Austerity, Affluence and Discontent in the United Kingdom, .1951-1979

Transcription

Austerity, Affluence
and Discontent in the
United Kingdom,
.1951-1979
Part 4:
“People try to put us down”
Social Change, c. 1951–1979
Source 1: Swinging London – young people on Carnaby Street in the 1960s
2
Austerity, Affluence and Discontent in the United Kingdom,
c.1951-1979: Part 4
How much did the lives of women change
between 1951 and 1979?
Source 2: A photograph from the1950s showing a husband and wife in the kitchen
Women’s role in the home1
The traditional role for women was to be a good wife and mother – to keep the home clean, and
make sure the children and husband are fed. This was still considered to be true even in the early
1960s, especially amongst working-class women. Women were expected to give up their job
and personal independence when they married or when their first child was born. According to
Woman’s Own magazine in 1961, ‘the most important thing they can do in life is to be wives and
mothers’.2
The ‘Janet and John’ series of children’s early reading books was first published in Britain in
1949 and reinforced the traditional role for women. Janet was always helping out mum with the
housework, while John cleaned the car or built bonfires with dad. Dad went to work, mum stayed
at home; mum was always prettily dressed and dad was always appreciative of a clean house
and cooked meal. Keeping the house clean and the family fed were not always easy. In the early
1950s feeding the family often required a lot of planning and preparation as rationing was still in
effect, and clothes had to be washed and the house cleaned by hand.
Convenience foods, supermarkets and new, cheaper appliances made women’s role as
housewives easier:
•
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•
refrigerators and supermarkets meant you no longer needed a daily shop or delivery
washing machines3 meant hours more free time that was not being spent washing by hand
vacuum cleaners meant cleaning could be done quickly without brushes, dusters and
dustpans.
Family life in 1964 is discussed in a BBC documentary which may be seen at http://goo.gl/EtppXI
This is quoted as Source B in Stuart Clayton, Mass Media, Popular Culture and Social Change in Britain since 1945
(Edexcel, 2010), page 158.
3
A 1950s advert for a washing machine may be seen at http://goo.gl/qrLww6
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2
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c.1951-1979: Part 4
According to New Look magazine in 1964:
The female kitchen is the temple of those twin symbols of the new life – the refrigerator and the washing machine.4
In an interview about life at that time, Christine Fagg, who was a housewife in the 1950s and
1960s, said:
I wanted to desperately do things outside the home. I was always trying to think of shortcuts to the housework, to get out and stimulate my own interests, and that’s where the washing machine, Hoover, etc. really came into their own.5
Advertising domestic products was still aimed entirely at women,6 e.g. Kenwood appliances used
the phrase, ‘Your servant, Madam’. Adverts reinforced the idea that women should be good wives
and mothers:
•
•
the child who didn’t get beaten up at school anymore because his mum washed his shirts
bright white
the husband who resisted the temptation of other women because his wife kept their house
clean using disinfectant.
Between 1957 and 1967 annual spending on weekly and monthly magazines which contained
many of these adverts went up from £46 million to £80 million a year. The biggest growth was in
‘women’s magazines’ – Woman was read by 50% of women in the UK in 1957.7 As well as this, radio
programmes like Woman’s Hour bombarded housewives with recipes and handy household tips.
A 1950s survey by the newspaper Manchester Guardian found that 40% of women were content
with their role but 50% were bored a lot of the time. Gradual recognition of the boredom of the life of
the housewife led to founding the National Housewives’ Register. This was set up in 1960 by Wirral
housewife Maureen Nicol as a mutual support network for bored housewives, organising talks and
coffee mornings through local newsletters to break up the daily routine. It had 15,000 members by
1970.8
This is quoted in Sally Waller, A Sixties Social Revolution? British Society 1959–1975 (Nelson Thornes, 2008), page 85.
Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat – A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London, 2006), page 691.
6
Clips about women in 1950s advertising may be seen at http://goo.gl/B86I0l and http://goo.gl/rMAFmf
7
Stuart Clayton, Mass Media, Popular Culture and Social Change in Britain since 1945 (Edexcel, 2010), page 163.
8
Sally Waller, A Sixties Social Revolution? British Society 1959–1975 (Nelson Thornes, 2008), page 85.
4
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c.1951-1979: Part 4
Women and education
Even after the 1944 Education Act women’s education was still biased towards domestic life. The
1959 Crowther Report confirmed this and the Newsom Report in 1963 said that schools should
provide a flat for girls to practice the skills of running a home and that a girl’s education should
follow ‘broad themes of home making’.9 Many women left school at the minimum leaving age and
married young. The average age for women getting married in the 1960s was 22, and two in every
three births were to women under the age of 25.10
According to the 1959 Crowther Education Report on education which was commissioned by the
government:
the prospect of courtship and marriage should rightly influence the education of the adolescent girl.11
In 1954 it was considered that too many girls were passing the 11-plus exam compared to boys.
In that year girls should have made up two-thirds of pupils going to grammar schools so a law was
passed to limit the number of girls who could go. Facilities at some girls’ grammar schools were not
as good as those for boys as they did not have decent science facilities.
The Report to the House of Commons Select Committee 1973 stated:
Perhaps the greatest single contributory factor to the position of women as second class citizens in the matter of employment has been the lack of opportunity for girls in school to participate in the technological developments of recent years [physics, metalwork, computing, etc.]12
Many of the women who passed their O Levels went on to do A Levels, although many of those
women who did make it as far as university married soon after getting their degrees. The number of
women studying at university grew steadily as a result of improving education, and because of the
availability of university grants to pay for living expenses:
•
•
in 1970, 183,000 women went to university, making up 40% of the total student population;
in 1975, 214,000 women went to university, making up 41% of the total student
population.13
However, students were still twice as likely to get a university place if they were a boy rather than a
girl into the 1980s.
Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat – A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London, 2006), page 689.
Nigel Bushnell and Cathy Warren, History Controlled Assessment: CA11 Change in British society 1955–75
11
Colin P. F. Hughes, Catrin Stevens and R. Paul Evans, The Changing Role and Status of Women during the 20th
Century (Aberystwyth, 2012), page 63.
12
J. A. Cloake, Britain in the Modern World (Oxford, 1994), page 44.
13
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c.1951-1979: Part 4
Source 3: A female student in the 1960s
Women and work14
During the Second World War women had shown that they were willing and capable of work
and could balance family and working life. The system of government-run day nurseries was
disbanded after 1945. The continuation of free school meals after the war made it easier for
women to work, although the government had introduced the Family Allowance in 1946 to try and
persuade women that they did not need to work to earn money to look after their children.
When men came home from the war after 1945 many women had to give them their jobs back.
According to a trade union leader after the war, ‘Men hate their girls going out to work and
impairing their own dignity as head of the house’.15 Women were sent back to doing the jobs they
had done before the war – domestic, clerical, nursing and shop work, where there was increasing
demand for workers in new supermarkets.
Only 1 in 5 married women went to work in 1951.16 Child Care and the Growth of Love (1953)
was a very influential book by John Bowlby. It said that juvenile delinquency was the result
of mothers abandoning their children and going to work. Working mothers were often portrayed
as unnatural or selfish, abandoning their children to go to work, especially in an age when rising
wages for men were making many homes affluent without women needing to work as well.
Childminders and nurseries were very expensive and hard to find. This ‘anti-work’ attitude did
gradually change – in 1943 some 58% of people opposed the idea of married women working, but
this was down to 11% by 1965.17
Programmes about women and work may be seen on the BBC Archive website: http://goo.gl/LxNxGO and
http://goo.gl/lRfvF4
15
Colin Shephard and Rosemary Rees, British Depth Study 1939–1975 (London, 2010), page 33.
16
Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good (London, 2005), page 414.
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c.1951-1979: Part 4
There was a gradual increase in the number of women with jobs:
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•
before the war only 10% of married women had jobs
in 1951 22% of married women had jobs18
over 30% of married women had jobs by 1961
47% of married women had jobs by 1971.19
Better-educated middle-class women took on jobs outside the home.
There were no shortage of jobs for women because:
•
•
•
•
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•
there was full employment for men already
many employers preferred to employ women as they did not have to pay them as much as
men until the 1970s
many jobs no longer required women to give up work when they got married from the early
1950s onwards
newer industries like electronics and chemicals did not need the brute strength of men
government organisations like the NHS (set up in 1948) and the DVLA (set up in 1965)
needed a lot of clerks and typists20
many women only wanted part-time work so they could continue to look after the
house and family, which also suited employers as it gave them more flexibility with their
workforce.21
Table 1: Women in paid employment 1951–197122
Women as % of the total workforce
1951
31%
1961
33%
1971
37%
Although the number of women in work increased, there was little improvement in the range of
jobs that women were doing:
•
in the 1960s, a total of 80% of all factory, shop and secretarial work was done by women
Dominic Sandbrook, State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970–1974 (London, 2010), pages 392–3.
20
A short clip from a Department of Employment film from 1969 about girls choosing the work they want to do carefully
may be seen at http://goo.gl/5f8Wju
21
These difficulties are explored in a BBC Archive programme from 1966 which may be seen at http://goo.gl/U9v4oA
22
This is adapted from Sally Waller, A Sixties Social Revolution? British Society 1959–1975 (Nelson Thornes, 2008),
page 107.
18
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c.1951-1979: Part 4
by 1975, a total of 97% of canteen assistants, 92% of nurses, 92% of cleaners, 81% of
shop keepers and 60% of teachers were women.
Women were still highly concentrated in lower status lower paid jobs. There were regional
variations – more women worked in the more affluent south-east than in less prosperous areas
such as Wales.
The number of women in professional jobs was rising slowly:
•
•
•
in 1960 only 15% of doctors and 5% of lawyers were women.
in 1970 only 5% of women achieved a managerial position in their employment
in 1980 only 8% of lawyers, 4% of architects and 1% of accountants were women.23
There were very few women MPs, even though a female Prime Minister was elected in 1979.
After the 1979 election only 19 out of the 650 MPs were women.
