An illuminating article that can be found in complete form at The Daily Mail. It makes some of the same points I and others have made here at times without being ridiculously nostalgic (there were good things about the past - there were also many bad things). I'm posting extracts here. Australia was much the same.

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A vanished Britain: 50 years ago we were a country where doors were left unlocked and children played in the street

by David Kynaston

The Daily Mail

31st October 2009

To many people who grew up in the Britain of half a century ago, the Fifties are a clearly and dearly remembered age.

'We walked to school, had open fires and no central heating,' recalled a woman of that generation.

'We played in the street with our friends and were safe; we climbed trees, skinned our knees and ripped our clothes, got into fights and nobody sued anybody. Sweets were a treat, not part of lunch.

'We got a clip round the ear when we had been naughty, and Mum gave us a teaspoon of malt and cod liver oil before school.

.....

Yet, helped by informally policed public spaces - by bus conductors, by park-keepers, by lavatory attendants - and by a police force that was largely admired, this was for the most part an era of trust.

'I liked my half-hour's walk through the quiet suburban streets,' children's author Jacqueline Wilson recalls about being a six-year-old in Kingston-upon-Thames, adding that it wasn't unusual for children of her age to walk to school by themselves.

Ken Blackmore, who grew up in a Cheshire village, remembers not only the front door of his home being left unlocked, but bikes generally being left untouched or unchained at the bus stop or the railway station.

It was not until about 1957 that British motorcycles were even fitted with locks or keys. John Humbach parked his 500cc Triumph outside his London house. 'I never had a chain and padlock and never knew anyone who had. The bike was never stolen and I was never worried it might be.'

That these were more lawabiding times than now is not a nostalgic fantasy. The fundamental fact was that, following a sharp upward spike in the post-war years, crime declined markedly during the first half of the Fifties. The numbers started to move up from 1955, but were strikingly low.
Notifiable offences recorded by the police were a little over half a million in 1957. Forty years later, they were almost 4.5 million. Violent crimes against the person numbered under 11,000 in 1957, and 250,000 in 1997.

.....

Yet, as easy-going and trusting as people were in such matters, Fifties Britain was also authoritarian, illiberal and puritanical.

School life set the tone. A tearful Jacqueline Aitken (later Wilson) was forced to eat up the fatty meat at her school dinners before going to throw up in the smelly lavatories. At his public school, comedian Peter Cook was tormented and beaten by an imperious, cricketplaying prefect called Ted Dexter, who went on to captain England.

In theory, education was becoming less Victorian. By 1957, the Ministry of Education was beginning to see its role as turning out well-rounded individuals. But on the ground, especially in secondary schools, what went on was very traditional and almost militaristic in tone.

Mick Jagger thought there was too much pen-pushing and homework at his grammar school. 'And too much petty discipline. Petty rules about uniforms and stuff.'

At Colston's School in Bristol, an independent, the list of strictly enforced rules seemed endless: 'Boys will raise their caps on meeting masters, masters' wives or ladies of the staff. No boy may have his hands in his pockets.

Private wireless sets and gramophones are forbidden. Association football is forbidden. No boy may keep in his possession a sum of money larger than two shillings.

'Only English comics are permitted. All American publications of this kind are banned. Cheap novelettes and such like reading matter are forbidden, but this prohibition does not extend to Penguins and reputable publications of the same kind.'

Discipline was invariably strict, as a series of ordinary women recalled in a Mass-Observation survey. At her girls' convent school, Dorothy Stephenson was once made to kneel for three hours on the hall floor for not having a white collar. 'I didn't have one because we couldn't afford it.'
Pamela Sinclair recalled that boys were regularly caned and girls rapped on the knuckles with a ruler at her junior school. 'Things were learnt by rote and the weekly times-tables test was a nightmare. No one questioned authority then, but it didn't mean we weren't resentful at times.'

At Rosalind Delmar's school, pupils were caned for being inside the buildings at playtime. 'Which teacher used a cane and which a rubber strap, if you could make it sting less by pulling your hand back at the moment of contact or spitting on your hand before - these were all subjects of endless discussion.'

Derek Robinson remembered how his PT master beat boys on the backside with a large wallmap of the world, rolled around the strip of wood from which it normally hung.

'He was short and stout, and the map was long, so he had to stand well back in orderto make his swing. When he got his follow-through right, he could knock a boy clean off his feet.'

