ADAM TRIMINGHAM

FROM compiling the Remember When feature which appears weekly in the Argus, I know what a huge amount of sentiment there is for the Fifties.

The funny thing is that despite being there, I don't feel it myself.

To me, the Fifties were a decade as monochrome as the pictures we took all too rarely on eight-exposure Kodak films using Box Brownie cameras. It wasn't until the middle of the next decade that life burst into full colour.

We started off with the Korean war and ended with the Cold War in the shadow of the H-bomb. In between we had Suez and Hungary. We missed our chance to go into Europe and, having started ahead of our Continental neighbours, we fell well behind them.

Obsessed with Empire, we were late to feel Harold Macmillan's wind of change sweeping through Africa, leaving that sad continent with a mess of one-party dictatorships. Our own racism led to the Notting Hill riots of 1958 at which I was an unwilling and horrified witness.

Old Supermac intoned that we'd never had it so good but most of us were miserably poor. The true prosperity didn't come until three decades later, by which time we'd managed to get rid of restrictive trades unions and dozy managements.

The lack of money was astonishing. Most people rented their homes and the average wage was a fiver a week. I can recall going to parties where people each brought a bottle of brown ale, all they could afford, and when that ran out after a few minutes, everyone went home.

There was a rigid discipline that permeated society, making many schools brutal and ineffective, radio dull and unadventurous, and church services dreary. We endured relentless drivel at the cinema and antediluvian drawing room dramas in the theatre.

Even the weather was awful, with three of the century's worst summers in 1954, 1956 and 1958. London was full of smog, that did not disappear until the following decade, and northern industrial towns were grim beyond belief.

Despite Hugh Cudlipp's efforts to inject excitement into the Daily Mirror, most newspapers were skimpy and written turgidly. Sometimes there was such a lack of news that the main headline in the Telegraph one summer's day was Woman of 105 Buys New Hat.

We all got excited by occasional celebrations like the Festival of Britain, in 1951, and the Coronation parade, two years later, but I went to them both and expectation was better than either event.

Most people's lives were those of quiet desperation, often ending even before retirement.

There were signs of a loosening up by the end of the decade with the advent of rock 'n' roll, experimental theatre, commercial TV and comprehensive schools. But it all took time and my childhood passed without the freedom most kids today take for granted.

Of course I regret many modern scourges of society, such as increased crime, a drugs explosion, too many cars, the emergence of an underclass and far too much rubbish. Many of us have eschewed religion and family values, only to put nothing whatsoever in their place.

But I'd far rather have been a child of the Nineties with real hope, excitement, prosperity and fun than to have been stuck in the stultifying social rigidity of the Fifties.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.