Calling all members of the Baby Boomer generation

[TheyGrewUp]

For educational purposes, would anyone like to share the good and the bad. I'll start, b1960.

Bad:
Very few of our generation went to university
Very high marginal rates of tax - up to 97%
Many left school at 15
Sexism, racism, homophobia
Beauty parades as the norm
Shame was fostered
Corporal punishment at school
People were still institutionalised
Girls/women were more likely to be encouraged to be nurses rather than doctors
Limited mat leave and pay

Good:
Better availability of social/council housing
Legalisation of abortion (safety)
Contraception
Cheaper property but v difficult for women to get a mortgage without a man
Better upward mobility
Good music/fashion
Post war
Seasonal food
No Sunday opening
No social media?

How much did you have to be earning to pay 97% tax, and what is that inflation adjusted for today?

It was on "unearned" income, so not on wages etc at all. It was on things like royalties so it badly affected authors, many of whom moved abroad to avoid it!

Another for the "good" list was ease of getting jobs and ease of getting "good" jobs, such as only needing a few C grades at O level for most office/admin jobs including banks, local authority, etc, and only needing 2 or 3 A levels at any grade to get into professional jobs such as training to be an accountant or bank manager etc. People didn't need a clutch of A and A*s to get decent jobs back then, nor did they need a degree for jobs such as nursing, police, etc.

And yet another "good", linked to the above, was that there wasn't the same pressure for kids to get A or A* grades to make something of themselves. Anything C or above at O level or any grade at A level was good enough for lots of decent/professional jobs. There simply wasn't the same pressure to get the top grades - yes, some did, but they were usually the "top of the class" high fliers going onto the top careers.

Another "good" being a world leading adult education system - where you could go to a local college on evening classes etc to get O levels, A levels, BTECs, and even professional qualifications, as well as all the "Hobby" and vocational courses.

And final good was plentiful and cheap public transport, especially before the Beeching railway closures came into full effect, and before the local authorities stopped running local buses. It meant people didn't need cars to go shopping or get to work as there were lots of affordable buses and trains options.

Another good thing: employers expected to have to train people up. People in many technical and professional jobs were given study leave and had their tuition paid for (day release, evening classes, correspondence courses, block release before exams).

Bad thing: smoking everywhere, including the office and the doctors' surgery. Even the non-smokers would end up reeking of smoke after a night in the pub or a trip to the cinema.

"Plentiful and cheap public transport" ... maybe in London but not in the place I grew up.
I agree on the affordable further education though. It was easier to do night school in the 80s.

Good
Everyone could get a paper round or Saturday job at 14ish
Police could be trusted (that may perhaps have been a wrong perception)
Complaint about school behaviour, punishment at home
No internet
No tuition fees

Shiny toilet paper...... definitely not good 🤢

I'm a late Boomer, on the cusp of Gen X.

Bad:
Smoking was considered normal and permitted everywhere. Public transport, restaurants, in the cinema, in the staff room at work.
I grew up not seeing women having many opportunities in competitive sport.
I wanted to be a skilled manual worker, like the men in my family. I was told, "Girls can't do that."
Sexism was open and endemic. By the time I left school it would have been illegal to advertise different hourly rates of pay for men and women doing the same job, but this was not the case for earlier Boomers.
Likewise, by the time I grew out of getting pocket money I was able to have a chequebook without my dad having to vouch for me, but this was not the case for earlier Boomers.
For the first two years of my marriage, my husband could have raped me without fear of prosecution.
A lot of institutional misbehaviour went on, particularly male teachers and university lecturers flattering vulnerable female students into their beds. Now, they'd be disciplined and probably end up in the tabloids. Then, folk just said the girls had asked for it.
Limited contraceptive options and deep shame associated with becoming pregnant outside marriage. Midwives denying pain relief in labour to unmarried mothers.
The food was nothing to be sentimental about. For most of us, it was boring and stodgy.
1000 calorie diets. Half a grapefruit for breakfast.
Bri-Nylon sheets and blankets and the ritual of bedmaking.
I remember a lot of strikes and power cuts, although as a younger Boomer this brought the excitement of reading by candlelight and Mum making bread at home instead of buying the flabby white sliced that was our usual fare.
No internet and no social media. Having to go to the library for information (or visit a friend whose parents had been suckered into buying a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica) was a pain in the neck.
In the UK, non-white people were likely to get stared at in the street, and casual and targeted racism were commonplace.
Where I grew up, sectarianism was prominent in a way that is no longer the case.

