The Right to Roam
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What would you say the main differences were between your average British street today and its equivalent of 30-40-50 years ago? Well, there’s probably more traffic on the roads, that’s a fair bet; and the air’s perhaps a little cleaner now there aren’t so many chimneys pumping toxic aromas into the atmosphere; stray dogs aren’t as prevalent anymore and neither is that curious cream shade of the calling-card they used to leave behind for the unsuspecting Cuban heel. But to see the key change in the Great British street scene over the past half-century, simply watch any location footage from a TV drama or sitcom filmed in the 1970s, or alternately, watch any Ealing movie from the 1950s; it really is quite blatant: there are always un-chaperoned children in shot.
Scruffy ragamuffins crawling over bombsites are something of a cliché when it comes to immediate post-war British cinema, and whilst it’s possible directors inserted these snotty-nosed urchins in there because that’s what the audience expected from a street scene, the routine whimsy one associates with Ealing certainly isn’t present in the likes of 1949’s ‘The Blue Lamp’, a landmark crime drama rooted in the wartime documentary realism school and therefore attempting to reflect reality as it was. A key moment pointing towards the plot resolution concerns the discovery of a murder weapon by a little girl who belongs to a pre-pubescent mob running wild through the flattened landscape of Paddington. But one doesn’t have to travel back as far as Ealing; as recent as the turn-of-the 80s, an episode of that brilliantly hilarious testosterone-manifesto, ‘The Professionals’, will occasionally feature Bodie or Doyle encountering Chopper-riding latchkey kids with nary a parent in sight. So, at what point did children without shackles vanish from our streets? If you don’t have children (and I don’t), perhaps it’s not really an issue one takes much notice of; it only ever becomes something one notices when the aforementioned portals to the past are breached.
I was a child from the beginning of the 1970s to the end; my dad, being of the ‘Ealing generation’, would often drone on about how he would disappear at the dawn of each day in the school summer holidays and his mother would have no notion of his whereabouts until he reappeared when she called out to inform him his dinner was ready. But with the benefit of hindsight, I now realise my summer holiday experience was remarkably similar. The great lost sound of neighbourhoods up and down the country is the sound of mothers calling their children in for dinner, reaching out across the rooftops like an oral umbilical cord; it was as though mothers then, denied the technological advances that now enable them to track their offspring with such precision that the kids may as well be wearing tags designed for criminals, possessed an inbuilt radar system that provided them with the knowledge their message would reach its intended target, however far from home that target wandered. And it – I – would often wander very far from home indeed.
My first two-wheeled bike was the great liberation; motorists regularly refer to their inaugural car as such, but I’ve never owned a car, and for me that role was filled by my bike. Suddenly, my geographical horizons expanded tenfold; me and the boy-next-door would wait until the credits rolled on the daily instalment of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and then we’d be away, whizzing through our manor like a couple of infantile Hell’s Angels, daring each other to nick a comic from the bag the local paper-girl had slung over her shoulder (I once managed it as well!). We’d skirt the very fringes of our territory, so far from our respective homes that it would have taken our mothers the best part of half-an-hour to track us down on foot. We’d blitz the shops (much to the chagrin of the unsmiling proprietors-in-cardigans who hardly welcomed our custom), transform local woods and waste-ground into our own private scrambling track, sometimes join a bunch of other kids we half-recognised from school in a ‘jumpers-for-goalposts’ game of football, climb (and fall) from trees, run riot around empty building sites, clambering over the huge diggers, shinning down scaffolding holding up half-completed houses or simply leap from the first floor windows into a sandpit; equally, we’d explore the other end of the housing market, turning one of the many terraced estates in the process of demolition surrounding us into a WWII-themed adventure playground. And we couldn’t have had so much unbridled bloody fun if a) we hadn’t had our own personal transport and b) our mothers hadn’t accepted their children had the right to roam.
Naturally, we had the ‘don’t talk to strangers’ mantra drilled into us, but we would routinely engage in conversation with adults we didn’t know because they would innocently engage us in conversation. They weren’t scared of doing so. I remember moving house aged seven and forgetting my way home from school during my first week; I asked an old man for directions and he practically walked me to the end of my street. I had no idea who he was and he never touched me inappropriately. Anyway, other kids were far more terrifying than adults, forever challenging me to a fight as a means of introduction, making the turning of any corner a potential stroll into an amateur boxing ring; I wasn’t the sort of little boy who actively sought fisticuffs, but I always seemed to encounter them. Yet, funnily enough, I don’t recall any public information films warning me about the casual violence of my contemporaries. Regular punch-ups seemed to be the only price of childhood freedom, but we paid it gladly.
However, at some point towards the end of the 2oth century, the shedding of traditional English reserve and the sudden willingness to discuss everything in the open via the imported Oprah Winfrey fashion turned the comparatively rare crime of child abduction – hardly a newfangled fad – into an apparently omnipotent threat, not only diverting police resources away from more commonplace criminal acts, but elevating the local neighbourhood pervert (one every parent had always sensibly advised their children to steer clear of) to virtual celebrity status – hiding in plain sight, as they say. Paedogeddon was underway as Fleet St and the mainstream media convinced the families of Britain that their towns harboured a Terracotta Army of clandestine deviants, ones who had lain in suspended animation for centuries before being stirred into life by the electronic impulses transmitted from the internet. And the most visible, not to say saddest, legacy of this moral panic has been the disappearance of un-chaperoned children from our streets, their right to roam revoked by parents who had once enjoyed that right themselves but are prepared to deny it to their own children because the ‘popularity’ of paedophilia has rendered every stranger a potential child-catcher. Children have become victims of a twenty-four hour curfew.
