate tax for every adult. Huge numbers of people either refused or couldn’t afford to pay the new Poll Tax, which made the tax impossible to police because of insufficient numbers of police, bailiffs, courts and prison cells. The feeling against the new tax was so strong that its introduction led to Poll Tax riots in towns and cities across the country, especially in Central London. The nationwide fury and condemnation of the Poll Tax, especially in the north of England and in Scotland, contributed to the downfall of Margaret Thatcher the following year. Even her most loyal supporters thought she was showing signs of grandeur exceeding her position when following the birth of her first grandchild in March 1989 she announced, ‘We have become a grandmother.’

  Thatcher may not have always got things right but she was clear-thinking and not afraid to make difficult decisions, even if it made her unpopular. Whether at home or abroad, no one messed with Margaret Thatcher, and it was widely reported that she only needed four hours sleep a night. Amazing! She had so much energy and an eternally optimistic ‘go for it’ approach to life. She wanted people to take more responsibility and strive to improve their lives, whatever their background or circumstances. She encouraged home ownership and made it possible for council tenants to buy their council house or flat at a discounted value depending on how long they had been a rent-paying council tenant. This ‘Right to Buy’ scheme came into being with the Housing Act of 1980 and opened the floodgates for hundreds of thousands of tenants to buy the council home in which they lived. More than a million council properties were sold in this way during the 1980s alone. Thatcher also encouraged more people to start their own businesses. Her rhetoric gave the impression that anyone could be an entrepreneur, even those who had no experience at all in risk taking, and we were all tempted to have a go. Many were attracted to the idea of going it alone after being made redundant, and by 1984 nearly 2.5 million of us were running our own businesses, almost a million more than a decade before. The Thatcher government also introduced several new schemes to stop the unemployed becoming long-term dole claimants. These included a Youth Training Scheme (YTS) to get young people suitably trained for work, and several other schemes to help other unemployed people find suitable work again. They also started the Enterprise Zone scheme for job-creating employers and the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which guaranteed an income of £40 per week to any unemployed person who set up their own business, but these would-be entrepreneurs had to produce a proper business plan and have at least £1,000 of their own money to fund the start up (bearing in mind that according to the Office of National Statistics, in 1983 the average annual wage in the UK was £7,700).

  When we baby boomers were looking for our very first jobs back in the 1960s, the mood was fresh and optimistic and many of us were keen to seek out new and better job opportunities than those that had been available to our parents when they were starting out. In many cases we were better educated than our parents and grandparents and we had the extra advantage of knowledge gained through television while we were growing up, unlike our parents. To us, the world seemed a much smaller and less-daunting place than it may have been to generations before. In many cases, we were more worldly wise and adventurous, and some of us became the first in our family to move away from the local area in which we grew up. A lot of us were not content to follow the traditional paths our parents and grandparents had taken, working down the mines, in steel production or in shipbuilding, for example. We were less willing to clock in at the same factory gates and do the same routine work for the rest of our lives. We could see other job and career opportunities opening up in new and developing areas of business and industry, and we had the confidence to seek them out. The trend of travelling distances to work and willingness to move home for a job grew in the 1970s and by the time the 1980s job crisis arrived we were well used to the possibility of having to commute long distances to work. By now, most of us had also acquired a new job-seeking qualification that was somewhat absent during the 1970s – flexibility.

  The economic recovery did eventually come, but it took a few years. Unemployment stayed above 3 million until the spring of 1987 and then it began to fall dramatically. People living in the Midlands and the south of England definitely needed some good news after being hit by the worst storm to batter England in 284 years. The hurricane-force storm killed at least twenty-two people and caused widespread devastation, mostly in the south-east of England where gusts of 120mph were recorded. By spring 1988 unemployment was down below 2.5 million and by the end of 1989 the figure was just above 1.6 million. The economic measures taken by Thatcher’s government, which included financial deregulation and the 1986 tax reforms, led to an economic boom, often called the Lawson Boom (Nigel Lawson was chancellor of the exchequer from 1983–89). Indeed, from 1983 to 1988, those of us who were fortunate enough to have a job benefited from a sizeable reduction in the basic rate of income tax, which went down from 30% to 25%, and the highest earners celebrated a reduction in the top rate from 60% to 40%, but the Lawson boom led to inflation rising from 3.4% to 8% and interest rates almost doubling in the late-1980s. To make matters worse, by the end of the 1980s the housing market was on the verge of
collapse. Data collected by Nationwide, one of the UK’s biggest mortgage providers, shows that in 1980 the average cost of a house in the UK was £22,677 (equivalent to the sum of about £78,000 in 2011) and apart from a small fall towards the end of 1981, prices rose steadily throughout the 1980s until the last few months of December 1989 when prices went into free-fall. In the autumn of 1989, average house prices were £62,782 (equivalent to the sum of about £117,000 in 2011); by December they had dropped to £61,495 and by March 1990 they were down to £59,587.

