From the Observer archive: this week in 1960

“…As for the boys and girls, the dear young absolute beginners, I sometimes feel that if they only knew this fact, this very simple fact, namely how powerful they really are, then they could rise up overnight and enslave the old taxpayers, the whole damn lot of them – toupets and falsies and rejuvenators and all.”

The young hero of Mr. Colin MacInnes’s novel was not far wrong. Since the war the youth of this country have not taken over the Government, but they have, by their numbers and vitality, their spending power and their undoubted capacity for mischief, asserted their right to be treated as a separate class in the community which any Government must take seriously. The proof of this can be seen in a list of reports from the McNair Report in 1944 to the Albemarle Report last week. Not much has happened as a result, but the young have not waited. They have adopted their own clothes and their own language, their own leaders and their own pastimes. They have even chosen their own name. From now on the teenagers are here to stay…The children of the working class are still, unless they are exceptionally clever, chucked out into the world of industry at fifteen, to grow up as best they can… It is not surprising that in their leisure hours a minority get their own back on a community which so neglects them.

Observer editorial

KEY QUOTE

“By law, neither pedestrians nor animals are permitted on the motorway, although the animals would not know that.”

Warwickshire police spokesman

TALKING POINT

Prolonged consultations yesterday within two of the three railway unions confirmed the probability of an effective national railway strike tomorrow week. The executive of the Transport Salaried Staffs Association representing 87,322 registered members – all of them clerical workers – met for two hours, but only to endorse its earlier decision to reject the Transport Commission’s offer of an interim pay-rise back-dated to January 11.

Rail strike, front page story