A 1960s Childhood E-Book

Paul Feeney

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Do you remember Beatlemania? Radio Caroline? Mods and Rockers? The very first miniskirts? Then the chances are you were born in the or around 1960. To the young people of today, the 1960s seems like another age. But for those who grew up in this decade, school life, 'mod' fashions and sixties pop music are still fresh in their minds. From James Bond to Sindy dolls and playing hopscotch in the street, life was very different to how it is now. After the tough and frugal years of the fifties, the sixties was a boom period, a time of changed attitudes and improved lifestyles. With chapters on home and school life, games and hobbies, music and fashion, alongside a selection of charming illustrations, this delightful compendium of memories will appeal to all who grew up in this lively era. Take a nostalgic look at what it was like to grow up during the sixties and recapture all aspects of life back then.

Leseprobe

A 1960s Childhood

From Thunderbirdsto Beatlemania

PAUL FEENEY

To mum and dad

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

One A Decade of Change

Two Home Life

Three Out on the Streets

Four Games, Hobbies and Pastimes

Five Music, Fashion and Cinema

Six Radio

Seven Television

Eight Schooldays and Holidays

Nine Christmas

Ten Memorable 1960s Events

Eleven Whatever Happened To?

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Gwen Lippingwell for allowing me to reproduce the photograph on page 11. All other pictures and illustrations are from the author’s collection. Every reasonable care has been taken to avoid any copyright infringements, but should any valid issue arise then I will look to correct it in subsequent editions.

One

A DECADE OF CHANGE

It’s eight o’clock in the morning on the first day of January 1960, and kids all over the country are dipping freshly cut bread soldiers into the soft yellow yolks of lightly boiled eggs. Just like any other morning, the wireless is already on and Jack de Manio is reading the news on the Today programme. Thousands of grown-ups are running late for work, having foolishly believed his inaccurate time-checks. Everyone knows that he is prone to giving out the wrong time during his radio show, it is all part of his laid-back presentation style. He is easy to listen to and can be quite amusing, not at all stuffy like the other BBC newsreaders; even young children happily tolerate his breakfast programme. It’s hard to believe that Christmas Day was only a week ago. It now seems like a distant memory. Some children have already gone back to school, and the rest have just three more days of freedom to enjoy before the dreaded Monday arrives when they too will have to return to school for the start of a new term.

You have just finished the last of your bread soldiers and you are now scraping your spoon around the inside of the eggshell to retrieve every last piece of egg white. There is a cup of tea that’s been sat on the table in front of you for about fifteen minutes, and it’s now cold. You’ve been daydreaming and it’s taking you absolutely ages to eat your breakfast. Meanwhile, your mum is bustling about the room, trying to clear the table around you, but you are oblivious to her loud tutting, too engrossed in your own thoughts and in no rush to finish.

As amazing as your daydreams may be, your imagination will never stretch to encompass all of the astonishing delights that future years will bring to improve the lifestyle that you so readily accept as normal on this, the first day of 1960. Could it be that one day, ordinary people will have their whole house centrally heated and families will no longer have to huddle into one room to keep warm? Is it possible that soon there will be a toilet and a bath fitted inside every house, and that the old tin baths will only be needed to wash the dog? Is it really feasible that every home will have at least one television set, and that within a few years you will be able to watch all your favourite television programmes in colour? Can you believe that the GPO telephone boxes that are so prevalent on the streets today will some day become almost redundant? Not only will everyone have their own telephone, they will even walk around with them in their pockets! Many of these things are way beyond the imagination of the average grown-up, let alone a young child. You might as well suggest that one day a man will walk on the moon!

A young boy and girl enjoy a ride in their new red metal motorcar, in South London, c. 1962.

