The Baby Boomer Generation (7 page)

We spent as much time as we could outside in the fresh air and memories of the long hot summers we loved so much are as indelibly printed in our minds as the cold, smog-filled winters we hated. It was a long time ago and some may think it's a trick of the imagination, but we did seem to have lots of warm summer days, when the morning lasted all day and we played outside until late into the evening. We had few toys but we managed to get a lot of enjoyment from what we did have, and we learned to share everything. If there was only one pair of roller skates or one bike then we would wait to take our turn or we would do without. We were experts at improvising and we would make our own playthings out of a few unwanted makeshift materials, often rescuing things from the rubbish. Everything had a use; cardboard, string, bits of wood and parts from a broken old pram were all put to work as valuable components for our home-made toys. From bows and arrows and toy guns to go-carts and sledges, we made them all. We would chalk stumps on a wall for a game of cricket and spend hours playing board games like Monopoly on each other's doorsteps. While boys played football in the empty streets using jumpers for goalposts, the girls would climb and swing from ropes tied to the tops of lampposts. All the girls delighted in playing dressing-up games using mum's make-up, frock and high heels, but neither boys nor girls had any real interest in fashion and we remained blissfully unaware of each passing trend. Girls were happy if they had a pretty ribbon in their hair, while boys would delight in having shoes without holes in them. We wore what our mothers dressed us in and for boys that often meant wearing the same clothes all the time, in and out of school. Girls generally fared better, usually having at least one other dress they could wear to play out in while their school uniform was neatly tucked away in the wardrobe. It was normal practice for young boys to wear short trousers until they started secondary school at the age of 11, but some would remain in short trousers up to the age of 12 or 13. Sometimes the move up to long trousers was determined by how quickly you grew out of your last pair of short ones; people were prudent with their money and were only inclined to discard clothes when they were worn out and could not be mended any more. Parents also had very different ideas about the way children should be brought up, with many seeking to prolong the childhood of their little darlings for as long as possible. It was much easier in those days to protect a child's innocence because they were not being seduced by adult themes at every twist and turn in their lives. Sex was rarely discussed in the home and there was no sex education whatsoever at school. Celebrity idols of the day always dressed and behaved modestly in public and there was no risk of children ever hearing bad language on the radio or television. Children were not exposed to any sexual images in magazines or on street hoardings as they are today, and there were no agony aunts writing about sexually explicit matters in any of the publications we read. Most of us learned the facts of life by exchanging snippets of knowledge in the school playground and reading rude postcards on day trips to the seaside. The absence of any proper sex education didn't lead to an uncontrollable spread of venereal diseases among the young and we didn't see any pregnant 13-year-old schoolgirls in the 1950s classrooms. Any influences the 1950s media had over children were usually harmless, apart from the tobacco adverts that portrayed smoking as being sexy and relaxing. The fact that we had little or no opportunity to travel outside of our own communities also helped to limit the amount we knew of how other people lived their lives; this meant that we were much less worldly wise than children are today. We were, however, given a great deal more freedom to roam the local streets and in doing so we learned how to assess situations and make decisions for ourselves, independent of our parents. Although we enjoyed a more lengthy childhood than you might expect today, being allowed out on our own without any supervision helped to make us streetwise from a very young age. Most of us walked to school unaccompanied each day and many of us were even allowed to travel alone on the buses and trains, reading maps and planning journeys for ourselves. Grandma's half-a-crown (2
s
and sixpence) birthday money would often be spent on a child's Red Rover Ticket, which allowed unlimited travel anywhere you wanted to go on any of London's red buses. We may have been immature, scrawny young things but we were not completely naïve.

