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 born in 1955.
Good - no ready meals, everything was cooked from scratch using seasonal ingredients.
Children had much more freedom than those of today and because there were more of us we were relatively safe (with exceptions obviously, like the moots murders).
There did seem to be a stronger sense of community, all of the neighbours helped each other.
Much more wildlife - birds, butterflies, bees etc.
Music in the 60s & 70s was great.
better public transport.
Lack of palm oil meant we had much nicer chocolate
Lack of additives in general meant food tasted better

Bad
No double glazing or central heating. We had a single coal fire to heat the entire house and there was often ice on the inside of the bedroom windows in winter
I'd say fireworks were probably more dangerous back then
Choice (food, clothing etc) was often limited

Even though legally women should have been able to get a mortgage in the 80s, after my marriage broke up, I traipsed around all the banks and building societies only to be turned away. I was told by my own bank to go home and talk to my husband. This despite me having reasonable equity and the required income.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

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.

No, but the Boomer generation voted for Thatcher and then Blair - the politicians who created the current mess. Thatcher was very open about her policies and manifestos and won three general elections!

People voted for the opportunity to buy their own council houses.

Likewise the demutualisation of building societies and insurance companies - their members voted to demutualise and become private profit making companies.

There is definitely a collective responsibility of voters in the 80s and 90s who, as a group, have caused many of today's problems.

I think back very fondly on ( some, maybe not every one ) of my jobs at this age. I had a paper round going round the streets of Winchester - mainly the posh bits close to the college for most of the time and those early mornings with nothing else on the roads, no humans moving, just me and the birds, it was sublime. I'm not an early riser now but I completely get why someone might want to me.

Not sure if this is quite the point being made here. Think I just spent the money on Look In magazines, lipgloss and sweets. It did instill a bit of a work ethic perhaps.

I realise it's the legislation that prevents kids from getting jobs this young but I think in certain conditions they could still be allowed to work from say 14.

Depends on the work of course. I worked as a chamber maid when I was i think about 14 and not really ready for the lecherous rugby fans which tried to accost me a few times.. Safeguarding hadnt been heard of.

We had a partyline with our German neighbours. I'd have enjoyed a good cheeky listen in on their calls if I'd understood German.. I like to imagine all kids considered just not saying anything and listening but maybe the neighbour would sense a difference in the background sound. We will never know .Unless there's a phone expert reading all this.

You're right, but I'm not one of them. I voted Labour in every single election up to the Iraq war and we stuck with the Nationwide precisely because it stayed as a building society. It's annoying when people treat several million people who happen to have been born in a particular age range as if we are all identical, when obviously we aren't.

I agree, but on threads like this, it always comes back to "well I didn't" and also how certain things affected individuals, etc. It's how society works - there'll always be individuals who don't comply/follow the majority. But we have to accept that lots of people did exceptionally well out of things THEY voted for such as buying council houses, getting windfalls from privatisations, endowment mortgage windfalls, etc., just as many did well out of buying houses when they were affordable and making an absolute unearned/untaxed killing on the rising house prices. The fact is that Thatcher and Blair won successive elections by appealing to the greed of voters rather than standing on what is best for the country, and that's led us to where we are today.

Completely agree. I wish I thought there was any prospect of change in that respect, but I don't.

Born in 1958
Good
Social housing readily available to anyone who wanted it until the introduction of the right to buy.
You didn't need a degree to get a decent job.
Every school leaver could walk into employment
Anyone could get a Saturday job from age 14
No internet. I count this as good and bad. Life was simpler.
Sex and relationships were more relaxed until the 80s when AIDs appeared.
Fashion was fun and daft. We all dressed as boys or girls but we didn't think we were the wrong sex.
As children we roamed safely.
Food was seasonal, home cooked and often home grown.
Because people generally didn't move away for work because they didn't go to university they stayed near family. My grandmother did childcare for my mum who worked from when I was 7.