At last, you stop scraping around inside that long-suffering eggshell; you put down your spoon and allow your mum to finish clearing away the breakfast things. Resting your back against the hard wooden uprights of your chair, you turn your gaze to the skies beyond the tightly closed sash window next to the table. You have absolutely no idea that you are witnessing the start of what is to become the most exciting decade of the twentieth century, and that, in years to come, you and every other child of the 1960s will have reason to look back on these years with great fondness. Forevermore, the decade will be referred to as the ‘swinging sixties’, and although future generations will experience greater lifestyle improvements than you can ever imagine, they will also fantasise about what it was like to grow up in the 1960s.

You will surely have many unforgettable personal memories of your childhood, but there are also a myriad of things that touched and influenced everyone that grew up in the sixties and evoke common memories. In the early sixties, you will have experienced some of the austere 1950s’ mood that rolled over into the 1960s as part of the seamless transition between decades. After all, the older generation were not likely to forget the hard times that went before, and their long-time practice of living sparingly didn’t just end at the stroke of midnight on 31 December 1959. The stories you were told of the post-war hardships and food rationing suffered by your parents and grandparents are like ancient history to you, even though food rationing only finally ended a few years earlier, in 1954. But even the most uncaring or self-absorbed child couldn’t help but see the lasting reminders of war and deprivation that were still evident in the early sixties, with many bomb ruins and bomb-damaged buildings still to be seen in towns and cities. You would regularly encounter people suffering from old war injuries, not just ex-servicemen and women, but also many innocent civilians that had been caught up in enemy bombing raids on local streets and houses. It wasn’t unusual to see people in their thirties and forties, particularly men, hobbling around with the aid of a crutch or a walking stick, with some having lost limbs or been made blind during the hostilities. Back in 1957, the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, caused an upset when he said, ‘let us be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good’. This remark remained etched in the minds of the fifties generation; in the 1960s it was regularly paraphrased as ‘You’ve never had it so good’, and used by grown-ups to remind children of the hardships that people suffered in previous decades. However, the cold rooms, tin baths and outside toilets had not been entirely consigned to the history books. For some people, the dearth was ongoing and improvements were only gradual.

During the early sixties, more and more high-rise blocks of flats and new housing estates were being built to replace homes that had been demolished during the government’s large-scale slum clearance programme, and the once familiar landscapes in some urban and rural areas were seen to be radically changing. The new homes provided more comfortable and sanitary facilities for people that had previously occupied old run-down and overcrowded terraced houses, but they were considered by many to be characterless and ugly, lacking the community spirit previously enjoyed in the rows of old terraced houses. Some people in tower blocks felt isolated and the kids had to adapt to a whole new way of life. But there were some benefits, such as the luxury of having modern bathrooms and hot running water, thus consigning many old kettle-filled fireside tin baths to the scrapheap.

Britain was in what was called a post-war boom period, when there seemed to be factories in every street in the country that were busy making all sorts of British goods. It was a time when British products and services were in great demand and unemployment was very low. The sixties generation had much more disposable income than their predecessors and they could afford to buy and enjoy many of the things that were previously considered to be extravagant. Up until about 1962, items like television sets and telephones were regarded as luxuries, but they soon became much more affordable to ordinary people, as did labour-saving devices like vacuum cleaners and washing machines, and by the mid-sixties these were all considered to be necessities in the home. There was little sign of ‘absolute poverty’, as there had been in previous decades when it was obvious that some people did not have enough money to clothe themselves or to eat an adequate diet. By the mid-sixties, a great many working-class families had seen their lifestyles improve significantly, and it could have reasonably been said that most people had ‘never had it so good’!

Although cultural changes were noticeable right from the start of the sixties, in retrospect, the first couple of years were monochromatic in comparison to the rest of the decade. We were still cleansing deprivation from our lives and ridding ourselves of all the guilt we felt for having so much more to enjoy than our parents did when they grew up in the forties and fifties. From about 1962 onwards, attitudes began to change very fast, and by the mid-sixties even the old fogies were too caught up in the mood of the sixties to reflect on the frugal times that went before. The good times had finally arrived and everything was so different to anything that had gone before. It was like someone turned on the light or fine-tuned our signal so that all of a sudden there was an explosion of colourful sound and vision.