Source 4: New Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the steps of 10 Downing Street in 1979
Equality24
1) Equal pay
Women had started joining trade unions during the war and unions were often happy to fight the
case for better and equal pay for all of their members. In 1951 women in teaching, the civil service
and local government started to campaign for equal pay. They used marches, demonstrations and
petitions to lobby MPs with the slogan ‘Equal Pay – When?’. In 1955 the government agreed to
raise women’s pay in these areas gradually until it was the same as men’s.
The justification for paying women less than men was that women were only expected to work
for a few years before getting married and having children. It was therefore not necessary
to pay them the same as men who would be doing the same job for twenty or thirty years.
Another argument was that a woman’s wage was the ‘second’ wage into the household after her
husband’s. As women were not paying for the essentials in the household, they did not need to be
paid as much as the money would only be spent on holidays and gadgets.
In the early 1960s industrialists noticed that women were not taking on scientific and technical
training so they employed the London School of Economics to find out why. In 1968 a Royal
Commission published the results which identified three problems:
23
24
Christopher Culpin and Brian Turner, Making Modern Britain (Collins Educational, 1987), page 224.
This is discussed in a programme on the BBC Archive website which may be seen at http://goo.gl/b9j4v9
8
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c.1951-1979: Part 4
unequal pay; women were being paid on average 75% of the wage that men were getting
for doing the same job
a lack of nurseries and day-care for women who had children too young to go to school
a deeply-held belief that women were mothers and housewives and that men should be
going out earning a wage, so there was no need to train women for a job.
Why did things change? The main reasons were as follows:
•
•
•
•
•
in 1968 forty women machinists at the Ford factory in Dagenham25 went on strike for
three weeks demanding equal pay (their job of making headrests and seat covers was
classed as ‘unskilled’ so they were earning less than male cleaners). They received 92%
of their pay demand with the support of Barbara Castle, the Labour Secretary of State for
Employment.26
Barbara Castle got trade unions, the government and employers (CBI) to work together on
how to achieve equal pay for women
women’s rights organisations like the Fawcett Society began lobbying MPs to give women
equal opportunities – a rally in 1969 was attended by 30,000 people
some newspapers began to run campaigns about the equal pay issue – in May 1968 The
Times said that the current situation was ‘a great waste of potentially useful skills’27
the UK government had to ensure that men and women had equal pay and equal
opportunities so that it could sign the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and join the EEC in the
1970s. According to the Treaty of Rome, ‘Each Member State shall during the first stage
ensure and subsequently maintain the application of the principle that men and women
should receive equal pay for equal work’.28
The Equal Pay Act 1970 was introduced by Barbara Castle, and required businesses to give equal
rates of pay to men and women doing the same job. Employers were given five years to put this
in place, to ensure that they could afford the extra costs. Because of the vague terms of the Act
it was easy for employers to avoid implementing it and several other acts were needed to clarify
important issues. The Employment Protection Act 1975 had to be passed so that women could not
be dismissed from a job for being pregnant. Employers also had to give women 18 weeks maternity
leave, paid at 90% of their normal pay.
There is a short piece from the Channel 4 News about this at http://goo.gl/Lb0Wi6 and Film Education have produced
some materials explaining the historical background of the film Made in Dagenham (2010) at http://goo.gl/MY3c10
26
The BBC News obituary for Barbara Castle may be seen at http://goo.gl/oP85lo
27
Dominic Sandbrook, State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970–1974 (London, 2010), page 374.
28
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c.1951-1979: Part 4
In 1970 a report showed that women’s average pay was only 63.1% of men’s pay.29 By 1980
that figure had risen to 73.5%.30 Some women took their cases for equal pay to the European
Court which showed that there was still work to be done in this area – the gap between men and
women’s pay was closing but there was still a difference. The Women and Employment survey
of 1980 found that 63% of women still worked in jobs commonly done by women at that time
(e.g. nursing) so there was no legal basis to challenge their low pay31 because it could not be
2) Equal opportunities
There was another important employment issue for women – a lack of opportunities, both in terms
of the jobs they were allowed to do, and how highly they could be promoted. These limits were
referred to as a ‘glass ceiling’ that women could not break through. Many employers rejected
women for certain jobs, thinking that they would leave soon to get married or have children.
Some employers even thought that women had characteristics that should bar them from a job,
or believed that it was a man’s job.
Mary Stott,32 a journalist working at the Manchester Evening News, remembered being sacked
from the post of deputy editor of the newspaper in 1950 in the BBC documentary People’s Century
in 1995:
I went to the editor and said, “Why am I not to go on doing this deputy editor’s job?” He said, “Oh, Mary, there’s nothing wrong with your work, but we have to safeguard the succession and the successor has to be a man”. End message. How can you go on doing something knowing there is no promotion, knowing that young men whom you have helped to train will inevitably jump over you?33
The Sex Discrimination Act 1975 made it illegal to refuse a job to a woman on the grounds of her
gender.34 The Equal Opportunities Commission was set up to investigate discrimination. It had
2,500 enquiries in the first two weeks.35 There was an impact on schools as all subjects now had
to be open to boys and girls. The Act also guaranteed women access to housing, and monitored
their portrayal in advertisements. By 1980 more women were entering business and professional
occupations, but there were still important issues, like access to childcare, to be resolved.
31
32
Mary Stott ended up having a long career in journalism running the women’s section of The Guardian – read her
obituary at http://goo.gl/Th77oB
33
Colin Shephard and Rosemary Rees, British Depth Study 1939–1975 (London, 2010), page 36. Also see the BBC
People’s Century episode ‘1970: Half the People’ at http://goo.gl/Z70KZ0
34
The potential impact of this is discussed in a BBC2 programme from 1975 on the BBC Archive website http://goo.gl/
tCsR6V
35
29
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c.1951-1979: Part 4
Women and the right to
choose36
1) Abortion
There was a huge social stigma attached to being an unmarried mother in the 1950s and 1960s.
Sometimes women handed their babies over to neighbours or other members of their family to
bring up as their own. Many of these women were sent to ‘unmarried mothers’ homes’, of which
there were 200 around the UK in the 1950s. In these homes women were pressurised to give their
babies up for adoption. As many as 40,000 unmarried pregnant women were sent to these homes
per year, and more than half of them were teenagers.37 There was no government regulation for
these homes as most were run by church organisations. Women in these homes had little access
to trained medical staff and were often used as cheap labour.
Why did attitudes towards abortion change?
•
•
•
•
the Abortion Law Reform Association had campaigned for abortion reform since the 1930s
in the 1950s and 1960s there were around 100,000 illegal and dangerous ‘backstreet’
abortions a year; 35,000 woman were admitted to hospital a year with post-abortion
complications; between 1958 and 1960 a total of 82 women died from these illegal
abortions
between 1959 and 1962 the poorly-tested Thalidomide drug had been given to pregnant
women with morning sickness, resulting in physical deformities in their children when they
were born; this convinced many people that abortion would be acceptable if a deformity
had been detected in an unborn child
in 1965 the Church of England said that it would consider abortion to be justified if ‘there
was a threat to the mother’s life or well-being’.
In 1967 the Abortion Act, proposed by Liberal MP David Steel and supported by Labour MP Roy
Jenkins, was passed by Parliament. It legalised abortion within the first 28 weeks of pregnancy,
providing that it was done under medical supervision and signed off by two different doctors. It was
legal if it prevented physical or mental harm to the mother or if the unborn child was potentially
disabled. This could be done at private clinics or on the NHS.
There were many objections to this law, usually on religious grounds. For example, the Catholic
Church and the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child are still campaigning against
abortion today. On the other hand, some women’s rights campaigners complained that this law did
not go far enough as it was not ‘abortion on demand’. Many people were shocked by how many
abortions there were once they became legalised, thinking that the availability of better education
and family planning would make it unnecessary for many women.
The position of women in relationships in 1965 is discussed in a BBC2 programme on the BBC Archive website at
http://goo.gl/F75Afe
37
Nigel Bushnell and Cathy Warren, History Controlled Assessment: CA11 Change in British society 1955–75
36
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c.1951-1979: Part 4
Table 2: Numbers of legal abortions38
YEAR
Women who
had abortions
Women who had Women who
abortions aged
had abortions
less than 16
aged 16 to 19
Women who had
abortions who were
not married
Proportion of
abortions to live
births
1970
1975
1980
75,400
106,200
128,900
1,700
3,600
3,700
34,100
52,300
68,800
96:1000
176:1000
196:1000
13,500
24,100
31,900
2) Family planning
‘The Pill’ was an oral contraceptive licensed for use in the UK after trials in Birmingham and
Slough in 1961. It was available for free to married women on the NHS because the Secretary
of State, Keith Joseph, thought that it would be a way to reduce poverty by reducing unwanted
pregnancies. By 1964 some 500,000 women were using it. The cost (£1 per woman per month)
and effects were widely debated in the media. Between 1961 and 1962 there were 400 items on
teenage sexual behaviour in UK newspapers.
The Family Planning Act 1967 said that local authorities had to provide contraceptives and family
planning advice via the Family Planning Association to anyone who wanted it, not just those who
were married.
Not everyone agreed with increasing access to contraception. In 1968 Pope Paul VI, head of the
Catholic Church, issued the ‘Encyclical Humanae Vitae’ which publically restated the Catholic
Church’s view that contraception was against God’s law. By 1970 only 19% of married couples
under the age of 45 used it, and only 9% of single women.39
3) Divorce
Divorce rates had risen sharply in the five years after the end of the war as long-distance
relationships and war traumas caused many marriages to break down. By the 1950s the nuclear
family made up the majority of families and divorce rates dropped back. Divorce still carried a
social stigma.40 Children were embarrassed that their parents were divorced and would go to
great lengths to hide it from their school friends.
The Divorce Reform Act 196941 made a ‘no fault’ divorce possible. Irretrievable breakdown of the
marriage could now be the only reason for granting divorce. Couples could now divorce if they had
lived apart for two years and they both wanted it, or they had lived apart for five years and only
one of them wanted it. Under the previous divorce laws the husband or wife had to prove the other
partner was guilty of adultery, cruelty, desertion or insanity.
