The Baby Boomer Generation Read Online Free PDF Page A

special treat. Mind you, we did go a bit mad when sweet rationing was lifted on 5 February 1953. On that day, we all raided our piggy banks and headed off to the local sweetshops. It was a very special day; the shopkeepers were besieged with hordes of neighbourhood kids, all desperate to buy one or two treats from the huge selection of unrationed sweets on display. Penny chews, boiled sweets, nougat and liquorice sticks were all very popular but, surprisingly, it was toffee apples that were the biggest sellers of the day. A firm in South London gave away 800 free lollipops to local kids, while other manufacturing companies handed out free sweets to anyone who turned up at their factory gates. It was all very exciting: a one-off experience that was unlikely to ever happen again. We had an extra special spring in our step that day; it was certainly a day to remember. Knowing that sweets were now available to buy in unlimited quantities didn’t immediately turn us into chocoholics. Having spent our early years doing without sweets, we had no addiction to them and most of us continued to regard them as treats, preferring to buy a comic than a packet of Spangles. Strangely enough, although sweets were now de-rationed, we had to wait another few months before sugar was taken off rationing in September 1953.
    The post-war baby-boomer generation was still at pre-school age when the clocks crept past midnight to herald the arrival of the first New Year of the 1950s. The population of the United Kingdom had just passed the 50 million mark and three-quarters of all families lived in rented accommodation. A quarter of British homes had no electricity and Britain still had an empire, albeit a diminishing one. Everyone, including children, were compelled to carry wartime identity cards wherever they went and this requirement continued right up until 1952, seven years after the war had ended. Trams were still in use on our city streets and they carried on running for another two years. The vast majority of our parents were married before we were born, with only 3% of us born outside of marriage. Abortion and homosexual acts were illegal and capital punishment still existed. The British way of life was very different back then; there were no shopping centres, multiplex cinemas and out of town retail parks. Self-service stores and supermarkets had been popular in America since the 1930s but it took the British a long time to catch up. A handful of self-service shops opened here during the 1940s and J. Sainsbury opened their first one in Croydon in 1950, but other food chains were slow to follow Sainsbury’s lead; by the end of the decade self-service stores were still few and far between.
    Shopping in individual specialist shops was still the norm here. With many families living hand-to-mouth and few homes having refrigerators, there was an essential need for daily shopping and the corner shop was at the centre of the local community. They usually sold everything from newspapers to sliced ham, but unlike today, most of them didn’t open in the evening and they shut for a half-day during the week, with some shutting all day on Mondays. Our mothers did their weekly shopping in the local high street, nipping in and out of many different shops, including the butcher’s, baker’s and greengrocer’s. There was also a busy local pub on nearly every street corner of the land where noisy singsongs could be heard bellowing out on a Saturday night.
    For most of the 1950s, the wireless (radio) was our main source of entertainment in the home. At the turn of the century, two out of three people in Britain had never seen a television programme let alone owned a television set. Television ownership only started to take off in 1953, prompted by the public’s desire to see the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, which was planned to be broadcast live on BBC television in June that year. There was another surge in sales of television