by Abrams, Fran
Michael would avoid becoming a Teddy Boy or a Fisher Boy because he would go to London, to art college, where to be working-class was a kind of youth identity in itself. Even before he left school, he and his friends would go on day trips to the capital: ‘We’d go round the galleries, go to a jazz club, and seek out army surplus stores to buy jeans and work clothes,’ he said. ‘We did like to buy fisherman’s outfits – they used to have really good sweaters and shirts. We liked to identify with work clothes, rather than clothes your dad would have. Working-class culture and your own identity, a bit stroppy and anti-establishment. Of course, posh people like John Osborne were doing that too – the kitchen sink dramas.’
The Teddy Boys have been credited with being the first distinct youth culture, which of course they were not. The myriad territorial gangs which had dotted the Victorian and Edwardian cities gave the lie to that theory. But perhaps they were the first national working-class youth culture – or at least, the first with such a strictly defined style and set of norms. The flapper, for example, or even the at-leisure public schoolboy, would have had a sort of uniform and language of his or her own – but they were not working-class. Certainly, the Teddy Boys were able to spend money on style to an extent no youth group had previously been able to match. Yet the Teddy Boys also carried shades of the Victorian gangs, particularly in terms of the violence with which they were associated. When the US film Blackboard Jungle, featuring Bill Haley and the Comets, was shown, there were riots. The Teddy Boys were present in large numbers, too, during the Notting Hill race riots of 1958.
It was not long before the newspapers began reflecting the opinions of the older generation on the subject of youth culture. The Times’ arts critic, reviewing the film Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray in 1956, took the opportunity to launch into a diatribe on the failings of the young: ‘Modern fashion has promoted the routine of blaming the parents for the sins of the children to a fine art. The last person to be held responsible for delinquent behaviour is, of course, the delinquent himself. It is not necessary to be a bigoted reactionary, out of all sympathy with the emotional problems and difficulties of youth, to hold that Mr Ray’s specimens deserve not commiseration but a visit to the headmaster’s study – only the school they attend does not seem to have such an animal and discipline is not one of the subjects on the curriculum.’
Psychologists like John Bowlby, whose work suggested that persistent delinquents might be reacting to adverse events in their childhood, were commonly held to be responsible for new, liberal attitudes. And liberal attitudes were very commonly held to be responsible for a rise in juvenile delinquency. Leo Page, a barrister and JP who wrote widely on penal reform, wrote to The Times in 1950 imagining the speech a judge might give when passing sentence on a boy charged with persistently breaking windows: ‘Your recent offences were due to the fact that during the first five years of your mother’s life she was on two occasions, for some trivial fault, brutally struck upon her buttocks by your grandmother. The sentence of the court upon you, William Sikes, is that your mother be sent to prison for five years. Your grandmother will go to preventive detention for the remainder of her life; you will be bound over to be of good behaviour for one month.’ The letter drew a hurt response from Bowlby himself, suggesting Mr Page should read his evidence – which, he said, was being replicated by other experimental psychologists all over the world – before resorting to satire: ‘Their truth or falsity will not be settled by lampoon, polemic or appeal to authority. Nothing but well planned and painstaking research can decide the issue.’ Yet Mr Page was one of many who would continue to believe psychologists and social workers were encouraging the young to misbehave: the issue even cropped up in West Side Story, which first ran on Broadway in 1957:
Officer Krupke, you’re really a square;
This boy don’t need a judge, he needs an analyst’s care!
It’s just his neurosis that oughta be curbed.
He’s psychologic’ly disturbed!
There was general agreement that the young of the day lacked energy and direction. And it was a view that seemed to be backed by the evidence: in 1947, the sociologist Mark Abrams had asked sixteen-year-olds how they spent their spare time, and almost a quarter had replied that they spent it ‘doing nothing’. Almost a third had been to a cinema or a dance hall the previous evening. And another piece of research at around the same time had found a striking lack of creative or constructive leisure pursuits among teenage boys – they just did not seem interested, for the most part, in contributing to community activities. The majority, according to this study from the Social Medical Research Unit, did not respect the institution of marriage, and many were emotionally disturbed. On the bright side, their physical health was good – which was more than might have been said for their fathers’ generation at the same age.22
The perception that the young were going to the dogs was nigh-on universal. In January 1950, a film called The Blue Lamp was released – the precursor to the television series Dixon of Dock Green. Its theme was juvenile delinquency. In a voice-over, the film’s central character, Jack Warner, reported that children were living in homes ‘broken and demoralized by war’, and went on: ‘These restless and ill-adjusted youngsters have produced a type of delinquent which is partly responsible for the post-war increase in crime. Some are content with pilfering and petty theft. Others, with more bravado, graduate to serious offences. Youths with brain enough to plan and organize criminal adventures and yet who lack the code, experience and self-discipline of the professional thief – which sets them as a class apart, all the more dangerous because of their immaturity.’ The film told the story of a young man named Tom Riley, played by Dirk Bogarde, and an accomplice. The pair were seen to gun down and kill PC Dixon during a robbery.