Opponents claimed that the new law would lead to the breakup of the traditional family. In 1950
there were two divorce decrees for every 1,000 married couples but by the 1970s one in every
two marriages ended this way42 and increasing numbers of relationships involved cohabitation
rather than marriage.
Andrew Boxer with Keith Lockton and Elizabeth Sparey, The End of Consensus: Britain 1945–90 (Essex, 2009),
page 97.
39
40
A programme about coping with divorce before the law was changed may be seen at http://goo.gl/9js6DA
41
A clip from a BBC Panorama programme about divorce may be seen at http://goo.gl/yoOLsv
42
38
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c.1951-1979: Part 4
Table 3: Numbers of marriages and divorce43
Year
1950
1955
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
Marriages
358,000
358,000
344,000
371,000
415,000
381,000
370,000
Divorces
31,000
27,000
24,000
38,000
58,000
120,000
148,000
By the end of the 1960s marriage seemed less important. Increasing numbers of couples
cohabited before getting married or had long-term relationships and families without getting
married at all. The number of divorces rose and so did the number of illegitimate births
from 5.8% of births in 1960 to 8.2% of births in 1970. New laws helped women to escape difficult
relationships, but not the problems of bringing up their children alone.
Other laws that improved women’s status within marriage:
•
•
•
•
Married Women’s Property Act 1964 – this allowed women to keep half the money they
saved from housekeeping
Matrimonial Homes Act 1967 – this recognised that men and women had equal rights of
occupation in the family home
Matrimonial Property Act 1970 – a wife’s work was an equal contribution to making a home
so should be taken into account when dividing up property in a divorce
Guardianship of Children Act 1973 – gave mothers equal rights to fathers in bringing up
children
Feminism and the Women’s
Liberation Movement44
1) Feminism
In the 1960s the mini skirt became the symbol of women’s independence but it was also seen by
some as part of the female stereotype of women as ‘sex objects’ for men. Sexist attitudes
continued to be seen in all areas of life into the 1970s and beyond.
Feminism was not a new idea. It had begun with the campaign to get women the vote in
the 1900s, and had continued with the campaign to get women better rights with regard to
contraception and their families in the 1920s. By the 1960s feminism was supported by women
The numbers of divorces are from Andrew Boxer with Keith Lockton and Elizabeth Sparey, The End of Consensus:
Britain 1945–90 (Essex, 2009), page 97 and http://goo.gl/0PozHo; the numbers of marriages are
from http://goo.gl/lSlKQK
44
Feminists explain and debate their views on the BBC Archive: http://goo.gl/sVluMy (short clip from Radio 4
programme) and http://goo.gl/WdyQDl (25 min programme from BBC2)
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c.1951-1979: Part 4
of all ages. It demanded a radical shift in the balance of power between men and women. The
Women’s Liberation Movement, as it was known, was not a single organisation, but a collection of
different feminist groups and ideas with the common theme of trying to improve the lives of women
in the UK.
Local Women’s Liberation groups began to appear in the late 1960s:
•
•
•
the fishermen’s wives of Hull who campaigned for safety at sea
the London bus conductresses who campaigned for the right to train as bus drivers
Peckham Rye Group and other local branches of the Women’s Liberation Workshop who
met to discuss feminist issues – the Peckham Rye Group described housework in 1971 as
“An endless routine...like a pet mouse in its cage spinning round on its exercise wheel”.45
There was also very public support for feminism from famous actresses like Vanessa Redgrave,
writers like Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch and politicians like Labour’s Barbara Castle and Shirley
Williams.
More and more articles and books were being written about feminist ideas. Shrew magazine
(1969) gave analysis of women’s position in society and detailed feminist news. Spare Rib
magazine started in July 1972 and sold 20,000 copies a month, even though some mainstream
newsagents like W H Smith refused to sell it because it was too radical. These publications
were intended to combat traditional magazines like Woman and Woman’s Own which were still
focussing on women as domestic goddesses. Elaine Morgan wrote The Descent of Woman in
1972 in which she questioned men’s dominant role by focussing on the evolution of women.
Feminist book publishing company Virago was launched in 1973.
FOCUS: Germaine Greer and
the Female Eunuch
The Female Eunuch (1969), written by Australian academic Germaine Greer, was an important
feminist book. The title of the book came from the idea that becoming suburban married
consumer wives took away women’s true potential – turning them into eunuchs. ‘Like beasts,
for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master’s ulterior motives – to
be fattened or made docile – women have been cut off from their capacity for action,’ as Greer
explained to the New York Times in 1971.46 It was much more extreme than most feminist
literature as it was liberating women rather than gaining equality with men. The book did get a
lot of media attention as Greer was widely interviewed in newspapers, magazines and on TV
and radio.
The book explained how women were oppressed by men – the traditional roles of the sexes
were learned and not natural; the differences between men and women were exaggerated. It
showed how girls are conditioned to follow a female stereotype, and what they have done and
can do to fight against it. Greer believed that most women lived miserable and unfulfilled lives
because the ideas of romantic love and happy families were a myth.
This quote may be seen at http://goo.gl/8ojMmI and has been taken from Ann Oakley, The Ann Oakley Reader:
Gender, women and social science (Great Britain, 2005), page 75.
46
From http://goo.gl/eoy7or The original article on Germaine Greer may be seen here: http://goo.gl/pUlefz
45
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c.1951-1979: Part 4
The Women’s Liberation Movement had started in the USA in the late 1960s. It was heavily
influenced by student protest movements about civil rights and the Vietnam War. The movement
had been inspired by Betty Friedan who wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963. In this book she
argued that being a housewife was like being locked in a prison as it prevented women from
achieving their true potential. She then went on to set up the National Organisation of Women
in 1966 to campaign for ‘a truly equal partnership between the sexes’. One of the most talked
about protests was when women dumped their bras into dustbins outside the 1968 Miss America
contest.
In 1969 the Women’s National Co-ordination Committee was set up to bring the different strands
and elements of the women’s movement together. The first National Women’s Liberation
Conference was held at Ruskin College, Oxford in February 1970 with four demands:
•
•
•
•
equal pay
free contraception and abortion on request
equal educational and job opportunities
free 24-hour childcare.
Feminists in Britain continued to protest for equal rights for women. In November 1970, at the Miss
World Contest47 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, feminist protesters pelted the compere, US
comedian Bob Hope, with flour and smoke bombs. This received a lot of publicity, with television
and newspaper coverage showing women with placards and t-shirts covered in slogans, like ‘Missfortune demands equal pay for women, Miss-conception demands abortion for all women, Missplaced demands a place outside the home’.48 In March 1971, on the first International Women’s
Day, 4000 feminists marched through London and handed a petition for more women’s rights to
the Prime Minister, Edward Heath.
Source 5: Women’s Liberation protesters outside the 1970 Miss World Contest in London
There were successes for feminism in the 1970s – equal pay and equal opportunities legislation,
guaranteed property rights, guardianship of children and protection from domestic violence. Other
issues like access to childcare and sexual harassment still needed to be dealt with. By the end
of the 1970s women had more choices about how they could live their lives, but they were still
discriminated against and not treated equally to men.
47
48
A clip showing this may be seen at http://goo.gl/wIAbll
15
c.1951-1979: Part 4
2) Some other feminist campaigns
•
•
•
1974: The Women’s Aid Federation was set up to provide refuges for women to escape
from domestic violence and the Domestic Violence Act 1976 gave women some protection
from violent husbands
1975: The ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign demanded that the government should pay
women for work in the home that did not pay a wage; this was unsuccessful
1976: The Women’s Peace Movement tried to bring an end to the violence between
Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland; its founders won the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1977.
3) Did 1970s feminism end sexism towards women?
The women’s movement did not have widespread support. Its aims were difficult for many to
understand and their more extreme, publicity-grabbing methods got them press coverage but also
trivialised what they stood for in the eyes of many. Continued protest did, at least, keep the issue
of women’s rights in the public eye.
There were a number of developments which showed that the women’s movement still had a long
way to go to achieve equality:
•
•
•
•
49
50
there were on-going critical newspaper stories about feminists who considered words like
‘chairman’ and ‘manhole’ to be sexist (although the Labour Party did start using the term
‘chair person’ in the 1970s)
The Sun introduced the female nude ‘Page 3’ model in 1970 – it was Britain’s best-selling
newspaper
there was increasing organised opposition from both men and women to feminism.49
The Campaign for the Feminine Woman,50 an organisation originally started in the early
twentieth century to oppose giving women the right to vote, was revived in 1978: members
believe that women working outside the home has done a lot of harm to family life and that
feminism was a ‘dangerous cancer’.
women’s magazines continued to focus on fashion, romance, family and dieting and
advertising continued to demonstrate sexist attitudes towards women.
A BBC2 programme about this campaign may be seen on the BBC Archive at http://goo.gl/7JmMMb
This is referred to in Peter Barberis, John McHugh and Mike Tyldesley, Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political
Organizations: Parties, Groups and Movements of the Twentieth Century (London, 2000), page 454.
16
c.1951-1979: Part 4
How much did life change for young people between 1951
and 1979?
Childhood
Source 6: Photograph of children playing in the street in the 1950s
1) Playing outdoors
In the early 1950s streets were emptier than today as fewer people had cars. They were much safer
places for children to play. In the early 1950s there were fewer toys so children had to improvise and
make their own entertainment:
•
•
•
•
•
playing conkers or marbles, hopscotch, kicking cans, skipping
role-playing cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, pirates
riding go-karts or bicycles, roller skating
playing sports like football and cricket with improvised goal posts or stumps
playing games like hide-and-seek, tick or tag, ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’
This was just the same as their parents and many generations of children before had done. The
1960s saw more and more cars on the roads, leaving fewer opportunities for children to play outside.
Increasingly children were spending their free time indoors, watching television.