Of course, high-visibility parent-free children can still be seen in working-class neighbourhoods, usually in packs and clad in school uniforms at home-time; but the anxious drivers of the 4×4 family taxi have conspired to turn their children into bizarre beings that are both delicate china dolls wrapped in cotton wool and conceited little kings and queens who believe the world revolves around their every whim, wielding unchallenged emotional and legal superiority over parents, teachers and strangers alike, secure in the knowledge that nobody can lay a finger on them. Ironically, the only right they have no access to is the only one that really should be theirs for the duration of their childhoods, the right to roam. Yes, we all know there are a few perverts out there and children need to be made aware of this; but equally, parents need to invest their offspring with some intelligence and common sense. Otherwise, we will end up with a generation of socially inept teenagers incapable of progressing beyond puberty and…oh, I forgot. We’re already there.
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September 9, 2014 at 10:31 am -
The bicycle was my childhood best friend.
I can still recall the joy I felt as one of the stabilisers on my hand-me-down Raleigh Dido sheared off and I found I could balance on one – and that when my Dad removed the other one I could balance on two wheels. The joy at the brand new blue Raleigh Boxer for my 6th birthday in 1979 – many hours spent tonking around the housing estate but never crossing the by-pass for fear of being “run over” (my old man being a traffic cop, and me being burdened of being his eldest child). The red Raleigh Grifter I got just prior to my eight birthday (he’d found a buyer for the Boxer) with it’s accessory – a speedometer! The freedom it gave me, to travel to and from my grandparents’ at will, to adventure around the extended neighbourhood (never daring to cross those forbidden ‘busy roads’). If I was ever without my bike, I felt caged and shackled. I got put in Summer nursery in 1980, and couldn’t stand it – all I wanted to do was listen to music, play with my toy cars and ride on my bike. It was torture not being able to. If I had those, I would amuse myself all day every day.
We even had a ‘bad man’ in the area – a barber on the main road. I was told ‘never go there’, so I didn’t – no pitchforks, no burning cross. Just a simple instruction I obeyed without question. (Mind you, ask my old man about that now, and he hasn’t a clue – completely forgotten. Perhaps he was just a ‘shirt lifter’ they had some intelligence on? This was the back end of the 1970’s after all)
Later on the Grifter became a 21″ frame Sun Solo and ‘my area’ became wider until I could go practically anywhere. Hell, I even went my against my Dad’s instructions and cycled 5 miles into town when I was 10 to get some window stickers from the brand new ‘Viking Radio’ station HQ. (Having said that, my best friend did get beaten up in broad daylight in town a few weeks later, thereby confirming to my father that I should never go there again – took me 3 more years before I go record shopping on my own or with a mate)-
September 9, 2014 at 10:59 am -
Was the Grifter the bike that had ‘gears’ on it? A boy on our street rode one of those – in a rather smug manner, it has to be said!
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September 9, 2014 at 11:08 am -
Yes – just three ‘Sturmey Archer’ mind, you’d twist the right hand handle-bar just like a motorbike. Indestructible – and, albeit almost 30 year unused ‘still with us’ (hung up in my dads garage) along with a second one I bought later on purely for paper rounds for £20 – they weighed a ton, but were indestructible, and the rigours of that job had already done for a £15 purple Chopper (fnar fnar)
Which brings me to the perils of ‘other kids’ – I can remember being chased on it by scoundrels, and even being pushed off it down ‘snickets’ a few times – even had a couple of snot-nosed bullies threatening to pelt it with bricks. Never had a problem with adults though!
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September 9, 2014 at 10:32 am -
I remember many happy adventures on the “debris” at the bottom of our street in East London in the late forties. We’d be around six to eight years of age. We thought “Debry” was the name of the place. No one ever accosted us and in any case, if offered a sweet by a stranger, we would have run for our lives, having been told tales of people poisoning children with confectionary.
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September 9, 2014 at 10:53 am -
One big difference, you had a bike, and you could leave it outside the house, or the shop, completely unchained, and be 99,9% sure it would be still there when you came out.
Now, it will be in Poland before you can ask for a bag of Bulls eyes.
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September 9, 2014 at 10:57 am -
During the war from when I was aged about 7 onwards, I had to walk to school, about a mile through outer suburbia. The instructions to all pupils were that if the air-raid sirens sounded, we were to knock on the door of the nearest house and ask if we could share their shelter. Was the assumption that all the “nasty” people had gone to war, or was the risk from them considered to be less than that from bombs?
After the war, now at Grammar School, I went everywhere on my bike if it was within a range of 10-15miles. This went on until I was about 25 when I got my first car. -
September 9, 2014 at 11:00 am -
It is traffic that caused this. I became a father in the mid-80’s and my child would spend all day in a local park, with other kids; but even though we lived at the time on a cul-de-sac style estate we issued strict instructions NOT to leave the park alone. I remember one heart-stopping day when the eldest cycled off in front of me through some neighbouring open countryside and unexpectedly did not wait for me at the next road, but had evidently gone across and there were more roads to come. My heart was in my mouth. When I was a kid reaching 40mph on a long stretch in my dad’s Vauxhall was a huge adventure; byt the mid-80’s red Escorts were reaching 60mph in my cul-de-sac.
It may be that the existential threat of the Child Snatcher is our way of telling ourselves that this prison for our own children that our thirst for cars has created is not our own fault. The need for speed has created the need for paed, perhaps so we don’t have to give up our precious tins on wheels because we love them even more than we love our kids.
