If you were born in England in the 50’s you were born on the cusp of a new era while still in the long shadow of several earlier ones and this mattered. If you were a child of the mid 50’s, as my sister was, the odds are you could remember austerity/rationing and it felt as if the Second World War was not that far away. On the other hand, if you were arrived in the late 50’s, as I did, you felt that while prosperity and the liberation from old strictures was nearly upon us, we were still living in some long Victorian twilight and that England was in some endless and inevitable decline.

Of course, when you are young you are disproportionately affected by how your parents have experienced the world. This means you are not simply raised in the knowledge of the years you grow up in, but the world as it was a generation before. Thus, the clash between the world as it now is and how it was, is very real for you. I suppose if you happen to be born into a period of great stability this matters little; the same might apply to a sheltered rural upbringing. This certainly was not the case in Manchester in the 60’s, let alone Los Angeles in the 70’s where I spent my early childhood and teen years respectively.

I guess most people have some ideas about England & the general culture of the 60’s: the Beatles, George Best, the Pill, Paris 68, flower power, the anti-Vietnam War protests, a belief that science and technology would solve all problems, full employment etc. In Manchester, the triumph of Manchester United in the European Cup in 1967 felt like a victory for the new order over the general awfulness and tragedy of the past. This went far beyond the particular collective memory of the Munich air disaster of 1958. Munich ‘58 was a metaphor for the losses that the previous generation/s had experienced. The fact that the pride of English youth had died in a field in Germany was lost on nobody, but never spoken of directly. During the austere 50’s Sir Matt Busby the manager of Manchester United Football Club assembled a team of youth, vibrancy and hope. While trying to be the first English club to win the European Cup, the heart of the side died in a tragic plane crash while taking off in snow and ice from Munich on 6 Feb 1958. An account of this can be found here or by clicking on their picture to the right.

Note most pictures if clicked provide a link to the stories behind them or they expand, clip art may as well and a mouse over will tell you what they are. Also anything green and underlined is probably a link too.

One of the best earlier memories that I have, is of sitting with the family watching the side of Best, Charlton, Stiles; Law etc win the Cup at Wembley in the most dramatic fashion. You thought that history would indeed right itself and the shackles of the past could be overcome, this was an illusion, but nonetheless a happy one and of course when you are 10 illusions seem real.

The grim reality was that the deprivation and losses of two World Wars, the depression between the wars, the loss of Empire and loss of economic superiority had left a nation and its leaders adrift, fearful and most importantly without belief. My parents’ generation was an odd one; it had the memories and fear of the slum built into its collective consciousness: the workhouse, slum-housing, mass unemployment and no welfare safety net. They had experienced a cataclysmic war without being able at least to take credit for fighting and winning it. They spent their adolescence in the grey 50’s and then their adulthood in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, not exactly a barrel of laughs in a country seemingly in terminal decline. Even Germany and Japan were clearly on the up compared to the UK and everyone was bloody annoyed about that. "Won the war and lost the peace" was a favourite expression.

The future existed somewhere else and for my parents’ generation that was the United States, or possibly Australia/Canada. There was a hierarchy to this, but either way, it is an irony that England was once again looking to its (former) colonies for renewal. In fact, Southern California in the 70’s did decadence far better than renewal. People there had generally made it and were rather pleased/smug about that and wanted to advertise and celebrate it. Economic drive tends to be amongst those on their way up not those who are already there. Getting stoned, laid, drunk and really, really indulging yourself was the actual name of the game. Even the new frontier economic dream hit the buffers, with the recession/retrenchment in the mainframe computer business in the mid 70’s, the future of computing travelled via Silicon Valley up the West Coast to the (then) little known town of Seattle.