There was consternation in other quarters, too. In early 1950, the BBC felt the need to send a questionnaire to more than seventy child guidance clinics, to canvass their opinions on the possible deleterious effects of the radio crime series Dick Barton. Several of the replies expressed concern. The Portman Clinic in London warned that some children were having nightmares because of the programme’s violent content. And its potential moral effect, even on children who were not frightened by it, was questionable: ‘Many of them look on Barton as a fool who gets away with too much.’ Subsequently, the programme gained a tailpiece in which a voiceover discussed the moral issues raised.23
But despite the widespread perception that delinquency was growing, the numbers of indictable offences actually fell during the first half of the 1950s. And in November 1955 The Times reported that numbers of delinquents had fallen so fast that no fewer than twenty ‘Approved Schools’ were being closed down. Between 1951 and 1954, the number of boys aged between eight and sixteen years who were convicted of an indictable offence had fallen from 47,000 to 31,000, the paper reported. The number of girl delinquents had also fallen, from 3,600 to 3,000. The causes of the decline were not known, the article said, but ‘improvements in housing and other social services, and full employment together with the growing influence of the child care services . . . have all contributed’.
So the 1950s were in many ways an age of plenty for children. They were better fed, better housed, healthier, better educated, than they had ever been before. Yet this was also an age in which the young were vilified, perhaps even more so than they had been in earlier eras. And the old, pre-enlightenment idea that children were born evil, needing strict discipline in order to drive out the devil from them, was having a resurgence.
A dream turning sour
Perhaps William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which was published in 1954, was not a novel about children at all. Perhaps it was really a novel about mankind as a whole, and the struggle between civilization and savagery. Certainly it was a commentary on the brutality of a world where one war had just ended and another – possibly nuclear – could begin at any time. Yet to the extent that it was about children, the p
icture it painted was not an optimistic one. The novel depicted a little group of boys stranded on an island, struggling to create a civilization for themselves and failing dismally. Lacking strong leadership, the novel suggested, children would fall quickly back into their corrupt and violent natural state. This bad spell was broken at the end of the novel by the arrival of a naval officer who behaved just as the ‘civilized’ adult world of the day would have expected: he remarked that British youngsters should have put up a ‘better show’. And the boy Jack – who had come to personify evil and savagery as the novel reached a terrifying conclusion – was suddenly reduced to a small, unkempt young child, needing to be punished for bad behaviour. In some ways, Lord of the Flies was a novel about the importance of sustaining the post-war suburban dream. If the shiny carapace of the perfectly regulated family ever broke open, it suggested, the true – ugly – face of childhood would be revealed. The adult world, it suggested, should be vigilant at all times.
This generation of babies had a great deal to be grateful for – a childhood without war, the prospect of full employment as they grew up, a veritable army of health professionals on hand to check their teeth, eyes and general wellbeing. Rationing was at an end; swathes of new housing were being built and the austerity of the post-war years was largely in the past. For the child, there were many delights in this era – sweets freely available, more money for treats such as comics and trips to the cinema. Yet by the time the 1950s were out, the glossy veneer on that post-war dream was beginning to crack.
7 Children of the Social Revolution
While the magazines continued to print pictures of the perfect kitchen, the perfect home, the perfect family, their readers were becoming increasingly aware that life just was not like that. Boys like Richard Cannon, whose parents’ marriage was marred by his father’s violent temper and his drinking, knew the uncomfortable truth. And as the 1960s began, one uncomfortable truth could no longer be ignored: marriage was not necessarily all it was cracked up to be. Both men and women, emboldened by growing economic security, began grabbing the opportunity to escape unhappy domestic lives. Imperceptibly at first, the divorce rate began to rise. The perfect nuclear family would never be quite so perfect again.
Academics say the divorce rate is bound up with economics. When the relative cost of separation – both financial and social – falls, more couples separate.1 If work is plentiful, the divorce rate is likely to rise because people can afford to live separate lives. And as divorce becomes more common, the stigma reduces and the social cost falls too. So the divorce rate continues to rise. Close up, of course, it rarely looks so simple. For Peter Popham, growing up in a middle-class family in West London, his parents’ divorce was simply ‘a terrible blow’.
Both Peter’s parents had exciting wars: his father piloting a Hurricane and his mother serving as a catering officer in the Women’s Royal Air Force, which posted her to Egypt. Her marriage, to a man who had been married twice before, had been regarded by her family as a bad idea. And Peter’s father had a tendency to disappear for long periods – once to work as a cook on a small boat sailing to the West Indies – yet like most children, Peter had assumed his parents’ marriage was strong.
‘The way children do, you get used to the fact that your parents quarrel a lot, or sometimes there are bad scenes or for some reason Dad’s not sleeping in the bedroom any more. I think home’s so important to children that they always discount the idea that it’s going to go to the crunch. I certainly did,’ he said.2 ‘I remember thinking when I was about fifteen, before my parents split up, how common it was becoming, looking round my friends and thinking: “Wow,” how many parents had split. I was aware this was something new and rather strange, and in a sense sort of menacing in a way. When they actually did split up, it was awful. I think probably they’d decided in the classic way of the time to stay together for the sake of the children.’