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September 10, 2014 at 3:53 am -
Moor,
That’s a lovely insight. Of course, other than the physical danger posed by the car (being run over), it also removes people from the immediate environment (fewer people just out and about to say hello, and be aware of what’s going on), and provides the means for means for kidnapping – a man in a car offering sweets to passing children seems much more dangerous than one on foot (the car *is* the child snatcher)!I suppose I’m just forgetting how important the car is to almost everything we do, but vehicles do seem to play a big part in many of the accusations against ageing/dead celebrities – he tried to grab me before I got out of the car; he offered to take us all for a drive; I was sent to wash his car; he offered me a lift home; he had a Bentley/Roller/sports car (at a time when car ownership was less common).
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September 11, 2014 at 12:11 pm -
“Despite the rise in the number of drivers … there was a 70% fall in [traffic-related] deaths among infants and children, from 66 in 1960 to 20 in 2009.” http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24835192
Other reports showing a fall in the number of deaths of children in traffic explicitly suggest that it’s indeed because they no longer roam as freely.
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September 11, 2014 at 2:50 pm -
I remember that when crossing the road, we were advised never to do so between parked cars, but to walk to the next piece of clear road. That would mean children could only safely cross the road at a motorway nowadays. Look Right. Look Left Left. Look Right again, Then run like hell.
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September 9, 2014 at 11:03 am -
I wasn’t the sort of little boy who actively sought fisticuffs,
Now I have heard tell of a boy named Sue –but never one called Petunia —or have I (as I too often do) simply made wrong presumptions? -
September 9, 2014 at 11:24 am -
Beautiful, beautiful,beautiful, just beautiful…….!
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September 9, 2014 at 11:28 am -
Praise indeed!
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September 9, 2014 at 12:07 pm -
Has the penny has dropped ? —in my case as it usually drops markedly slower than for everyone else or does the machine need a further shake by the Raccoon and the Winegum for it to get there?
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September 9, 2014 at 6:19 pm -
yes/no, uh?
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September 9, 2014 at 11:47 am -
I have often ‘droned on’ about the free roaming childhood we had during WW2 and after. I feel deep concern for children these days. They can no longer organise their own play rituals. Mum and dad are forced to pay gross money to get in any local attraction. They can travel to legoland, and the like, to find entertainment, then queue to use various attractions. Guzzle fattening treats or sit on a bench playing with their mobile! The boys can run about in shops irritating other shoppers. Slightly older girls roam in bunches….speciality is shrieking and screaming and texting to their mum to say where they are every few minutes. Otherwise the deserted streets are strangely soothing. No ropes turning, hopscotch, rounders, french cricket, marbles or girls seeing how many times they could hand on cats cradle. Leap frog with no helmet or elbow pads…tut tut. Our mum took us to Belle Vue or Ferry across the Mersey after a mucky steam train trip to Liverpool. A bus service might take us to Chester Zoo, with mum, when it was up and running after the war. So mums did take us around on visits to accessible entertainments. By the way we knew nothing whatsoever about s*x until a goodly age. None the worse for that either. We could run very fast too, as we were so fit from all the mischief we got up to.
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September 9, 2014 at 12:03 pm -
There’s a super little story by JG Ballard where a man is arrested because he is walking in the streets alone at night. He wrote it in 1951.
http://mikejmoran.typepad.com/files/pedestrian-by-bradbury-1.pdf-
September 9, 2014 at 12:04 pm -
oops… I meant Ray Bradbury.
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September 9, 2014 at 12:12 pm -
It is strange. I grew up in the 70s (Born 60, so before 10 years old I do not really count it).
In the 80s, I started meeting teenagers that had NEVER been to the beach!
O.K, so what? Because we lived a mere half hours walk away from New-Brighton, THAT is why I am astonished.
90s. 15 and 16 year olds living in Bathgate, that had NEVER seen Edinburgh! Never seen more than three trees in a gang. We lived LITERALY over a fence from woods and fields that went from Bathgate to Linlithgow, and to South Queensferry Eastwards, and they had NEVER jumped that fence to go and have a look! (Look it up on google maps/sattelite, you will see what I mean.)
It seems the more the world opens up, the more the youngsters close down.
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September 9, 2014 at 2:44 pm -
If you want to see where we are heading, read “The Machine Stops” by E M Forster. In this story, written a century ago, he depicts a future in which everyone lives alone in their own underground cells, and all communication is through the Internet.
It is on the web somewhere.
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September 9, 2014 at 3:28 pm -
I remember that story being read to us when I was in junior school in 1968-ish.
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September 10, 2014 at 12:00 pm -
The 1960s BBC adaptation is out on DVD next month.
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September 9, 2014 at 12:13 pm -
Ah memories of my first shiny racer bike, and setting off for adventures..
What I remember most though is the smell of crushed brick. My family decamped from leafy Surrey to go back and live with my maternal grandmother in a terraced house in a Lancashire cotton town – whilst they looked for a house. They Council were slowly clearing the ranks of little houses, getting ready to replace with with concrete and cardboard monstrosities such as my granny was subsequently allocated. There were lots of diggers such left parked around. I vividly remember scrambling over the piles of rubble and the smell of brick dust, and the older lads trying to get into the diggers. Later on, as we moved into a new house, the endless games of street football, or football in the cobbled ginnels between houses. often using a telegraph pole as one post.
One other point. We all ate fish and chips and drank pop. We liked sweets. Nobody was fat.-
September 9, 2014 at 12:18 pm -
‘One other point. We all ate fish and chips and drank pop. We liked sweets. Nobody was fat.’
Must be because we burned it all off!-
September 9, 2014 at 7:05 pm -
“We all ate fish and chips …” out of real newspapers.
