by Abrams, Fran
So, this new emphasis on the family had its drawbacks, especially for children who were aware their own families were less than perfect. Yet there was a genuine sense of optimism, a real feeling that this was a good time to be a child. Family Allowance of eight shillings per week helped to stretch tight budgets, and despite the fact that post-war austerity stretched well into the 1950s, there was a new health service, a new school system, new housing, all of which had a direct effect on children’s lives.
Some of this family-centredness might be seen as a sort of hardheaded attempt by the government to ensure necessary population growth. After all, Beveridge had warned during the war that a declining birth rate continued to be a threat to national prosperity. And in 1952 the Archbishop of Canterbury told the Mother’s Union that two children did not represent a proper effort in this respect: ‘Family only truly begins with three children.’6 Yet it quickly became clear that the population was growing healthily as couples married and settled down to post-war life. However, the notion that Britain had a ‘baby boom’ generation, as America did, is something of a myth. Official statistics show the population of the UK grew by around two million between 1941 and 1951, as it had done in each decade since the early twentieth century – mainly because fewer people were dying. And while there was a spike in the birth rate just after the war ended, it was smaller than the one that followed the end of World War One. By the early 1950s, the birth rate had dropped again to wartime levels.
And in an age of growing prosperity, concerns about children’s health began to turn in new directions. No longer would the newspapers worry aloud about the puny, underfed youths who might be the country’s first line of defence in the event of another war. When sugar came off the ration in 1953, the papers greeted the event cheerfully: ‘Nowadays, a child’s pocket money is once again genuine currency, capable of conversion at any confectioner’s into bull’s eyes, humbugs, allsorts and chocolate; and the old joy that the young used to find in humouring their palates in their own way has returned. Already more sweets and chocolates are being eaten than before the war,’ The Times reported in June 19537 – there had been an earlier attempt to de-ration sugar in 1949 but the resulting rush for the sweet shops had led to the decision being reversed. But the sense of unalloyed enjoyment would not last long. Before the decade was out, medical officers were seeing a worrying rise in obesity among the young. In the late Victorian era, workers had queued up on their days off to stare at Miss Ivy, the celebrated Lancashire Fat Girl. A century later, there would be no novelty in finding an overweight adolescent female in Lancashire, or anywhere else. The UK’s confectioners never looked back, and large swathes of the countryside were given over to the growing of sugar beet to feed the nation’s new craving. Just as the old infectious diseases were being swept away by antibiotics and better housing conditions, they were beginning to be replaced by diseases of affluence – road traffic accidents, air pollution and, of course, over-eating.
Alan Briddock was born in 1934, in Sheffield, just as the old era was coming to an end. When he was four, his father died of pneumonia – a not uncommon occurrence at the time. But even though he was not able to share the dream of a perfect nuclear family in a perfect semi-detached house, he did benefit from several of the huge changes brought about by the advent of the Welfare State. The Briddock family, which had lived in a two-up, two-down in the centre of town, were among the first to move when slum clearances brought the new council estates which would dominate housing policy during the post-war years. Their move came earlier than most – just on the eve of the war: ‘The local authority were rehousing, to redevelop the area. Where we had lived, it was two up and two down, no bathroom, toilet in the yard . . . my sister remembers it vividly. She said the new house was like a palace. The toilet was at the back, in the porch, but we had a bathroom upstairs. There was a garden. It was cleaner, there was more open space, the amenities were so much better than the old place. Nowadays it’s talked about as a sink estate, but it’s the people who make it what it is.’8
There was a new sense of possibility, too. Not only had families like the Briddocks moved out from the centre of Sheffield; the promise of a free secondary education – an academic education, for those who could pass the eleven plus – offered the possibility of social mobility, too. The 1944 Education Act had brought with it a free secondary education system with three types of schools – secondary moderns, technical schools and grammar schools. The last, of course, was for those who could pass the eleven plus exam. Alan Briddock worked steadily for it, and consequently found himself travelling across Sheffield every day – a walk, then a tram, then a bus – to Firth Park Grammar School, which had been recommended by the local vicar: ‘None of my friends from primary school went there, but down the road there were a couple of guys. My mother couldn’t afford the red coat and I just used to wear a red cap. I wasn’t on my own in that respect.’