People of all ages and social backgrounds were now taking an interest in fashion and music, and although young people set the trends, older people also began to follow them. The revolutionary changes in lifestyle were all-embracing, with children from working-class families enjoying a much better standard of living than ever before and sharing in the thrill of being at the birth of exciting new forms of entertainment and fashion. At Christmas 1961, while kids were practising the latest dance craze – the Twist – in the playground, the first signs of ‘mod’ fashions were starting to emerge in London. By Christmas the following year, The Beatles had made their first appearance in the pop music charts with their single Love Me Do, and within a few months the whole music scene had exploded into action with a procession of other Mersey groups and artists hitting the big-time, quickly followed by a contingent of new groups from London, including the Rolling Stones and the Dave Clark Five.

This was the first generation of children to take a real interest in fashionable clothing, which was probably because they were the first generation to be influenced by television, with programmes like Thank Your Lucky Stars, Top of thePops, and, in particular, Ready Steady Go! This was a must-watch Friday evening show for kids who wanted to keep up to date with all the latest music and fashion, and it was co-hosted by the much respected and admired ‘Queen of the Mods’, Cathy McGowan. You were completely uncool if you didn’t watch it, and you had to be able to recount the whole show at school on the following Monday morning. Can you believe that a grainy black and white television programme created so much excitement back then?

Back in the fifties, many schoolgirls balanced their school hats on top of their perfectly backcombed bouffant hairdos, while the Brylcreemed quiffs of fashionable schoolboys often poked out from under the front of their school cap, much to the annoyance of schoolteachers trying to enforce strict school uniform policies. In the revolutionary sixties, kids were more reluctant than ever to conform to rigorous rules on school uniform, and were continually looking for ways to bend them. With girls, the biggest rule breaker was wearing skirts above the knee, and of course there were always some who took it too far! Sadly, for those who went to strict schools, there was often a rule that the hem of your skirt had to touch the floor when you knelt down. If it didn’t, then it was too short and had to be lengthened. With boys, as in the fifties, it was their haircuts that seemed to most offend authority. But attitudes were slowly changing and by 1963 it was noticeable that older people were becoming more relaxed about modern male hairstyles; even male teachers were beginning to grow their hair. The regular shearing sessions and pudding-basin haircuts started to disappear and young boys were allowed to grow their hair longer. It was now acceptable for a boy’s hair to be touching his collar at the back; at last, short back and sides were beginning to disappear, and there was no going back.

For children, some sixties revolutionary changes were somewhat less welcome. It was nice to have parents that were ‘cool’, but it could also be embarrassing. All of a sudden, everywhere you looked there were mums and grannies wearing knee-high boots and brightly coloured miniskirts. Dads and granddads consigned their hats and flat caps to the dustbin and allowed their hair to grow and be styled as never before. It was embarrassing for kids to see their mums and dads turning up at the school gates dressed in trendy ‘mod’ clothing, and it was even worse in the late sixties when flower power and hippy fashions were all the rage. These fashion-conscious mums and dads were probably only in their twenties or thirties, but to their children they were ancient! Shouldn’t your mum be snuggled up by the fire in her slippers, knitting a beige chunky cardigan for dad? And shouldn’t dad be whittling some wood in the garden shed and smoking a pipe? It’s not their job to be trendy, that’s what youngsters do. But no. This was ‘the sixties’, and the sixties generation was unlike any that went before. The old rulebooks were completely discarded; everyone wanted to be part of the sixties’ cultural revolution. The barriers between young and old were torn down and oldies sought to reclaim their youth.

