by Abrams, Fran
‘I don’t remember anyone saying directly, “You’re off the estate,” but it became clear later I wasn’t welcome in certain houses. People would meet me in neutral venues. I remember a friend saying, “It’s best not to meet at my house. Meet in town, or the football field.” It didn’t hurt – I didn’t register it as a social snub – but at secondary school it became clear there was a form of apartheid, really, about those from the estate: “He’ll be trouble. Don’t bring him round the house.”’
David, a bright boy whose bright father had been forced to leave school at fifteen during the depression of the 1930s and who worked in a chemical plant, was aware from an early age that there were things he could not have: ‘I remember a shop called Hughes’ in Rhyl where they had a model railway in the window. I was conscious of never being able to afford one, but there was a democracy about being able to stand outside and imagine, just like anyone else could . . . when I got married I bought a model engine every week,’ he said.6
Britain was still a country of haves and have-nots, then. The National Child Development Study,7 which was following the lives of 17,000 children born in a single week in 1958, uncovered what at the time may have seemed a striking fact – that some children were at a disadvantage from birth. ‘Their disadvantages increase if they belong to large families, physically if they are male and across a broad spectrum if they are badly housed,’ The Times reported.8 ‘Nearly half the children from unskilled families suffered from social, health and educational handicaps compared with those from professional families. They were on average 1.3 inches shorter. Working-class children were more likely to have a squint, a speech defect, poor physical coordination and to wet their beds after they were five years old. They were twice as likely to have hearing trouble. They were less likely to be immunized or vaccinated or to have been taken to clinics or health centres. Fewer working-class children had visited a dentist at all in their first seven years although more had bad teeth. In fact, the study shows that the children most in need of the health and welfare services were the least likely to have used them.’
There was a growing body of evidence that all the efforts of the post-war government had done little to make Britain a more equal society. One of the biggest disappointments – and one which was to remain controversial for generations to come – was the grammar school system. Here, too, things had not turned out quite as predicted. Working-class children like Alan Briddock from Sheffield, who won a place at grammar school, were still finding themselves at a disadvantage once they got there.
Alan, having come joint top of his year in the School Certificate exam, which all pupils then took at sixteen, progressed into the sixth form at Firth Park Grammar School. Yet there was little sense that the school was driving him on to greater things; no guiding angel, whispering in his ear of the better life to which he had been handed the key. A few months later, worried that he was not bringing money into the house and uncertain whether he could cope with further maths, he left.
‘I don’t think I had ideas about where it was taking me,’ he said. ‘I think I just ploughed on until I couldn’t go any further. Nobody said anything. We didn’t get any advice, nobody talked about when you left. They didn’t say, “You’re ripe for this or that.” So I left school and on the Monday I went into the chemi lab at Arthur Balfour steelworks. I was sixteen.’9
For most working-class children, grammar school was never a realistic possibility at all. A study published in 1962 by a Liverpool University academic revealed that in one of that city’s poorer areas only a quarter of the pupils even sat the eleven plus exam.10 Just one in ten was destined to make it to grammar school. The Observer, reviewing the book, noted that teachers in deprived areas – most of whom were caring and well meaning – fed their pupils a standard academic curriculum, ‘leavened by country dancing and songs about cuckoos’. In Liverpool 7, in sight of the docks and with racial intolerance and prostitution rife, the school experiences of these pupils seemed ‘derisory’, the paper’s education correspondent felt.
One of the problems with the system was that while children like those from Liverpool 7 lived in homes where there was little interest in education, few books and nowhere to do homework, even if they should wish to do so; children in middle-class areas were being drilled for the eleven plus years in advance. In 1962, the president of the Manchester Teachers’ Association felt inspired to warn parents against putting their children through private lessons in order to pass the test. ‘Parents . . . may cause much misery in later years. They may be doing their child a grave disservice.’ Children, said Miss Webster, Headmistress of the Styal Open Air School, would find the right niche only if they were left to progress naturally, without pressure.
Miss Webster’s speech bore hints that schools were beginning to enter a new, more liberal age. Junior schools were relinquishing the formal approach to learning, taking on board the work of post-Freudian child psychologists. The Plowden Report into primary education, published in 1967 but commissioned by the government four years earlier, would be a sort of homage to the work of Jean Piaget. Piaget had developed four ‘sequential stages’ of intellectual development through which he believed all children must pass – albeit at a wide range of ages. These stages also embraced physical, motor and emotional development, and Piaget believed that it was pointless trying to teach a child something until he had reached the right stage along the continuum. Bridget Plowden’s report went so far as to state, for example, that ‘a child cannot read without having learned to discriminate shapes’.11
Despite this apparently biologically deterministic base, the report heralded in a new age of liberalism in education. It embraced, too, Piaget’s theory that a child should be the master of his or her own destiny, in educational terms – sparking a wave of new, radical practices in primary schools. Learning became more flexible; play was placed at the heart of children’s lessons, pupils were encouraged to use their environments and to learn by discovery: ‘Teachers should not assume that only what is measurable is valuable.’12 Typically, children in one of these newly liberalized primary schools might spend the morning learning the ‘three Rs’ and the afternoon doing ‘discovery’ – nature, music, literature, arts and crafts. An Observer journalist who visited one such school noted that the headmistress, a Miss Horsburgh, gave her pupils fine china cups to wash and then smiled benevolently when they broke them. ‘The workbooks had no marks, only comments such as “good work”, or “well tried”.’ Miss Horsburgh explained: ‘I don’t give my children marks, or grade them. They are individuals and I expect them to do the best they can.’
