Free The Baby Boomer Generation by Paul Feeney

‘The Ugly Duckling’; these were all played regularly on Uncle Mac’s Children’s Favourites Show , which we listened to each Saturday morning on the BBC Radio’s Light programme, Hello children, everywhere! .
    Being just children at the time, we were touched and sometimes bewildered by some of the events that made headline news during the 1950s. The death of King George VI on 6 February 1952 left its mark on us because everyone was so upset and the whole country was in mourning for days afterwards. Immediately following the announcement of the King’s death, BBC Radio cancelled all of its usual programmes and played solemn music for the rest of the day. It was a Wednesday and a normal school day for us kids, but we were still caught up in all of the grieving because our teachers were openly saddened by the news and there were long faces everywhere you looked; everyone was in a state of depression.
    In May 1953, we were all excited by the news that Edmund Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay had become the first climbers known to have reached the summit of Mount Everest in the Himalayas. Most of us had no idea where Mount Everest was apart from the fact that it was thousands of miles away, somewhere on the other side of the world. Our geography lessons at primary school didn’t stretch as far as Nepal and China. A year later, in May 1954, we were all very impressed when we heard that the English athlete, Roger Bannister, had run the first ever sub-four-minute mile. It seemed an impossible achievement to us kids who were struggling to do 100yds in half-a-minute. We all wanted to have a go at doing the four-minute-mile but most of us lost all interest after we had been running for about fifteen-minutes and the end of the mile was still nowhere in sight.
    An event that was to prove of great benefit to us children of the 1950s and beyond was Parliament’s introduction of a Clean Air Act in 1956. This was important to us because it sought to address the problem of air pollution and to stop the dense fogs that regularly engulfed us in horrible yellowish smog, especially in London and other highly populated industrial areas. These smogs were commonly known as ‘pea-soupers’ because they had the consistency of thick pea soup. The smog was caused by cold fog mixing with coal fire emissions and many people died from the effects of breathing the polluted air. London’s Great Smog of 1952 left more than 100,000 people ill with respiratory problems and some of these died prematurely as a result. The Clean Air Act legislated for zones where smokeless fuels had to be burnt and it identified power stations that needed to be relocated to rural areas. The winter air quality was much improved in subsequent years.
    Up until 1956, we had only known a life of peace; we had heard all of the stories of war from the older generation but we had grown up in a wholly peaceful Britain with no fear of terrorism or war. However, there was a short pause in our hopes for long-term peace when news of the Suez Crisis began to dominate the newspaper headlines in October 1956. Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt in an attempt to regain Western control of the Suez Canal after Egypt nationalised the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company, intending to finance a dam project using revenue from the canal. Fortunately, due to the intervention of the first United Nations peacekeeping force, the conflict only lasted a matter of days, which meant that Britain could once again return to its previously calm state.
    In 1957, we read that a European Economic Community (Common Market) had been established between the six European countries of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The idea was for these members to promote peace and economic growth through cooperation and trading agreements. It didn’t affect Britain; we would continue to row our own boat and to conduct our worldwide trading