So here we are. We’ve got past 2020. A date many of the children of the Fifties would have seen as purely belonging to Dan Dare. A date punned with excellent vision – a Millennial milestone. An aspiration – and now, almost a fact.
What has it been like for us children of the Fifties to have lived through the last seven decades, to have seen a world spinning around our lives, sometimes with purpose and focus, sometimes in utter confusion?
The short answer. It has been amazing. I speak as an invisible bald grey-suited man lost in the crowd of life. Half Yorkshireman, half Welshman, living the North West of England – part of the crowd of 15.4 million north of Watford.
Our lives have changed beyond all recognition. Our brains have been filled with shared moments of world wonder, national pride and international tragedy. We have seen economic cycles come and go and their prime ministers and cabinets with them. We have seen consumerism and marketing ravage the nation. We have seen banks prostitute their ethics for personal gain. We have seen families and neighbours driven by envy sink deep into the financial trap of the money harvesters – and we have seen family structures destroyed as those same families became enslaved in feeding the money machines.
In the Fifties it really was different. The sober lessons of World War II still rung in the minds of the grown-ups. Small things were appreciated. Values were simple. Aspirations were modest, and for many, achievable.
Culturally, at that time, we were a nation that knew its identity. A nation that took pride in being to help and accommodate others. That accommodation, more often than not, was not next door, and so needed little thought and could afford to be generous.
We had vegetable patches – perhaps another legacy of the war – we had Sunday Roasts – and we had church and the Sunday sermon. We had collective reminders and a reason to look our best.
We had no internet, no personal computers, no mobile phones. We had letters. Communication by post. Communication by consideration. Communication with time to think. And we had new and exciting music.
With our ordered lives, and our Sunday roasts, the irreverent excitement of music was exactly what we needed. We were rebels with a cause. The subtlety of The Beatles was rebellion in a suit. Driving drumbeats, simple lyrics and amazing harmonies earworming into everyone’s lives and shouting what until then we had only whispered.
And then there was sport. An English football team with pluck and values. The game was king then – not the money. Charlton, Moore, Best – names that cut through the ether and into the soul. Sport in the Sixties when we were young meant just that – Sport. It was the same in Formula 1. Clarke, Hill, Stewart, men who were friends on the most dangerous of journeys through life. And Walker, bless him, Murray Walker – the man whose passion, knowledge and unburstable enthusiasm would scream into our living rooms – and yes, he put a lump in our throats too.
Too much you say. But there was more. There was Martin Luther King and John F Kennedy. Stiff reserved English had never seen words used to the effect that these men used them. Both had a dream – and both were articulate and committed enough to make us want to share their dreams. Passion, they say, pays a price – and when we saw the price they paid – a collective world rocked on its heels.
Consider this though; in both cases, the odds against them had been considered too high. King was trying to change the world – and Kennedy was reaching for the moon. In death, King did change the world and Kennedy reach the moon. What journeys to have witnessed. What a privilege to have been part of the world when all this happened.
And during all this time, we had the long summers of Wimbledon – and the winters of snooker. The ever-trying efforts of the quintessentially English Roger Taylor, the talent and sexiness, of Chrissy Evert, the brashness of Connors – the rudeness of McEvoy. As our heads flip-flopped from left to right and right to left in the headiness of summer, it was if the grandfather clock of happiness was ticking the most positive of time into and out of our lives.
In the winter it was Reardon, Taylor and Higgins that played to a different rythmn. Reardon, the plodder, Taylor, the man with the upside-down glasses – and Higgins, the moody, effervescent, champion of the people.
As a child of the Fifties, these are the characters that came into our lives and settled into the corners of our minds. Like Tommy Cooper sweating through his precise, but apparently chaotic, routine – or Eric and Ernie putting smiles, sunshine and laughter into millions of homes and dominating the morning conversations at work.
No internet, no computers. No mobile phones. And then there is the realisation that none of this is permanent. King and Kennedy were shot. Fair enough, we can understand that. We hate the fact of it. We mourn the fact of it. But we understand it. But the immortal gods of sport and comedy? When they pass, they seem to take something of us with them.
Not to have the brilliance of Best in your life – or the warmth and humanity of Morecambe – or the frail genius of Cooper or Higgins – it somehow doesn’t seem fair. Worse is when we see them fallen.
As children of the Fifties, like the generations that came after us, we were learning that life is not fair.
And when the computers and the mobile phones came? What then? Like the passing of steam or vinyl – we had to learn to live a different life – and often that came with some pain.
Amstrads and Nokias may have made fortunes for their inventors, but more often than not, for a while at least, they made fools out of us. Can you imagine having to put code into a computer to make it work? Can you imagine a time when your mobile phone was just that – a mobile phone – a phone for talking on?
At work we ditched our Olympians, I mean, of course, our typewriters. We let the fax machine gather dust in the corner, and we watched a world that had rooms become a world that was entirely open plan.
Tesco began an apparently unstoppable race to the top of consumerism – and there were points for that – Clubcard points as big brother began to watch our every move. Somewhere, sometime, someone decided that choice was more important than convenience. And so, going shopping was no longer a matter of going out to get what you wanted – and instead became going out and trying not to be sucked in by what you didn’t.
And, as shops began to turn ugly – so too did sport and television. Things we had leaned on and taken comfort from suddenly became complex and confusing. Roads that had been inviting to travel on suddenly became corridors for watched behaviour and congestion. Joy that had been unconfined suddenly became scheduled into an app. The peaks and troughs of life clipped like the frequency range of a now obsolete CD.
Why was a steam train so utterly intoxicating to watch? Why was the scream of a Ferrari flat 12 formula one car so desperately gorgeous on the ear? What was it about the thunder and majesty of a Saturn V defying gravity as it carried men to the moon that moved us so? Why was each new song by The Beatles such an assault on the senses?
And why can’t we give all those emotions to our children today? Being a child of the Fifties has been such an utter joyous privilege. It feels like we have been the children of the big moments.
We owe those around us love and passion, wisdom and understanding, patience and fortitude. The world is now a truly global village, with room for cultures, with room for all of us – and, with the right mindset, room for some great moments to come.
If we look through the glass half-full, no-one knows what those moments will be – what joys lie around the next corner – what sorrows will test our mettle - but we can, at least, share the adventure with the knowledge of what is possible and what might be.
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