And secondary education was about to change, too. By the time the Plowden report was published, the Labour government, re-elected in 1964 under Harold Wilson after thirteen years out of office, had announced the abolition of the grammar school system. The period in which all children would – in theory at least – have access to a free, selective secondary education was destined to be a very short one.
In 1970, David Hughes, growing up in Rhyl, became one of his area’s comprehensive school guinea pigs. He had greeted the news that his future would not rest on a single exam with a sense of relief. His new school would be an amalgamation of a secondary modern and a grammar. ‘It was like the Hittites had arrived,’ he remembered later.13 ‘At first it was a mixing pot – they developed a junior high school, which gave the grammar school time to prepare for the hordes, get the discipline right.’
At that stage, though, the ideas of educational psychologists such as Piaget had had little impact on the secondary school system in North Wales. The local authority’s solution seemed to have been to divide pupils into ability groups and to carry on pretty much as before: ‘Some of the nuances were lost on me. I was aware there were two streams in parallel – if you were in Glyndwr you did modern maths, while we had to do the standard stuff. The tutor groups were mixed ability, but the classes were segregated from day one. I think if you were top set, you were top se
t for everything. For the lower sets, the balance of the curriculum was more practical – using the assets from the secondary modern curriculum. If you weren’t very good at maths, you did more woodwork and cookery.’
The teachers could be brutal, too: ‘Once, a woodwork teacher got me to put both my hands in a vice. Then he walked away. It was a double period, eighty minutes, and I spent the whole time with my hands in this vice. It became psychological. I wasn’t going to let on I was irritated. I thought afterwards it was a fair cop. He was an interesting guy. He showed us how to make a helicopter. I wouldn’t have wanted to have crossed him.’
Schools may have been changing slowly, but changing they certainly were. Writing in the Guardian, Jill Tweedie lamented the loss of the orderly atmosphere of her old grammar school, and recalled her secret joy when one of her teachers, a Miss Needham – ‘profile sharp as stalactites, great brown bun bowing the scraggy neck, feet two yards long in pointed button shoes’ – had unfairly lost her temper with her for walking on the wrong side of the corridor: ‘How super, how smashing, Miss Needham was being unfair . . . we judged all our teachers at some deep level by the standards of our parents’ world. As girls we knew our looks and charm were all-important and so we applied the same criteria to our teachers. Did they have a man? Could they get a man? . . . Only the one or two rare birds, the cold clever women with sharp tongues and a deep cynicism, escaped our ultra-conventional net.’14 Nowadays, Tweedie felt, the deep lines that had divided teachers from pupils were breaking down. Instead, teachers were being made to feel they must befriend their pupils. ‘We ask for less exercise of authority and more equality, less parrot feeding and more understanding and involvement . . . Mothers who lam out quite happily at their own children condemn bitterly teachers who adopt, even once, the same methods . . . We demand liberal attitudes, but we give teachers very little extra help for the extra time liberal attitudes demand. The whole school structure today, combined with an appalling shortage of money, virtually demands an authoritarian approach to work at all.’ Tweedie felt teachers were being driven to despair because they could no longer discipline their pupils.
The changes in the education system mirrored a broader change in social attitudes in which children were slowly being swept up. Eleanor Wintour, an American journalist living and bringing up a family in London, exhorted British parents in the Observer15 to take a less buttoned-up approach to child-rearing than they had done in the past. The Brits were still making parenthood look far too much like hard work, she said: ‘Americans, on the whole, aim at happy (some of them unfortunately prefer the term “well-adjusted”) rather than good children . . . In upper-class English circles it is common knowledge that American children are spoiled, whining, bad-mannered little creatures . . . Americans have a vague idea that English children are quiet and well-behaved, but when they happen to run into any . . . they find them quiet, unchildlike and repressed.’
Far from embracing this call to liberal arms, legions of British parents – most of them women – wrote in to the paper to complain about Mrs Wintour’s attitudes.16 ‘Why must Mrs Wintour postulate such an extraordinary either-or? Cannot a good child be a happy one?’ asked Claire Rayner, writing from North Wembley. ‘We take it for granted that our children cannot live in an adult environment without learning a code of behaviour that makes them acceptable to adults.’ Diane Hemingway from Birmingham asked: ‘Happy or slaphappy upbringing? A look at American juvenile delinquency figures might give a pointer. We may have followed Americans in many fields, but let us stand firm on this and continue to bring up our children to be well-mannered, likeable people.’ Jonathan Lewis, who had lived in the US for a year, wrote: ‘The experience of myself and many European friends has been that American children are indeed spoiled, whining, bad-mannered little creatures – in a word, brats.’ Not everyone agreed, though. Anne Spencer, from Chelmsford, wrote in to assure readers that there were indeed British families who were adopting the more child-friendly American style of parenting: ‘There is perhaps an encouraging revolution going on.’