Meanwhile, children’s lifestyles were changing in other, more fundamental ways, particularly in urban areas. In the early 1960s, as in previous generations, children’s main source of enjoyment was playing outside in the local streets and on the greens and wastelands or bomb ruins with their mates. This is what their parents had done before them and they encouraged their children to do the same. It was playing outside in the fresh air that rid them of their excess energy and kept them healthy. That is where they played all the best games and had such great adventures, and importantly, it is where they became streetwise. This was all part of childhood and growing up; taking a few tumbles, getting dirty, grazing knees, having a few bumps and bruises and falling out of trees. You were more afraid to go home with a torn shirt or blouse than you were with a grazed knee or a bloody nose. Cuts and grazes would be disinfected with iodine, and the telltale sign of purple iodine was often to be seen on children’s knees and elbows. The sting from the antiseptic as it was applied was often worse than the pain of the accident itself. In later years, TCP antiseptic became more popular, but it really stank. The smell followed you around for hours. There was very little mollycoddling of kids in the 1960s; once a cut or graze was cleaned up and disinfected, the wounded little soldier would be sent back out into the street to fight another battle. But, over the coming years, all of this was to change. In the early 1960s, traffic levels were still fairly low and kids were able to play happily in local streets without the hindrance of parked cars and passing traffic. The main roads only suffered from traffic problems during the morning and evening rush hours and so there was little reason for vehicles to use side streets as ‘rat runs’. However, car ownership doubled between 1960 and 1970, and by about 1963 traffic problems had started to spread into the residential side streets. As the years went by and car ownership continued to increase, the streets became busier and far less safe. Those previously traffic-free streets were quickly filled with parked vehicles and it soon became impossible for children to play their chase and ball games in the road, as they had done for generations before. Exhaust fumes from passing traffic now polluted the fresh air that was once peacefully enjoyed by babies in prams on the pavements outside their houses. Very soon, just crossing a small side road became a game of dodgem cars. The quiet local back streets, where the peace had only previously been broken by the sound of excited children playing, were now changing forever. Most of the bomb ruins and derelict war-damaged houses had by now also been demolished, cleared and rebuilt, or at least more securely fenced in. The local streets and ruins that had been handed down to the sixties kids as their main playgrounds and ‘home turf’ were gradually being lost to them. Now, with the exception of a few games like hopscotch, skipping and two-balls, which could all be played on the pavements, children had to go to a park, playground or swing gardens to play safely in groups. It sounds like a better alternative to playing in the streets, but there were some disadvantages, not least the fact that they now had to share territory with other groups of kids from different neighbourhoods, and territorial fights between neighbourhood gangs became more common. It was also further to run home for treatment when you fell out of a tree.

A range of typical 1960s cars can be seen benefiting from the trouble-free parking that was still possible in the mid-1960s. Note the once familiar high street store names of Woolworths and International Stores in East Street, Bridport, Dorset, c. 1964.

No matter what decade you were born into, everyone can recall the long hot summer days of his or her childhood, and there were certainly some of these in the sixties. You may have been fortunate in having the open fields of the countryside or the sand dunes at the seaside as your natural playgrounds, but most kids found themselves hemmed in by houses and flats in the back streets of large cities. Wherever you grew up, to you, that was your natural environment, and you thought that yours was a normal childhood. Whatever the setting, you will have played the same games and had the same thrills and spills, whether you played British Bulldog in a rural field or on an inner-city bomb ruin, you had just as much fun and nursed just as many injuries.

By the early sixties, television had overtaken radio as the most popular form of home entertainment and children were spending much more time indoors, particularly in the early evening when most of the children’s television programmes were on air. But even with all this extra time spent in front of the television, and in spite of all the new sixties toys and games available to them, their appetite for outdoor adventures had not diminished. Many of the outdoor games had been handed down to them through the generations. Ball games, skipping, run-outs and tag were as popular as ever, as were mischievous games like knock-down-ginger, but when it came to make-believe they now had even more television and cinema heroes to imitate as they played their swashbuckling games.