Alan’s sister Lilian had passed, too, but their mother couldn’t afford to send both of them. In general, Alan enjoyed it and did not feel he was different because he had not come from a well-off family. But one incident remained with him through his life: ‘We were considered so poor we had vouchers for free boots. But once the head-teacher . . . took me into his office and offered me a pair of shoes. They were women’s cuban heeled shoes. He had no idea of the embarrassment a young person would feel at that! I could see they were women’s shoes, and this silly old guy . . . I was twelve or thirteen, and I was mortified. He thought he was giving me charity. If they’d been a decent pair of shoes I daresay I would have taken them – I think I just said they wouldn’t fit me, and backed out of the room.’
Despite this, he was glad to have gone to Firth Park: ‘It having been a fee-paying grammar school, the teachers were out of the top bracket, they really were. They were all graduates from university. There was a terrific English teacher – Doc Wood. I enjoyed it. Grammar school gave me the education that was required. Had I gone to a secondary modern school, I would have gone into the steel works as a labourer.’
Others, like Michael Foreman, who grew up near Lowestoft and who later became a well-known illustrator and author of children’s books – was rather glad to have escaped the grammar school system. ‘I used to cheat,’ he explained. ‘In the final year I sat next to Brenda Smith, who I thought was the bees’ knees, and she was good at maths and I wasn’t. And in examination conditions you get found out.’9
He remembers just one thing about the exam itself: ‘The whole affair was a blur at the time, but I remember the spelling part. One by one we had to go to the front of the class and stand beside Oscar Outlaw, the teacher, as he sat at his desk. On the desk were several sheets of paper with columns of words. As he pointed to a word we had to read it. The only word I remember is the word I had never seen or heard before. “Antiku,” I said. It was “antique”. There couldn’t have been many households in our village where antiques were part of tea-time conversation, but if there were, those were the children the grammar school wanted.’10
Michael Foreman’s feeling that the grammar school system was not set up for village boys like himself was not universal. Elsewhere, middle-class parents were feeling the pain. For every working-class child who passed in through the gates of the grammar school, a middle-class child – whose parents would previously have paid fees – was left outside. A father calling himself ‘Pater’ wrote an anguished letter to The Times in July 1945 complaining that there were no fewer than 1,000 hopefuls applying to Manchester Grammar School: ‘I am prepared for some sacrifice to give my boy a good education, and he in turn is anxious to learn, yet at the age of eleven his whole future is in jeopardy owing to rules and regulations of the education authority . . . The country is going to lose in the long run because the children and the parents who have the interest and the desire to send their children to a grammar school are not going to be able to, whereas children and parents who have not that interest are able to send their children on the re
sult of an examination.’
There might even have been something in this view. Michael Foreman, having discerned that the eleven plus tended to favour boys who knew what antiques were, had no desire at all to pass it. Everyone he knew was going to the secondary modern: ‘There were a few posh kids in the area but they went away to school, and they went away for holidays. They hardly existed for us at all. We were the “common boys” they shouldn’t play with. We could spit further, pee higher.’11
Michael found himself in a borderline group, whose members had to undergo an interview. When his teacher told him the result he was overjoyed: ‘I ran from the room, bounded down the stairs two at a time, which wasn’t allowed, and burst out through the doors into the sunshine. I leapt and jumped and whooped down the road after my friends. I hadn’t passed! I was going to the secondary modern school with my mates. What a relief!’