  Love her of hate her, Margaret Thatcher still arouses the same extreme emotions today as she did when she was at the height of her power back in the 1980s. Whether you see her as a heroine or a villain is a matter of opinion and that usually depends on one’s own personal experiences. Whatever your point of view, when our thoughts turn to the 1980s we can’t help but remember her: the Iron Lady of politics. She was undeniably one of the two leading ladies of the decade. The other was Diana, Princess of Wales, the fresh-faced and naive young beauty who captured the hearts of the nation with her elegance and charm. Images of these two influential women regularly appeared on the front pages of every national newspaper and television news and current affairs programme throughout the 1980s. They even featured in almost every 1980s episode of the satirical puppet show, Spitting Image. It was on 29 July 1981 that an estimated 750 million global television audience, including 28.4 million British television viewers, watched the shy 20-year-old Lady Diana Spencer marry 32-year-old heir apparent Charles, Prince of Wales at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Throughout the 1980s, Princess Diana was the most photographed woman in the world, ruthlessly pursued by paparazzi wherever she went.

  As we cast our minds back to those days when we baby boomers were mere 30-somethings and the Rubik’s Cube puzzle drove us completely up the wall, we also remember how addicted we were to TV shows like Dallas and we wonder what possessed more than 30 million viewers to dampen the joy of their Christmas by tuning in to watch the breakup of Den and Angie’s marriage in Eastenders in 1986. This was also the decade in which we dreamed of ditching our old cine cameras for one of the new handheld camcorders, which were the size of a small suitcase at the time. Mobile phones were in their infancy and were huge, unreliable and very expensive to buy and make calls from. The early ones took hours to charge up and the charge then only lasted for a few minutes of call time. The car phone versions were much better, with a continuous source of power and proper aerials, but in addition to the high cost of the phone these cost a fortune to have professionally fitted. These early day mobile phones were all analogue with very poor signal strength. You could feel your ear warming up within seconds of starting to use one. You found yourself being constantly cut off as the signal came and went, sometimes not even managing to speak to the person at the other end before being cut off, and yet you were still charged 35p per minute and each part of a minute by the service provider for the privilege. There was no such thing as an ‘all-in’ deal back then and monthly mobile phone bills would run into hundreds of pounds – definitely a gadget for the wealthy. We grew accustomed to the sight of city whiz kids and celebrities sporting brick-size mobile phones with thick, rod-like aerials. These new must-have status symbols were so big that when they were being used they would almost completely bridge the gap between ones shoulder and jaw. The not-so-well-off gadget lovers continued to use 1970s-style citizen band (CB) radios to keep in touch with other like-minded CB enthusiasts when they were out and about in their cars and trucks. They used CB slang to communicate with each other with such words and phrases as, ‘Got your ears on,’ ‘Copy,’ ‘Good buddy,’ ‘Handle,’ ‘Breaker 19,’ ‘Eyeball,’ and ‘10-4.’ The rest of us technophobes stuck to the conventional fixed-line home and office telephones for any voice-to-voice communications.

  The method by which we could enjoy our own personal taste in music was also rapidly changing. The wide shoulders on the fashionable jackets we wore in the 1980s acted as a useful shelf to support and position the extraordinarily large stereo boom boxes (ghetto blasters) as close to the ear as possible. Although these were held right next to the ear, it was important for the volume and bass to be turned up as loud as possible to be sure that everyone in the whole area around us could hear every thumping beat. It seemed we had barely got used to the excitement of owning a Sony Walkman audio cassette player when compact discs were launched and at last we could listen to our favourite music without any annoying sounds of scratches and hisses. Fortunately, the record companies started re-releasing 1950s and 1960s music on CD, which was really good because we baby boomers were getting a bit too old to appreciate much of the popular music released in the 1980s by the likes of Adam and the Ants, Culture Club, Bros and Wham!. And for some of us, as much as we loved Whitney Houston’s songs, we felt more of an attachment to the catalogue of music her cousin Dionne Warwick and godmother Aretha Franklin had entertained us with throughout most of our record-playing lives. Having said all of that with tongue in cheek, there was a lot of good music created during the 1980s and many songwriters and pop stars went on to develop long and successful careers, including Billy Joel, Madonna, George Michael, Kylie Minogue, Lionel Richie and Sting. And we have to admit that most of us quite liked the new romantics’ style of pop music, which was epitomised by the likes of Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. It also seemed as though Stock, Aitkin and Waterman could do no wrong with anything they produced in the way of pop music from the mid- to late 1980s. A large number of us baby boomers bought the bestselling single of the 1980s, Band Aid’s, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ We were even tempted onto the dance floor to shake our stuff to the UK’s biggest-selling singles artist of the 1980s, Shakin’ Stevens. Yes, much to the surprise of 1980s pop music fans, it wasn’t any of the big-selling names like David Bowie, Phil Collins, Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney or Rod Stewart; it was Shakin’ Stevens. He had twenty-eight top-40 hit singles in the 1980s alone, including four number ones.

