by Abrams, Fran
Gradually, these institutions would be swept away. In the mid-1970s a special committee on children’s health, headed by the chair of the British Paediatric Association, Donald Court, would help to move the children’s mental health system into the modern age and to prepare the way for their closure. Slowly, quietly, the pendulum was once again swinging away from the pre-enlightenment view of the child. Now, once again, children were born good rather than evil, and once again the adult world was beginning to be prepared to give children the benefit of the doubt.
Yet despite this new, warmer atmosphere, adult–child relations were very far from being perfectly harmonious. Across the Western world, children were beginning to act in new, sometimes alarming, ways. And the adult world often found itself scratching its collective head and wondering what on earth was going on. Strange, even hilarious, occurrences broke out. In Rochdale, in 1968, crockery was smashed and food thrown at the Newbold Infants’ School after children who had been bullied out of their dinner tickets bit back and refused to watch their tormentors eating their food. The result was, quite literally, a riot. The Guardian reported22 that 160 children had rampaged through the school, bean-bags had been thrown at dinner ladies and the school left strewn with twisted and broken cutlery. The following day, the chairman of the local education committee, Alderman Cyril Smith, watched sternly as the children filed, chastened and silent, into the hall for meat pie, potatoes and beetroot, declaring that all they needed was ‘a bloody good hiding’.
Elsewhere, people were asking why children and young adults were indulging in similar outbreaks of baffling behaviour. So, why? Perhaps decades of changing thought about children, of increasing awareness of their need for individuality, was filtering through to their consciousness. Or perhaps the freedom offered by better education, better health and better housing had begun to embolden them. Certainly, greater prosperity was leading to children having more space, more time to themselves. Better housing meant more children having their own bedrooms; central heating meant they could spend more time in them rather than huddling round the fire downstairs. Now, teenagers used their own rooms to do homework, spend time with their friends, listen to music.23 Freely available parttime work meant they had money to spend, and better adult wages meant their parents didn’t necessarily need that money to go into the family purse. Children with money to spend could create and shape markets: for clothes, for records – and sometimes for leisure pursuits that were considered rather less than desirable.
In 1961, The Times reported that a young man named Jonathan Phillips from Surrey had been remanded in custody after being caught in possession of fifty ‘cannabis cigarettes’. ‘He had taken hemp cigarettes to parties instead of a bottle of drink, but sometimes took a bottle as well. The parties were mostly attended by teenagers and often one did not know who was giving the party.’ Jonathan Phillips, it emerged, was considered very bright but had dropped out of school and had become ‘a source of much distress to his parents’. His father, the paper reported, feared he was becoming part of the ‘Beatnik fraternity’. The judge told Phillips his was one of the most serious cases of the kind that had come before him: ‘Not only from your own point of view but from that of the young men and women who might have come under the influence of this drug which you were growing and manufacturing. The evidence here displays, in our view, that there are probably no depths of degradation to which the human personality in young people cannot sink when they come under the influence of something like this.’
There was bound to be a backlash against the more liberal atmosphere that was beginning to cling to the life of the young. And the new freedoms teenagers had gained were beginning to cause discomfort, not to say consternation, in some quarters. There would be plenty more for social conservatives to worry about as the decade wore on. A few years later, Peter Popham, at school in north London, would stop going to Sunday school and begin secretly smoking the occasional joint: ‘Before long I was taking LSD with friends. Just sort of buying into the whole “underground”, as we called it. But I was slightly too young to be part of what was going on, being conscious that I was on the fringes, peering in through the window.’ At sixteen, he and a friend went up to town to the hippy-oriented Middle Earth Club, but felt their short hair marked them out as distinctly uncool.
Everywhere the less-than-liberal part of the adult world looked during the 1960s, it seemed to find young people doing things of which it could not approve. In February 1960, Lord Saltoun told the House with some consternation that sexual activity was now rife among teenagers. ‘Fifty years ago when I was living in Hackney I do not remember that these fashions prevailed among children, although people were living far more on top of one another than today,’ he said. The cause of the trouble was clear: sex education was being taught in schools: ‘I do not think this kind of instruction is suitable for classes . . . I am convinced that a lot of this misbehaviour among juveniles is due to this cause.’
Something was certainly going on. The teenage pregnancy rate was rising to an alarming level, doubling between 1955 and 1970 to fifty births for every 1,000 girls aged between fifteen and nineteen.24 Yet most girls, if asked, would still express quite conventional views about sex. A Guardian journalist interviewing a group of schoolgirls in 197025 remarked that ‘you can hear their mothers’ voices behind them’: ‘Susan wouldn’t get pregnant. That wouldn’t be fair to her mum . . . It’s funny, she says. When she was younger she couldn’t think how anyone could. Now if she’s out with a boy she really likes. You know. The others don’t say much. Lynne, in a small voice, says that those pictures in the biology room, of babies being born, put you off. They’re all silent. “Still, it’s fulfilling, having a baby, isn’t it?” says Susan. They cheer you up. Oh, yes. They’d all like to get married and have babies one day. They don’t know what they’re going to do till then.’
