To think the 1960s were a great time to be alive?

[firstcape]

Having watched some documentaries on life in the 60s,

it seems to have been a brilliant time to be alive, (being middle class)
nice large modern houses, seem to have pretty much everything needed. People seemed far more polite. The fashion was brilliant, and so very smart. Men seem so much more handsome too!

Feduuup, as the bible says, “The poor are always with you”. Oppressed communities have existed in every era since time began, and sadly probably always will. But there is a different feel to living in a time of possibilities, hope and change, as opposed to during a time of repression or economic slump, with no prospect of improvement.
My own parents were slum dwellers, mum lost 4 siblings to diphtheria, they hadn’t even an outside toilet, just a midden, where the excrement got shovelled onto a horse drawn cart once a week and taken away to be dumped. They had to leave school at 14 and get jobs - dad earned 10/- a week (50p in modern money).
But in the 60’s, they worked their way up to average office jobs, they bought a tiny matchbox house and got their first car. With free grants, they sent both kids to university - an impossible dream for their own generation. Yes, they were too old by then to be hippies or enjoy pop music or fashions, but they loved the relative luxury of their lives, and the freedom and opportunities to better themselves, rather than be stuck in the rigid class structure they were born into in 1916 and 1919 respectively.

@Babdoc I'm pleased for your parents, but that feeling of "great change" wasn't felt by all. My grandparents obviously didn't know each other and both lived lesser existences for being women. That did not change for them in 1965, largely due to the people around them, their families, older generations, didn't change over night, nor at all in some cases. So while you describe it as an exciting era to live in, I get that, I'm proud to have lived when women started getting out into the work place more and when gay people could marry, that does mean that excitement was felt by all and can take years or even generations to have effect for them. My grandmothers would not describe the 60s as an exciting time to live, especially now they can compare with modern times and the lives their children can live.

@feduuup

Your Grandparents lives would have been a vast improvement on their Grandparents lives. So in comparison, they probably felt grateful for the time they were born.

I was 8 in 1960
Certainly was a kinder time
Growing up in my Northern, quite an economically depressed town there wasn’t a lot to do but I had a very loving childhood so I would see things much differently from children from a larger family who weren’t very secure financially
It certainly wasnt ‘swinging London ‘ up here. Things never got swinging till I went to college in 1970
Sheffield
I thought I’d died and ended up in heaven

I was born nearer the end of the decade. We had a nice house in a suburb and I remember being in other people's houses playing with other dc. Very few cars.

Had a gate into allotments at the bottom of the garden.

DM was at home but had been at work before having me.

My dps weren't really into pop.

We had heating and a car

We were very lucky in that our council invested in loads of social housing after the wars.
Houses were well built and are still sought after today
They all had internal bathrooms and in the mid 60s they ripped out the coal fires and pit in gas fires and in the 70s they added central heating.
They were very affordable
I think the rent was about 25/- in mid 60s

So we were warm, well housed and well fed.
So much different from my mums childhood

I suppose it depends on your heritage if you thought the 60s were a kinder time.

Even as a child I felt oppressed. That other children seem to go through life without the anger that people seem to direct on me and my family and those who weren’t of this country.

Remember once walking past a house in a nice neighbourhood with a friend who lived around there and an old man coming out of his house screaming that I was to go no where near his flowers as he would call the police.

Remember always being frightened that if you looked at something for too long people thought you were going to steal it.

@Flaxmeadow my grandmothers were a bit more emotionally intelligent than that and I don't believe for a second they put up with their lot silently because it was an improvement on what their parents had. Just as I will keep fighting for women's rights despite it being better today than in my mother's time. Just because something is less shit than it was it doesn't mean it isn't still shit, so we mustn't colour over it. So no, please don't be so flippant about some of the quite harrowing experiences I know they had or make assumptions about people you didn't know.