2) Hobbies
There were some very simple hobbies that boys and girls could do to keep themselves occupied:
•
•
stamp collecting was a hobby from the nineteenth century which had grown because of the
increasing ease with which people could get hold of foreign stamps; as time passed and
stamp designs changed there were also older designs that could be collected
keeping scrap books of personal mementos like letters or cinema tickets, as well as records
of events from the wider world like newspaper clippings.
17
c.1951-1979: Part 4
There were also newer hobbies which had become increasingly popular after the war:
•
•
‘I-SPY’ books were very popular from the 1950s onwards. Each book covered a subject
such as I-SPY Cars, I-SPY on the Pavement, I-SPY Churches, I-SPY on a Train Journey,
etc. As children spotted objects like oak trees, fire engines, seagulls, etc. they recorded
them in their book and gained points; once the book was complete, it could be sent to Big
Chief I-SPY for a feather and order of merit. There were half a million I-SPY members by
the end of the 1950s.
‘ABC’ booklets, full of data about railway locomotives and equipment, were first published
in 1942. These were used by ‘trainspotters’ who would stand at stations and on railway
bridges recording the details of what they had seen going past – for some it was about
trying to see rare or unusual things on the railways and reporting it to others who were
interested. The Locospotters Club had 82,000 members in 1952.
Source 7: Young trainspotters at Doncaster station in the early 1950s
3) Toys
Immediately after the war, shortages and rationing meant that children’s toys were homemade or
second hand. Jigsaws were the first toy to be revived after the war. They were printed on cheap card
to avoid rationing restrictions. People started jigsaw lending libraries so they could swap designs
without having to buy new ones. Soon more creative toys followed:
•
•
fuzzy felt, invented in the UK in 1950, with sets based around popular themes like the
farmyard or the hospital, even Bible scenes which were very popular in Sunday Schools
plasticine, a toy from the late 19th century, went on sale again in the early 1950s, with a
huge boost to sales from modelling kits based on popular children’s characters like Sooty.
For girls, toys were supposed to reflect their future as mothers and housewives – dolls were now
made from lighter and more flexible vinyl plastics which allowed more sophistication in their design,
like nylon hair and sleeping eyes. There were toy prams and cots as well. Other toys were aimed at
the limited range of jobs that women could expect to do if they did want to work – nurse’s outfits, tin
telephone exchanges, toy typewriters, tills to play shop assistant, and so on.
Boys were supposed to have toys that focused on transport, adventure, building and engineering:
•
scale model metal and plastic replica toy cars were made by UK companies like Dinky
(1934), Corgi (1956) and Matchbox (1953). These were made more popular in the 1960s
with tie-ins to films and TV, e.g. the Corgi model of James Bond’s Aston Martin from 1965,
Dinky’s Thunderbird 2 from 1967.
18
•
•
c.1951-1979: Part 4
tin printed clockwork train sets like Hornby Dublo (1920), which were back in shops in 1947
after a wartime break, or moulded plastic Tri-Ang train sets (1946)
Meccano (1901) was a model construction kit made up of metal strips, plates and girders,
with wheels, pulleys, gears and axles, along with nuts and bolts to connect the pieces. It
was an educational toy, teaching basic mechanical principles like levers and gearing.
Source 8: Corgi’s 1965 model of James Bond’s Aston Martin from the film Goldfinger
New toys became available to children in the 1950s and 1960s as a result of new mass-production
techniques and developments in plastics. Fewer of these toys were gender-specific as unisex
toys could be sold to twice as many children. Many of these toys were so popular they are still in
production today:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Hula Hoop (USA, 1958) – the plastic hoop from the USA led to the craze for ‘hooping’ in
1958
Space Hopper (Italy, 1968) – a large inflatable orange rubber ball with two handles, like
ears on top, and a smiling face; children sat on them and used them to bounce around the
garden
Airfix model kits (UK, 1949) – plastic moulded construction kits with numbered plastic parts
which were glued together then painted
Lego (Denmark, 1955) – the first Lego System of Play featured 28 building sets all based
on the new plastic lego brick
Scalextric (UK, 1952) – model cars powered by clockwork and then electric motors in 1958;
they could be driven on plastic track from 1963
Mr Potato Head (USA, 1952) – plastic body parts to be attached to a potato which parents
provided but a plastic body was included from 1964
Sindy (UK, 1963) – smaller, thinner doll than the traditional design with a range of
accessories, based on US doll Barbie (1959); Sindy was much more successful than
Barbie in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s
19
•
c.1951-1979: Part 4
Action Man (UK, 1966) – war-themed male doll based on US GI Joe (1964) with collectible
wardrobe and accessories, with innovations in the 1970s like realistic hair and ‘eagle eyes’.
Source 9: The Lego town planning set
4) Board games
Playing board games was not a new idea, although there were new games that became available
after the war. Board games were for days when the weather was not good enough to go outside,
and were often for the whole family to play together. There were old games like chess and
draughts, as well as Victorian games like Tiddlywinks, Snakes and Ladders and Ludo. Families
were also playing more recent games such as Monopoly (a property development game from
1935), Cluedo (a murder mystery game from 1949), The Amazing Magic Robot51 (a quiz game
with a robot that pointed out the answers from 1953) and Scrabble (a word-based game from
1955). New games had been made possible by technological advances, especially in plastics, for
example Mouse Trap (1963).
Source 10: Mouse Trap
5) Comics and children’s magazines52
Older comics like The Beano (1938) and The Dandy (1937) had survived the paper rationing of the
1940s and were still very popular with smaller children in the 1950s. They were based around the
antics of comedy characters like Desperate Dan and Dennis the Menace (who appeared in his first
strip in 1951).
Adults became very concerned about the growing interest in imported American horror comics
like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror and a law was passed in 1955 banning their
importing or printing. To counter this a new style of comic was introduced for older children that
still had comic strips, but also contained text stories and factual articles as well. One of the most
51
52
This may be seen at http://goo.gl/yj1z0O
The first episode of the BBC series Comics Britannia may be seen at http://goo.gl/0V4LfF
20
c.1951-1979: Part 4
successful of these was Eagle which was started in 1950 by the Reverend Marcus Morris. Its first
issue sold 900,000 copies and made an instant star of the focus of its front cover story – ‘Dan
Dare – Pilot of the Future’. It also featured illustrated stories about British heroes like Nelson, and
religious icons as well.
In the Foreword to The Best of Eagle Annual 1951–1959 published in 1977, Marcus Morris stated:
The strip cartoon could be used to convey to the child the right kind of standards, values and attitudes, combined with the necessary amount of excitement and adventure.53
Source 11: An issue of Eagle
A whole new generation of comics followed. For boys, there was Lion (1952) and Tiger (1954 –
starring one of the most long-lasting comic characters, Roy of the Rovers54). For girls, there was
Girl (1951 – sister comic to Eagle) and School Friend (revived from a pre-war comic in 1950), as
well as Bunty (1958). Boys’ comics focused on adventure, sport, space, westerns, exploration,
spies and war. Girls’ comics focused more on school, friends, and romance. The comic annual
(dated for the year after it was published) became a common Christmas present for children.
There were even educational magazines like Look and Learn (1962). This had original comic
strips such as ‘The Trigan Empire’, factual articles on interesting topics like volcanoes, along with
illustrated versions of Bible stories and classics of literature like H. G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon.
Comics began to lose out to television in the 1960s. Comics adapted and incorporated strips and
stories based on popular TV programmes:
•
•
•
53
54
TV Comic, first published in 1951, contained comic strips about early children’s television
characters like ‘Larry the Lamb’
TV Century 21, first published in 1965, was a magazine which was based around Gerry
Anderson’s television series for children like Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and the
Mysterons
Look-in, first published in 1971, had pin ups and interviews of the TV, film and music stars
of its time, as well as comic strips based on popular TV programmes like The Six Million
Dollar Man.
From the Foreword to The Best of Eagle Annual 1951–59 published in 1977.
A short piece about Roy of the Rovers from the Comics Britannia series may be seen at http://goo.gl/5zbt78
21
c.1951-1979: Part 4
To keep comics going the number of different titles available was shrunk by merging comic titles
together – Lion merged with Eagle in 1969. There was also a new wave of comics in the 1970s
that challenged some of the existing conventions of comics. For boys, comics like Battle Picture
Weekly (1975), Action (1976) and 2000ad (1977) were more violent and featured anti-hero
characters like the brutal futuristic policeman Judge Dredd.55 Girls comics like Tammy (1971)
were darker in tone and magazines like Jackie (1964) focussed more on issues of fashion and
relationships. Old favourites like The Beano and The Dandy continued to be very popular.
6) Cinema, radio and television
There were radio programmes for children:
•
•
•
•
Listen With Mother,56 story-telling which began with the catchphrase ‘Are you sitting
comfortably? Then I shall begin’
Children’s Hour, featuring ‘Toytown’ starring Larry the Lamb
Journey into Space57 about the adventures of Jet Morgan and his crew, which ran from
1953 to 1958 and had millions of loyal followers
for older children there was Dick Barton, Special Agent58 which got peak audiences of 15
million.
Children also loved the madcap humour of The Goon Show59 and other radio comedies aimed at
adults.
Although adult cinema audiences were reduced because of the influence of television, going
to the ‘flicks’ was still popular with children. In the 1950s and 1960s many children went to the
Saturday Matinee at their local cinema. These shows were dominated by American series like
Flash Gordon60(made in the 1930s) and films like Treasure Island (1950) and Davy Crockett, King
of the Wild Frontier61 (1955) which led to a rush in demand for Davy Crockett merchandise. This
continued into the 1960s with the two colour Doctor Who films (Doctor Who and the Daleks in
1965 and Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D.62 in 1966) which led to the Dalekmania craze of the
mid-1960s. In the summer of 1977 the first Star Wars63 film was another huge hit with children and
there was accompanying merchandise in Star Wars toys, books and comics.