Good:
Fewer people went to university - but there were better opportunities to get into a decent career straight from school, and for those who did go to university there were no fees to pay and a student grant that you could, at a pinch, live on (I know, I did). And Deeds of Covenant ...
And when you left school and got an entry level job, you could live on your wages.
Drug taking was exceptional rather than mainstream.
Limited television channels, a predictable time for every type of show, and the television went off at night. (Not everyone would consider this a good thing.)
The ability to be uncontactable outside office hours.
Much better availability of good council housing.
Car ownership was exceptional, towns and cities were cleaner and safer, and public transport was cheap and reliable.
I went to very ordinary state schools, and my impression is that behaviour and discipline were better and expectations higher even than when my own children went to school in the 1990s/early 2000s.
Public parks were well laid out and maintained.
Clothes and toys were much less gendered. In photos from the 1960s and 1970s, my sisters and I could have been either sex from the way we were dressed, and the toys in the Christmas Day photos didn't tell a tale of a house full of little girls.

I'd blanked out the shiny toilet paper! Universal in public toilets and school toilets, and everyone had at least one granny who swore blind that Izal was MUCH better than tissue paper at getting your bum properly clean. Possibly the same granny who insisted that the television picture was better in black and white than in colour.

MIL is baby boomer. Discouraged from doing well at 11+, grammar school not for the likes of her. So no social mobility. Left school at 15 with no qualifications, as at that time only grammar school offered qualifications. She is very bright. Had to go straight into work. There was a training course she could go on but her dad wouldn’t let her as would mean staying away from home.

Married at 19. Worked for M&S on shop floor. Got pregnant, no longer allowed to work on shop floor. Encouraged to leave work once she had baby

You could really only watch TV live. This was both good and bad. Good because everybody talked about the popular shows that we were all watching. Bad because if you missed it, you missed it. No way to record, no catch up services. You just had to hope it would be repeated.

@NotMyRealAccount nails it. The smoking everywhere was horrible (although I smoked of course from 18-28). Clothing less gendered for kids was a major plus and huge difference from the state of things now

Getting “a few C grades at O level” wasn’t trivial though, Badbadbunny. Only about 20% got C or above at O level in 1975-1987, so equivalent to 8 or 9 in current GCSE.

You could only buy books in bookshops, and they were sold for a fixed price, which was quite high relative to wages/pocket money. We needed our public libraries.

Rather than being dewy-eyed about local high streets with a butcher, a fishmonger, a baker, a greengrocer, a newsagent, a hardware store and a fish and chip shop in which the owner knew your regular order and would throw in an extra chop or bun just because it was you, I (just) remember my mum carrying a basket around a dingy general store. She was absolutely over the moon when supermarkets arrived.

Police could be trusted?! Perhaps you need to read about the Yorkshire Ripper.

Better availability of defined benefit pension schemes

Bad: Rationing, very large school classes, high inflation, high mortgage rates, strikes, power cuts, three day week, fuel shortages. Our bus was once an hour from 8 till 10pm then nothing (always had to run at the end of a film to catch the last bus or an extremely long walk home). Everything shut on Sunday, half day closing one day a week, everything closed at 5pm on other days, clothing and white goods were expensive, only one tv channel and no mobile phones or social media, no online shopping, food shopping had to all be carried home on the bus and then a walk, no fridge let alone a freezer when I was young. Bad for women: Limited promotion prospects in most jobs, mostly low paid administrative, typist, reception, telephone exchange, shop work and factory jobs or nursing, stigma of illegitimate children, very limited benefits which were also stigmatised. Good: I was young! We were pretty poor but relatively happy.

Good-we were teens and adults during the 70s and 80s, so fashion and music wise we had fantastic choice. As kids we had freedom to play out. Weekends were not devoted to work so mums and dads were around and we (personally) spent time seeing friends and relatives. Downside-sundays could be incredibly dull. Good-could buy first house with no deposit at 3 times main income and took my student grant in account. Downside- and yes I know why, a few years later sky high interest rates and negative equity. Student grants. I went in early 80s along with a cohort of ex miners, steelworkers, union people who'd come through from Goldsmiths, we marched against grants and were one of the last cohorts to get full grants.

If you weren't " courting" you were presumed " one of those"
And yes..the police were not to be trusted.

I'd forgotten all the queuing when buying food, separate queues in Sainsbury's for butter, bacon, tinned food, etc. I would be stood in one queue and my brother in another and hoped mum in another queue got served in time to take our places. I remember the first supermarket in the town, only one queue to pay!

And books were really expensive to buy, the library was very forbidding, old, silent, dim and the children's section was not exactly inviting, I was rather afraid of it.

Doesn't apply to me but my late parents were baby boomers.

Whilst they left school at 15, they could leave a job on Friday and walk into another on the Monday, having a choice of jobs (not necessarily the best paid though).