Jesus no. Women’s rights were horrific. And people’s attitudes were extremely backwards. Even my lovely mum at that point thought it was a terrible thing to marry a Catholic and that gay people were wrong and ill

Totally support everything that @Oliversmumsarmy has said, but especially
"Even as a child I felt oppressed. That other children seem to go through life without the anger that people seem to direct on me and my family and those who weren’t of this country."
*
This still happens today in 2019.* Other children still go through their childhood without the anger of other adults and society. So many children have to experience the societal punishments of their perceived future outcomes. Not just in the UK, but in SA (OP?!), in the EU, in the US and many other places.

Yes SA & the UK in the '60s must have been a barrel of laughs everyday for the everyday black nurse travelling to work to be told to clean the loos. Or for the young man going from establishment to establishment in search of a job, only to be beaten by nightfall by some undeserving jobs worth police officer. They are all in their 80s now and looking back with rosy memories

I remenber walking up the hill to my teacher training session in attercliffe one morning in 1970
It was like something out of the hovis adverts.
Dim, grey, drizzle, cobbled streets
What did shock me was the newspapers at window, bare electric bulbs dangling from the ceiling, children in filthy grey vests and pants with holes in when they stripped off for pe
Unbrushed hair when they came to school and the amount of nits in one classroom
From my northern seaside town I’d never seen poverty like it
In fact when I look at school photos taken in the 1950s we were all well dressed and well fed unlike these poor children 15 years later 😢

No one in my family, peer group at school or college were politically aware.
No one
I should imagine it’s far different in schools now

@feduuup

I'm sorry if I came across as flippant. That wasnt my intention and Im sorry your family went through hardships. Many people suffered terribly, but I think this also has to be considered within the context of the times. I had a very tough working class myself but I had many advantages and protections that my Grandparents could have only dreamed of. I wasn't a child labourer and my father and uncles didn't die in the meat grinder that was the first world war.
The feminist movement is laudable and should never be undervalued but it must be remebered that it was very much a middle class pursuit and in fact always was. It had very little working class support in the beginning

Started work in 1961 and earned £6 10 shillings a week. From that I paid £2 to DM for keep and the rest was spent on clothes, records, make up, going out. It seems inconceivable now.

Life was uncomplicated. There were no mobile phones, so no expectations of receiving constant texts all day, every day from your boyfriend. A couple of calls a week were enough. No FB or whatsapp or Twitter or youtube or any social media, no horrors like the Kardashians.

Great music, wonderful family Christmases - DM and her five siblings took turn every year to host for three days, so 10 adults, 15 children, lots of mattresses scattered around the house, it was fab.

No mention of the threat of nuclear annihilation? My parents and a lot of others married in haste on the grounds that the bomb was likely to drop....

The local priest was a bit funny about my mum and dad getting married. As my dad wasnt/isnt Catholic and my mum isnt British,

He did marry them though...........in 1965. Life was bloody hard for women back then for all the reasons listed here.

But some of the TV was great Ive just finished watching Callan on youtube. (the series starring Edward Woodward) Its original run was from 1967 to 72. fab series it was. I was born in 73 after it ended.

Ooooh! I remember Callan!

Holy shit OP! I hope you're cringing with embarrassment, starting a thread about how great life in Apartheid SA must have been.

'kin hell. Some people live in a parallel universe.

Only if I could have been in San Francisco and rich, hanging out with the Beatles etc. Not in the life my mum etc had living in poverty. I grew up in the 70s and think we ate out once every couple of years. And that was the norm.

I think the 90’s was the best time to be a young adult. The music, the clubbing! I’d love to go back then...

I think any year prior to instagram was better, I feel sorry for younger people now, everyone is always shoving an airbrushed/sponsored version of their lives as the normal minimum, if theirs doesn't live up tto tthat, they must feel very inadequate. Glad I am an old gimmer who has lived without it. After speaking to my grandpa when I was younger, who had to flee the Nazis (we are Jewish) interwar Germany sounded quite idylic, obviously without know what was on the horizon, of course.

@Babdoc, homosexuality was legalised in 67, not 63.

My mum would argue that bath night was Saturday so you were clean to wear your Sunday best! She was a teenager in the 60's.