I’ve been looking back as a way of looking forward! Studying history is a useful way to reflect on the past, to discover lessons that may be learned to prepare ourselves for the future. The more I look back, the more I can see that so many world events recycle themselves in a never-ending repetition of gain and loss.
My personal fascination with history is in events that affected Britain during and after the Second World War, and the more I learn, the more I see a familiarity in the arguments being posed today about the way forward for our increasingly fractured world.
But for now let’s focus on the 1960s, when more than a decade after the end of the Second World War, Britain was still reeling from the loss of life, the devastation, and the underlying fear that such hard-earned peace might be short-lived.
The sixties brought with it a generation of youngsters who believed they could put the past behind them and surge forward to a better life. Social and political attitudes began to change, with significant events acting as forerunners of even greater change.
I explore some of those changes in a series of fictional stories, entitled the Mountfield Road Mysteries where we meet some tenants who come to live in a tiny bedsit at Number 1, Mountfield Road, in the Sussex seaside town of Hastings. The tenants have little in common, except for their decision to rent a room from a certain Mr Humphrey, a landlord who is a stickler for traditions and protocols that were fast disappearing.
The first book in the series, Storms of Change [external link], is set in 1960. We meet Marcus Chase, a young man keen to throw off the constraints of his childhood and teenage years, breaking free from his home in London and moving south to Hastings.
He meets Fred and Gilly Barnes, the couple who rent the flat below, and is soon absorbed by their tales of adventure, impressed by their carefree attitude to life. But like everything in life, all is not as bright as it would first appear…
One year on, in Whispers of Fortune [external link], we meet Sally Hilton, a young woman who is certain 1961 could be her year.
‘You can be whoever and whatever you want to be,’ are her mother’s words to Sally throughout her childhood. But Sally doesn’t know who she wants to be. That is the problem.
When the thirty-fifth President of the United States is elected to office, Sally Hilton is worrying about the ladder in her stockings. It’s her only pair and needs to last until payday on Friday. In his augural speech, John F. Kennedy promises significant change to his fellow Americans. In Britain, the sense of euphoria is contagious. If not us, then who? If not now, when? Powerful words spill out from the skilled orator, and Sally Hilton, with her laddered stockings and empty purse, wants to believe they will make a difference. Change is coming, not just for Americans, but for the ‘free world’, whatever that means.
Then Sally notices a card in the newsagent’s window. It feels like a sign…
In the third book in the series, Flashes of Doubt [external link], we meet William Arnold. Forced into retirement, having to leave his cosy cottage and move to a tiny bedsit in Mountfield Road, Hastings, William Arnold wants nothing more than to remember the past, a time when he understood the world, when he had a role to play, a purpose. Then William meets sixteen-year-old Peter, a young lad who challenges William to revise his thinking completely…
The 1960s was a decade when young people were finding their voice and older people were struggling to come to terms with the newly defined ‘generation gap’.
Some say the ‘swinging sixties’ really took off in Britain in 1964, the year that saw the Beatles rise to international fame, but it was 1960 when the group first got together, playing sessions in the now world-famous Cavern Club in Liverpool by 1961. An explosion of talent emerged during the next few years, with a host of pop and rock artists, many whose music is just as popular today.
Mary Quant, among others, transformed the way young people dressed, as interior designers, such as Terence Conran, transformed the way many people furnished their homes, offering contemporary furniture at affordable prices.
As well as music and fashion, the growth of consumerism and the widespread availability of labour-saving devices meant people had more leisure time to enjoy.
It was also the decade when car ownership took off, with estimates suggesting the numbers of people owning cars rose during the decade from around nine million to fifteen million. Thinking back to my childhood, I recall so few cars passed by our house there was no danger for me to cross the road on my own at the tender age of eight. And yet, that same road now sees tens of thousands of vehicles pass along it every day, with young and old taking their life in their hands should they decide to venture from one side to the other.