After the millennium, women would be more likely than men to initiate divorce. But during the 1960s, the assumption among observers of the rising divorce rate was that the phenomenon was actually being driven by men. In 1971, the Conservative Political Centre published a pamphlet on the subject, regretting the terrible toll that divorce was taking on abandoned women:3 ‘The deserted wife and the unmarried mother may find themselves leading a life of total isolation, unable to leave the children, caught up in a situation of poverty and despair,’ it said.
Indeed, the ‘deserting father’ became something of a hate-figure. Many disappeared without trace, according to the Conservative Political Centre, leaving their wives and children distraught: ‘A health visitor in a middle-class suburb reported three attempted suicides in one week, by wives with children, deserted by their husbands.’ But, in 1969, one such father did dare to put his head above the parapet and confess what he had done – in an article in the Guardian, headlined: ‘I Left My Wife and Children’.
‘I am a deserting father, the arch-villain of liberal humanists and social workers,’ he wrote. ‘Three years ago I left my wife and children and went to live with another woman. I last saw my children a year ago. Have I now, finally, to accept that we must become extinct for one another?’ With perhaps painful honesty, this father confessed that he had stopped weeping for the loss of his children. In any case, they were apparently doing well now the tension of the break-up had ended: ‘To tell the truth, I’m scared of the assault made by children on the emotions.’ The reaction to the article was angry, and mainly from abandoned wives.
‘My husband, unlike the writer, left me “out of the blue” with two toddlers and a third on the way . . . He promised to see them once a week in order to establish some degree of security in their lives. This lasted all of two weeks,’ one of them wrote. Others, including one deserted daughter, pointed out the terrible toll these break-ups were having on children. ‘I cannot understand how he could hold me in his arms one day and say he loved me, then walk out of my life for ever the next. My heart was broken . . . my emotions became more settled only after he had completely left, and I beg the author of the article . . . PLEASE, PLEASE leave the children alone.’4
Others were beginning to notice the emotional effect all this was having on the children, too: ‘Disturbed kids come from bad homes: There appears to be a greater number of educationally sub-normal children in one-parent families,’ the Conservative Political Centre noted. ‘There may be symptoms of lack of concentration, withdrawal, truancy, moving home and therefore change of school, or disruption in school attendance.’
These disturbed children were not just coming from homes where marriages had failed, either. There was a growing worry during the 1960s that the fabric of society could be under threat from the number of children who were now being born outside wedlock. Indeed, politicians and commentators were beginning to detect a trend that would accelerate in the next three decades. In the years just after the war, four out of every 100 babies had been born out of wedlock. By the latter half of the 1960s, this figure would double. By the millennium, four out of ten babies would be born outside of marriage. In the 60s, there was widespread agreement that this was a major social problem. Lord Derwent, speaking in a debate on the welfare of these children in 1967, told his fellow peers that the risks were great: ‘It is now generally agreed that one of the important causes of juvenile delinquency is in fact illegitimacy,’ he said. ‘It is quite understandable. The child grows up feeling that it does not really belong and that it is rather different from other children. The child gets a grudge against society, and where this happens juvenile delinquency may well start.’ The modern parlance was to call such children ‘illegitimate’, he went on, but ‘I prefer the word “bastard”.’
Nor was it just family life that was causing concern. The Welfare State, receptacle for so many of the nation’s hopes and dreams during the fifteen years after the war, was starting to show its flaws, too. In October 1961, the Observer newspaper ran a series of articles entitled ‘Gaps in the Welfare State�
��. They spelled out the extent to which poverty and inequality were still stalking the land, and the extent to which they penetrated every area of national life. And they helped to popularize a new term: the ‘problem family’.
‘Mrs A, the head of a problem family and herself a problem (she “can’t cope”), would have no problem with definitions,’ one article said. ‘She is simply in a mess, and does not know where to turn. She has been deserted, the six children are under eight years old, she lives on National Assistance, far away from relatives who might help and four floors up. Although she is only 30 she has high blood pressure and . . . is grossly overweight.’
The welfare state, the paper reported, was failing to join up the dots. It was dealing with the delinquent teenager, the neglected toddler and the rent arrears as three separate problems. And while local authorities were beginning to see the merit in employing family case workers, such preventive services were ‘patchy to say the least’.
The underlying problem, the newspaper implied, was inequality. It also told the story of Alfred B, an unskilled worker saddled with£1,700 in debt from hire purchase agreements for consumer goods. ‘The man is one of the have-nots, as we used to call them before we assumed that everybody had . . . it is a sad fact that in the Welfare State it is more reprehensible not to have than it was in the days of Victorian charity.’
Of course, there were plenty of children with no reason to believe ‘everybody had’. David Hughes, born in the late 1950s in Rhyl, north Wales, was aware from an early age that living on a council estate carried a stigma. ‘I didn’t realize it until someone unkindly pointed it out to me, but . . . to those who lived in the posher areas of town, the drives and crescents and boulevards, we were considered “the savages from the reservation”,’ he wrote in his autobiography The Reso, named after the popular local name for the estate where he grew up.5