But despite this conventional response, there were many places where the younger generation, having begun to form its own identities outside the classroom, was beginning to test the boundaries within schools as well. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a whole series of episodes of radicalism, quickly squashed but widely discussed, were to break out. In April 1971, the Obscene Publications Squad moved in on the offices of a small publisher named Stage 1 Ltd, in Theobald’s Road in London. Their target was The Little Red School Book, a slim volume which had sold 500,000 copies in mainland Europe and which was now being published in the United Kingdom with a print run of 20,000. The book, first published in Denmark, was written in a plain, informative style. It contained useful tips on how to complain about a teacher and how to organize a demonstration or a strike. It appeared to condone the use of illegal drugs, and advocated the sale of contraceptives in schools. The case would immediately send both liberals and conservatives running for the barricades: on the one side, a flamboyant Tory MP named Sir Gerald Nabarro and the anti-indecency campaigner Mary Whitehouse; on the other, the National Council for Civil Liberties and the eminent barrister John Mortimer. As the trial of the publisher, a twenty-seven-year-old named Richard Handyside, progressed, the papers were full of the story. Mrs Whitehouse railed that the book was ‘a revolutionary primer’: ‘Children were constantly exhorted to collect evidence against teachers of alleged injustices or anything which was likely to enhance revolution.’ Mrs Whitehouse declared herself ‘very relieved’ when Mr Handyside was fined £50, but the book continued to circulate.26 Perhaps a partial clue to these episodes of apparent radicalism, though, was the reaction of more liberal adults. ‘The crux of the matter is that the book encourages children to question the “system”, and to organize themselves to fight it when it begins to crush and mould them,’ a Mrs Stella Robinson from Surrey wrote to the Guardian.27 ‘I have read the Little Red School Book, and thought it absolutely first rate.’ The truth was that liberal parents – and there were a growing number of them – rather liked having their children exposed to radical ideas. In fact, where the book did land among t
he young, it largely failed to inflame. In one conservative Manchester school, pupils were given the book to discuss in a lesson, the Guardian reported.28 ‘There was a great deal of laughter and a general agreement that it was naïve rubbish which would appeal only to middle-class revolutionaries.’
So, what was going on? Were books such as The Little Red School Book, or the sex education film Growing Up, which caused shock waves in May 1971 with its graphic portrayals of masturbation and orgasm, inspired by some new radicalism among children, some desire to shock? Or were they really aimed at adults who quite liked the idea that their children might be radicalized by such material? In December 1971, there was another row – this time over a magazine called Children’s Rights. The magazine had published a communiqué from the Children’s Angry Brigade, which exhorted the young to ‘unscrew locks, smash tannoys, paint blackboards red, grind all the chalk to dust’. One of those who responded to a Guardian article on this development was A. S. Neill, founder of the progressive Summerhill school in Suffolk, who introduced himself as an editorial adviser to the new publication but confessed he had not read it ‘owing to the small print’. Neill was eighty-eight years old at the time. ‘I am all for children’s rights: the right to reject the barbarous cane, the right to have some say in their studies, the right to wear what they like. But sabotage is not the answer,’ he wrote.29
At around the same time, the National Council for Civil Liberties, founded in 1934 to promote human rights, decided to hold a conference to champion the rights of the child. Parents should run their homes in a way sympathetic to their children’s lifestyles, the organization suggested, and should even allow their children to have a degree of sexual freedom. The very notion drew an angry response from some quarters. One correspondent to The Times felt the whole idea was ridiculous:30 ‘What are they trying to do? Destroy parental authority? . . . We can already see the results of lack of parental control in the troublesome youths and students of today . . . They should get their heads out of the clouds and start exercising some genuine responsibility to society as a whole.’
There certainly was radicalism among children, even though much of it was encouraged by adults. Peter Popham, attending a large, cosmopolitan school in north London, tended to avoid the small clique of Trotskyists who had a habit of cornering their fellow-pupils in corridors ‘to preach rebellion’. These people were not regarded as cool by their peers. But Peter did begin reading alternative magazines – International Times and Oz. Oz had started out in 1963 as an Australian satirical magazine, but in England, where it was published from 1967, it quickly became essential reading for anyone who wanted to be associated with the hippy scene. Its brightly coloured psychedelic covers quickly became collectors’ items. By 1970, though, the magazine was facing criticism that it was losing touch with the young. In response, its editors decided to invite ‘school kids’ to edit an issue. Peter Popham, who had been trying to inject ‘a slightly hippy dippy thing’ into his school magazine, took up the challenge. ‘I thought this would be fantastic, but having got myself there, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,’ he said. ‘I ended up writing a couple of record reviews. I wasn’t angry about anything. It was no good pretending I was. It was just a wonderful thing in its own right, to be part of the group that produced Oz.’31 The issue, which was hammered out in a basement flat in Notting Hill and which contained a pornographic Rupert Bear cartoon, soon caught the eye of the Obscene Publications Squad. The law moved in – this was not the first such raid on the Oz office – and Richard Neville, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson were all charged with corrupting public morals. The case became the longest obscenity trial in history, with John Mortimer, barrister and later author of Rumpole of the Bailey, defending, the comedian Marty Feldman giving evidence along with the jazz musician George Melly, and John Lennon marching in protest. The three were cleared but were convicted of lesser charges – later overturned on appeal.32 By then, Peter Popham had left school and gone travelling in the Middle East, so he was not in London for the trial. ‘I was in touch with them by post, and sent a long article on spec about hippy dystopia in Eilat, in southern Israel. I was just delighted and relieved when they decided not to call me as a witness.’
