The Baby Boomer Generation Page 6

  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.

  Up until 1956, we had only known a life of peace; we had heard all of the stories of war from the older generation but we had grown up in a wholly peaceful Britain with no fear of terrorism or war. However, there was a short pause in our hopes for long-term peace when news of the Suez Crisis began to dominate the newspaper headlines in October 1956. Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt in an attempt to regain Western control of the Suez Canal after Egypt nationalised the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company, intending to finance a dam project using revenue from the canal. Fortunately, due to the intervention of the first United Nations peacekeeping force, the conflict only lasted a matter of days, which meant that Britain could once again return to its previously calm state.

  In 1957, we read that a European Economic Community (Common Market) had been established between the six European countries of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The idea was for these members to promote peace and economic growth through cooperation and trading agreements. It didn’t affect Britain; we would continue to row our own boat and to conduct our worldwide trading relationships as a sovereign state, managed entirely by our own elected government. In fact, it was unlikely that Britain would ever join the EEC because the British Government would never surrender any of its powers to a European bureaucracy.

  In July 1959, as we sat in our local cinema waiting to see Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, we were shown a film in the Pathé News of an amazing hovercraft skimming across the English Channel; what would they invent next? In November that same year, many of us went to see the Alfred Hitchcock film, North By Northwest, and on that occasion the Pathé News included the launch of the new Morris Mini Minor (the Mini) at October’s Earl’s Court Motor Show. At the same time, Pathé News featured a film of the newly opened first section of the M1 motorway, which ran between Watford and Rugby. Britain’s first ever motorway (the Preston Bypass, later to become part of the M6) had been opened a year earlier in 1958. The new M1 motorway promised no traffic jams and it looked as though that would be the case because you could see from the Pathé Newsreel that the motorway was almost completely empty. After all, there were still less than 5 million cars on Britain’s roads at the time. Surprisingly, there were no speed restrictions on this new motorway and motorists could go as fast as they liked. In those days, the average family car struggled to reach 70mph, so it was only the high-powered motorcars and motorcycles that could take full advantage of this new no-speed-limit superhighway. Some over-ambitious drivers managed to blow up their engines while trying to achieve high speeds that were beyond their cars’ capabilities, and there were no MOT vehicle tests back then, so any old banger could take to the roads.

  The unpretentious l
ifestyle of the 1950s now seems quite primitive, but we lived very active and healthy lives and most of us enjoyed our childhood even though we had very little money and few possessions to shout about. Our unsophisticated upbringing helped to mould a generation of unspoilt children, or as close as you might get to one. In fact, it was probably the last decade in which children were allowed to grow up slowly and truly enjoy the benefits of a carefree childhood. Most managed to retain their childlike innocence right up to the start of their teenage years and often beyond. Those childish, fun-filled years were uncorrupted by television, gadgets and electronic communications. They were innocent, fun years and we were very lucky. We were content with our lives in those austere childhood years, albeit though inexperience and ignorance, but as we reached puberty we became more and more eager for change. We developed ambitions of our own and we craved a better way of life: one that resembled the sophisticated images we regularly saw in films and on television. Those brief glimpses into a celluloid world of heady carefree opulence helped demonstrate how it might be possible for us to leave the sober 1950s mood behind us as we moved into the next decade. This baby-boomer generation would go on to become the 1960s teenage revolutionaries and the cultural innovators who would shake up the world and steer the country through the latter part of the twentieth century and beyond.

  From Gymslips to Miniskirts

  New Year’s Day 1960 arrived without any special fuss. In Scotland it was a Bank Holiday, as it had been since 1871, but it was a just a normal working Friday for everyone else. We celebrated the ending of the old year and the start of the New Year in just the same way as we had done on every other New Year’s Eve. There was nothing at all remarkable about the occasion. We didn’t open our eyes on New Year’s Day 1960 to find that the ‘swinging sixties’ had arrived and that we were now living in a new and modern world of carefree hedonism. There was no sudden change in the nation’s opulence or attitude; in fact the crossover from the 1950s to the 1960s was a seamless and unexciting event that passed without any fanfare to mark the dawning of what was to become a very special decade, and even more so for us, the younger generation.

  At the beginning of the 1960s there were plenty of jobs around but the post-war economic recovery was an on-going process and there had been no obvious changes in the way working families lived their lives. Back in the mid-1950s, we had seen how much the birth of rock and roll and skiffle music had livened up an otherwise staid generation of post-war underprivileged teenagers, but since then there had been a lull, with little happening to get young people excited. Most of us were still living a meagre 1950s lifestyle in cold houses that were filled with brown furniture, and we still thought it was only the posh that had indoor lavatories. For many of us, the thought of having hot running water was just an unattainable dream, and even more so was the idea of turning one whole room of a house into a washroom that would be fitted with just a sink, a cast-iron bath and nothing else. What an extravagant waste of space! As yet, the old kettle-filled fireside tin baths had not been completely consigned to the scrap heap and the local municipal bath houses were still doing good business, charging people sixpence a time to have a bath. At least we didn’t have to suffer the indignity of wartime bathwater rationing when whole families had to make do with just 5 inches of bathwater once a week to be shared, one after the other. We had moved on a bit since the war; several years had passed since the days of rationing and you could now have whatever you wanted, as long as you could afford to buy it. However, living standards were still relatively poor, as were the conditions that many people had to put up with in their workplace. Fashions were also stuck in the 1950s with winkle picker shoes and beehive hairdos. Heart-throb singers like Adam Faith, Emile Ford and Anthony Newley continued to dominate the popular music charts. Nothing much had changed at all.

