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?

I was a small child in the 1950s. I suppose my parents were lower middle class and reasonably well off though my mother's side were all working class - (woolen mill, quarries, farm labourers etc.) We lived in a little country town in Devon.
I didn't know anyone with a phone (we didn't), very few people with a fridge, car, washing machine... and TV didn't reach the area until I was about 5. No-one owned a freezer. Labourers earned about £6 a week - a TV would cost around £60 back then so about 10 week's wages assuming you didn't need to eat, pay rent etc.
Several of my relatives lived in council houses, they all had good sized gardens so the tenants could grow their own veg., keep a few chickens...
I suppose food was reasonable so long as it was in season - we didn't see fresh strawberries except for a few weeks in the summer and they were an expensive treat.
New clothes and shoes were dear too, charity shops didn't exist, so if you were poor you went to jumble sales. However it wasn't done to be seen at a jumble sale if you didn't want to be looked down upon as lower class. I went once with my best friend when I was about 10 and we got a couple of lovely dresses (we used to love playing dressing up and back then the "old clothes" - equivalent to 1980s-90s - were from 1910-1920 onwards). I got into dreadful trouble with my mother for going and didn't go to one again for years.
I went to university - 2% of school leavers went then (late 1960s). Tuition was free, living grants were means tested on parent's income, paid by the Local Authority if they were poor, IIRC.
There were lots of vocational courses at the local college earning ONC,OND, HND etc. I did my A-levels there but most of the students were doing plumbing, bricklaying, hairdressing, catering, mechanical engineering etc. - mostly on day release.
When I started work in the 1970s (Civil service) the men's pension plan included provision for their widow. The women's pension plan didn't for a widower and would only be permitted if you had a disabled husband who couldn't work.

Only 20% of children even sat O levels the rest did CSE exams.

Interesting that you see having a part time job at 13 or 14 as a good thing. I do too. I cleaned the local pub at weekends when I was 13 and it was really helpful. I could buy sanpro & clothes, and I saved up for a moped (1970s) so I could have a social life at 16. Yet today, people think that 13yos should still be treated like toddlers.

Or may not have taken any exams at all.

@Meadowfinch many boomers had to leave school at 15 to go into full time work. MIL and her siblings had to leave school then to help bring money into the home. Many of their peers had to do the same and left school without qualifications. Not sure that was a good thing. MIL was told she didn’t need qualifications as wasn’t going to have a career and was just going to get married and have babies

I'm a boomer and had none of that, thank god.

Good - parents treated school teachers with almost unconditional respect. Perhaps not always deserved, but it was the general starting point for most parents.

Bad - teachers could discipline children with a wide range of unconventional methods. Chalk or blackboard rubbers thrown at them, being singled out in front of the class, other odd ways.

My geography teacher had a special slipper he used to beat kids with. He would chalk a swastiker on the slipper first, so everyone knew the kid had been beaten.

My French teacher used to creep up behind you and hit you over the head with a book, just because she could. It happened to me. She also made kids stand in a waste paper bin if she didn’t like them.

The school I went to was awful. I’m pretty sure I didn’t learn anything. I had several bullies who picked on me throughout my time at secondary school. I never told anyone as I knew it wouldn’t be dealt with.

I was born in 1949. My father was disabled from the war and my mother worked full time. I was encouraged to do well at school and went on to university. Had a lovely time in the late sixties, Beatles fan, Saturday job at the local hairdressers and clothes shopping at Biba.
Met my husband at university and he started work as a computer programmer in 1970. Our children went to state nursery school, state school and university. I worked in education full time from when they were tiny until retirement. Joined the feminist movement in the mid seventies and experienced the breaking through of the glass ceiling and the beginning of the rise of more women into senior positions, as well as making lifelong friends.
I fully recognise that we were lucky in the opportunities we had and particularly the role models I had in my mother and grandmother, both strong women who worked full time to support their families.

I was a hairdresser after I left school. Clients used to light up as I was working on them!

No, they don't. It's just almost impossible for anyone to get a job before the age of sixteen, and not easy after that.

Very few people bought their TV. We rented ours from Radio Rentals. They sent an engineer out to fix it when it went wrong (often) and gave us a replacement if necessary. The technology must have improved out of all recognition as they now seem very reliable.

If you wanted a phone (landline, obviously), you applied to British Telecom (previously the Post Office) and waited, often for months. When my parents bought a new build in 1971, we were offered a party line as a stopgap. You shared the line with complete strangers!

Born mid-50s.
You could start a professional career on the basis of 2 A-levels.
You could start a good non-professional career on the basis of just one A-level (I did).
Both employment and mortgages were easy to come by.