The Oz trial was sparked not by children’s radicalism, but by the decisions of the adults who ran the magazine. And, inevitably, the ideological battle over childhood in 1970s Britain would be as polarized as the adult battles that were concurrently raging over class, race and gender. But as the decade drew to a close, one particular idea was gaining strength: children were, like immigrants, like women, like the workers, an oppressed minority. Their consciousness had not yet been raised; but once it was, they could be freed to fly in their own idiosyncratic ways to a brighter, better future. Writing in 1979, an academic called Martin Hoyles would argue that the popular image of the child had changed little since Victorian times: ‘It is typified at Christmas in the image of the babe in the manger who grows into Charles Wesley’s “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” . . . Particularly at Christmas, children are celebrated sentimentally as playthings.’ 33 Yet the very fact that academics were beginning to examine the way in which children were viewed by the adult world was an indication that the wind of change was blowing. By now, a wealth of Marxist and feminist literature had built up around the notion that childhood was but an oppressive social construct, a tool of the capitalist or the patriarchal system. Hoyles’ book included a chapter by the feminist writer Shulamith Firestone, entitled ‘Down with Childhood’: ‘Women and children are always mentioned in the same breath . . . The special tie women have with children is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature of this bond is no more than shared oppression. And that moreover this oppression is intertwined and mutually reinforcing in such complex ways that we will be unable to speak of the liberation of women without also discussing the liberation of children, and vice versa. We must include the oppression of children in any program for feminist revolution.’ Firestone saw childhood as a kind of apartheid, invented by adults to bind children to the family unit, and claimed the use of animal terminology to describe children – mice, rabbits, kittens – was part of this machinery of oppression: ‘The best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF . . . Gone are the days of Huckleberry Finn: Today the malingerer or dropout has a full-time job just in warding off the swarm of specialists studying him, the proliferating government programs, the social workers on his tail.’
The current radical thinking, then, saw childhood not just as something invented by adults but as a tool they were using to keep their offspring in check. The idea that childhood was the happiest phase of life, for example, was a fantasy shared by adults who wanted to believe at least one part of their own lives had been free from drudgery, anxiety and ill-health. This view contrasted with the notion that sentimentality about children was actually becoming a sort of substitute for economic value, which had dwindled as the child’s role had changed from that of wage-earner to that of scholar.
Meanwhile, the French philosopher Michel Foucault was drawing comparisons between schools, prisons and asylums:34 ‘Madness is childhood.’ Hoyles added that the comparison was ‘brought home forcefully’ by the knowledge that the city of Omaha was dosing children with amphetamine-type substances in order to control their behaviour, and that hyperactive children in Britain were being similarly drugged.
At around the same time, an American schools reformer named John Holt argued that outdated notions had led to the young being made subservient and dependent upon adults:35 ‘The words “expect” and “expectation” are on the whole badly misunderstood and misused by most people who write about children. Most people use them as synonyms for “demand” or “insist” or “compel”. When they say we should have higher expectations of children, they mean that we should demand that they do certain things and threaten to punish them if they do not.’ The main function of compulsory universal education, he argued, was ‘to control people’s minds, what they
thought and knew’.
Such views would always be contentious, but the notion that a child should have ‘rights’ had by now entered the mainstream. In 1973, Hillary Rodham, then a student at Yale Law School and soon to become Hillary Rodham Clinton, wrote that ‘children’s rights is a slogan in search of a definition’.36 Soon, it would find one, as it solidified into the notion that the child should have distinct legal rights, separate from those of its parents. That would not happen overnight, but one major step along the way was the declaration by the United Nations that 1979 would be the International Year of the Child. In practical terms, it would have little effect. But it would get people talking about children, and childhood, in forums which had had little to say about them up till this point. ‘Dare I say that I think some adults are tempted to spend a great deal of time telling children or other people what is good for them, rather than listening to children and learning from them of their needs?’ asked the Bishop of Salisbury in a debate on the subject in the House of Lords that year.37 ‘If we are seriously listening to our children, then our sense of awe is heightened, and their ability to go to the heart of matters is constantly recognized.’
Suddenly, children were being credited with the possession of a special and unique perspective on the world; even a sort of elixir which the adult would wish to share: ‘I think it was a Lebanese poet who said: “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself,”’ mused the Bishop, quoting Kahlil Gibran.