Watching television became an increasingly popular activity for children. In the early 1950s the
BBC kept a ‘toddler’s truce’ and was off air from 6pm to 7pm to help parents get their children to
bed. In the late afternoon Watch With Mother slot there was a wide variety of programmes through
the week:
A short piece about Action and 2000ad from the Comics Britannia series may be seen at http://goo.gl/lzpku3
Listen to the adventures of Joe the Tortoise at http://goo.gl/vjYciu
57
The first episode of Journey Into Space – Operation Luna can be heard here http://goo.gl/IBO99W
58
Hear the infamous theme tune to this series at http://goo.gl/RYnScs
59
You can listen to episodes from The Goon Show at http://goo.gl/wnvD2j
60
The first episode of Flash Gordon may be seen at http://goo.gl/OW4A9q
61
The trailer for Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier may be seen at http://goo.gl/xY3l1q
62
The trailer for Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. may be seen at http://goo.gl/2TthFT
63
The trailer for Star Wars (the original 1977 film) may be seen at http://goo.gl/ZhzKGq
55
56
22
•
•
•
•
•
c.1951-1979: Part 4
MONDAY – Picture Book64(story telling)
TUESDAY – Andy Pandy65(a puppet with his friends Teddy and Looby Loo)
WEDNESDAY – Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men66 (puppets who spoke their own strange
version of English)
THURSDAY – Rag, Tag and Bobtail67 (hedgehog, mouse and rabbit puppets)
FRIDAY – The Woodentops68 (a puppet family and their dog Spot)
As competition with ITV forced the BBC to end the ‘toddler’s truce’ a wider variety of children’s
programming began to be shown. The anarchic Sooty69 puppet show started in 1956, and Pinky
and Perky, pig puppets who sang high-pitched versions of pop songs, started in 1957. There were
game shows like Crackerjack which started in 1955, as well as magazine shows like Blue Peter70
which began in 1958. Alongside these British shows there were also popular US imports like the
Lone Ranger, Zorro and Popeye cartoons.
In the 1960s and 1970s there were further developments in children’s television:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Play School71 (BBC, 1964) and Rainbow72 (ITV, 1972) for toddlers
readings of popular children’s books in Jackanory (1965)
the puppet lives of the inhabitants of neighbouring Camberwick Green (1965), Trumpton73
(1966) and Chigley (1967)
for the older children there was futuristic Thunderbirds74 (1965) and Captain Scarlet and the
Mysterons75 (1967), and time-travelling Doctor Who76 (1963) on the BBC
the children’s version of the news began to be shown in Newsround from 1972
programmes for deaf children like the art and mime based show Vision On (from 1964)
programmes to get children more interested in hobbies and activities that were not
dependent on watching television like Why Don’t You (Just Switch Off Your Television Set
And Go And Do Something Less Boring Instead)? (1973)
An episode of Picture Book may be seen at http://goo.gl/Zz4Xyt
An episode of Andy Pandy may be seen at http://goo.gl/nPf0fp
66
An episode of Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men may be seen at http://goo.gl/2KSJXG
67
An episode of Rag, Tag and Bobtail may be seen at http://goo.gl/g5ClXb
68
An episode of The Woodentops may be seen at http://goo.gl/vBNdrL
69
Sooty’s first TV appearance may be seen here http://goo.gl/CBlxOC
70
A brief clip from a 1960s episode of Blue Peter may be seen at http://goo.gl/HcczQJ
71
A compilation of moments from the history of Play School may be seen at http://goo.gl/XMZoha
72
The first episode of Rainbow may be seen at http://goo.gl/BrWVUr
73
An episode of Trumpton may be seen at http://goo.gl/bmhnKz
74
The title sequence for Thunderbirds may be seen at http://goo.gl/o8BSJh
75
The first episode of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons may be seen at http://goo.gl/PAvq5G
76
The original Doctor Who title sequence may be seen at http://goo.gl/CQ3KHl
64
65
23
•
•
c.1951-1979: Part 4
Saturday morning television: the BBC’s Multi-Coloured Swap Shop (1976) was live,
three hours long and included viewer phones-ins. Tiswas77(short for ‘Today Is Saturday
Watch and Smile’) had already started on ITV with its anarchic mix of sketches, cartoons,
competitions, film clips and pop promos
there were further US imports like Scooby Doo and Star Trek.
Many of these children’s programmes only had a few episodes recorded, for example the 1971
Mr Benn which had thirteen episodes of 15 minutes each. They were frequently repeated, and
because of short childhood attention spans and the lack of any means to record programmes,
most children did not really notice.
7) Food
Rising affluence meant that children had more pocket money to spend on snacks and treats.
Sugar rationing ended in 1953, and potatoes had already stopped being rationed. Supported
by TV advertising there were not just penny sweets from the local newsagent, sweet shop or
Woolworths’ ‘Pick ‘n’ Mix’ but an increasingly wide variety of snack products aimed at children:
•
•
•
sweets – Spangles78 alongside older sweets like Trebor Chews, Murray Mints,79 Mars and
Milky Way
crisps – Smiths80 (started in 1927) – initially crisps had to be salted by the person eating
them using salt in a little blue bag. Golden Wonder (1947) invented ready salted crisps and
in 1962 made the first properly flavoured crisps, ‘cheese and onion’ (Smiths responded with
salt and vinegar)
fizzy drinks – there were UK brand names like Tizer and Irn Bru,81 as well as more generic
drinks like cherryade and dandelion and burdock; they came bottled in the 1950s but more
often in ring pull cans from the early 1960s.
8) Youth organisations and awards
The Boys’ Brigade was set up in 1883 to promote ‘Christian manliness’ and the Girls’ Brigade
in 1893 to promote ‘a sense of responsibility’. Children made a commitment to religion and the
rejection of temptations like drinking and gambling. They wore a militaristic uniform until the 1970s
and had church parades on Sundays with drums and bugles. Both groups started to go into
decline in the 1950s and had lost a third of their members by 1979.
Sunday School had started in the 18th century to educate children working in factories one day
a week. Since state education had taken away the need to teach children to read and write,
Sunday Schools became more about promoting communal sports and other activities. Children
were taught in small groups about the Bible and youth clubs gave young people a chance to meet
outside of their homes, even though they were potentially dull because of adult supervision.
The Scouts were started for boys in 1907 to encourage an active and adventurous outdoor life
with its motto ‘be prepared’. Membership rose from 343,000 members in 1940 to 588,396 in 1960.
The titles for Tiswas may be seen at http://goo.gl/mL1VCw
A 1970s advert for Spangles may be seen at http://goo.gl/e4O30e
79
Four 1950s adverts for Murray Mints may be seen at http://goo.gl/96lS9D
80
Some 1960s adverts for Smiths crisps may be seen at http://goo.gl/fpTMgN
81
A 1970s advert for Irn Bru may be seen at http://goo.gl/a8OY0T
77
78
24
c.1951-1979: Part 4
Membership of the girls’ branch of the Scouts, the Guides (which started in 1910) also rose
from 400,236 in 1940 to 594,491 in 1960. Changes in the lives of teenagers saw the number
of Scouts and Guides decline slightly in the 1960s, but there were record numbers of their
younger age groups, the Cubs and Brownies, by the mid-1970s. The Scout movement
changed with the times. In the late 1960s ‘boy’ was dropped from ‘boy scouts’, hats and
shorts were replaced by berets and trousers, and new proficiencies were introduced like
parachute jumping.
There were also the more openly militaristic youth organisations. There had been Army
Cadet Corps and Sea Cadets since the nineteenth century. An Air Training Corps was set up
in 1941, and in 1940 an organisation to train girls that would eventually be called the Girls
Venture Corps was set up. These were very popular groups to be members of, and not just
in wartime as they continue to the present day. Most independent schools, and some state
schools, also had their own military training groups called a CCF (Combined Cadet Force)
which had started in 1948.
The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme started in 1956 for boys aged 15 to 18. It was
designed to attract boys who had not been interested in joining one of the main British youth
movements, such as the Scouts. There was no organisation to join and no uniform to wear. In
the first 12 months 7,000 boys had enrolled for the scheme. In 1958 The Duke of Edinburgh’s
Award was extended to girls. The programme for girls was not the same as that for boys, and
was for ages 14 to 20. The first Gold Awards were achieved in 1958, and a single programme
for young people aged 14 to 21 was launched in 1969.
Education
1) Primary school
The focus of primary school education was still the ‘3 Rs’ (reading, writing, arithmetic). In the
1960s the school building programme meant that the cold old classrooms, with formal rows
of wooden desks, were replaced with new centrally-heated classrooms, with infant-sized
chairs and tables. There could still be more than forty children in a class but this was much
less than it had been at the end of the war. Following the 1967 Plowden Report there was a
move to individual project work rather than traditional ‘chalk and talk’. Pupils were given
topics to explore rather than lists of facts to learn, and individual creativity was increasingly
encouraged.
Source 12: A primary school classroom in Wales in 1970
25
c.1951-1979: Part 4
2) Secondary school
During the 1940s education in the UK had been very confusing and patchy. The 1918
Education Act had raised the school leaving age to 14. The 1926 Haddow Committee
said that education should be split into primary and secondary schools. Because of a lack
of money, by 1938 some 36% of children were still being taught the old elementary
curriculum until they left school without qualifications aged 14.
The 1944 Butler Education Act set out to provide ‘secondary education for all’ by raising
the leaving age for state school pupils to 15, which was implemented in 1947. A tripartite
school system was then put in place with three different types of school:
•
•
•
grammar schools, for more academic children who took exams and would go on to
study in further education
secondary modern schools, for more practical children who left at 15 without
qualifications
technical schools for academically weak children, although very few of these were
ever built.
People referred to the quality of these different schools as ‘gold, silver and lead’, although
the intention was that each type of school would have equal status and access to resources.
The Act resulted in a substantial school-building and refurbishment programme. Spending on
education doubled between 1947 and 1958. On the other hand, by the 1960s the average
grammar school had three times the resources of a secondary modern and the pick of the
best teachers.