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September 9, 2014 at 8:37 pm -
We did. But what we did not eat was pizza, fast food, or much processed food
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September 9, 2014 at 12:24 pm -
That was a fine piece of writing – very evocative. As a child of the 70s in Northern Ireland, I can assure you urchins were still scrambling over freshly-created bomb sites in Belfast, at least, and a remarkably fearless bunch they were – given that they had a good deal to be afraid of,as did their poor parents. Looking back on it, what strikes me is how bizarrely adjusted the average family was to the reality of a very dangerous and unpredictable environment. One of my earliest memories is of that classic from old films – the sound of a car backfiring on a busy street – at which point, every adult hit the pavement, pushing their kids underneath them. We thought it was hilarious: a new game. Only the look of whey-faced terror from a young soldier at a check-point made me realise that this wasn’t just funny grown-up behaviour.
Now a whole generation had similar experiences and worse within living memory inside the borders of the UK, not Somalia or Bosnia, and while I don’t recommend it as an ideal start of life, I sometimes ask myself why more was not made of it at the time by the sort of people who are passionately concerned with child protection and making sure all children feel safe and secure. What effect the 40 years of The Troubles had on the minds of children and adolescents is just not a subject that ever gets raised by anyone in any real depth, which tells me that we are very selective when it comes to children’s well-being at any time. I do know that the topic of”stranger-danger” and taking candy from men in cars was indeed thoroughly aired at my local primary school, but it wasn’t something we felt was immediately relevant to our circumstances.
And yes, in the midst of it all, we still wandered around at liberty, whether on bike or foot, possibly due to the strange fatalism that grips a society in genuine crisis. The only people we were warned about in the strongest possible terms were police and soldiers i.e. the importance of not giving them any cause to get cross with us. As for the paramilitaries: you could do nothing at all about them but stay as far away from their known haunts as possible. My parents told me years later that the greatest fear most families had was that their youngsters would be drawn into the PIRA or the Loyalist groups. That was the great bogey.
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September 9, 2014 at 1:16 pm -
XX I do know that the topic of”stranger-danger” and taking candy from men in cars was indeed thoroughly aired at my local primary school, XX
We had that as well. But I wonder how dangerous the threat those days actualy WAS?
Given Rochdale, and other citys/towns today, was this not an over reaction?
Having said that, the fear must have come from somewhere, and it could not “just” have been the Hindleys….or?
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September 9, 2014 at 1:33 pm -
@ taking candy from men in cars was indeed thoroughly aired at my local primary school @
To own a car back in the Sixties/Seventies meant you would have had to be well-off. I recall that on the new workers paradise Estate I grew up on, only one near neighbour owned a car. He was a retired man. I have photographs of the long street snaking up from our low rise and there is barely a car to be seen. Revisit that same street today, on what is now viewed as a “sink estate” and the cars are bumper to bumper half on the pavements because the roads were not built not wide enough for parking both sides. Nobody expected residents of such an Estate to ever be able to afford cars in significant numbers.
I’ve just done a blogpost funnily enough that is mostly about this very subject. Even though this movie was not a huge box office success, it did attract an awful lot of publicity at the time, because it broke a taboo subject into the mainstream and generated a lot of news media angst in 1960.
http://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/no-country-for-old-men.html
“This film could save your child’s life” declared The Daily Herald on April 3, 1960, but the major London dailies were having none of it. Despite bearing the stamp of approval from both Scotland Yard and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Don’t Take Sweets from a Stranger(1960) was widely reviled for its unblinking depiction of child molestation in the United Kingdom…-
September 9, 2014 at 2:26 pm -
When I was a child, it seemed to be generally the case that generally the only people who had cars were either those who actually needed it for their work, or to get to it. As my father was in insurance, he was in the first category, although because he worked from home, he was often free to take us to our middle school, unfortuantely situated on one of the most notorious council estates in the city. It had been planned as a secondary modern, but handed over to us Catholics, surplus to requirements, as by the time it was completed the comprehensive system had been introduced. We were, though, acutely aware that being driven to school, albeit intermittently, was seen as highly unusual, as was that our father occasionally had the time to do so. These days it would not doubt be simply assumed that he was unemployed, but back then we were assumed to be “rich,” or at least better off than we actually were. On other occasions our mother would drive, itself still considered somewhat unusual that a woman could a) drive, and b) have access to a vehicle.
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September 9, 2014 at 3:37 pm -
The first “company car” I can ever remember seeing in that street had “Players No6″ logo’s all over the sides of the vehicle. The lad’s dad was a Players Cigarettes salesman; that must have been before 1968 as we moved away from that estate that year. Of course some people would say that the whole thing is a false memory, but I swear to God I’m telling the truth.
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September 9, 2014 at 10:37 pm -
I remember being fascinated and disturbed by events in Ulster as seen on TV when I was a child, mainly because the streets looked much the same as the ones I roamed on the mainland, yet with soldiers present. I used to wonder how normality for those my own age in Belfast or Derry was possible back then, but I suppose if you’re raised in that environment, you obviously don’t know any different.
I recently read that children and young women in Northern Ireland were ironically safer in terms of being prey to sexual assault than any other UK country in the 1970s due to the fact that most working-class neighbourhoods were patrolled by either paramilitary groups or the army, thus limiting the opportunities for perverts. I don’t know how true that is, but if so, it certainly seems a curious and generally-unacknowledged side-effect of the Troubles.-
September 10, 2014 at 11:53 pm -
I think that’s true, Petunia. I grew up in the deep country – not the back-to-backs of Belfast and Derry – but it was the case that the police had been so long a “political force” that they had very little interest in what we would used to call “ordinary decent (or indecent) criminals” at all.
