Free The Baby Boomer Generation by Paul Feeney Page A

relationships as a sovereign state, managed entirely by our own elected government. In fact, it was unlikely that Britain would ever join the EEC because the British Government would never surrender any of its powers to a European bureaucracy.
    In July 1959, as we sat in our local cinema waiting to see Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot , we were shown a film in the Pathé News of an amazing hovercraft skimming across the English Channel; what would they invent next? In November that same year, many of us went to see the Alfred Hitchcock film, North By Northwest , and on that occasion the Pathé News included the launch of the new Morris Mini Minor (the Mini) at October’s Earl’s Court Motor Show. At the same time, Pathé News featured a film of the newly opened first section of the M1 motorway, which ran between Watford and Rugby. Britain’s first ever motorway (the Preston Bypass, later to become part of the M6) had been opened a year earlier in 1958. The new M1 motorway promised no traffic jams and it looked as though that would be the case because you could see from the Pathé Newsreel that the motorway was almost completely empty. After all, there were still less than 5 million cars on Britain’s roads at the time. Surprisingly, there were no speed restrictions on this new motorway and motorists could go as fast as they liked. In those days, the average family car struggled to reach 70mph, so it was only the high-powered motorcars and motorcycles that could take full advantage of this new no-speed-limit superhighway. Some over-ambitious drivers managed to blow up their engines while trying to achieve high speeds that were beyond their cars’ capabilities, and there were no MOT vehicle tests back then, so any old banger could take to the roads.
    The unpretentious lifestyle of the 1950s now seems quite primitive, but we lived very active and healthy lives and most of us enjoyed our childhood even though we had very little money and few possessions to shout about. Our unsophisticated upbringing helped to mould a generation of unspoilt children, or as close as you might get to one. In fact, it was probably the last decade in which children were allowed to grow up slowly and truly enjoy the benefits of a carefree childhood. Most managed to retain their childlike innocence right up to the start of their teenage years and often beyond. Those childish, fun-filled years were uncorrupted by television, gadgets and electronic communications. They were innocent, fun years and we were very lucky. We were content with our lives in those austere childhood years, albeit though inexperience and ignorance, but as we reached puberty we became more and more eager for change. We developed ambitions of our own and we craved a better way of life: one that resembled the sophisticated images we regularly saw in films and on television. Those brief glimpses into a celluloid world of heady carefree opulence helped demonstrate how it might be possible for us to leave the sober 1950s mood behind us as we moved into the next decade. This baby-boomer generation would go on to become the 1960s teenage revolutionaries and the cultural innovators who would shake up the world and steer the country through the latter part of the twentieth century and beyond.

From Gymslips to Miniskirts
    N ew Year’s Day 1960 arrived without any special fuss. In Scotland it was a Bank Holiday, as it had been since 1871, but it was a just a normal working Friday for everyone else. We celebrated the ending of the old year and the start of the New Year in just the same way as we had done on every other New Year’s Eve. There was nothing at all remarkable about the occasion. We didn’t open our eyes on New Year’s Day 1960 to find that the ‘swinging sixties’ had arrived and that we were now living in a new and modern world of carefree hedonism. There was no sudden change in the nation’s opulence or attitude; in fact