I endorse your comments. I have the advantage on you though since I was born in the late 1950's and my very first memories are of that era. I was born in Britain and my parents who married in 1953 had had their childhoods ruined by six years of total war. Even as a small child I was conscious of the effects of the war since the country was still very much in recovery mode. Indeed, some war time rationing was still in place when I was born. My parents were just grateful that they had survived (some of my mother's siblings didn't) and took whatever opportunities were available to build a better life for themselves and their young family.
As a boomer, my twin brother and I were amongst the first generation to grow up with television and the consumer age that was promoted through advertising on that medium. Three of my grandparents were proper Victorians for whom the 1950's would probably have seemed as far removed from their age as the Victorian period was from Elizabethan England (my paternal grandfather was, for example, born in 1876 but died six weeks before I was born). The prime minister of Britain at that time was the very patrician Sir Harold McMillan who promoted the slogan of the era, which was "
you have never had it so good". Just think of the derision that would greet today's prime minister Sir Keir Starmer if he tried to use that slogan
. However, for the post war generation, McMillan may have had a point.
What I do remember growing up was how ordered society was in the late 1950's and early 1960's. One vivid memory I have was going to a local park where there was a boating lake. It was summer and the men were dressed in blazers and flannels and the women in colourful summer frocks (think of the boating scene in that great romantic movie
Brief Encounter and you get the picture). By comparison today, we really do dress as slobs
. Perhaps my first memory of the coming counterculture was walking past a record shop in 1963 and seeing a lot of record sleeves promoting the new band of the moment, the Beatles. Little did I know then what an impact the Fab Four would have not just on British culture but western culture generally. The C's have commented on the CIA's involvement with the singers and bands that came out of Laurel Canyon in California in the late 1960's but my understanding is that John Lennon had links with Britain's MI6 through his uncle who was an MI6 operative. Just coincidence? Who knows?
We have a wonderful program in the UK called '
The Footage Detectives', which airs on the TV channel Talking Pictures. It is presented by the channel's owner and the popular DJ, Mike Reid who was heavily involved in promoting the music of the late 1960's and the 1970's on radio and later on TV, although today he is a very conservative character. The program plays clips of long lost or forgotten TV shows, advertisements, public information films and newsreels as well as home movie footage from the 1930's through to the early 1980's. I have to say that watching it makes me very nostalgic for the 1950's and 1960's. If I had a time machine, I would definitely be tempted to get in it and head back to those times
. They were certainly a lot saner than today and people seemed more serious and not continually absorbed by trivia. When watching the show, one is left with the feeling of how much the country has changed for the worse. No doubt this is true for most other western countries too.
