Twelve young people from south east London about to leave school for the last time.
It would have been in late June or early July 1968 outside Crown Woods School in Eltham, our exams were finished and we were all preparing for that long hot summer which would end with exam results and the beginning of a new phase in our lives.
Of the twelve sitting on the car I can easily name seven of the young people staring back at me. I’m there fifth from the left, beside me was my girl friend Ann, and on my right was Anne Davey, David Hatch, and Mike Robinson while perched on the car at the edge of the picture was Crispin Rooney and behind us Karen and Richard Woods. I rather think the chap on the end was Keith Bradbury while my dear friend Anne Davey has informed me that behind us was Jenny Turner and Ian Curle.
We have become that favoured generation, “the baby boomers”. Not for us world wars or bitter trade depressions.
We were born in to a world our parents were determined would be better and different.
Now there was a dark side to all this. The Korean War had begun just as most of us were coming up to our first birthday, and the ever present threat of nuclear war hovered in the distance, and as if to round off our child hood by the summer of 1968 there was the awful tragedy of the Vietnam War.
But that summer was a good one, and I have to say truly it seemed the sun shone all the way through.
Now I was the late comer to the group along with my friend Bernard, we had washed up at Crown Woods Comprehensive in the September of 1966. Me, from a Secondary Modern School and Bernard from a grammar school.
And Crown Woods was mixed, which pitched both of us into a series of wonderful new experiences and opened up new friendships that have survived the space of over 54 years.
Most stayed in the south with only me washing up in the north and never going back. We did the full range of post school careers, with some of us heading off to pursue a degree and others getting down to it directly in offices and factories.
And now most of us are on the cusp of retiring or have done so with all that that will bring. And as I stare back at the class of 68 I ponder on the stories that we made and the people we touched.
Pictures; from the collection of Anne Davey
Tomorrow, part 2, one of the class of '68 and a secondary modern school
I predated you by ten years having wartime and postwar rationing for both food, coal and clothes for ten years. In the 1950s things improved but the 1960s were better with a sense of hope and prosperity which we thought would continue. The 1970s changed that but through all that time London was a safe place for children to grow up. I used to go to watch Charlton play by myself from the age of 7 and meet my friends outside the Valley. My wife who lived in Soho at that time used to travel all over London on public transport by herself from the age of 8. London was a wonderful diverse place then but what we have now done is import tribalism from the Third World which has destroyed our social fabric.
ReplyDeleteWell while I can remember all you say about London in the 1950s, I disagree about Tribalism from the Third World, the situation which has caused the change is far more complex, and I remember pats of London which were unsafe, and look at the Manchester of the 1870s, through the book The Scuttlers will reveal, all was not well a century and a half ago.
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