The 11-plus exam (or ‘scholarship test’) decided which school a child would go to. It was not
a completely reliable test – in the 1950s it was estimated that 60,000 students a year were
in the wrong school and they were transferred up or down. Linda Shanovitch,82 who went to
school in the early 1960s, remembered, ‘We’d been building up to it for ages. For years it had
been impressed upon us at school how important the whole thing was. I felt that if I didn’t get
through this exam and do well, then I would never do anything with my life’. Not everyone
saw going to a secondary modern as failure. TV personality Alan Titchmarsh remembered,
‘I never saw it as a failure, just a sort of natural selection process that made sure that
practically minded kids like me weren’t lumbered with six years of serious academic studies
that we’d never get to grips with’.83
By 1960 two-thirds of state-educated children went to secondary modern schools but many
came to see themselves as failures. It is easy to see why pupils felt like this. For example,
in 1964 only 318 pupils in the whole of the UK who had gone to secondary moderns were
entered for A Levels. It was a very divisive system as more middle-class than working-class
children benefitted from grammar schools. Studies started to show that IQ testing like the 11plus could be influenced by a pupil’s background and the ability of a family to afford coaching.
It could also split up children from the same family or friends from each other.
Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good (London, 2005), page 421, referenced from Miriam Akhtar and Steve
Humphries, The Fifties and Sixties: A Lifestyle Revolution (Boxtree, 2002), page 26.
83
Alan Titchmarsh, When I was a Nipper: The way we were in disappearing Britain (BBC Books, 2011), page 123.
82
26
c.1951-1979: Part 4
FOCUS: Examinations
To measure the progress of children’s education under the post-1944 new system, the first
national externally-set exams came into existence in 1951. The GCE (General Certificate of
Education) – Ordinary Level (‘O Level’) was taken at 16, and Advanced level (‘A Level’) was
taken at 18. These exams were usually only taken by pupils at grammar schools. Secondary
modern pupils and increasing numbers of comprehensive pupils could only take locally-offered
school certificates until the introduction of the national Certificate of Secondary Education
(‘CSE’) in 1965. CSE grade 1 was equivalent to O Level grade C. CSEs offered a wider range of
subjects, many of which were more practically-focussed like car maintenance. By the late 1970s
many comprehensive pupils were taking a mixture of GCEs and CSEs.
One of the other changes brought about by the 1944 Education Act was to give responsibility
for schools to newly-formed Local Education Authorities (LEAs). It was up to these LEAs to
decide how schools were to be organised and run. Some LEAs quickly decided that the tripartite
system was not the way they wanted to run their schools and some looked to an idea that was
working very well in other countries – the comprehensive school, where pupils of all abilities and
backgrounds worked together in the same school. In London a few experimental comprehensive
schools like Walworth were set up in 1946, and London’s first purpose-built comprehensive was
opened at Kidbrooke in 1954. On Anglesey, Holyhead Grammar and St Cybi Secondary school
were merged in 1949 to form the new comprehensive Ysgol Uwchradd Caergybi [Holyhead
County School] and Wales’ first purpose-built comprehensive was Ysgol Syr Thomas Jones which
opened in 1950. In 1952 Anglesey was the first LEA to go over to a completely comprehensive
system.
Source 13: Ysgol Syr Thomas Jones
Some areas went comprehensive because they had Labour controlled councils, like London.
Others realised that there were potential savings in being able to put all available resources into
one school rather than several different ones. There was pressure from parents of children who
‘failed’ the 11-plus; they were a lot more influential as they outnumbered parents of those who
passed. Other areas like Leicestershire in the 1950s and West Yorkshire in the 1960s avoided
having the 11-plus by reorganising their schools into primary (pupils aged 4 to 8), middle (pupils
aged 9 to 13) and high (pupils aged 14 to 18) schools. In some rural areas there were bilateral
schools where there was a grammar school stream and a secondary modern stream in the same
school. By 1964 one in ten children were educated in a comprehensive school, as opposed to one
in a hundred in 1951.
There was an increasingly heated debate about the advantages and disadvantages of the
grammar school system. The government’s 1963 Newsome Report suggested that the potential of
many children was not being tapped as those who went to secondary moderns had not been given
equal educational opportunities to those who passed the 11-plus. The debate continued on local
councils and in national newspapers:
27
c.1951-1979: Part 4
•
•
•
•
•
Arguments in favour of comprehensives
larger schools could offer a wider
curriculum
it would be fairer because there
would be no selection by exam
aged 11
equality of opportunity for all
families
children would not be
condemned as failures at 11
•
•
•
•
Arguments against comprehensives
standards would fall as the less able would
hold back brighter pupils
more able students would not be properly
stimulated
schools would become so large they would
become impersonal
large schools would be difficult to manage
and organise
people from a variety of
backgrounds would get to mix
together
The debate continued even after Labour’s election victory in 1964. Tony Crosland, Education
Secretary from 1965, allegedly said to his wife, Susan, “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to
destroy every ******* grammar school in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland”.84 Scotland
already had a separate education system. And yet Harold Wilson, Labour Prime Minister, had
promised in 1963 that grammar schools would be abolished ‘over my dead body’. He was a
former pupil of Wirral Grammar School. Eventually Wilson would justify Labour’s support for
comprehensives by saying that it would guarantee a ‘grammar school education for all’.
Crosland accelerated the process of turning schools into comprehensives. On 12 July 1965
Crosland issued Circular 10/65 to local education authorities, which said:
It is the Government’s declared objective to end selection at eleven plus and to eliminate separatism in secondary education... The Secretary of State accordingly requests local education authorities, if they have not already done so, to prepare and submit to him plans for reorganising secondary education in their areas on comprehensive lines.85
There was no legal requirement for LEAs to respond but many authorities did. In 1966 money
was made available for new school buildings, providing they were comprehensives. By 1970
only eight local authorities had not prepared plans for comprehensives. In the same year 1,145
comprehensive schools taught one-third of state-educated pupils.
Margaret Thatcher, the new Conservative Education Secretary, withdrew Crosland’s circular in
June 1970 but left the matter up to LEAs, who continued their comprehensive plans as they could
save money by merging boys and girls schools. By 1974 there were 2,000 comprehensive schools
which provided for two-thirds of state-educated children. Margaret Thatcher only rejected 326 out
of 3612 proposals to end selection. She also raised the school leaving age to 16 which came into
force in 1973. This meant another £48 million spend on new buildings.
84
85
28
c.1951-1979: Part 4
Labour returned to power in 1974 and once again insisted that plans for comprehensive systems
should be submitted. From 1976 they started to put pressure on the remaining grammar schools to
close. Having all state education in comprehensive schools was never a national policy, and it was
never the law that all schools had to become comprehensive which is why some grammar schools
and other selective schools continue to the present day.
The debate about comprehensives did not go away. The BBC started showing a realistic children’s
drama about life in a comprehensive school from 1978, called Grange Hill.86 It caused a lot of
controversy at the time because some of its storylines touched on sensitive subjects, and groups
like the Women’s Institute demanded it be taken off the air after just one episode. For example,
one of the first group of pupils shown in the drama was a character called Benny Green who was
a talented footballer, but he was also black and a constant victim of racism. His family were also
very poor and teachers were often singling him out for not having the correct equipment, or school
uniform or PE kit.
FOCUS: Corporal punishment87
Corporal punishment ranged from a smack or crack with a ruler on the back of the hand, a
board duster thrown at a pupil by a teacher, to being hit with a slipper, belt or cane for the most
serious offences. This was supposed to teach pupils not to break rules again. It was not the
pain but the humiliation that most pupils who were punished this way remembered. Corporal
punishment was not made illegal in state schools until 1986, and not in independent schools
until 1999. Some teachers had already started to stop using it in the 1960s. The Society of
Teachers Opposed to Physical Punishment (STOPP) was set up in 1968. STOPP lobbied
politicians to ban corporal punishment and helped families take cases against teachers and
schools to court.88 Teaching unions were increasingly against corporal punishment, although
headteachers continued to support it throughout the 1970s. It is still technically legal for children
to be physically punished by their parents.89
Source 14: Secondary school pupils protesting against corporal punishment
The first episode of Grange Hill may be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-ATrUuBHRs
A teacher briefly describes corporal punishment in schools on Stuart Maconie’s The People’s Songs http://goo.gl/
m3Ih3u
88
A BBC News story about one of these cases from 1979 is at http://goo.gl/4Caan0
89
This is still an issue to the present day http://goo.gl/UHFZ14
86
87
29
c.1951-1979: Part 4
3) University
In 1960 Lord Robbins was commissioned by the government to research into the provision of
higher education. There was widespread concern that the UK was not keeping up with other
countries’ student numbers, and that most university courses were arts-related rather than
scientific or technological. Robbins found that only 4% of people went to university and they were
mostly doing arts-related courses. He recommended a 100% increase in student numbers by 1970
and a 250% increase to 560,000 university students by 1980.
The changes made following the Robbins Report 1963 were as follows:
•
•
•
semi-university status was given to leading colleges of technology and science, which were
to be called ‘polytechnics’; their focus was more on teaching than research. The Council for
National Academic Awards was set up to award polytechnic degrees.
nine colleges of advanced technology became new universities e.g. the Royal College of
Science became Strathclyde University; more new universities were founded like York90
and Warwick
teacher training colleges were upgraded, renamed Colleges of Education and now offered
four-year degrees.
Source 15: Female students studying in the 1960s
90
A short film about the origins of York University may be seen here http://goo.gl/1im53L
30
c.1951-1979: Part 4
The results of these changes were:
•
•
•
•
by 1968 there were 30 polytechnics and 56 universities
new courses were introduced, e.g. town planning, architecture
opportunities were opened up to more people as students were supported by a local
authority grant which paid their living expenses
student numbers grew steadily – in 1970 there were 183,000 women and 274,000 men
studying in higher education, and by 1975 there were 214,000 women and 302,000 men.
There had been a huge improvement but there were still important issues to address:
•
•
•
top universities like Oxford and Cambridge were still dominated by public school pupils
polytechnics struggled for many years with substandard facilities
students were twice as likely to get a university place if they were male rather than female.