You never reported anything to the police, eg a burglary because they would only be interested if they thought you could be leant on or coaxed into providing information about the “lads”. This was not PC Plod you were talking about, but a heavily armed, intelligence-driven, paramilitary police force. Bodie and Doyle ain’t it. The first time I encountered English policemen,I couldn’t believe they were for real, with their “community protection leaflets” and offers to provide information on self-defence classes in my
London neighbourhood.All crime was extremely low during the Troubles. I am pretty damn sure there was the usual domestic violence, child abuse and neglect etc going on – in fact I know personally of certain cases. But if your car was stolen, it was not for resale, but to plant a bomb. I don’t know if this makes anything better or worse. You tell me.
I couldn’t swear to this, and I am sure someone will tell me differently, but there was so much Puritanism in Ulster – both of the fundamentalist Protestant and Catholic varieties, which though different, are curiously complementary – that even “doctors and nurses” type experimentation would have been beyond the ken of most kiddiwinks. Anyone accused of rape would have simply been taken out and beaten to within an inch of their lives, and then unofficially deported to Scotland or England. In fact the accusation itself was so serious, that people didn’t run around making it for kicks or to exact revenge. We had a local perv, a mild-enough one (I suppose he could have escalated), who ended up shot in the face. In the face, mark you. Taking him out was a way of signalling to the community “the police won’t care about this, but we will”. I was horrified at the time, and still am.
BTW, it wasn’t the PIRA.
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September 9, 2014 at 2:11 pm -
I was born in Hull in 1966, so the 1970s truly was the decade of my childhood. In 1973 we moved from one sixties-built private housing estate to the new one being built next door, which offered us years of scaffolding-related shenannigans. Like cats, human children make their own territory, or at least we did. we were bounded by the River Hull on once side, and the rarely-crossed main road on the other. Between the estate and the river there remained the large house, the occupiers of which had owned most of the land thereabouts, but also a Rugby Union club, which remain to this day. We would range north through the old estate (known prosaically locally as the “ghost estate”), but not much further than the field beyond. To the south was older housing (rarely visited, except when I later got a paper round there), and a couple of broken straggles of shops. Being Catholic, we didn’t go to the local primary school, but instead had to take a bus or walk to one further afield.
As other have said, we were under no illusion about “strangers,” but by far the biggest danger was “big kids,” usually grasping for those twin badges of adolescent rebellion: whispy moustaches and leather jackets. It seems in retrospect that they were the only feared interrution to whatever we were doing. Building dens and tree houses was ever popular, with the building site that progressively moved anti-clockwise round the land that the estate took more than ten years to be built on providing plenty of raw materials. It seemed an unwritten rule that the builders’ shabby huts and stores were never broken into, but discarded scraps of timber and spilt nails were considered fair game. We were more concerned that tools borrowed from home would be back where they belonged before their absence was realised.
My father still lives in the same house we moved to in 1973. The estate is long-completed – although some of it only after I left home in 1984 – but still looks very much the same, only smaller. At the time it seemed that we had so much space, which perhaps suggests why we were content with that, and yet were not truly far enough away for our parents to be unduly concerned. Back in the present day, it’s very likely I’ll be a parent myself within the next two years, but it is with more than a little sadness that even I could allow my children a fraction of the freedom I had at the same age, the most real danger could actually be the “concern” of other adults, too quick to read “neglect” in such permission.
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September 10, 2014 at 12:01 am -
Are we talking the top end of Beverley Road Peter, per chance?
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September 10, 2014 at 12:05 pm -
Top of the class, lad! Specifically behind (but not right behind!) the old Wheelhouse pub.
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September 9, 2014 at 3:15 pm -
Petunia, you forgot to mention the treasure-hunting on building sites, for empty Corona bottles to return to the grocers to collect the 1d/2d ‘deposit’ which ensured an effective ‘recycling’ process.
Did your mob have Nov 5th bonfires in the middle of the street? The street with terraces of houses on both sides? (No need for ‘official’ road closure – the drivers any of the few cars around could ‘see’ the road was obstructed.)
1d ‘Bangers’ on 5th Nov?
Unaccompanied Boy Scouts offering ‘Bob-a-Job’ services to every (unknown) household a few streets away from ‘home’?
Playing conkers without full PPE (personal protection equipment – gloves, goggles & hi-viz waistcoat)?
Yup, those were the days of innocence, fun, and, learning.
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September 9, 2014 at 3:33 pm -
@ Unaccompanied Boy Scouts offering ‘Bob-a-Job’ services to every (unknown) household @
I can recall local press stories about “unethical” Boy Scouts ripping off old folk in that old activity. The tale went that they’d be tasked to remove some old junk from the back garden for “a bob” and then later the householder would notice that decent stuff had gone missing too. Proving the culprits were the boy scouts was almost impossible for the victims of course. My only experience of it was with some older lads who clearly had no intention that the Scouting Organisation would ever get to see a single shilling; but they were unsuccessful anyway, as not a single person we rang the doorbell of would let us on or near their property… … The media had done their work well. We soon got bored and did summat else instead.
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September 9, 2014 at 3:54 pm -
September 9, 2014 at 8:43 pm -
I remember all of those now, Joe. Thanks
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September 9, 2014 at 3:25 pm -
Thank you for this. It was spot on. We children of the 20s/30s depression years had very little in the way of toys or pocket money but we did have lots of freedom to roam wherever we liked. I don’t remember my parents ever warning me about not talking to strange men, but then I’m sure there were far fewer strange men about in those days. In general, people possessed self-discipline, one of the qualities which seem to be fast vanishing from a society that has become much more hedonistic.
