Songs of Innocence (22 page)

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.’

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:

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 picture 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.