The austere times we grew up in taught us to be pennywise and enterprising. The little pocket money we were given was always inadequate and many of us used our wits to earn extra. The few child-labour laws that existed at the time were not properly enforced and so we were able to do various trivial and cheap-labour jobs even though we were underage, from helping the milkman on his early morning round to shunting boxes around in the markets at weekends. Some of us did the traditional early morning newspaper rounds while others used their initiative to create entrepreneurial money-making jobs like selling coal door-to-door from an old pram. In those days, nobody was interested in saving the planet and everything went into the dustbin, but 1950s kids were experts at recycling and we made money by rummaging through dustbins to find stuff we could collect and sell to the local scrap merchant: everything from old newspapers and cardboard to rags and bits of metal. We specialised in collecting empty beer and lemonade bottles and returning them to the off-licence to get back the 3
d
a bottle deposit that people had paid when they first bought them. Nothing we did made us rich but it gave us a few extra pennies to spend and it broadened our education. We may have only earned enough to pay for our ticket to get into Saturday morning pictures, to buy a comic and a few sherbet lemons, but it taught us the value of money and we learnt that nothing in life is free; that is if you don't count the odd Saturday when we used to bunk in the cinema through the exit doors at the back.

We grew up in the midst of a 1950s rebellious youth culture that was enacted mostly through the dress and activities of Teddy Boys, Beatniks and Greasers. Weapons of violence such as flick-knives and knuckle-dusters were openly displayed and sold in high street shops and there was no age restriction on who could buy them. We did not feel at all threatened by their presence and we still felt safe walking the streets, even after dark. The bad behaviour of angry and unruly teenagers, however, was usually bought into line when they were called up to do their compulsory two years of National Service at the age of 18. Prior to this, teenagers would hang out in any public place that had a jukebox installed, from coffee bars to skating rinks. The radio stations only played a limited range of music and playing jukebox records was about the only way young people could get to hear the latest music loudly and with good quality Hi-Fidelity sound (Stereophonic sound from 1959). During the 1950s, jukeboxes started to be manufactured to take the new style 7in 45rpm vinyl singles and each machine could take up to 200 record selections. They, especially the Rock-Ola and Wurlitzer jukeboxes, fascinated everyone; groups of people would stand around them to watch the coloured lights and the automatic record-changing mechanism. Teenagers would push each other out of the way so they could be next to put their money in the coin slot and choose their own favourite records at a cost of sixpence a play or three for 1
s
. If you didn't like the record that was playing then a sharp thump on the side of the machine would dislodge the needle and an automatic arm would lift the record off the turntable and return it to its filing slot at the back of the machine; the next record would then be played. This was the cause of many a fight.

We may have only been in our pre-teen years but we still shared in the thrills and excitement that surrounded the ground-breaking films and record releases. They heralded the arrival of what was to become the biggest ever change in popular music culture: rock and roll music and the acrobatic rock and roll version of ‘lindy hop' dance that came with it. It arrived from America in the mid-1950s, pioneered by artists like Bill Haley and his Comets, and Elvis Presley the ‘King of Rock and Roll'. Around the same time, we began to hear recordings of a new style of British skiffle music, which had started in London's basement jazz clubs through bands like Ken Colyer's Jazzmen and in particular his banjo player at the time, Lonnie Donegan. At last we had some new exciting music we could listen to as an alternative to the crooners, balladeers, jazz and big show bands of old.