Few people disagreed with corporal punishment. A poll in 1952 found that nine out of ten teachers wanted it retained. Oddly, the victims agreed. In a survey, schoolboys were just as unanimously in favour. It was swift and brief in its execution, whereas alternative punishments, such as withdrawing privileges, were seen as generating greater resentment.

Still, its frequency was starting to diminish as the Fifties went on, and this caused alarm. 'These days, masters dare not touch little Willie or mistresses cane little Mary,' complained Dr N. S. Sherrard, of Beccles, in July 1954, in an address to parents at a Suffolk secondary school. Since teachers couldn't bash the children, 'you must do it yourself in the home.'

Some of them needed no encouragement. 'From as young as I can remember, we were all beaten, bullied and victimised by our father,' recalled John Davies about his childhood in South Wales.

'For playing out in the garden without permission, he lined us up and hit out with a leather strap he had specially made. We would regularly be black and blue. He would fly into a rage at the slightest thing - dinners would end up all over the walls and we'd all get beaten.'

.....

In the early Fifties, the anti-social antics of 'cosh boys' and 'Teddy boys' led commentators to worry that a lack of parental control, caused by mistaken kindness and the fallacies of modern psychiatry, was turning out a generation of delinquents.

There were calls for strong action - the birch, at the very least - after a widely publicised fight took place in Kent in which gangs of 'sinister' Teds in stovepipe trousers and velvet-coloured jackets fought a battle with wooden stakes and sand-filled socks

A stalwart of the Boys' Brigade warned that dangerously soft attitudes in society were whittling away all personal responsibility for wrongdoing. 'The child comes to regard himself not as sinful, but just as "a psychological case".'

.....

Nice pictures.

I was delighted to see Margaret Thatcher sat on the floor, cigarette in hand, watching television.

Surely it's not a case that Britain 'vanished' but our society evolved as it will continue to do? Unfortunately in my opinion, the evolution is unlikely to bring back the cane in schools.

DOC

50 years ago, I lived in East Greenwich, which is, as it was, a fairly low-class area of South London.

Daily Mail readers MIGHT have had a trouble-free walk through leafy lanes to school. I bloody didn't!! A blade of grass was as rare as a man with a beard(which used to score an amazing 20pts in the I-Spy books!!) in our neck of the woods.

If you left your bike unchained round our way, or in most of Britain, you would have had it nicked, even in 1959. I regret to say we also had regular bundles with the next primary school along-about a quarter of mile or three terraced streets away & this was usually in the week or at weekends.

But we got all the usual garbage about this terrible generation of teenagers then & about every 5 years since, from lazy journalists with no idea of what real life was or is like for most people. Usually the Mail or the Telegraph.

Sorry, but I never knew a Britain like this. The only reason crime dropped? The ending of rationing between 1950-1953 and the end of the spiv!



Steve

It must have been bad round your way Steve! Throughout the 1950s I was living in a small mining town in Nottinghamshire - about as working class an area as you can get. It was almost totally Labour dominated, then and for years afterwards. A solitary Independent sat on the local council (he had the advantage that his dad owned the local paper), the rest was solid Labour. There were a few areas of real slum streets and real poverty, and not many bits anyone would have called well off.

Despite that it was literally the case that everyone did leave their doors open, certainly all day, and a few old people never locked their doors at all. I was 8 in 1950 and in those days we kids simply roamed free wherever we liked, in and out of each others' houses, all round the neighbourhood, out into the countryside and woods. Everybody knew everybody else, there were a few incomers, but for the most part the same families had lived in the town for generations. As a child you could, and sometimes did, turn to any adult if you needed help. We walked to and from school by ourselves or with older children.

Theft wasn't a problem, very few households had much worth stealing anyway! There were 20 houses in the road I lived in, and at the time of the coronation there were 3 TV sets and 2 cars between them! The three TV set owners managed to pack in everyone who wanted to see the ceremony and processions, and the car owners left their cars in the drive while the road was taken over for a street party. You say:

If you left your bike unchained round our way, or in most of Britain, you would have had it nicked, even in 1959.

Well you certainly wouldn't have had it stolen round my way, or indeed over much of the centre swathe of Britain. I was a fanatical cyclist from the age of 15 in 1957 and ranged from the East coast to Mid and North Wales. I regularly cycled into Nottingham and left the bike outside libraries and bookshops. Agreed it was only the hack bike for that, but it would still have been worth a few quid to anyone pinching it. Nobody did though. I didn't buy a bike lock until I arrived at a big city university in 1960, when it came as a shock to the system to find that bikes did regularly get nicked on campus and in the city. You could still happily leave your bike unlocked in rural areas though, and we often did.

