Historical note: early years of the 1946 British birth cohort study

Abstract

The article by Michael Wadsworth in the previous issue of this journal (Wadsworth 2010) prompted thoughts about the importance to life course studies of social history. Wadsworth demonstrated this relevance in his pioneering volume The Imprint of Time (Wadsworth 1991). The present text adds a little further information about the social history of the parents of the 1946 cohort and the 1946 cohort’s early years. The social history of a birth cohort’s parents is a relevant, if somewhat neglected topic, because it shapes the ideas and values which surround the cohort during its early years of dependency. At the time the 1946 cohort was born, over 70 per cent of the male population was employed in manual occupations, with them and their families assigned to one of the manual social classes. The present historical note mentions some possibly relevant features of their experience. The recruits to the 1946 British birth cohort study mostly were conceived during July 1945, the month in which Attlee’s post-war Labour Government was elected, and gestated by mothers who had endured nearly six full years of war. The experience of women during the 1939-1945 war shaped the mental and physical health which the mothers brought to conception and gestation, while the ideas with which they raised their young children were coloured also by their socialisation in the pre-war world and the reality of post-war austerity. Each of these phases presents a complex picture of benefits and hardships, with a woman’s likelihood of experiencing one rather than the other being linked to their social class. Working class mothers were most likely to have suffered hardship at one or more points: pre-war; wartime; post-war austerity. The older mothers of the 1946 cohort had fathers and brothers killed in World War I or crippled by gas or amputation; and often carried rickets from the failure to add vitamin D to the wartime whale oil margarine or heart valve defects from childhood rheumatic fever. All knew of neighbours and kin invalided or dead by respiratory tuberculosis. The ubiquitous out-door toilet ensured that bedrooms smelt of urine from the chamber pot under the bed; and insect infestation in the fabric of poor terraced housing encouraged their inhabitants to sleep in the street during the summer months. High unemployment due to the mass closure of heavy industry in the north and west of Britain was, in time, counter-balanced by new light industry in the midlands and south-east. Routes out of the working class were offered by the merchant marine, police, nursing and teaching, where women had to resign on marriage. Suburban homes, bought on mortgage, were strip-built along Metroland, allowing more space in the centre of cities. The cinema, cigarettes and lipstick brought a new glamour to life. Cycling and motor-bikes allowed escape from locality; truck driving along the developing national road network was an adventure of navigation and machine repair; and crystal wireless brought the international into everyday life. The cruelties of the Poor Law (means testing; break-up of families on entry to Work House; the able-bodied forced to tramp every day to the next Work House) ensured a terror of relying on welfare (Spring Rice 1939; Greenwood 1939; Stevenson