A typical 1960s house was difficult to heat, with windows that let in as much of the weather as they kept out. Central heating hadn’t arrived for most families, leaving them with few options – a coal fire (with coal being an expensive commodity), a two-bar electric fire, which would eat up any money being put into the meter, or a paraffin stove with its fumes.
Young people had grown up in the shadow of war, with new threats being posed by the Cold War and growing tensions between the East and West. National Service was still in place, an experience that brought up conflicting emotions for many young men. What was right and what was wrong when it came to conflict? There were no easy answers then and many would say, there are no easy answers now.
With the threat of nuclear armaments circling, many young people joined the peace protests taking place across Britain. The term ‘teenager’ only entered into common usage in Britain during the 1950s. Around that time young people started to find their voice, with two distinct groups emerging: beatniks and teddy boys.
Both groups were strongly influenced by American music, Teddy Boys loving rock and roll, wearing long, draped jackets, and sporting the kind of hairstyle worn by Elvis Presley with his slicked back quiff, all kept in place with plenty of Brylcreem. Beatniks, by contrast, wore duffel coats and berets, long hair and preferred jazz. The ‘beat generation’ was said to have been inspired by writers such as Jack Kerouac, among others. Reacting to the experiences of the Second World War, this was a movement that sought to promote peace. Later in the sixties, the ideals promoted by beatniks were taken forward by another aspect of the counter-culture of that period – the hippies.
Both groups frequented coffee bars, vying over the jukebox. In the 1950s and 1960s, coffee bars were popular meeting places for teenagers. They were often the setting for live music, as well as the ubiquitous jukebox. Skiffle music was popular at that time, a type of jazz and blues-influenced folk music that was the precursor to British rock ‘n’ roll.
British teenagers made coffee bars their own; they were a cheap place to ‘hang out’, after all, coffee had no legal age limit. It’s said that London’s most famous 1950s coffee bar – the ’21s’ – famously launched, among others, Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard. In Liverpool, the Jacaranda club in Slater Street was a haunt for the Beatles in their early days, while Cilla Black waitressed at the Zodiac coffee bar in Duke Street, another musicians’ favourite.
Many women in their middle years who survived the Second World War came to realise they could achieve more with their lives than previously imagined. With so many men away fighting, women had taken on vital roles as mechanics, engineers, air raid wardens, bus and fire engine drivers. They took on dangerous work in munition factories and helped to build ships and aeroplanes. The end of the war brought an enormous change for them, as well as for the men who returned from the front. Attitudes had shifted, new horizons had opened up, and the years that followed confirmed that nothing would be quite the same again.
Aside from the changes that a strengthening youth culture brought about, Britain began to see the problems brought about by intensive farming, with nature beginning to suffer. Alongside the rise in car ownership, new towns were built where there was previously agricultural land. How much consideration was being given to the environment? We see the longer term effects now, with our loss of wildlife habitats and the very real fears about climate change.
Across the world, in China, as part of Chairman Mao Zedong’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ initiative that ran from 1958 to 1962, the Chinese people were ordered to eliminate rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The order came as the authorities decided that these ‘pests’ were damaging crops and the sparrows were eating too much grain. Over that period some one billion sparrows were killed, including the total population of tree sparrows. However, it seems the Chairman’s plan would backfire. The sparrows were a vital part of the Chinese ecosystem, as well as eating grain, sparrows ate locusts. Without the sparrows the locusts flourished. By 1960, locusts decimated the rice crops, resulting in one of the worst man-made famines ever experienced. The exact numbers of people who died during the famine is unknown, but it’s suggested that it was between twenty and forty million people. It’s certainly a reminder that tampering with nature will inevitably create problems for our whole ecosystem, mankind included.
I will continue to explore the past, to learn from the good and the bad, and above all, continue to hope for a positive future. •

Isabella Muir [external link] writes novels, novellas, and short stories about post-Second War World Britain and she runs an independent publishing company, Outset Publishing. Some of Isabella Muir’s books are translated into Italian [external link] and Portuguese.