  As the 1980s progressed, we were beginning to see some development in television broadcasting, which gave us a much greater choice of programmes to watch and at different times of the day. In November 1982, Channel 4 began broadcasting, taking the total number of available television channels to four: BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV and Channel 4. However, these were all national terrestrial analogue channels; we were not yet blessed with multi-channel digital television. In 1983, breakfast television arrived in Britain and changed the routine of our early morning lives forever. Who could ever have imagined that we would be watching television at that time of the morning, before we went to work or took the children to school? Here in Britain, it was not yet popular practice to have a television set in the bedroom or in the kitchen, let alone have multiple television sets all around the house. Many of us had to nip in and out of the main living room to catch snippets of the topics being covered on these new early morning television breakfast shows. This was a time when television sets were enormous: as deep as they were wide and very heavy, often needing two people to lift one. Even portable television sets were huge in comparison to today’s; they were large square boxes that needed to be sat upon sturdy pieces of furniture. On the plus side, we did by now have the benefit of hand-held remote controls, albeit with a limited number of functions, and these enabled us to switch back and forth between each of the breakfast television shows. Our first experience of breakfast television was on 17 January 1983 when the BBC launched their Breakfast Time magazine-style programme hosted by Frank Bough, Selina Scott and Nick Ross, with regular appearances from astrologer Russell Grant and fitness expert Diana Moran, better known to us as the ‘Green Goddess’ due to the striking colour of the leotard she wore. On 1 February 1983, just two weeks after the first BBC Breakfast Time went on air, ITV launched its own flagship TV-am breakfast-time programmes, Daybreak and Good Morning Britain. The early TV-am team of presenters were David Frost, Michael Parkinson, Angela Rippon, Anna Ford, Robert Kee, Esther Rantzen and sports presenter Nick Owen.
Anne Diamond joined following a shake up in presenters a few months after the programme was first launched.

  The type of television we watched in the evening was changing too. A new style of alternative comedy emerged in the 1980s, showcased in television shows like The Comic Strip, Saturday Live and The Young Ones. There were several new alternative-style comedians including Ben Elton, Jo Brand, Frank Skinner, Alan Davies, Julian Clary and Harry ‘Loadsamoney’ Enfield. Most of the alternative comedians were about ten years younger than we were and many of us baby boomers just didn’t get it. We could appreciate clever satirical comedy but some of us couldn’t quite grasp the humour of this new anti-Establishment stuff. Perhaps we were too used to the type of comedy that involved a story and a punchline.

  There was a lot of good stuff to watch on television in the 1980s; many excellent writers, producers and directors came to the fore, and there was now little evidence of scenery wobbling about as there had been in the early days of television soap operas. The one exception was of course Acorn Antiques, Victoria Wood’s wonderful mid-1980s spoof TV soap opera. The choice of television programmes had never been greater; our screens were awash with a multitude of good quality television series and it would be amiss not to highlight some of these wonderful British comedy TV shows, like ’Allo ’Allo!, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Blackadder, Bread, Hi-de-Hi!, Only Fools and Horses and Yes, Minister. We were also spoilt with an abundance of British crime and whodunit TV dramas, like Bergerac, The Bill, C.A.T.S. Eyes, The Gentle Touch, Inspector Morse, Juliet Bravo, Rumpole of the Bailey and Taggart (with Mark McManus). There were scores of good American police and detective TV series, including Cagney and Lacey, Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, Magnum, P.I., Miami Vice and Quincy, M.E.. Other popular British-made TV shows included Blankety Blank, Blind Date, Bread, Brush Strokes, Butterflies, Casualty, Doctor Who, Ever Decreasing Circles, A Fine Romance, Just Good Friends, London’s Burning, Lovejoy, Minder, Robin’s Nest, Shelley, Surprise Surprise, Tenko, To the Manor Born and Wogan, the chat show that was on three nights a week in the late 1980s. Television chat shows were very popular but the choice of guest was sometimes questionable, especially when the guests included glove puppets such as Spit the Dog, Basil Brush and Rod Hull’s Emu. The big British-made TV soaps of the day were Coronation Street, Crossroads, Eastenders and Emmerdale Farm (as it was called back then). The notable American imports included Knight Rider, The Fall Guy, Knots Landing, Lou Grant, The Cosby Show, Moonlighting, Mission Impossible, Remington Steele, Roseanne, T. J. Hooker, Taxi, Fame, Hart to Hart, Cheers and of course, the two big ones, Dallas and Dynasty.