Violence there was in the 1950s. Friday and Saturday nights were mayhem in my town, with fights often spilling out of the pubs into the street. But it was 'clean' violence - men fighting other men with fists, no feet and certainly no weapons! Further it was limited to the participants. If you weren't involved you could happily weave your way through the chaos. What's more those poor chained to the kitchen sink downtrodden women Jenny is always telling us about could sometimes be seen wading into fights, dragging their man out of it, and hauling him off home while giving him a good telling off. And nobody would lay a finger on them, or on the unfortunate man concerned once he was safe in their custody. Everyone knew the poor fellow would have been far better off in the fight!

So what went wrong, and how did the UK get into the state it's in now? My two penn'orth would be increasing affluence (the more you've got the more you want, even if it belongs to somebody else), TV for making violence, stupidity and ignorance seem the norm, STOPP and their craven political allies for crippling discipline in schools and thus eventually throughout society, and the traitor Heath for selling us out to europe. That'll do for now!

Doctor Dominum ,

Well, here is the American Cousin . This is Michael Savage ( aka Michael Alan Weiner BA,MA,- sociology, education and PhD nutritional ethnomedicine - seriously! ) , who has the singular privilege of having been excluded from the United Kingdom on the capricious grounds by our very own politically correct Jacqui ( I've forgotten where my home is ) Smith .He has written four political best sellers

He has a following of more than 8 million Americans,most south of the Mason Dixon. Admittedly this probably includes every red neck who can figure out how to use the remote, and he's not exactly the flavour of the month with the Obama clan...but clearly he has a political touch that will someday qualify him for anchor on Fox News or head of the Murdoch corporation.........Oh and his radio show , the third largest audience in the US is quite a bit bigger (!!!) than Paula and Justin on 101

Judge for yourselves, this makes the 'Mail' look craven!

BBC Health warning. Don't watch this if you are/may be easily offended by political incorrectness

So this is High School 1959/2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_LFB-NMm7E&feature=related

Now y'all jus' settle down with three fingers of 'Jack'...........

A_L

Surprisingly enough, Greenwich had a Tory councillor or two, Camberwell, from whence I had come had none & much less crime?!

Anyway, my parents were superficially very honest & poor working class. However, Dad was soon revealed as a duck-shover supreme(and I'll explain the art if required for Doc or anyone else!), and, to my amazement, Mum had often been a very good customer of the spivs prior to me & marriage to Dad.

Now where did she think bloody furs etc came from-THE SWAG FROM ROBBERIES, probably armed ones, that's where!

That's what you called mixed messages!


Steve

I was brought up in the 60s on a respectable council estate, and we then moved to a middle class area when I was eight.

I do not remember much crime or hooliganism on the council estate. I'm sure we all kept our doors locked though. That council estate is still a good one, I don't see many reports of crime there today.

The major change in my lifetime has come in the city centre. 30 years ago you would get a few drunks on Saturday night in the city centre, nowadays the whole place is awash with them, including large groups of girls staggering about. This would never have happened in the 1970s or 80s and certainly never before that.

In the middle class area you do get a very few youngsters hanging around with cans of beer today, but not enough to cause a major problem.

Hi Steve. You say:

Surprisingly enough, Greenwich had a Tory councillor or two, Camberwell, from whence I had come had none & much less crime?

You may disagree, but I think crime is very dependent on communities. The tighter knit the community the less crime - at least in that community. It is very difficult to prey on your neighbours if everyone knows everyone else really well. That's why in the North-West Highlands you'll still find a bike theft or a car being broken into will make the local paper, whereas in most urban areas the police would laugh if you bothered reporting it. In the 1950s there were a lot more close-knit communities than there are now. And I'll bet in the case you mention Camberwell was a tighter knit community than Greenwich. Nothing to do with politics, you can have close-knit communities of any political complexion.

I live now in the town I was born in. In fact I can look out of my window and see the house I was born in! A short walk of just over a mile will take me to the house my Dad was born in, and on the way I'll pass where the house my Mum was born in used to be before it was knocked down. If I'd have made that walk in the 1950s I'd probably have known 80% of the people I met, nowadays I'll be lucky to meet anyone I know. That's why you could leave your house door, your car if you had one, or your bike unlocked round here in the 1950s and you certainly wouldn't now!