Do you remember all those 1960s television advertisements that will never again see the light of day? ‘Go to work on an egg’, Esso Blue Paraffin, ‘Happiness is a Hamlet’, ‘Radio Rentals’, ‘Tick-a-Tick Timex’, Opal Fruits (‘made to make your mouth water’), Green Shield Stamps, Brentford Nylons, ‘A Double Diamond works wonders’ and ‘all because the lady loves Milk Tray’. Many of these advertisements were better than the programmes that they interrupted. You can’t help but remember popular and well-known 1960s television programmes like Blue Peter, DoctorWho, Thunderbirds, Star Trek and Top of the Pops, but if you dig deep into your memory bank you will recall lots more television programmes that you tried your hardest not to miss when you were growing up. Children’s programmes like Crackerjack, Batman, Stingray and Top Cat. Action programmes like Bonanza, 77 Sunset Strip, Danger Man and TheSaint. Dramas including The Forsyte Saga, Maigret and TheFugitive. And, of course, some of the earliest British soaps like Emergency Ward 10, Crossroads and Coronation Street, which were all essential viewing. Then there were the groundbreaking comedy shows that you sometimes had to beg to stay up and watch; shows like The Likely Lads, Till Death Us DoPart, The Liver Birds, That Was The WeekThat Was (aka TW3) and the inimitable Morecambe and WiseShow. There were also many children’s television personalities that you feel you grew up with, people like Valerie Singleton, Christopher Trace, John Noakes, Peter Purves, Leslie Crowther, Peter Glaze, Johnny Morris, Tony Hart, Muriel Young and Wally Whyton; not forgetting the puppet characters Pussy Cat Willum, Ollie Beak, Fred Barker and Basil Brush. And, who could ever overlook the distinctive ‘Black Country’ accent of Janice Nicholls on ThankYour Lucky Stars, with her familiar catchphrase: ‘Oi’ll give it foive.’ These are just a few of the television memories that surely still linger in the back of your mind.

By 1964, the sixties music and fashion revolution was well under way, but the BBC was playing far too little pop music, and the only way that kids in Britain could be sure to hear the latest pop record releases was by tuning into Radio Luxembourg on 208 metres medium wave. But Luxembourg only transmitted at night-time and reception was very poor in many areas of the country. Radio Luxembourg’s sound regularly faded in and out, and you had to endlessly fiddle with the tuning knob on your transistor radio to pick up the signal. However, all of this changed on Easter Sunday 1964 when the then little-known actor and disc jockey Simon Dee made the first broadcast from the offshore ‘pirate’ radio station, Radio Caroline. The music revolution had well and truly begun when, for the first time ever, you could listen to pop music all day long. Soon, several other ‘pirate’ radio stations were broadcasting from various coastal and offshore locations around Britain, allowing access to endless amounts of pop music for kids all across the country. No longer would you be forced to endure BBC radio programmes like The Billy Cotton Band Show or Desert Island Discs: Radio would never be the same again.

Your schooldays may now be just a distant memory, but there are things you encounter in your everyday life that can suddenly take you back there. It could be a smell that reminds you of your old school bag, a textbook or the inside of your old pencil case. Perhaps there is an unpleasant odour that reminds you of the lingering pong around a pile of sand that the school caretaker once left in the corridor outside your old classroom; maybe the smell of boiled cabbage reminds you of all those lovely school dinners you once tried so hard to avoid. In autumn, when you see horse chestnut tree seed pods lying split open on the ground and revealing shiny new brown conkers, you might, for a moment, be tempted to collect them all up as you did back in your schooldays when you used to play conkers with your mates in the playground. Just planting sweet peas around canes in the garden will be enough to stir the memory of anyone who was ever at the wrong end of a caning when they were at school in the 1960s, long before corporal punishment was abolished.

You will have enjoyed playing with so many new toys, more than any generation before. Advancements in plastic manufacturing techniques during the fifties meant that the 1960s plastic toys could be made in all shapes and sizes, in bright colours and with smoothly rounded edges. The toy industry began to mass-produce metal and plastic toys in response to the huge demand that was being created from new television programmes like Doctor Who and Daleks and Thunderbirds, and by cinema heroes like James Bond. Also, children were starting to be greatly influenced by the promotion of new toys through television advertising, such as Sindy Doll and Action Man. All sorts of games and toys could now be bought at affordable prices. Boys’ old cowboy cap guns were soon replaced with new toy space guns, and girls’ trusty but staid old toy dolls were upgraded to new highly fashionable talking dolls with interchangeable fashion accessories. Children’s toy boxes and cupboards were quickly filled with all sorts of new toys, from pogo sticks to space buggies.