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September 9, 2014 at 3:47 pm -
I am not sure I share unreserved nostalgia for the England of my childhood years whilst sharing the scepticism of where things have ended up for many. Post war Britain was to my present recollection a rather dull drab undynamic place both physically and culturally and I too escaped it as best I could by bike —–it was the best that could be achieved in the circumstances pertaining then. But whilst the option of escaping by bike and collecting a bottle of pop on the way was not one that I made available or was necessarily available to my children (through circumstances that prevail now be it cars or predatory pervs —– or whatever —- or more plausibly the availability of other more interesting options ) that did not mean the option exercised for them was the shallow glitzy but equally undynamic world of television and amusement parks –we can I think complain about the modern world and where it has led for many —but that is in part through choices exercised —- but that is to forget that life in England is waaaay more plural with greater access opportunity and choice —and greater mobility both geographic and social —- not just the ability to change channels on the television but to choose to do really interesting things. Dare I venture that the poverty and narrowness of parental ambition has led to where things are as much as anything else? Its little different than the quietist culture which comes to mind when I remember childhood
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September 9, 2014 at 4:42 pm -
Splendid piece as ever Petunia.
As for the question of when things changed, that I can tell you, it was 1986 [the process may have begun in 1984, as GCSEs take two years to digest through the system].
Take a look at this 132 page pdf in your browser:
Look at the graph on the bottom of page 18 [page 18 on the document will read as page 22 in adobe reader]. It shows the results O-Level and GCSE results for boys and girls, on the same graph, for the period 1962 to 2006.
Boys and girls prior to 1986, showed remarkably similar achievements; then after 1986 they diverge.
Only a cultural shift by the State could achieve this, unless children’s chromosomes spontaneously mutated by gender? Or parents decided to treat their children differently, again by gender?
And as they might say, the boot that kicks the cradle rules the peoples’ republic.
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September 10, 2014 at 3:25 am -
Considering the obvious sudden change, do we have a specific idea of what it was?
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September 10, 2014 at 10:06 am -
Seemed to relate to the switch between CSE ‘course work’ starting to predominate over the short sharp pressure of the O’Level exam system. Girls perhaps are more placid and prepared to do as the teachers tell and take a pride in pretty project folders, whilst the boys preferred the short, sharp pressure of an exam and being able to lark about the rest of the time. Is there a teacher in the house? The document of itself was fascinating though. It must mean something, as JimmyGiro suggests.
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September 10, 2014 at 3:34 pm -
A ‘switch’ from one style to another could lead to vertical separation of the graphs, but they would still be flat plateaus. The telling part is that the graphs develop gradients, and those gradients are different for boys and girls. This implies that the system of change is ongoing, and indicative of induced bias.
Years ago, a saw a similar graph for A-levels, where the ‘demarcation’ of gradients by gender seemed to occur during 1982. Boys used to do better than girls for A-levels [the right hand amygdala, of heterosexual boys, will grow in response to testosterone levels, whereas heterosexual girls have more predominant left hand amydalas]; by the time of 1988, they reached ‘parity’, and the left-wing press had a public orgy-porgy with themselves, whilst everybody else stood stultified, holding their dicks. I wish I could find the data that goes further back, giving us the full narrative rather than the propaganda by omission.
These days, I’ll bet you a pound to a penny, that all graphs for A-levels by gender, will start post 1988, despite the fact that A-levels began in 1951. You know something is bent system wide, when the fact keepers cover things up by universal omission.
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September 10, 2014 at 7:09 pm -
XX Considering the obvious sudden change, do we have a specific idea of what it was? XX
Flouridation of the water.
Match the dates, and look up the clinical effects of flouride.
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September 10, 2014 at 12:42 pm -
That’s a remarkable graph, not least for the rather obvious implication that GCSEs work better for girls as for boys, but also because it shows that – contrary to what many may think – there wasn’t previously any overall gender disparity that needed addressing. Looking at some of the indiviudal subject graphs, though, it’s clear that there were differences that GCSEs didn’t necessarily “fix.” Girls have always outperformed boys in English, although both were declining before GCSE were introduced – the last years very much so – after which the pass rate picks up again. In contrast, for Maths the performance of boys was pretty static, while the girls were steadily diverging downwards. Both plummeted with GCSEs, but the girls over took the boys when the results picked up. I wonder what caused the anomallous drop for Girls in Physics in 1974 – can we blame the Bay City Rollers?!
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September 9, 2014 at 6:03 pm -
“… stray dogs aren’t as prevalent anymore and neither is that curious cream shade of the calling-card they used to leave behind for the unsuspecting Cuban heel.”
As a child I believed this to be Dalmatian Dump. Since then I have been told it was because dogs used to be given bones to chew and they excreted the calcium therein.
Mothers didn’t need mobile phones in those days to keep track of you, the Mum Mafia was constantly reporting back your misdeeds!
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September 9, 2014 at 7:03 pm -
Oh, anyone else remember the welcome which was given to the refugees from the Hungarian uprising?
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September 9, 2014 at 8:10 pm -
I was at primary school with some of the Hungarian refugee children of that era, they were the first foreigners (or immigrants) I had encountered. But they were just ragged-arsed kids, like us, and blended in very quickly.
Their families tended initially to form local ghettos, along with earlier influxes of Poles and Ukrainians etc., but very soon integrated into the wider community. Half a century on, their names often now appear in the obits of the local papers, but many had married local partners (evidenced by English forenames), usually giving English names to their own children to aid their own further integration. Those obits are about the only remaining clues to that period of history.