Bad
As a child we were properly poor. Literally one toy for Christmas. Very few clothes and they were home made.
Mortgage interest rates went up to 15% and negative equity was rife.
It was normal to be groped by men both socially and at work.
No foreign travel for most ordinary people until the 80s. My first holiday abroad was as an adult.
No eating out, my first trip to a restaurant for a meal was aged 18.
No central heating until I was 12.
Age restrictions were ignored. As a 14 year old I thought it was great that I could get into nightclubs but in hindsight....
Smoking everywhere
Inequality at school. Boys did woodwork and metalwork and girls did cooking and sewing. We all did commerce O level though which was useful and taught us about finances.
Hardly anyone in my year went to university (2 I think). However we all got good jobs because employers didn't ask for degrees.
Someone mentioned class sizes. There were 50 children in my year 6 (equivalent) class.
Three day week and power cuts. This is mentioned a lot but it was very difficult.
Strikes. Miners strikes and steel workers strike caused immense hardship. My parents were both employed in the steel industry and we survived on my part time wages.

Collecting Corona bottles on the way home to get the deposit to buy sweets that we weren't allowed to have except at the weekend. My brother had an interesting side line. He salvaged valves from dumped old radios and sold them to a man down the road.

The first house in 1971 when I was still a student was based on DH's salary, but from the mid-seventies it was both our salaries. It depended on the mortgage provider iirc.

I don’t know if this has been mentioned but right up until the late 70s women who got pregnant out of marriage were often sent away to have their baby in secret and then had to give it up for adoption and then come back home pretending you’d been staying elsewhere. If you were lucky you were allowed to keep it and your mother would pretend it was hers

I think this might depend where you lived? Maybe in NI?
I was born in 1958 and left school in 1974.
Teenage pregnancy was much more common than now and abortion rates were high. I knew many girls who had abortions, nevertheless there were girls at my school who had babies at 14/15 and came back to school afterwards.

This is so bizarre. Since baby boomers range from 1946 - so almost immediately after the war - to 1964, the lives at either end of the generation aren't remotely comparable.

That’s the same for most / all generations though,

I'm a couple of years younger than you OP. Your listed experiences seem very different from mine.

The only people I know who left school at 15 were those very young in year who left after O Levels/CSEs. Whilst fewer went to uni in those days, we got grants and it wasn't difficult to get into Higher education. There were lots of jobs with great career prospects and progression that could begin at 18. In some professions, graduates who were over qualified could not be appointed to posts for those educated up to A Level.

As regards house buying, then as now, it depends where you live. Our neighbours daughter went into banking at 16, bought her own property at 20. I knew many single women older than me who owned houses. Most of these more in the Boomer bracket than I am. In the late 80s interest rates made those of us buying our first property around that time very poor and stressed. Also endowment mortgages were the norm and many lost money, savings or their houses.

I didn't follow the trend set by a fair few of my contemporaries in regard to marriage and having a family. I was married by the late 80s but having children at that point in my career wasn't something I wanted to do. When I did, Maternity Leave had improved and going back to work had become much more the norm. I'd say from mid 90s onward that was the norm.

Politics was terrible - Thatcher and the seemingly endless years of Tory rule were depressing.

Sexism and harassment in the workplace began declining in the late 80s, esp if you had a good employer with decent HR. Most men who tried it on could always face consequences, but women were so much less well informed or able to stick up for themselves. I think our generation are the women who powered change in this area.

78-82 best soundtrack to youth ever

We bought our first house in 1986. The standard formula, which as far as I recall was applied by all the building societies, was that you could borrow up to 90% (may have been 95%) of the asking price, you had to have saved the balance, i.e. the deposit, over at least two years in an account with that building society, and you could borrow up to three times your salary if you were single or a couple with just one income. For couples who each had an income, it was three times the higher salary plus the lower salary, or 2.5 times the joint income. There was absolutely nothing in the literature to suggest that there would have been a problem if my salary had been the higher one. It wasn't at that point, although it would have been the year before and two years later it was again (so in fact when it came to getting our second mortgage). In practice, though, I imagine there probably were some building society and bank managers using their discretion in a prejudiced way and deciding that it was too risky to lend a lot to a couple where the wife's salary was higher as she would likely leave to have babies in the near future.