Pls explain how it was hard to get a mortgage without a man? Born in 1960 so imagine you're buying in 1980, there were no laws to stop women buying property then ? Property was cheaper and you could afford to have a mortgage on a single wage so I'm not really sure what you mean by this?

One really good thing I remember was being able to retake any O level subject in the January. You weren't restricted to just maths and English.

I failed chemistry with a D in June 1975 and retook it in January 1976 and achieved a B. I think I was more proud of that O level success than any other.

I had no idea that only 20% of pupils took O levels. I'm not that bright and ended up with 8 (not all As)

The pressure for O levels was nothing like the pressure for GCSEs nowadays.

The bad things:
Smoking everywhere of course
Inequality (The Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 was a start, and was passed before I left school)
I wasn't allowed to learn typing at school because it was only for the less academic. I wish I could touch type.
Interest rates in the 1980s. The interest rate on our mortgage in the late 80s was 13%!

It was hard for a woman to get a mortgage until the sex discrimination act in 1975.

https://www.tembomoney.com/learn/female-homeownership-uk

Right, so it didn't affect boomers really then did it, OP would have been 15 in 1975.

I remember our first mortgage in 1981 being based on 2.5 x DH's salary + 0.5 x mine.

It would certainly have affected those Boomers born in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The generation spans almost 20 years.

So they could have still bought a house by mid 30s, pretty average for today anyway?

I absolutely see this was an issue but it's not one that hugely affected boomers. They benefited massively from the housing boom.

I remember that! And the 'phones were cream, red, or two-tone green. My auntie was very avant-garde and got "one of those Trimphones" instead of the standard shape.

My parents knew the people they shared the party line with. I don't know if it was normal to be given this information or if it was just a small-town busybody thing.

We thought twice about the time we 'phoned people too. The price of calls went down after 7pm.

I'm a boomer (born 1954), so I was 21 in 1975. There are other boomers up to 7 years older than me who certainly would have been disadvantaged regarding mortgages before the law of 1975. In the early 1970s I remember awful workplace sexism by some (not all) - occasional bottom slapping, lewd remarks, etc and generally regarded as not having any input worth listening to. Feminism and law change was very much needed and welcomed (before that a well-aimed high heel, whilst "accidentally" stepping backwards onto the offender's foot was useful (plus an elbow in the ribs at same time).

I was born early 90s, I have had my bottom slapped and squeezed in workplaces, have heard countless demeaning remarks, been wolfwhistled, have been ignored in meetings, have been asked in an interview when I'm having children etc. etc.

I don't want to derail the thread and make it about feminism but whilst things have undoubtedly changed (please don't misread me) it's not changed as much as it needs to.

A man could buy a house with a mortgage at any age, subject to meeting the financial requirements. It was only women who could have been refused a mortgage before the mid-1970s solely on the grounds of their sex. Opinions may vary, but I'd regard that as a significant inequality which disadvantaged women.

House price inflation kicked in in a big way from the late 1980s, as far as I can recall. There were several key reasons:

• Mrs Thatcher abolished the very sensible restrictions the building societies had in place on the amount you could borrow relative to how much you earned
• Mrs Thatcher (I sense a theme developing) made it possible for council house tenants to buy their homes at a huge discount and then sell them at a massive profit after a couple of years
• Mrs Thatcher liberalised all sorts of controls in the financial sector which led to most of the building societies turning into banks and focussing entirely on profits and not on benefiting their members (savers and borrowers) as they had before, plus banks moved into the mortgage market
• Far more households had two incomes as more and more women returned to work after having children (thanks in part to statutory maternity leave, which didn't exist until the 1970s, but also changing attitudes to married women and mothers working), and because of the Equal Pay Act (ditto) they would often have been earning a bit more than in previous times as it was no longer legal to pay a man more simply because he was a man (and in many cases women would have been unable to get those jobs earlier on)

None of this was easy to foresee in the 1970s when the UK economy was in a dreadful mess. I think when young people decry the hated Boomers for owning houses which have increased massively in value and for having final salary pensions they often forget that we did not create the conditions that led to this state of affairs, nor could we predict the future. It has always been the case that people tend to get a bit more comfortable financially as they get older because they have time to build up savings and they no longer have to support their children. In the present generation, a lot of older people who've done well are choosing to help their children out with buying a home. Many grandparents provide childcare for their grandchildren (thus saving their children a huge outlay). Then there's inheritance and inheritance tax (which in my view should be much higher to try to level the playing field a bit).