In fact, the displayed the complete opposite of what happened in the same area later with Asian immigration, where no attempt was made to integrate, rather (with state collusion) a determination to emphasise and preserve the differences. I think I know which was a better plan – and the good folk of Rotherham will probably agree too.
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September 9, 2014 at 7:57 pm -
Although I originated in the 1950s industrial North, much of Petunia’s colourful description from a decade or so later resonates with me too. It may have been very poor and innocent, but there was a freedom from cares and scares which enabled kids to develop into well-rounded adults by their own early experiences.
We too were advised to avoid strangers ‘offering you sweets to get into their cars’ (why was never actually explained) but, conversely, when out enjoying our all-day parentally-unsupervised freedom, we always were told that, if ever we had any problems, just ask any adult to help and they would. All adults considered themselves in loco parentis for any child in trouble and they would go to great lengths to help solve whatever your problem was. Today, if I see an unknown child with a problem, I am reluctant to offer support and that saddens me greatly. Those random interfaces with unknown adults helped prepare us for the world ahead, whereas today’s youngsters must be suddenly launched from their over-protected isolation, unprepared for life outside that extended parental bubble.
Progress ? You decide.-
September 9, 2014 at 8:40 pm -
I agree with you on all those points Mudplugger
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September 9, 2014 at 8:38 pm -
“Chopper bikes.”
I never had one (I never wanted one) but I remember them well… -
September 9, 2014 at 8:43 pm -
Done that. Jumped from second floor scaffolding onto a sand pit, trying to use the first floor scaffolding as some form of brake. Limped for a day or so but no great harm done.
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September 10, 2014 at 12:50 pm -
During one summer holiday while I was at primary school, we made a see-saw out of an oil drum and a scaffolding plank. With my older brother/fiercest rival on the other end, I thought it would be hilarious if, on my downward swing, I jumped off. Unfortunately, when I did, I didn’t get out of the way fast enough, and the vacated end smacked me in the face. After the holiday, still with a thick dressing covering one eye, I was paraded in front of the entire school by the headmistress Sister Mary Austin, as a dire warning as to what happened to naughty children who played on building sites!
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September 9, 2014 at 9:52 pm -
Born in the fifties, my father had a successful but short lived business in London, his office was in Wigmore Street. With an inheritence my parents bought an idylic cottage on the Gt. Yeldham – Clare road in Essex in ’61 and by the mid sixties before I was ten I was cycling all over. I used to regularly go to Sudbury to the swimming baths on my push bike with mates I had met from the locality as well as playing in the fields and woods of the farmers when they allowed us to. When towards the end of my teens and into the seventies when I got my first motorcycle I discovered how much further I could roam there still was an innocence about life, except that I quickly discovered that ‘my type’ were not welcome in pretentious, snobbish middle class pubs, which I found amusing as no landlord could ever explain to me precisely what ‘ my type ‘ was. Back in London I used to go to a Catholic youth club in St Margarets Twickenham, even though I was neither Protestant or Catholic; all very innocent and the young girls often walked home with no fear of adults or strangers.
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September 9, 2014 at 10:21 pm -
Born in 1941 I remember as a five year old getting on a bus from East ham to the Woolwich Ferry and going over and back several times before catching the bus back to East Ham high street and meeting my mother in Woollies. She thought I was round at my friends house as did his mother. I also remember getting a clip round the ear for scrumping from the local Bobby who was my fathers friend, who did not tell my dad. I don’t remember taking drugs or going off the rails because of these experiences.
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September 9, 2014 at 10:48 pm -
I can recognise much of what is mentioned above from my own childhood.
If you want to get really poignant when looking back at the relative freedoms that have been lost, just browse through a copy of ‘Steam World’ or such in WHS to see what teenagers could do in the ’50s and ’60s. Nowadays their parents would get locked up
I agree with Moor about the traffic issue. 19 year old yobs with 3rd hand Volkswagon Golf GTIs pretending to be at Eau Rouge have killed roller skating and carting on the sidestreets, not to mention a few kids who were doing just that
But, if we’re looking at root causes, for me, there has always been one simple, self evident, most probable cause. Those were the days that were pre Estrus Ratbag
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September 9, 2014 at 11:10 pm -
“…browse through a copy of ‘Steam World’ or such in WHS to see what teenagers could do in the ’50s and ’60s. ”
Ian Allen train-spotter’s list of engine numbers.
Job’s-worths station masters trying to kick train-spotter’s of the platform, defeated by the purchase of a 1d Platform Ticket.
Strolling round marshalling-yards.
Putting 1/2d & 1d on the rails so the passing loco would flatten them.
It taught you to be aware of what could be rattling up & down the tracks.
Nowadays, a pair of teenagers ignore the closed level crossing gate, flashing red lights, klaxon horn, don’t bother to ‘look both ways’, get mown down, and somehow its Network Rail’s fault. Cruel, but it’s removed a couple of idiots from the gene pool.
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September 10, 2014 at 12:57 pm -
Ain’t that the truth. The sad reality is that if you “protect” kids from all forms of danger, they have no appreciation of it when they eventually meet it. I wonder whether it might explain some of the cycling deaths that half of London wants us to wring our hands about. Using a bike regularly as a kid makes you wary of cars, let along something as big as a construction lorry, so you give them a wide berth. In contrast, too many cycling fatalities are caused by people rtrying to pass on teh left of a left-turning lorry.