  Fortunately, there were some young and talented entrepreneurs who were starting to make their mark on London’s fashion scene with some great, innovative ideas. Working independently of each other, trendsetters like Mary Quant and John Stephen had been among the first to open new-style clothes boutiques in London’s West End in the mid-1950s and the unusual clothes they sold were by now proving to be hugely popular with fashionable young Londoners. Word of their success was now starting to spread far and wide. With Quant specialising in womenswear and Stephen in menswear, the ground-breaking work that these two young people did in the late 1950s and early 1960s created a style of fashion that would later become a major part of 1960s mod culture; it would completely transform British fashion, kick-starting the post-1963 ‘Swinging London’ era that focused the world’s attention on London’s Kings Road and Carnaby Street. While Quant and Stephen were busy building-up their fashion empires, a number of other talents were also doing their bit to close the door on the seemingly dull 1950s. These included two people who were to become pioneering icons of the sixties and beyond: Vidal Sassoon and Terence Conran. Vidal Sassoon is the man who everyone associates with 1960s geometric hairstyles and his success allowed him to open the first worldwide chain of hairdressing salons. But, in the early 1960s, he was still experimenting in his Bond Street salon with his own unusual new cuts and techniques in hairdressing and was unknown to the wider world. Meanwhile, Terence Conran was designing and manufacturing ranges of furniture in ground-breaking, modern styles that were aimed at the new generation of young 1960s homemakers. Unfortunately, it was going to take another couple of years before the new wave of mod fashions would really take off around the country, and we youngsters would have to wait just as long for the next new dance craze (The Twist) to arrive from America and liven us all up. Even then, we could not envisage the cultural changes that lay ahead of us.

  The summer of 1962 came and went and still there were few people outside of Liverpool and Hamburg who had heard of a group called The Beatles; their first hit single record, ‘Love Me Do’, had not yet been released and there was absolutely no sign of any Beatlemania. The drab 1950s mindset of the early 1960s gave us no hint of the home-grown cultural revolution that was about to take the whole country by storm, but by the mid-1960s, London would be dubbed the fashion capital of the world and the city would become known as Swinging London, as defined by Time Magazine in 1966. Subsequently, the same ‘swinging’ tag would be used to describe the period from around 1963 until the end of the decade: forevermore known as the ‘Swinging Sixties’ era. It got this label because it was in those years that we saw the most noticeable move away from Victorian values and the birth of what was called the ‘permissive society’, when attitudes to everything seemed to become increasingly liberal. There was indeed a more relaxed attitude to sex and sexuality and a more liberal approach to all forms of censorship. Abortion and divorce were also made easier and we saw the end of capital punishment. It was also in the mid-1960s that the second wave of feminism emerged and members of the Women’s Liberation Movement burned their bras in the street and demanded equality.

  Meanwhile, back in the pre-1963 days, before even the modern bikini had become popular beachwear in Britain, our main focus was still on school life. The early 1960s period was an important time for us because we were now at secondary school and having to deal with all of the teenage moodiness and acne that came with our newly acquired youth status. We were maturing in body and mind and our social and intellectual interests were beginning to change. This was a confusing time in our lives when we had to absorb all sorts of different information in a short period of time and our future career paths would be determined by the amount of knowledge we absorbed at secondary school. It wasn’t easy because we were now at an age when we were most open to distraction and it was so easy for us to lose our concentration. Teachers would regularly hurl objects across classrooms to regain the attention of daydreaming students; pieces of chalk and blackboard rubbers were among their favourite missiles. If a teacher was within reach of someone who was not paying attention then a swift clout across the back of the head would quickly remedy the situation.
With so much going on in our young minds, it was hard for us to focus solely on our schoolwork, especially during double Latin or English literature lessons on hot summer days. Our heads were filled with muddled thoughts of everything from nuclear bombs to sex. Some of us were beginning to show an unusually keen interest in literature, eager to get a peek at one of the illicit copies of the banned book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which were being passed from satchel to satchel in school playgrounds up and down the country in the early 1960s.

  As the months went by, we found we were using the playground much less for play and more for idle chatter. We began to find the younger kids around us irritating and childish; we were now part of the older brigade – too cool to play games. Amazingly, we began to fill our entire break times discussing all sorts of trivial issues, from what happened on Coronation Street the previous night to who was number one in the latest pop-record charts (or Hit Parade, as it used to be called). It was also in the playground that we picked up most of our knowledge about sexual matters. We would swap snippets of information about things we had heard or read and we would tell one another rude jokes. There were some weird and wonderful stories about sexual matters and there was always a lot of brave talk going on, but few had actually experienced any kind of sexual activity at that young age. When all the talk was done, each of us was left to sort the fact from the fiction as far as sex was concerned. There was no sex education at school in those days and it was usually a taboo subject at home as well.