A_L

You are on to something with that loss of community. We have mostly become quite a dispersed species.

I also think you've made a very pertinent remark about increased wealth & acquisitiveness. People were trying to better themselves when I was a kid, BUT how many parents of my generation aspired to a mortgage, I wonder?

And now? Well, the days of Mum at home went west once that became a standard aspiration, and that IS a major contribution to the decline of community, because the feminine wisdom and DISCIPLINE that you & I & I expect Doc over there grew up with had a lot to do with at least a feeling of the old days being better to grow up in.


DECLAN

It is definitely a shame that young girls are now trying to live up to the British inability to drink sensibly-thought they had more brains!

Why IS it we can't drink in moderation? Even the 50's & 60's licensing laws couldn't stop the Friday & Saturday night mayhem-remember them well enough in Greenwich! My bedroom was bang opposite the Labour club-the night after 1959 General Election was a shocker!!

You just do NOT get this on the continent & never have done.


Steve

Hi Declan. You say:

The major change in my lifetime has come in the city centre. 30 years ago you would get a few drunks on Saturday night in the city centre, nowadays the whole place is awash with them, including large groups of girls staggering about. This would never have happened in the 1970s or 80s and certainly never before that.

Yes, the city centre on Saturday night really is something else, isn't it! Entirely due to the deliberate policy of the city council in promoting it as the midland's premier night out hot spot. They had to do something to attract trade after they ruined the place as a shopping centre by getting rid of all the on-street parking. You'd have thought they'd have learnt their lesson, but now they are trying to do the same trick with all the businesses by taxing company car parks, amazing!

The only thing that can be said for the Friday and Saturday night drunks is that, like the pub fighters in my town in the 1950s, they tend to fight each other rather than the public at large - at least that's my experience on the few occasions I've ventured in there. Mind you, every time I've been in there on a weekend night in the last few years I have, as luck would have it, been accompanied by very large lads half my age so that might have something to do with the problem free transit!

Don't we all have a tendency to look through rose tinted glasses, how good we think the past was. I came from a working class area of SW London, Fathers worked and mothers suffered endless chores running house and looking after children, with none of the trimmings of today. Everybody in the area looked out for each other, parents weren't afraid to discipline their own, or other parents children if thought fit, We played in the street and spent endless hours wondering free here there and every where.

Amidst all this we were continually warned , the dangers, a couple of local nonces, one being a teacher from a local primary school who was arrested for molesting his charges and later hanged himself,

Unpleasant incidents such as animosity between the two local primary schools broke out now and again . I recall lads armed with bats, torn down branches and dustbin lids advancing down our street towards a smaller band of boys from the apposing school. For the next hour or so there was a lot of police and teacher activity.


Our house was burgled once when I was around 9, doing me the huge favour of stealing amongst other thing, the family radio, thankfully no more sitting down to the family meal, with the Archers.

The area had it share of low-level criminals, plus home to a few well known notorious contract killers and protection racketeers. As children we were quite oblivious to a lot of the things that went on, but I remember returning home from Wales 1968 to read about shootings in a neighbouring road the result of a gangland feud and subsequent reports in the local paper described a street gripped by shock and fear, and of calls for the restoration of the death penalty for gun crime. A few years earlier saw the cold blooded shootings of three policeman in a neighbouring area.

Today the area is very gentrified, with house prices commanding upwards of 1.5 million, a far cry from the few hundred pounds then. Despite all, it was a community that is still closely bonded in some cases 70 years on, some 600 people regularly post from wherever they've settled in the world reminicing on a dedicated website.

Nowadays, not out of choice I reside in the Isle of Man, a decade behind in every respect, and still an Island of narrow minded locals that held out for years and would still welcome the right to birch and cane its young for petty crime and yield as a deterrent to come overs. paradoxically it was those that handed down such barbaric sentences and spread their propaganda, that were most corrupt.


Post birch - makes a mockery of their ideas against crime and youth. The Islands children are mainly well behaved and still enjoy the freedom the wander out and about on their own. I rarely lock my house or car,and you can still find you lost wallet at the local cop shop money intact. we don't see the wave of serious violent crime, that has infested the mainland. Much of our crime originates from drink related offences, spilling to domestics, not supprising when 78,000 inhabitants have little else to amuse them.

Ketta