Re: End of school milk


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Posted by David Meadway on February 17, 2008 at 20:59:29 from 89.204.244.34 user davidm.

In Reply to: End of school milk posted by Jock on February 17, 2008 at 13:55:58:

Obviously it all changed when Mr Marples decreed that the workers must all have motorcars, and wouldn't need trains any more. They never had it so good.

Less facetiously I would say that the preceding arrival of US, particularly teen-age, culture into the lives of those who became adults in the 60's infected the zeitgeist.

Or deeper, they were the first adults in three generations to feel guilt for NOT fighting in a war (mostly). Plus the cultural shock of losing the Peace, Empire and Suez. If the recent past is uncomfortable then look to the future; if you feel guilty be generous to the next generation. Thus all the liberalism and technological optimism. The upshot may have been vastly reduced public transport, but I had no trouble getting into a pseudo-Grammar School, followed by University, and back then the State paid for the lot.

Managerial inflation, hospital decline and consultancy followed later. Bureaucracy was always with us, but is now much more mechanised. I take no responsibility for the hospitals, but regrettably I have benefited from the other three. So I and the other baby-boomers have still never had it so good.

I think that technological innovation would have generated a lot of the 60's changes in any case, but the social changes were markedly greater, even revolutionary. I find it easy to compare the social assumptions that I learnt as a child in the 50s with those of AR in the 30s (although he was progressive). The British middle-class world hadn't changed that much, despite the war; and the milkman still delivered green top milk from a horse and cart. The social values of the later 60's and 70's are closer to those of the Hullabaloos than anything else, but a lot more egalitarian (and ethical, I hope). And then along came Mrs T ....

From memory, the snack eaten by adults last thing at night was referred to as 'Supper' by pre-war, Upper-middle class novelists, usually as a break during formal balls; and the same by lower-middle class Lancashire landladies in the 70's. My own middle-middle class home had no such meal; but as children we had supper if my father was absent, otherwise it became dinner. For the rest of the evening we starved.

Lunch becoming Dinner was pretty well universal in British State schools. Something of an anomaly, like referring to married, female teachers as 'Miss'. Does this still happen?




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