Changes in technology had made a new kind of university possible. It was called the ‘Open
University’ (OU) and it was set up by Labour in 1969, with the first students starting to study parttime courses in 1971. The OU used TV and radio to teach its students. Special programmes
were broadcast during the night, but students had to listen to them live as most had no way to
record them. There were other distance learning techniques as well, like essays sent in the post,
with tutors ringing up with feedback. It attracted many of the kind of people left out of traditional
academia – mature students, women, the socially disadvantaged, etc. By 1980 the Open
University had 70,000 students and was awarding more degrees than Oxford and Cambridge
universities combined.
Teenagers and the ‘generation gap’
1) The teenager
The term ‘teenager’ was first used in 1930s America as a way of identifying a particular age
group to be targeted by advertising. It came to be used in the UK in the 1950s. Before this people
thought that you were a child, and then you were an adult, without any transition in between.
Children were smaller versions of adults, expected to wear the same sorts of clothes, have the
same haircuts, and follow the same interests. However, from the 1950s onwards young people
were becoming a much more important influence in society. By 1960 some 40% of the UK
population was under the age of 25.
The teenagers of the 1950s were too young to remember the Depression of the 1930s, along with
the dangers and shortages of the Second World War and the austerity that followed. They were
growing up in a much more stable and prosperous world. They were healthier than young people
had ever been before as a result of the introduction of the welfare state. They were wealthier
because full employment gave their parents job security and higher wages.
31
c.1951-1979: Part 4
It was not just because of their parents that young people were becoming more affluent:
•
•
•
•
•
•
they found it easier to get part-time or weekend jobs
they could look forward to being able to have a job and earn decent wages when they left
school aged 15
technological advances meant that there was a lot of demand for unskilled labour so young
people could avoid having to do poorly paid apprenticeships
working-class teenagers were no longer expected to put their earnings into the family
budget as their parents’ wages were much better
teenagers were still young enough to be living at home which left them with more of their
wages to spend on themselves
from 1960 young men could earn a decent wage sooner because they no longer had to do
National Service, which had required all 18-year-old men to spend two years in the armed
forces, and four years in the reserves.
Research carried out between 1959 and 1961 showed that young people had on average £8 a
week to spend, which meant that they accounted for 10% of the UK’s total national income. They
spent half of this on entertainment – young people made up one-third of cinema admissions and
two-fifths of the sales of records and record players.
FOCUS: Teenage fashion and
Carnaby Street
By the early 1960s, teenagers had become a very important group of consumers. By 1967
half of women’s clothes made in Britain were sold to women aged 15 to 19. Fashion began
to change very quickly as clothes were increasingly made to be disposable rather than to be
kept. Fashion became brighter and more experimental as technological developments led to
new materials like PVC plastic, nylon, polyester and acrylic which were all cheaper, as well as
being easier to shape and colour. Designers like Mary Quant, with her chain of boutiques, had
a lot of influence over these new fashions, introducing bold new ideas like the mini skirt. These
new fashions were popularised by models like Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton. Fashion became
a very important British industry, centred around Carnaby Street in London. There were also
shops associated with particular subcultures – mods would buy sharp designer suits from John
Stephen, while hippies would buy vintage military jackets from I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet.
2) The generation gap
Differences in fashion became a visible sign of the generation gap. In clothing it was
developments like shorter skirts for girls, while longer hair styles were more acceptable for boys.
The extremes of these 1960s’ differences in fashion are satirized in the song ‘Dedicated Follower
of Fashion’91 (1966) by The Kinks.
91
A live performance of this song by The Kinks (with audience participation) may be seen at http://goo.gl/8GYiKg
32
c.1951-1979: Part 4
There was a wide range of issues where younger and older generations had different views:
•
•
•
•
•
pop music and pop idols which changed with every new generation of young people
changing attitudes towards sex, challenging religious views about sex before marriage,
making use of modern contraception
taking drugs, with cannabis smoking and LSD popularised by bands like The Beatles and
The Rolling Stones
political views like supporting equality for women, sympathy for immigrants, anger at the
Vietnam War
less trust for the Establishment because of political scandals.
Young people in the 1950s and 1960s had more independence from their parents than any
generation of young people before them. They were better educated and more financially secure,
so they could more confidently assert their right to question things and to make their own choices.
More and more middle-class children in particular were leaving school at 16 or staying on to
university which was now paid for by state grants. Between 1961 and 1969 the number of full time
students in further education increased from 200,000 to 390,000. As young people were spending
longer in education they felt less need to focus on work and earning money which had been very
important to their parents’ generation. They had more time, more independence and could focus
more on developing their own distinct identity.
Young people even had their own places to go to and spend their time with other young people.
Coffee bars like the 2is in Soho, El Toro in Muswell Hill or the Kardomah in Liverpool became
meeting places for teenagers as pub landlords would throw out underage drinkers. Coffee bars
had jukeboxes full of the latest music from America and sometimes even featured live music
performances. Wimpy burger bars also became places where young people would meet together.
The generation gap was not just about specific ideas but also a different view of the world. The
older generation had been brought up in an age of war and austerity, while the younger generation
had been brought up in a time of affluence. The ideas of duty, respectability and obeying orders
seemed less important to young people who had not fought in a war or done National Service.
In the 1960s these opposite views about many important issues led to the interests of younger
people being described as a counter-culture. These differences between young and old are
explored in the song ‘My Generation’ (1965) by The Who,92 which opens with the line ‘People try to
put us down’.
Elisabeth Tailor, a British teenager during the 1960s, recollected the time as follows:
As a sixteen year old, my parents forbade me to go out alone with a boy, to ride on the back
of a motor scooter, to drink [alcohol] or to go to a club where the Rolling Stones played.
So one night I deliberately broke every one of their rules. There was a sense that we were
going to do things our way, and that there were a lot of us who rejected not just our individual
parents but what their values represented.93
92
93
A video compilation of the band’s performances of this song may be seen at http://goo.gl/Ky0MTS
33
c.1951-1979: Part 4
3) Teenage deliquency
According to a letter in the Daily Mail newspaper in October 1949:
Teenagers are pampered with high wages, first-class working conditions and excellent
facilities in education. Their outlook is centred in trashy books and films. The boys are
hoodlums in embryo, defiant and uncouth, while the girls are brazen and unrefined.94
Young people growing up in the 1950s and 1960s had a lot more leisure time because:
•
•
•
•
•
housework was less time-consuming because of labour-saving devices
from 1960 young men did not have to do National Service
trade unions had made sure jobs had reasonable working hours
as the school leaving age was raised there were school holidays for those still in education
there were guaranteed paid holidays for those in work
However, more leisure time and more money did not necessarily make young people happy. It
could mean lots more time with nothing constructive to do and more boredom.
Source 16: Teddy boys in the 1950s
In the early 1950s the teddy boys were demonised by the older generation. They were banned
from dance halls and pubs, accused of rival gang fights and of attacking youth clubs that would
not let them in. The American teen film Blackboard Jungle (1955) was about a temporary teacher
being given a bad time by difficult teenage pupils, and Rock Around The Clock (1956) was a
musical vehicle for Bill Haley and the Comets. British teenagers vandalised their seats when these
films were shown in UK cinemas – these incidents were blamed on the teddy boys and many
towns banned cinemas from showing Rock Around The Clock.
94
34
c.1951-1979: Part 4
FOCUS: The impact of
American Culture
One of the fears that adults had about the changing lives of British teenagers was the increasing
influence of American culture – ‘Are We Turning Our Children Into Little Americans?’ was the
1957 headline in Everybody’s Weekly magazine.95 American influence began with US armed
forces stationed in the UK during the war. British people knew a lot about the USA already
through Hollywood films. American influences amongst 1950s British teenagers may be seen in:
•
•
•
Teddy boys’ sideburns and neckties which were taken from the image of gamblers in
Westerns, and their long coats were based on the ‘zoot suits’ of off-duty US service
personnel
American jukeboxes would be used for listening to rock ‘n’ roll records in US-style milk
bars
the rockers who came along in the later 1950s and who were influenced by a new
generation of US rock ‘n’ rollers like leather-clad Gene Vincent or film stars like biker
Marlon Brando in The Wild One.
Not all teenagers were so obviously influenced by American culture. The mods were more
influenced by European style and fashion, hanging out in Italian coffee bars, although they did
listen to soul music and modern jazz. Musically, British performers like Cliff Richard and Tommy
Steele imitated Elvis Presley, but quickly became far more popular than middle-aged Bill Haley
had been. The British beat groups of the 1960s took their inspiration from American rock ‘n’ roll
and blues music, but combined them with more traditional British music like skiffle and music
hall.
By 1964 Americans were starting to worry about the impact of a ‘British Invasion’ on their
teenagers. In the end there was a sympathetic relationship between the USA and the UK.
American garage and punk bands like Iggy and the Stooges, New York Dolls and the MC5 were
influenced by 1960s British music but influenced the British punk movement themselves in the
1970s.
Successive generations of teenagers came to be seen by older people as hooligans and
delinquents. The 1950s and 1960s did see a rise in reported crimes, and many of these were
blamed on young people. Between 1955 and 1961 the number of boys aged 14 to 21 who
were convicted of serious offences doubled, even though the overall number of young people
involved in crime was still very low. The Albermarle Report 1960 was commissioned by the
government because of concerns over a growing youth problem, but it concluded that most
young people were not cynical or disrespectful. Young people were far more likely to smoke
tobacco, and drink coffee and alcohol than they were to be taking LSD.
Newspapers continued to publish extreme stories like the Bank Holiday clashes between
teenage mods and rockers in 1964, although they did make things seem much worse than they
were in reality. According to the popular newspaper The Daily Mirror:
95
Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good (London, 2005), page 437.
