Were the 1960s a great time to be alive?

Sluttygran.

I grew up in the late forties and early fifties as a child of a family who were part of the, "Undeserving Poor".

Looking back at family history I can see why my mother and father were so bad at parenting; I just resolved, as a seven year old, not to be like them if I had children when I
I grew up.

Taking History O Level in 1961 I somehow thought that, "Reform",meant making things better; now I realise it just means changing things, often for the worse for ordinary people.

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It was a wonderful time to be young, with the country shaking off the shackles of wartime, and with a huge change in social attitudes and mores.
I guess the decades of youth are always the most fun, so long as you have the essentials of life.
Sadly the youngsters of today have a terrible struggle if they try to afford further education, and far too many of them lack sufficient food and clothing, live in poor housing and have little if any chance of a decent job.
We seem to be rapidly returning to the ‘hungry thirties’ - I hope we soon rotate through another sixties type era very soon!
Before anyone else says it, I know that all young people have giant TVs and expensive mobile phones - it’s been said before, but I have not observed it to be true, and in any case those items are no substitute for a decent and fulfilling life.

As far as I am concerned the 60s was a great time to be young. I was 17 when they started so got full advantage of them. University, working in finance and industry and rarely if ever facing any sexism at work - and when I did meet it, I just walked right over it. Women were a unusual in finance so no one felt threatened by us.

I lived in central London - rent £6.50 a week - and everything in central London was in walking distance, art galleries, museums were free and concerts and theatres cheap. I had a season ticket to the Promenade Concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, queueing for the gallery every night and seeing prodigies like Jacqueline Du Pre, Yehudi Menuhin, Sir Malcolm Sargeant. Clothes were fabulous and I could walk and travel by myself late at night without any concerns for my safety.

At the end of the decade, I married, we bought a house and moved out of London.

A cracking decade of young single hedonism and fun.

Party lines on phones....wow, there's a blast from the past sodapop! I remember ending up dating someone I 'met' during a mistaken identity, party line phone call. Would run a mile these days of course. How things have changed!

Haven't seen you post for a while ExaltedWombat I love your name, it sticks in my mind.

We bought our first house in the 60s the mortgage was £14 per month and we were hard pushed to find that sometimes as we were both nurses.

The best of times, and the worst of times.

Yes, it was pretty good. Society was loosening up, there was a bit of money around. We KNEW we'd all die pretty soon in a nuclear war (I'm quite serious) so why not have a good time? If you got a college place tuition and maintenance was free. You could drive a car without feeling like a criminal, and when you got somewhere there was generally free parking.

It was a great time! I was an art student and therefore the coolest thing on the planet. 4 years of pretty much doing what I wanted! Beatles and Stones, a folk club every week and we were only just up the road from Eel Pie Island. A couple of the girls tried purple hearts once and we knew someone who knew someone who took heroin!! Very few of us drank because we couldn't afford it, but we always had a party in the pub at the end of term. My friend and I had a joint 21st party at the pub - cheese and pineapple on sticks. We knew how to live

I remember most the utter freedom of it all.

I remember having some sugar and butter as part of my wages as a student nurse in the early 60s. I lived in the nurses home and think this must have been a post war left over.
It stopped shortly after I started my training,

I had the most wonderful time in the 60s! I was 17 and in school in 1960 and by 1970 I had been teaching in a comprehensive school for 4 years. In between , I spent 3 years at university and one year in France when I discovered what it was like to earn some money for the first time, apart from little holiday jobs and I was able to buy lovely French clothes. While I was in France President Kennedy was murdered which left us all numb with shock and we were all terrified by the Cuban missile crisis. I learned what it was like to party all night and have non-stop fun and to have the world at my feet and it was amazing! I wish I could go back to that time when I didn’t have the aches and health problems associated with the age I am now. Life is stilll good but I still think about the sixties and the wonderful time I had when I was young, gorgeous and fancy-free!

My brother went on the Aldermaston anti-nuclear marches, but although I agreed with the reason I was never a marcher. Recently, at the age of 82 and with a walking frame, the same brother went on the People’s Vote march.