Childhood in a Cold War
‘One day two strange boys arrived at school. One was very tall, the other had a very round face and startling white hair. We Pakefield boys had the usual very baggy British knee-length trousers which made the backs of your legs sore in cold, wet weather, and long grey socks which always slipped down around our ankles. These strange boys had tight trousers, hardly lower than their bums, and bright white ankle socks . . . But there was something about the two strange boys which excited me. They had come from somewhere else.’12
No sooner had one war ended, it seemed, than others were breaking out. At Michael Foreman’s school in Lowestoft, the arrival of two strangers from Estonia made flesh of the news in the papers – the borders of the Soviet Union were closing, and families like those of Michael’s friends, Rigo and Henno, were leaving before it was too late. There was trouble elsewhere, too: Michael’s older brother, Ivan, was called up to go to Egypt during the Arab–Israeli war of 1948. The local station again became a place of sad goodbyes.13
There were major compensations, though. While Ivan was gone, his girlfriend Brenda would take the young Michael to the pictures every Thursday evening. If children had had their way, the Cold War would have been won before it had even started – by the Americans: ‘We loved all things American. All our movie heroes – cowboys, Indians, even Robin Hood and his merry men – had American accents . . . I didn’t like Saturday morning pictures with all the singing or the films made specially for kids. My mates and I went on Saturday afternoons to the real films. Hopalong Cassidy, who didn’t sing, and best of all Gabby Hayes, like a Wild West Father Christmas. Roy Rogers and Gene Autry always burst into song and we booed them.’
This was the golden age of Americana, and the cinema was its king. Picture-houses had moved on from the days when they were unruly fleapits where the children of the poor could keep warm on a Saturday. Saturday-morning cinema was still a major event, but adults and children from all walks of life were now embracing the world of film. In 1946, eight out of ten people in Britain would attend at some point during the year, and the weekly audience would reach an all-time peak of around 1.6 million.14 And a very large part of that audience consisted of children. A Mass Observation study in 194615 found that while one third of adults went to the cinema at least once a week, the proportion of children who did so was twice as high. Despite the growing respectability of the cinema, it was still predominantly a working-class leisure activity, with the children of factory and clerical workers spending more time there than their middle-class contemporaries.
And there were comics, too. Again, Michael Foreman was among the lucky ones – his mother sold them in her shop, so he was able to read them first: Film Fun, the Dandy, the Wizard, the Hotspur and the Rover. ‘Later a new comic, Eagle, appeared but I didn’t like it. It was not daft enough.’16 Most of these comics were perfectly innocent. But now, with the cultural dominance of America growing, there was a sense of unease about some of the material to which children were gaining access. A history teacher named Peter Mauger reported, for example, that he had been horrified by the sight of a young boy on a train far more engrossed in his comic than he would ever have been in a school book.17
Teachers were in the vanguard of this minor moral panic of the early 1950s. One early campaigner was George Pumphrey, a junior school headmaster from Horsham in Sussex, who would rail against this new habit children seemed to have formed of sneaking comics into school. His articles on the subject began appearing in Teachers World magazine, and the Schoolmistress, in 1948. Soon the unions were involved, too. At the 1952 conference of the National Union of Teachers, no fewer than fourteen motions on the subject were tabled for debate. The church had its concerns, as well. The Eagle, the comic so despised by Michael Foreman for not being ‘daft’ enough, was actually the brainchild of the Reverend Marcus Morris, who wrote: ‘Morals of little girls in plaits and boys with marbles bulging in their pockets are being corrupted by a torrent of indecent coloured magazines that are flooding the bookstalls and newsagents.’18
Morris was talking about a strain of comic now being imported from the US, which would become universally known as the ‘horror comic’. An infamous example, cited in a campaigning book on the subject entitled The Seduction of the Innocent, was the Grim Fairy Tales, which were parodies of the well-known stories which included Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel. The most controversial of these comics, Foul Play, featured a baseball player who was murdered and dismembered for some offence; his body parts were then used as bats and balls in a game.