Is it though? I'm not sure. A post war childhood and a 60s/70s one are so different that they out to be separate generations

Re teenage pregnancy, the other option was marrying the father if both parties were old enough. I remember back in the 1960s when I was about 8 overhearing a conversation amongst a few of the neighbours about the forthcoming wedding of another neighbour's daughter, who was in her teens. It was difficult for me to make sense of what they were saying, as I was under the impression at the time that God somehow arranged that women became pregnant after they were married but it sounded as if God had slipped up in this case and set things in train a bit too early.

Certainly is for Gen X - very different experiences being born in 1965 and 1980. Imagine it’s also the case for Millennials.

Perhaps not for significantly older generations.

Born 1961. No central heating, single glazed windows.
Larger classes but more discipline. The classes were streamed so the brightest ones werent held back.
No children rocking up in nappies.
Those with SEND had their own schools.
Child protection very sketchy.
Abused children were not believed or it was covered up (still does happen sadly)
Free university fees but only the top pupils got in.
On the job nursing training. No degree required.
Single girls getting pregnant were shamed .
Yes, always the going mother..not the young father 😡
People had to jump through hoops to get sickness benefits. Often people had to work when really not well enough (like my dad)

If you did A Levels and passed 2 of them at grade E you could easily get into uni or poly to do a degree. There were so many jobs with good career prospects for 16 year olds that many felt there was no need to go to sixth form or uni.

Good - more green spaces. Population increases has forced development on even small green spaces that previously existed near houses.

Good - defined benefit pensions for some people.

Bad - much more definitive class structure. I watched a film from the 70s on careers and your parents job was relevant to your opportunity Now if you come from a deprived, unprivileged background you will have priority in many sectors.

I was born in 1960.

Primary school was 40 to a class covering 2 academic years with a single teacher. Only 4 classes and 4 teachers for whole school plus the Head.
Lack of heating or double glazing at home meant it was really cold in the mornings with ice inside the windows.
Very few people did O levels, most did CSEs and went to FE colleges to do practical courses at 16. Even those that did A levels often chose not to go to University.
Sexism and minor sexual assault was rife in the work place. I was told at an interview (professional firm) that I shouldn't ever expect promotion as I was a woman.
I was given my P45 when I stopped work to have a baby (the day I went to hospital). No maternity leave.
No pension contributions until late 1980s.
Banks and building societies found excuses not to give mortgages to women despite the new legislation. I had to shop around to find a more liberal-minded banker to get my first mortgage (3x my salary).
Mortgage interest rates were high, and went sky high in the early 1990s putting a lot of people into negative equity, forcing them to just hand their homes over to the bank and having to start again. Others lost out on endowment mortgages - it wasn't all as rosy as many today seem to think.
Although houses were cheaper, other stuff like food was more restricted and anything out-of-season was very expensive or impossible to get. Meat was only available from the butcher or the market as were vegetables. The local small co-op supermarket only stocked tins and a few dry foods etc.
Meals were meat, potatoes and veg (mainly home grown) every day. Very limited variety of foods until after we joined the Common Market mid 1970s.
We were lucky as we had a telephone and rented a TV, but it was just black and white until I was a teenager.
I got my first job in the summer holidays when I was 14. It was fun and felt good to earn some money to spend on clothes, books and records. I had to walk two miles each way to get the job and back every day.
Jobs were easy to find, but there was no minimum wage so you were just grateful for whatever you got. My first full-time job paid just £100 per month! I had to remain living with my parents until I got married as there was no way I could afford to rent on such a low salary.
Many of my friends parents lived in Council Houses and stayed in the same village all their lives. Mostly the fathers went out to work and their mothers stayed home. My parents were farmers so we lived in a farmhouse so both parents were around.

@Badbadbunny please don't insult the intelligence of the many of us who didn't vote for Maggie Thatcher or Tony Blair.

Re class sizes - we had 44 children in my class in primary school. We were also streamed for maths in the last two years.

I agree about age restrictions. Underage drinking in pubs was rife. We all did it, until I got caught by the police at 16.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g we are also with Nationwide.