The different experiences on this thread are very interesting reading, but we all remember the fashions and the new sense of freedom with affection.

I left school in 1962 aged 18 and moved back to London where I had spent most of my childhood.

I had a job as a technician at the university. I was paid £7 10s a week. I was naive financially, politically and in most other areas to be honest. At the end of my first week the Chief Technician had to gently explain about Income Tax when I asked why I hadn't been paid the full amount.

My Bedsit rent was £3 10s, my fares to work £1 10s. I had some money saved from my Saturday job but I realised that I needed to do more or I was going to become extremely thin, so I took on a paper round.

Then I discovered Folk Clubs.

The first one I sang at didn't pay. It was at Unity Theatre in St Pancras. Of course the fact that it was a hotbed of Communism passed completely over my head.

Then I was asked to sing at another venue and the guy who organised the club apologised to me afterwards because he could only pay me £3 10s. I hadn't realised you COULD get paid and had sung for about 14 minutes.

So in the 60s I was into Folk rather than Pop. I quite liked the Beatles when I heard them on radio. Knew about Mary Quant etc from the papers and did once walk down Kings Road to see what it was like but like others on this thread was desperately worried during the Cuban Crisis and more into Ban the Bomb marches.

I knew that things were generally lightening up but it really didn't affect me much. I do remember lying in bathwater wearing a new pair of jeans in an effort to make them skin tight.

VIOLETTE Quote [ Oh yes ….left school at Christmas 62...just 15 and 3 months] End Quote

I believe you have "hit the nail right on the head" in your above statement VIOLETTE. I was still 14 years old when i left school at Christmas 1959. However, as my fifteenth birthday fell during that holiday, i was allowed to leave. So, at that young age, you were suddenly out in the working world and being treated like any other adult. As a trainee butcher, my basic working week was 45 Hours starting at 6:30 am on Friday and Saturdays and 7:30am for the rest of the week, with Monday and Wednesday afternoons off

That may seem harsh to many in this age, but through that, you grew up very quickly, and that brought about all the freedoms of adult life. In the summer of 1960 still only fifteen years old i went on my first holiday with my gang on mates which was camping at Weymouth. At sixteen years old we lived for our motorbikes and the gang of girls who would hang around with us very often. We treated them as adult, they looked on us as adult, and everybody else looked on us in the same light.

That sadly in my view is what young people today do not have the chance to experience. They are still referred to as children right up to the age of eighteen. Many do not experience the world of work until they are well into their twenties when they have accumulated heavy debts from all that education and that great teenage experience we had has been lost to them.

It was certainly a very different world for young people, and whether todays "young adult" experience is better, I find very debatable.

Yes, I had a ball.

I was born in '61.

My memories of the first five years of my life are all in black and white!
We lived in a tiny terraced house, the first house that my parents bought.
The only heat came from the coal fire in the lounge, and I still remember how cold the house was on a winter's morning when we got up, and having to get dressed as quickly as possible.
Next door lived an elderly widow. I remember her taking me for a walk - the coal wagon had passed by, so she gave me a paper bag and we went along the pavement collecting any lumps of coal that might have fallen from the wagon.
In the same terrace, but behind on a lower level lived two elderly sisters. They had a tiny lawn, and one say they gave me a little pair of scissors to help cut it, while they used a pair of shears.
Below on the end of the terrace lived a lovely childless couple who grew all their own fruit and veg, as well as flowers which were sold in bunches from their wall next to a bus stop (the council put an end to that in later years!)
I think it's fair to say that I was born into a world that was still very hard for many people, and subconsciously I picked up on this as a youngster.

My first school was very small and very old fashioned. I hated it! Even now, some smells bring back memories of it that upset me!

Then in '67, when I was six, we moved - or 'flit', as a neighbour put it. My parents bought a brand new house, and I started going to a modern primary school.

From then on, my memories are in colour (even though my photographer dad was still using black and white, and we didn't have a colour TV at any point in my childhood)!

