Free The Baby Boomer Generation by Paul Feeney Page B

the crossover from the 1950s to the 1960s was a seamless and unexciting event that passed without any fanfare to mark the dawning of what was to become a very special decade, and even more so for us, the younger generation.
    At the beginning of the 1960s there were plenty of jobs around but the post-war economic recovery was an on-going process and there had been no obvious changes in the way working families lived their lives. Back in the mid-1950s, we had seen how much the birth of rock and roll and skiffle music had livened up an otherwise staid generation of post-war underprivileged teenagers, but since then there had been a lull, with little happening to get young people excited. Most of us were still living a meagre 1950s lifestyle in cold houses that were filled with brown furniture, and we still thought it was only the posh that had indoor lavatories. For many of us, the thought of having hot running water was just an unattainable dream, and even more so was the idea of turning one whole room of a house into a washroom that would be fitted with just a sink, a cast-iron bath and nothing else. What an extravagant waste of space! As yet, the old kettle-filled fireside tin baths had not been completely consigned to the scrap heap and the local municipal bath houses were still doing good business, charging people sixpence a time to have a bath. At least we didn’t have to suffer the indignity of wartime bathwater rationing when whole families had to make do with just 5 inches of bathwater once a week to be shared, one after the other. We had moved on a bit since the war; several years had passed since the days of rationing and you could now have whatever you wanted, as long as you could afford to buy it. However, living standards were still relatively poor, as were the conditions that many people had to put up with in their workplace. Fashions were also stuck in the 1950s with winkle picker shoes and beehive hairdos. Heart-throb singers like Adam Faith, Emile Ford and Anthony Newley continued to dominate the popular music charts. Nothing much had changed at all.
    Fortunately, there were some young and talented entrepreneurs who were starting to make their mark on London’s fashion scene with some great, innovative ideas. Working independently of each other, trendsetters like Mary Quant and John Stephen had been among the first to open new-style clothes boutiques in London’s West End in the mid-1950s and the unusual clothes they sold were by now proving to be hugely popular with fashionable young Londoners. Word of their success was now starting to spread far and wide. With Quant specialising in womenswear and Stephen in menswear, the ground-breaking work that these two young people did in the late 1950s and early 1960s created a style of fashion that would later become a major part of 1960s mod culture; it would completely transform British fashion, kick-starting the post-1963 ‘Swinging London’ era that focused the world’s attention on London’s Kings Road and Carnaby Street. While Quant and Stephen were busy building-up their fashion empires, a number of other talents were also doing their bit to close the door on the seemingly dull 1950s. These included two people who were to become pioneering icons of the sixties and beyond: Vidal Sassoon and Terence Conran. Vidal Sassoon is the man who everyone associates with 1960s geometric hairstyles and his success allowed him to open the first worldwide chain of hairdressing salons. But, in the early 1960s, he was still experimenting in his Bond Street salon with his own unusual new cuts and techniques in hairdressing and was unknown to the wider world. Meanwhile, Terence Conran was designing and manufacturing ranges of furniture in ground-breaking, modern styles that were aimed at the new generation of young 1960s homemakers. Unfortunately, it was going to take another couple of years before the new wave of mod fashions would really take off around