A successful campaign was waged, leading to a ban under the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act, 1955. And the interests that combined to make this happen were not just religious and educational. The Communists had an angle, too – Peter Mauger, the history teacher who was so shocked to see a boy enjoying a comic on a train, was in fact a member of the British Communist Party, which had seen an opportunity to exploit anti-American feeling. It, too, flung itself into a campaign against the comics and in so doing brought the Cold War into the world of children’s literature. The left had not been slow to spot the growing dominance of the United States in the lives of the British populace, and it hoped to put a stop to it. In these years, the ideological struggle between left and right was not just about the big geopolitical blocks of the world, the US and USSR all-powerful with the smaller and less powerful countries lining up behind the protective barricades of either one or the other. The Cold War was fought, too, in the world of culture. And nowhere more so than in the world of children’s culture. But there was never any contest, so far as the children were concerned. On the one side was Soviet-style austerity, the work ethic, a world in black and white. On the other was the unstoppable machine of American capitalism, in full colour, with music and lights.
To the young Michael Foreman, everything that came from America seemed strangely alluring – even the consumer goods that had little to do with childhood seemed bigger and shinier than the things post-war Britain could make: ‘Magazines would have ads for the latest fridge, when nobody had fridges . . . you’d see the ideal housewife, who would look very American. Also there were the B movies on Saturday mornings – there was one called Blondie, which was also a strip in the newspapers at the time. A typical American family, living in a typical American suburban street, with the front lawn and the picket fence. And the newspaper boy would cycle down the road and throw the newspaper into the front yard, because it never rained in these films, it was always perfectly sunny. Then you’d get to see what their kitchens were like.’19
Yet even the most pro-American youths knew it was OK to be anti-American on some fronts: ‘I had a ban the bomb symbol in my window – but people thought it was a Mercedes sign,’ Foreman recalled. ‘And I painted “Ban the bomb” on the police station in the middle of Lowestoft in the night. My Auntie Lou, who lived in the north end of the town, came to the shop, saying: “Some fool painted ‘Ban the Bomb’ on the police station.” I went on the second Aldermaston march.’
This was a generation whose parents and grandparents had
all seen conflict, and during those post-war years there was never a time when peace looked certain. The 1940s brought the Arab-Israeli war; the 1950s the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the 1960s Vietnam. The young men of this age, in particular, could never be quite sure their national service would not lead them somewhere dangerous. Richard Cannon, growing up in Kent with a father who had fought in the desert under Montgomery, was always conscious of this: ‘I’m the first of three generations that have had a peaceful life, really. I did grow up with a sense of that, but during the fifties you’d got Suez, the Korean War; and then that slowly led up to Cuba. Oh yes, there was a sense of fear. When I used to go to the cinema there’d be a Pathé newsreel and you’d see the build-up. I can recall that my father was expecting us to go back to war.’20
Hooligans and rebels
Was it this sense that the next generation might soon be plunged into another conflict that led the young to seek new ways of enjoying themselves, just as the flappers and bright young things of the 1920s had done? Was it perhaps that wages were rising, that part-time work for the school child was plentiful and that parents were allowing their offspring to hold on to an increasing proportion of their earnings? Was it perhaps just that the adult world was starting to take notice of children and young people in a way it had not really done before, and was disliking much of what it saw? Whatever the cause, there was little doubt about the effect: outrage.
Looking back, Michael Foreman couldn’t remember whether teenage gangs were a new thing in 1950s Lowestoft, or whether they had always been there in one form or another. But he felt the war had changed things for this generation: ‘Maybe because their dads had been away, and so there was this breeding ground for independence . . . they were used to being amongst their own kind, and out of sight really.’21
‘The dangerous people were the Teddy Boys,’ he remembered. ‘In Lowestoft, they were one tribe and the Fisher Boys were another. They were similar to the Teddy Boys, but they had wide trousers rather than pinstripes. The Fisher Boys would be off fishing for two or three weeks, and they’d come back with money and then they’d burn it. They’d spend a lot on clothes. Then there’d be fights in the jazz clubs.’
