A 1950s childhood by Paul Feeney

I was born in London in 1948 and was fortunate enough to have grown up at a time when it was still possible for children to play out in the streets without fear of traffic and with little hindrance from parked cars. The backstreets were our playgrounds, and the bomb sites and derelict houses left in the wake of the Second World War were where we played out our adventures and rummaged for buried treasures. Life in Britain was so very different then; the nation was still recovering from the ravages of war, the country was bankrupt and times were very hard for ordinary working families. However, because of the wartime bravery of our parents and grandparents in successfully defeating Nazism, our generation had the good fortune to grow up in a peaceful country in which we were free to enjoy a happy and untroubled childhood.

This was a time of severe austerity; wartime rationing continued until well after the war ended. Sweet and sugar rationing continued until 1953, and it wasn’t until July 1954 that we saw the end of rationing altogether. But, after government-imposed rationing formally ended, some things were still difficult to get hold of, even if you could afford to buy them. For ordinary working families, times were hard throughout the fifties and many didn’t begin to see improvements in their lifestyles until well into the 1960s. The ravages of war were still etched in the faces of our parents and it was clear that their memories of wartime destruction and misery would never die. We lived in damp and draughty houses with no hot water and outside lavatories, and in winter, the outside air was often polluted with dense killer smog.

Our day-to-day lives were very simple: we enjoyed none of the technological wizardry of today; we didn’t even have a television or a telephone in our homes. No fridge, freezer, washing machine, microwave, central heating, stereo; we had none of these things. In 1950, there were less than 2 million cars on the road in Britain and few of these were owned by ordinary working families. We didn’t even have the right sort of clothes and shoes to keep us warm and dry in bad weather. Yes, these were austere times and it is easy to paint a completely dark and gloomy picture of the 1950s; the history books generally portray it as a bleak period wedged between the war-torn 1940s and the ‘swinging sixties’, but this is not the uppermost image in my mind when I look back on my 1950s childhood. You see, as children we didn’t know any other way of life; we had been born into these times of hardship and we knew no different. Up until 1954, we thought the rationing of food and goods was a normal way of life and that it had always been that way.

We just got on with our childhood and made the best of it, and from what I can remember, we children had a lot of fun.  I hope this book  will help to dispel the myth that some like to promote of miserable, snotty-nosed urchins littering the streets. There was a baby boom in the early post-war years and it is clear that there was an abundance of children around during the 1950s, but the image in my mind is of happy, fun-loving children with lots of smiling faces and loads of laughter. When we weren’t at school, we spent as much time as possible playing outside, and we were never short of playmates. We had few shop-bought toys and so we made our own out of discarded bits of wood and metal we found around the bomb sites. We made our own bows and arrows, and carved toy guns and rifles out of lumps of wood to play cowboys and Indians, and we used old pram wheels, planks of wood and orange boxes to make our own gokarts.

We were very industrious; it came naturally to us to make use of any old discarded stuff we found when we were out on our adventures. We had  endless hours of fun playing with very basic things, whether it was a length of rope, a piece of chalk, a lump of wood or a tennis ball. We also made use of every piece of street furniture – from lampposts to street signs – for climbing and swinging from. We explored every inch of any derelict houses we came across and climbed every tree there was to climb. As the pictures in this book will testify, we had fun!

It is hard to compare childhood in Britain today with how it was back in the 1950s. No doubt childhood today is equally fun-packed, just different. I feel privileged to have experienced the joys of a 1950s childhood. There was something very special about it: a carefree childhood in what was to be the last decade in which children were able to retain their childish innocence well into their secondary school years and enjoy an untroubled young life, full of fun and games. There were no pressures on us to grow up too soon; the stresses of adolescence and then adult life could wait. We were lucky.