The rest of my childhood was probably quite different from that of my parents.
As a girl, I was still more limited in what I was allowed to do than my older brother, but still allowed far more freedom to roam than today's youngsters are allowed (though I pushed the boundaries way beyond what my parents would have allowed, had they known) .

By the time the sixties ended, I was getting towards the latter years of my primary school time, and changes were taking place in education that were to open up so many more opportunities in the years that followed,

In other words, from a young child's point of view, I remember the sixties as a time of great change, change that definitely was good for me!

I remember the pedal pushers and paper nylon petticoats of the late 50s and the amazing fashion and music of the 60s. Those of us who left school at 15 without qualifications were usually able to walk into a job, often with the opportunity to finish our working life with a decent career by working through the ranks. I was lucky enough to see both the Rolling Stones and Beatles live in concert. I definitely feel the 60s were a great time to be alive.

Oh yes ….left school at Christmas 62...just 15 and 3 months …...what a brilliant time to be alive !! so much freedom then to do whatever we wanted and it felt that the sky was the limit …..someone once said to me 'Yours was the first generation in a long time not to experience a war',,,well, that was true to an extent, if you mean not on our shores (but our sailors went to Korea and Suez) etc...….we joined the Ban the Bomb movement, not sure it did any good ….and there was love and flower power everywhere ...and jobs were plentiful ...my first job paid £3 a week of which I gave my mum £1.10/- but there was still plenty left for nights out at dances, buy a bit of material to make a mini dress ……………...good memories . Shame the current generation will never know what it was like to have such freedom.

gillyknits I thought that was called a Bunny Dip ?

The sixties were the turning point for the younger generation. In fact the word ‘teenager’ had hardly been used before that. Young women had dressed like their mothers, still in short white socks until they were twenty and never seen outside without gloves (even in summer, white cotton then). Then along came rock and roll, mini skirts, and later, tights.
I loved it especially the fashion, although I remember having to learn the ‘mini-skirt bob’ so as not to expose knickers to the general public when bending down ! ?

Oh yes Sitting on the settee in Biba's window on Saturday mornings. The Royal Court and the Angry Young Men. Chris Barber and Ottie Patterson. Skiffle. Going down to Brighton on the back of a motorbike without a helmet on a Sunday morning. Roller skating to Sinatra singing love and Marriage.......... walking along the Thames towpath and holding hands with someone I loved......

By and large I think the 1960s were a good time to be alive, but not particularly funny to be nine in 1960 and 20 in 1970.

Why not, you ask?

Old fashioned parents who objected to pop, wouldn't let us wear mini skirts. no make-up until we were 16, and then to top it all, they refused to let me learn to drive!

Had to be home at nine on school nights, and when I was sixteen my mother fetched me home from friends and even from a concert I went to with my boyfriend.

Nonnie, Quote [At 11 you were judged a success or failure and the rest of your education depended on your 11+ result which meant that in some areas the top 25% passed and in other areas only 5% did. ] End Quote.

You are entirely correct in the above Nonnie. At my school which was on a council estate in Bristol, only one person in 1955 passed the eleven plus exam out of the entire year. Connaught Road Cowshed we as kids always called that school, and the Headmaster was known as "The Rook". The school motto was " Manners maketh Man", which says it all about that place.

With the exception of the one person above, all my year left with no education certification whatsoever, but as there was full employment at that time with more jobs on offer than people to fill them we all obtained employment within the first few days of leaving that School.

Many of my classmates improved their education themselves in the coming years, with myself using the education facilities of the Transport & General Workers Union to further my basic and later specialist education.

I believe that the sixties decade was a time more than any other when the opportunities were available for anyone to make of themselves what they wished to be, whatever start they had in life or education background.

As Jane43 says, in the 60s a man and a woman doing the same job would be paid different amounts. My first job was in the wages department of a large company and there was a chart showing annual increases but divided into male and female salaries.

As a teenager in London it was a great time, shopping at Biba , eating out at The Golden Egg, going to pop concerts etc. but there was also the church youth club and lot of friends there and going off hiking and camping with. Office jobs were easy to find and plenty of temping but by the end of 1969 I was married and had a baby, seemed to pack a lot in!