The advent of rock and roll and skiffle music coincided with the welcome demise of the cumbersome 12in 78rpm shellac gramophone records and the arrival of the new 7in 45rpm single vinyl discs, and we were told that we would soon be able to buy records that we could play in two-channel stereo sound if we had a suitable stereo player. To us, this stereo sound innovation seemed light years away and it was well beyond our short-term expectations. We remained content to dream that one day we might be able to have one of the most desired and ‘must-have' machines of the 1950s: the British-made Dansette portable mono record player with a built-in speaker. Just a little while later, in 1957/58, those of us lucky enough to have a television set were able to watch some of the new popular music shows that were beginning to be broadcast by the BBC for the very first time, shows like
Six-Five Special
and
Oh Boy!
. These shows featured live performances from new and up-and-coming artists like Cliff Richard, Petula Clarke, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Tommy Steele, Shirley Bassey and the popular balladeer Ronnie Carroll. Most television screens only measured somewhere between 9in and 14in and they all produced a 405-line grainy black-and-white picture that appeared on the screen in tones of silvery grey. We had to sit up close to the television screen to see all of the action, and the sound was awful. It was also useful to sit within touching distance of the television set so that you were close enough to land it with an almighty whack on top of its cabinet to settle its picture whenever it went haywire, which was a regular occurrence because television reception was very poor in the 1950s. But this was our first opportunity to see live rock and roll performances in our own front room and so we thought it was great. Music lovers fondly remember the 1950s as being the heyday of rock and roll music, but even at the height of its popularity the British record-buying public remained loyal to home-grown heart-throb ballad singers like Ronnie Hilton, Michael Holliday, Dickie Valentine, David Whitfield and Jimmy Young. We were still captivated by all sorts of soppy love songs, and British female artists like Alma Cogan, Shirley Bassey and Ruby Murray all managed to compete well against rock and roll artists in the popular music charts; as did lots of American, male and female artists such as Pat Boon, Nat ‘King' Cole, Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Doris Day, the Everly Brothers, Guy Mitchell, Johnnie Ray, Frank Sinatra and the very popular Canadian artist Paul Anka. However, in terms of music phenomena, the 1950s probably belonged to Elvis Presley – even though Frankie Laine had more UK top ten hit singles in the 1950s than Elvis (nineteen against Elvis's eighteen, each having four UK number ones). We kids had scores of our own special favourites too, including lots of novelty tunes, like Max Bygraves' ‘When You Come to the End of a Lollipop', Mandy Miller's ‘Nellie the Elephant', and the two popular Danny Kaye songs, ‘Little White Duck' and ‘The Ugly Duckling'; these were all played regularly on
Uncle Mac's Children's Favourites Show
, which we listened to each Saturday morning on the BBC Radio's Light programme,
Hello children, everywhere!
.

Being just children at the time, we were touched and sometimes bewildered by some of the events that made headline news during the 1950s. The death of King George VI on 6 February 1952 left its mark on us because everyone was so upset and the whole country was in mourning for days afterwards. Immediately following the announcement of the King's death, BBC Radio cancelled all of its usual programmes and played solemn music for the rest of the day. It was a Wednesday and a normal school day for us kids, but we were still caught up in all of the grieving because our teachers were openly saddened by the news and there were long faces everywhere you looked; everyone was in a state of depression.

In May 1953, we were all excited by the news that Edmund Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay had become the first climbers known to have reached the summit of Mount Everest in the Himalayas. Most of us had no idea where Mount Everest was apart from the fact that it was thousands of miles away, somewhere on the other side of the world. Our geography lessons at primary school didn't stretch as far as Nepal and China. A year later, in May 1954, we were all very impressed when we heard that the English athlete, Roger Bannister, had run the first ever sub-four-minute mile. It seemed an impossible achievement to us kids who were struggling to do 100yds in half-a-minute. We all wanted to have a go at doing the four-minute-mile but most of us lost all interest after we had been running for about fifteen-minutes and the end of the mile was still nowhere in sight.

An event that was to prove of great benefit to us children of the 1950s and beyond was Parliament's introduction of a Clean Air Act in 1956. This was important to us because it sought to address the problem of air pollution and to stop the dense fogs that regularly engulfed us in horrible yellowish smog, especially in London and other highly populated industrial areas. These smogs were commonly known as ‘pea-soupers' because they had the consistency of thick pea soup. The smog was caused by cold fog mixing with coal fire emissions and many people died from the effects of breathing the polluted air. London's Great Smog of 1952 left more than 100,000 people ill with respiratory problems and some of these died prematurely as a result. The Clean Air Act legislated for zones where smokeless fuels had to be burnt and it identified power stations that needed to be relocated to rural areas. The winter air quality was much improved in subsequent years.