Children and adults enjoy a ride on the small road train and in chair lifts at Butlins Holiday Camp in Filey, Yorkshire, c. 1965.

The way we took our holidays and the destinations began to change. The traditional seaside, bucket and spade, stick of rock and kiss-me-quick hat sort of holidays were still very popular, but access to many of the smaller seaside and rural holiday destinations was becoming increasingly difficult by train, and the old romantic notion of a holiday train journey was turning into a thing of the past. From 1950–62, over 3,000 miles of British railway lines had been closed for various reasons, and in 1962, the then chairman of British Railways, Dr Richard Beeching, instigated what was called the ‘Beeching axe’, which resulted in the shutting down of a further 4,000 miles of railway and the closure of 3,000 stations in the period from 1963–72. More modern diesel and electric trains were replacing the old steam locomotives, but the reduced train services coupled with increasing car ownership meant that more and more people were now travelling to the seaside by car rather than train. However, that same age-old question could still be heard, only now it was coming from the back seat of a car: ‘Are we nearly there?’ But the familiar British seaside resorts were no longer the only holiday destinations. There was an extra added bonus of growing up in the 1960s, in that you were the first generation of children to experience the luxury of foreign travel. The new charter airlines enabled ordinary people to take ‘cheap package holidays’ to exotic foreign destinations – to go abroad, just like film stars and royalty.

On a sourer note, it was a time when even children were aware that the world was in danger from dreadful wars, particularly in the early sixties with all the talk of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the possibility of nuclear war, with constant references to the Cold War and the ‘four-minute warning’. We heard much talk about Britain’s secret observatories at Jodrell Bank and Fylingdales, but we didn’t really understand what it was all about. We were apparently all under threat from this strange, mysterious place called the Soviet Union. Do you remember trying to work out what you would do in those final four minutes if the warning ever came? There was great rivalry in the school playground to see who could come up with the most outrageous thing possible, but, unfortunately, most of the ideas required more than four minutes, and of course you couldn’t plan for where you would be when the four-minute warning was given. There were also the regular news reports and general talk about the ongoing Vietnam War, and although Britain was not directly involved in the war, we saw all the chilling newspaper headlines and television coverage of the anti-war and ‘ban the bomb’ marches. The shock of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 didn’t escape children either, with everyone talking about it at home, on the streets and at school. It was a scary time, with schoolboys fearful that, at best, the government would bring back conscription and they would be called up to join the armed forces and fight in wars when they left school. As in every decade, there were some serious world issues to concentrate everyone’s minds, and for students to protest about. But, having said that, there were plenty of good things going on to distract us from the more sombre issues; an overwhelming abundance of exciting new experiences to celebrate and enjoy. There were so many ‘firsts’ in the sixties: the first time you saw an E-Type Jaguar, the first time you watched colour television and the first time England won the football World Cup. You will never forget the first episode of Doctor Who, the first Beatles record you ever heard or the first magazine picture you saw of Twiggy in a miniskirt.

It wasn’t just the kids that were influenced by the ever-increasing slick American-style television advertising on ITV. Our cupboards and medicine cabinets were beginning to bulge with products we had been convinced to buy through television advertisements. Accordingly, mums kept more medicinal treatments for minor ailments in their bathroom cabinets at home. Strong-smelling antiseptics, like Germoline and TCP, were popular for treating little warriors’ cuts and grazes; after all, if it had a strong smell, then it must be good. Such pungent antiseptic smells were associated with the mix of ether and other aromas that permeated hospital corridors, and this provided extra comfort that these products were good for treating wounded children. Kids acquired lots of cuts and bruises, but were generally very fit because of all those exhausting and dangerous outdoor games they played; nevertheless, they still couldn’t escape the childhood illnesses. Chicken Pox, Measles, Whooping Cough, German Measles, Mumps and Tonsillitis: they got them all!