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September 10, 2014 at 1:21 pm -
I have the same theory about some of the “extreme violence” these days – head-stamping and suchlike. Because little boys are not allowed to fight, they develop no sense of how it hurts, and so generate an empathy for pain in others. Their only exposure to ‘fighting’ is “Hollywood” where grotesque violence is the norm and they have no understanding.
I learned that a punch on the nose is bad enough, so that my stamping on somebody’s head would simply be as impossible for me as punching a woman would be. I absorbed these lessons from a society now vilified as “institutionally abusive”. What a contemporary farce we live within.
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September 10, 2014 at 2:58 pm -
An interesting idea. Although I’ve long rejected it, some will have us believe that screen violence alone begets real violence, but they would probably have an even harder time believe that it may do for some only in the absence of the “violent play” that had been so decried by the self-same people.
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September 10, 2014 at 7:08 pm -
No. Because whilst these films are on T.V, they are missing them, because they are out, bieng violent.
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September 10, 2014 at 8:41 pm -
I think the theory is that the little darlings are stuck indoors with mummy and their Playstation until they get to be teenagers, then the trouble can start. Some can start even earlier of course, as the Bulger case seemed to illustrate at the time.
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September 11, 2014 at 12:20 am -
I couldn’t agree more. My loathing of Hollywood gun-play ( the ready reckoner solves all yer problems) comes from having had the experience of the age of 21 of being surrounded by 5 paratroopers, all training their rifles on my NHS specs as I strolled obliviously past a check-point at Great Victoria Street, Belfast. There was a ring of steel in operation, as it was just after the terrible events in Anderstown Cemetery, when Michael Stone opened fire on mourners for the three IRA members shot on Gibraltar, followed up by the horrendous mob-murder of three British signalsmen who had wandered into the Cemetery when the second funeral was taking place.
In much the same way, I breezed along a back-alley at the railway station , with my head full of a book, and found myself flat down on my face, my arms wrenched up behind my back, with an equally terrified young man standing over me yelling ” Who? What? How? Jeeesus.”
I wish I could have come up with something as gallant as Quentin Crisp’s “I seem to have offended you, gentlemen”, but instead I replied ” This is the short-cut. Everyone knows that.”
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September 9, 2014 at 11:24 pm -
Enjoyed that, thankyou.
It doesn’t seem like 50 years have passed since i gained my freedom, it seems like another world entirely.
Like many young lads of my age i was a train spotter, and spent hours days weeks on end in the local signal box, learning from the signalman, sharing sandwiches drinks and the worlds best apple pie made by my mum.
When not pestering the hell out of the signalman, i travelled the length and breadth of the country alone visiting various stations, depots and marshalling yards, creeping quietly round workshops, sneaking into cabs of engines just for the hell of it…able to double underline the engine number as ”cabbed”.
Got kicked out a few times, but treated kindly and shown around on others.Strangely enough, out of all these potential middle aged child molesters i met not one ever made a wrong move.
Was i lucky, yes…i grew up in a much better time and am eternally grateful for that.
Expect that kind and decent signalman would have been hounded out of his job now (probably home too), was he foolish enough to allow a 7/9 year old boy to spend hundreds of hours sitting in that signal hut, pulling line levers and sending bell signals, and helping mould his independence attitude and nature for the rest of his life.
We have lost so much, i doubt we will ever get it back, the tragedy is that the present generations really do now know what they are missing.
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September 10, 2014 at 1:06 pm -
Unfortantely Dr Beeching did for any railway lines even remotely near where I grew up, but as kids – at least during the summer holidays – we often hung around the builders huts on the bits of the estate that were still being contructed. A couple of times, when I must have been 8 or 9, I got to ride in one of the big trucks when the driver went to collect some more hardcore from the quarry, which was probably a round trip of 15-20 miles. When he’d suggested it, I’d asked my mother, but I don’t recall he making any fuss, or even demanding to meet the man first. If she said anything, it was probably just to tell me to be careful, and not mess about.
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September 10, 2014 at 3:11 am -
Well, my rose tinted memories of the 1970s are much like this so I won’t reiterate everyone else. It’s a fine article Petunia, thank you.
As to bikes. I had this rubbish one called a Raleigh Spider. Iron frame. No gears. Not much cop. But it gave me strong leg muscles. We used to go to my gran’s on Sunday afternoon (yes, the boring day) and I would, after bearing the tedium for a short while, announce I was going for a bike ride. I’d then ride out of town, around the nearby villages. I got lost a couple of times. Asked directions. Got home again.
But the thing is, back then, you thought adults were generally good people who acted as one big network. So, you hid from them if you were being naughty, trespassing etc. And if some random adult came across you being naughty, they’d say “I’ll tell your parents” even though they had no idea who your parents were, and you’d believe them and stop being naughty. Or at least go and be naughty elsewhere. But if you needed help, you’d expect an adult to help. Now everyone is scared of each other. It’s very sad.
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September 10, 2014 at 10:36 am -
So true. My recollection of being directed home by an old man I’d asked for directions emphasises that mutual trust; I wasn’t scared to approach him and he wasn’t scared to be seen talking to me. Perhaps the death of ‘community’ isn’t solely down to an influx of hard drugs or the collapse of traditional industries that sustained so many towns, but the breakdown of this mutual trust. Very sad indeed.
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September 10, 2014 at 1:08 pm -
That’s probably the fear of hard drugs, rather than the effect of them directly. I blame Grange Hill….
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September 18, 2014 at 5:18 pm -
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/four-year-old-boy-left-school-alone-4277685#rlabs=4
Gary and Michelle have complained to Kent county council about the incident and demanded a “proper apology”Hands up all those children who know what “proper apology” means, in law.
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