They were the first generation of their families to buy their own home. They were young enough to have benefitted from the Pill when the criteria was being widened, without having to be married (although not certain if they had to be engaged)

They got full state pension aged 60 and 65, although my mother was a SAHP during most of her working years, she got a full pension and NI credits up to the age of us being 18, I think (compared to age 12 now).

I do envy their lives in some aspects, not all. They could afford a very nice house in a good area on DF's salary only. Without any qualifications on leaving school, he easily 'worked his way up' - both things not very obtainable now.

I also envy the music scene, they were always in and out of clubs in their teens and early 20's seeing what became to be big acts and groups.

Bad, the price of getting a phone line, I remember paying £150 almost 40 years ago.

Also I have aunts and uncle baby boomers who had careers where you now need a degree! One uncle left school with no qualifications and became a police officer. His son in the early 00's also became a police officer and had very poor GCSEs.

An Aunt became a nurse, then later did a midwife conversion course. She had no A levels and maybe one or two O levels - but apparently if you had no O levels, as long as you passed the test and showed the right aptitude.

Another uncle became an ambulance driver, later paramedic, had no qualifications.

Whilst I don't think you need a degree to be a police officer currently, I think they have to take a degree in policing during probation. And of course in-hospital training for nurses changed to Project 2000, then a degree and similarly there is now a degree in Paramedic Science.

These relatives were committed and very good at their jobs, now it seems most people have to go to University and get in debt to become many occupations.

I’ll bite.

I had a sister four years older than me. Our parents were strict and never encouraged either of us to strive for anything other than marriage. My dad believed women didn’t really need an education, as all we were ever going to do was get married, have kids and be a housewife. My dad thought women shouldn’t work, end of.

Before we married we both had office jobs but there wasn’t any pension scheme for women or equal pay. I was groped at work and often humiliated. It was seen as normal for a young woman to be treated like that.

We lived through strikes, power cuts and the three day week.

My sister and I both married young, into awful marriages. My sister was bullied and abused. At one point she only weighed five stone.

I had two friends who became pregnant. Their single status was seen as absolutely disgusting and they were sent away, returning after the births. The babies were forcibly taken from them and adopted.

I managed to escape my awful marriage and I went on to get an education and a successful career. I raised my three children as a single parent. Back then, grandparents didn’t step in and do any childcare, so I was on my own completely. I couldn’t get a mortgage. I was told by the bank to go home and talk to my husband.

Most people’s only form of heating was a coal fire in the main room downstairs so getting out of bed and stepping onto lino was cold. Some had a pull cord electric bar heater screwed high up the bathroom wall to take off the chill (which it hardly did). A shower could be had if a rubber contraption was pushed on to the bath taps. Perishing rubber was not unheard of, particularly for hot water bottles. If it was very cold coats were thrown over candle wick bedspreads and blankets.
There were fewer cars. During the first months of Covid the quietness, cleaner air and more audible birdsong reminded me of summer time in the 1960s.
In towns more people walked when I was a mini boomer or they took the often crowded bus. When it set off, the conductress would sing, “Hold tight love,” as the driver put his foot down. Note the distinct male and female roles.
There were a lot more pubs and corner shops. Women queued for “divvy” at the Co-Op. Supermarkets were new-fangled affairs. Payment was in pounds, shillings and pence, none of this decimalisation rubbish. Oh, and when we did convert, boy did the prices go up!
Christmas trees were always real, scenting the house and shedding leaves, as there was very little plastic. No plastic bags were provided by shops, every household used its own shopping bag, milk was delivered in glass bottles to every home. The pop man came round once a week and sold Dandelion and Burdock and American Cream Soda which I loved. Bottles had deposits.
Black and white tv, with limited hours, showed “Dixon of Dock Green”, “Emergency Ward 10”, “Andy Pandy”. “Listen with Mother” and “Workers’ Playtime” were on the radio. The radiogram played Nat King Cole, Golden Age of the Dance Bands.
The cooker, aka the stove, had an eye-level grill with metal racks at the sides to warm plates. My gran’s tea pot wore a cosy, the sugar bowl a crocheted doily weighted with colourful glass beads. Cocktail cabinets were the bees knees.
People had far fewer clothes. Parents’ clothes fitted into one wardrobe, above it a single suitcase which came down for the family’s one week holiday, if you were lucky. Coaches or trains took people to their destination. The man of the house carried the suitcase - no wheels to pull it along - to the B and B.
IIRC child benefit wasn’t given for the first child. Nurseries were built to encourage women to work after WWII, many of them working in typing pools. Class sizes were huge.
The big freeze of 1963 seemed never ending. Fortunately central heating was on the horizon. A lot of lives were endangered or lost because of coal fires and chip pans. Bri-Nylon was in vogue.