There was indeed. As early as 1961, there had been a feeling that children should be given their leisure time – as they had been given, in part, their educational time – and allowed to decide for themselves how to spend it. Peter and Iona Opie, who had been studying children’s playground games, made a plea for more autonomy for children:17 ‘The qualities of self-organization, self-discipline and perseverance shown by most children of seven to eleven when they think they are on their own has to be seen to be believed. It is possible we too readily think of a child as a “good citizen” only when he is one of a school football team or a scout patrol . . . the more children have their free time organized for them . . . the more they lose the traditional art of self-entertainment.’
Increasingly, children were being seen in a wider social context as individuals, as social players in their own right. And as that change of attitude began to trickle into some of childhood’s darker and more hidden corners, there would be radical change for some groups of children. In particular, campaigners for children’s rights were beginning to ask why children who had disabilities, or who could not for some reason live with their parents, did not have a greater say in how they lived, or how they were educated. As the world began to wake up to the notion that all children had their own individual worth, it equally began to wake up to the fact that some children were not part of society at all. In 1971, Maureen Oswin published a book about the thousands of children who were hidden from view, spending their lives in institutions because they had disabilities or ‘social problems’.18 Writing in the Guardian, she described their lives:19 ‘I met children in locked hospital wards who never went on holidays, had not been outside the hospital for months, and had never been in a shop, children who had never seen food being prepared, or properly laid tables, because they always received their meals from a hospital trolley. Children whose lives were organized to suit the working hours of hospital staff, so they were got up too early in the morning, spent long, empty hours of boredom . . . and were got ready for bed at three in the afternoon. I remember a dozen little limbless five year-olds, dressed in night clothes, bemused by boredom, sitting in a straight row, staring up at racing and football results.’
Oswin’s reference to ‘limbless children’ underlined another dark news story of the time. In the late 1950s, increasing numbers of predominantly middle-class women had begun taking a new wonder-drug to counteract the effects of morning sickness. It was called thalidomide. Within a few years, more than 10,000 children across the developed world had been born with deformed limbs and other problems as a result of the drug – and many of them would spend their childhoods in institutions such as the ones Oswin described.
As the 1970s wore on, there was a gradual change of attitude towards these hidden children. But as David Hughes, growing up in north Wales, was to find, old taboos were slow to break down. David’s older brother Graham was autistic: ‘I was told it was oxygen starvation at birth that caused it. That was easier to take than that there might have been something genetic,’ he said.20 Their mother had flatly rejected suggestions that Graham should go into an institution, and throughout his childhood had fought for him to have as normal a life as possible. ‘He was very thin and wiry, and he had a very limited range of subjects he’d converse on. I’m eight years younger – but I would set sums and he would struggle to do them, even though I was dumbing down: two and one, three and two. And yet on subjects he was interested in, he had an almost encyclopaedic knowledge. He was interested in electricity – from about the age of six he could wire a plug and knew exactly how it all worked. It was a bit like Rain Man21 – I’d say I’d met someone born on the 13th April 1980, he’d say it was a Sunday, we went to so-and-so and it was raining, so we had to put on our coats. He was incredible, really.’
But when David was in his teens, Graham became increasingly troubled. ‘The first time was about 1972. He was pretty affable, but he seemed
more and more agitated. We were in our living room and he was sitting there and rocking backwards and forwards. He started saying ‘No, no!’ – as if someone was talking in his head. He’d made a poker with a ram’s head handle, and he picked it up and threatened me with it.’
For David, the stigma of having a brother who was mentally ill was hard to bear. As he studied for his A-levels, Graham became increasingly unwell and eventually was admitted to a hospital – an asylum – known locally as ‘Denby Mental’. ‘In Rhyl, if you did something daft, they’d say: “You’re Denby Mental, you are.” It was a place of horror. You didn’t want anything to do with it. When I visited, it was incredibly distressing. It felt like the treatment was to sit in high-backed chairs and sit it out, with lots of male nurses coming every so often, and saying: “All right? Want a cup of tea, Gray?” Or, “Here’s your medication – take this.” My worry was he’d go in there and never come out. Some of the people there had clearly been institutionalized since they were children. It was like a vision of nineteenth-century Bedlam. I was really, really scared of that. Of him not coming out. Of knowing there were places like that. There was a whole group in society that basically nobody knew about.’
David found himself unable to talk to anyone at all about what had happened – even his girlfriend: ‘Part of it was that mental illness was almost contagious, that we as a family might be tarred with the stigma. The closest I came was saying, “He’s ill, he’s in hospital.” In no circumstances would I have told them which hospital. There was a lad who grew up on the estate with me – he lived with his Auntie because his Mum was in Denby Psychiatric Hospital. You could tell he had a really fractured life. He was talented but socially dislocated. “Your Mum’s a nutter, so you’re a partial nutter.” The language associated with it was diabolical, really. There must have been thousands of people who went through that and said nothing. It’s the first time I’ve talked about it.’