35
c.1951-1979: Part 4
The Wild Ones [gangs of mods and rockers] invaded a seaside town [Clacton] yesterday –
1,000 fighting, drinking, roaring rampaging teenagers on scooters and motor cycles... Leather-jacketed youths and girls attacked people in the street, turned over parked cars,
broke into beach huts, smashed windows and fought with rival gangs.96
Source 17: Rockers in the 1960s97
Media hysteria turned public opinion against these youth groups even though much of what
was reported was exaggeration or fabrication. It was more petty acts of vandalism by bored
teenagers whose tempers tended to blow up as a result of heavy-handed policing.
FOCUS: Reducing the voting
age
However much young people were demonised in the press, politicians took a different view. The
Representation of the People Act 1969 reduced the voting age to 18 from 21. Labour had been
promising to do this since their 1966 election manifesto, ‘to add a necessary political dimension
to the increasingly important economic and social position of young people’.98 A parliamentary
investigation into lowering the voting age had been started in the early 1960s and had already
recommended lowering the voting age to 20. Labour chose 18 because that was the age that
people could get married and fight for the country. It was when people became full citizens, so
that should be the age at which they could vote.
Supporters of this also argued that young people would benefit from being more directly
involved in the political process and would feel much less alienated from political decisions.
Most Conservative MPs voted against it, but it did bring the UK into line with most other
advanced industrial countries. The General Election 1970 was the first time that 18-year-olds
could vote. Some went to vote on the way to school to take their A Levels.
Many young people did become increasingly disenchanted in the 1970s. Since the Second World
War there had been full employment, jobs for everyone that wanted one. As the UK economy
began to struggle at the start of the 1970s, unemployment began to rise. By 1977 there were
252,328 people under the age of 20 out of work. This was three times more than it had been in
the 1960s. By 1979, four out of ten young people under the age of 25 were out of work. As the
From The Daily Mirror, 30 March 1964, as quoted in Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat – A History of Britain in the
Swinging Sixties (London, 2006), page 203.
97
See http://goo.gl/oV4djY/ where there is also a 45 minute programme about mods and rockers.
98
This is quoted from the 1966 Labour Party Manifesto found at http://goo.gl/iIdDPU
96
36
c.1951-1979: Part 4
Sex Pistols sang in ‘God Save The Queen’ it looked as if they had ‘no future’. Some of these bored
unemployed youths were attracted to the violent and nihilistic punk movement. As a Daily Mirror
editorial from June 1977 called ‘Punk Future’99 put it:
It’s not much fun being young today... 104,000 school leavers have gone straight from their
classrooms to an idle and purposeless life on the dole... Is it any wonder that youngsters
feel disillusioned and betrayed? Is it any wonder they turn to anarchistic heroes like Johnny
Rotten?... Punk rock is tailor made for youngsters who think they only have a punk future.
Source 18: Two punks in London
Sometimes the frustrations of young men in the 1970s also spilled over into hooliganism. There
were several notorious examples of this:
•
•
•
in 1975 Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea fans fought on the pitch at the end of a match100
at the 1977 Home International football match at Wembley between England and Scotland,
Scotland won 2-1 and Scottish fans poured onto the pitch, damaging the goal posts101
fighting broke out in the terraces between fans at the 1978 FA Cup quarter final between
Millwall and Ipswich and dozens of people were injured.
Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun (London, 2012), page 556.
This incident may be seen at http://goo.gl/xnGa49
101
The pitch invasion may be seen at http://goo.gl/fcz7cA
99
100
37
c.1951-1979: Part 4
4) Teenage subcultures
There were a number of distinct teenage subcultures between 1951 and 1979. None of these
groups dominated at any time and many young people did not see themselves as belonging to any
of these groups.
TEDDY BOYS102
Beginning in the early 1950s, they wore
Edwardian-styled outfits which gave them
their name (‘teddy’ is a shortened version
of ‘Edward’). Compared to other youth
subcultures they were well-dressed with
their long colourful ‘Drape’ jackets, drainpipe
trousers and crepe-soled shoes called
‘brothel creepers’. They had longer than
usual greased hair, with a quiff on top and
the DA [duck’s arse] parting at the back. The
‘teds’ listened to earlier rock ‘n’ roll records
by singers like Bill Haley. They were widely
blamed for the teenage vandalism that
happened in cinemas during showings of
Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Rock Around
The Clock (1956).
MODS104
Originating in the early 1960s the ‘mods’
were named after their preference for
‘modern’ rather than ‘traditional’ jazz. Mods
had a much smarter sense of style than
other groups like the rockers. They wore
very smart, Italian collarless jackets, parkas,
drainpipe trousers, polo shirts or turtle neck
sweaters with suede shoes. Their wellgroomed hairstyles, like pudding basin cuts,
were very influential in the look of the early
Beatles. As well as listening to ‘cool’ modern
jazz music, the mods also liked new rock
bands like The Who and the Small Faces, as
well as having an interest in black American
Rhythm & Blues and soul music. As well as
their distinctive clothing, mods would also be
seen out riding scooters, especially Italian
makes like Vespas and Lambrettas.
ROCKERS103
Later in the 1950s the teddy boys lost popularity
amongst teenagers. The rockers took over, riding
motorbikes (like the British-made Nortons), while
wearing leathers and travelling around in gangs
to meet up at roadside cafes. Compared to the
‘teds’ the rockers were much more scruffy with
their leather jackets, dirty jeans, t-shirts, vests and
boots. They were inspired by American gangs like
the Hells Angels and the bikers in the film The Wild
One (1953), led by Marlon Brando. The rockers
listened to a newer generation of rock ‘n’ roll stars
like Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran.
HIPPIES105
Their name was taken from the black American
slang ‘hipster’. The ‘hippie’ idea had come over
from the USA in the summer of 1967. Hippies
wore more natural clothing like shaggy Afghan
coats, with very long and often unwashed hair.
They dropped out of traditional society, supported
environmentalism, drug-taking and free love.
They took drugs like cannabis and LSD to try to find
spiritual enlightenment, and were fascinated with
‘oriental’ mysticism. Hippies listened to psychedelic
music to replicate drug trips. Bands like Pink Floyd
and Procul Harem were soon joined by more
established bands taking on the hippy sound like
The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band album.
A good summary of teddy boys may be found in a short film which may be seen at http://goo.gl/RYK8n4
A rocker describes antipathy to mods http://goo.gl/gDzP8m and the UK rocker chapter of the Hells Angels may be
seen at http://goo.gl/uy7DfI
104
The mod style is described on Stuart Maconie’s The People’s Songs http://goo.gl/IkqKfp and at http://goo.gl/Xrfy1a
105
A BBC Learning Zone clip about hippies may be seen at http://goo.gl/u61kEW
102
103
38
c.1951-1979: Part 4
SKINHEADS106
Beginning in the later 1960s skinheads were
a working-class version of the mods. They
had closely cropped hairstyles and wore
braces, Ben Sherman shirts, rolled-up jeans
and Dr Marten boots. For many skinheads
it was a very macho response to the more
effeminate hippy movement. They listened
to ska music which was influenced by the
West Indian reggae of artists like Desmond
Dekker. The 2 Tone record label of the 1970s
made ska become more popular with music
from bands like The Specials. By the 1970s
some skinheads fought at football matches
and some would go on to become involved in
racially-motivated violence. As one skinhead
said, “What are we for? Nothing really”.107
PUNKS108
The name ‘punk’ is American slang for an
inexperienced youth. These 1970s youths were
very aggressive. They dressed in ways that
deliberately upset people, wearing bondage gear,
dog collars, Nazi emblems, pins, studs, zips and
leather. Their hairstyles were usually brightly
coloured – cropped very short for girls, and spikey
or in mohicans for boys. Punks deliberately gave off
a sense of disgust and menace in their dress and
attitude. They also did this in the ways they enjoyed
themselves – ‘pogo-ing’ up and down to live music,
spitting and fighting. Punks were very provocative,
but gave equal importance to male and female
artists – bands like The Slits and The Banshees
had female lead singers and musicians.
A short film containing a good summary of skinheads may be seen at http://goo.gl/dLVA2n
Alwyn W. Turner, Crisis? What crisis? Britain in the 1970s (Aurum, 2008), page 62.
108
A short film containing a good short piece on punks may be seen at http://goo.gl/WI9jvr
106
107
39
c.1951-1979: Part 4
Glossary
juvenile delinquency
professional jobs
nuclear family
social stigma
cohabitation
teenage crime
highly qualified, well paid
husband, wife, children
disapproval by other people
living together
illegitimate births
sexist attitudes
where parents are not married
discriminating against women because of their
gender
promoting women’s equality to men
a word usually meaning men who have been
castrated
for boys and girls
the teacher standing at the front of the class saying
and writing on the board what pupils need to put in
their book
primary
three part
punishing a child by inflicting physical pain
private schools you had to pay to go to
differences in attitudes between younger and older
people
the older and more privileged people who ran the
country
against the culture of their parents
rejecting religious and moral principles and
believing that there is no meaning to life
fighting and displays of violence in public
groups of young people with similar interests
having sex with whoever you wanted without formal
relationships
feminism
eunuchs
unisex
chalk and talk
elementary
tripartite
corporal punishment
public school
generation gap
the Establishment
counter-culture
nihilistic
hooliganism
teenage subcultures
free love
40
c.1951-1979: Part 4
Recommended materials
VIDEO:
‘1960s – the Me generation’ in the Landmarks school series
Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain: episode 2 ‘The Land of Lost Content’
These films are available on DVD:
Made in Dagenham
Quadrophenia
READING:
Colin P. F. Hughes, Catrin Stevens and R. Paul Evans, The Changing Role and Status of Women
during the 20th Century (Aberystwyth, 2012).
Acknowledgements
Source 1: © Wikimedia http://goo.gl/E5vRIi
Source 2: © MARKA Alamy
Source 5: © Getty images
Source 7: © Wikimedia http://goo.gl/FwtXvz
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This resource is provided to support the teaching and learning of GCSE History. The materials
provide an introduction to the main concepts of the topic and should be used in conjunction with
other resources and sound classroom teaching.

Austerity, Affluence and Discontent in the United Kingdom, .1951-1979

Transcription

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