Lesson video

- ♪ Yeah! He's been workin' so hard ♪ ♪ Yeah! I've been workin' too, baby ♪ ♪ Yeah! Every night and day ♪ ♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! ♪ ♪ We got to get out of this place ♪ ♪ If it's the last thing we ever do ♪ ♪ We got to get out of this place ♪ ♪ 'Cause girl, there's a better life for me and you ♪ Hi everyone.

Welcome back to our lessons on the the Swinging Sixties.

I was about to say, but in this lesson, I think we're going to begin to challenge that and see how accurate that view is.

This is lesson three on the Sixties.

And my name is Mr. Wallace.

Now the song you just heard made by the band that you can see on the screen here.

If I just make myself a little bit smaller, you can see all of them there.

This is a song that was actually written by an American couple.

But the band that you just heard is a band from Newcastle.

And you can see a picture of the Tyne Bridge here.

And they're singing about wanting to get out of this place.

And that was a feeling shared by a lot of people who felt like they were stuck, that they were in a place that was going nowhere.

Contrasting the view of the Swinging Sixties as an exciting time of new ideas, new developments, new music, new culture, and all this that we've talked about.

The first two lessons we've really hammered in what the stereotype of the Sixties was.

This place that wasn't as much fun.

And in fact, I was talking about this to a friend, someone else whose father grew up in the Sixties.

And they grew up in a town called Gateshead, which is near Newcastle near what you can see on the screen.

And his father says the Sixties didn't happen on Gateshead High Street.

And what he means by that, or what he meant by that was that the view of the Swinging Sixties, the stereotype that may have happened for some people.

That may have happened in the media.

That may have happened for certain young people, if they had the money.

But for him and for many others, the Sixties, it wasn't so swinging.

And there were challenges.

And the lyrics of that song go into some of those challenges.

The constant working, the lack of appreciation, the fact that you feel like your own life is going nowhere.

These were problems that many people had to deal with.

Just like they've had to deal with at other time periods as well.

So today we're going to look at that idea, of whether or not the Sixties were a time of prosperity? So people having more success and people having more money and more access to other things.

Or were they a time of poverty and in certain parts of the country and yes, in certain parts of like Newcastle and Gateshead or other parts of the country as well.

The Swinging Sixties was more of a media myth than it was a reality.

So today we're going to look at both sides of that.

But before we get started, as always make sure you've got what you need.

So you should have a pen, you should have something to write on.

And ideally, you've got somewhere quiet to work.

So once you are ready, we'll get started.

Perfect, Let's go.

All right, I'm up here now.

So just made myself a little bit smaller.

And I want it to stay on the picture that you can see to the side.

Now, this is, like I said before, an image of the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle, where that band you heard The Animals that's where they come from.

And this is an iconic image and it's iconic city in fact, because like many places in the North it's still seen to this day as a very working class community.

The people who have lived in Newcastle over recent decades have tended to have a lot of working class jobs.

Things like shipbuilding and other jobs that are related to manufacture and to the ports.

I mean, nowadays it's I suppose, largely a different city, but at the time of the Fifties and Sixties, that tradition still held.

And you had a working class community that wasn't as connected to new things like art and fashion.

Now there would have been people because of the media, because of what they see on television.

That would have wanted those things.

And that doesn't mean that no one there had them.

But as a culture, it wasn't exactly like London.

Most places in England in fact, it would have taken time for the changes in London to spread out.

And to hit the rest of the country.

And Newcastle at the North of the country, maybe a little bit longer because of those working class roots.

Now because of those working class roots, it's also got certain communities or that lived at the time and in previous years in worse conditions.

Just like you'd find in any inner city.

So in inner city London and in Birmingham and Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, all of these places, Glasgow, all of these places would have had inner city areas with extreme poverty.

And you're looking at communities that looked like this.

Now this is a photo taken in 1969.

And we've been talking about the Swinging Sixties about excitement and change.

Now this does not look particularly exciting for any of the people in this photo.

If you look around this photo and you've going to look at it more later on in the lesson.

You've got these children and a bed which has no mattress.

You've got a couple of blankets.

You've got damp and rotting wallpaper on the walls.

And a mother that's trying to care for all of them.

And she would not have been alone in this.

Now I'm not saying the entire country was like this.

But we're talking millions of people living in conditions that nowadays we would look out and think, "Well, that's just unacceptable." The changes in society hadn't necessarily made it to them.

They're not as worried about things like new fashion and new technology because they need better living conditions.

So in certain parts of the country, you have extreme poverty.

But in other parts of the country, you have prosperity.

You have this split kind of feeling this split experience.

That's the word I'm looking for a split experience of what the Sixties were actually like based on kind of your economic circumstances and whether or not you could afford these things.

So you've got here, the idea of an affluent society.

Now, the word affluent, you can see over here.

This means well off or wealthy.

And affluent society was a name that was often given to the Sixties.

That people describe the Sixties as an affluent time.

Now in this picture, you can see this is called a 1960s shopping spree.

And a lot of the items in here, you either might not recognise, or you might think, "Well, they're completely ordinary, like doesn't everyone have one of them." But at the time they weren't.

I want you to have a look through here.

I want you to pause in a second.

And I want you to note down any of the items in this picture that suggest affluence, that a family is reasonably well off.

I'm not saying rich, but I'm saying reasonably well off.

So pause the video.

What can you see in this picture is affluent? Okay, let's go.

So what did you find? Let's have a look and I'm not going to highlight everything.

But what I want to point out is how some new items were coming into people's houses at this time that weren't there before and they were quite revolutionary.

So let's talk here about things like our cooker, our food processor.

You've got things like a record player down here.

You've stainless steel, pots and pans.

You've got washing machines, you've got electric heaters, electric irons, colour televisions.

All of these items were signs of affluence.

And as the Sixties moved on, more people had access to that.

Doesn't mean everyone did, but more people than say in the forties and fifties.

And nowadays we'd say, "Well, it's a washing machine, or it's an electric iron.

That doesn't make much of a difference." But if you're someone in the 1960s, that's trying to manage a house.

And let's be honest here, that expectation of managing a house would have fallen on the woman that the mother to be a housewife.

A washing machine compared to hand washing clothes or a dishwasher.

These things can change your life because it frees up so much time and it makes the kind of the way that you run your home so much different.

So, what we would consider ordinary pieces of technology actually have quite an important impact on people's lives.

So this is our question then.

Were the Sixties a story of poverty or prosperity? Now we're thinking as our main inquiry here.

The overall inquiry that we started into the lesson is on the title screen.

Is what kind of stories can be told about the Sixties? And we've already told you one, the Swinging Sixties, the stereotypical story.

But is that the only story? What other stories can be told? If we're being honest and we're trying to see everyone's experiences, not just the stereotype.

What other stories did people have? So on the one hand, then you have stories based around affluence, rising prosperity.

These are two adverts from the 1960s, of pieces of technology.

You've got an oven and cooker over here, you've got a fridge and it is again, let's be honest here, let's talk about what we're actually seeing.

These we would now consider, well, slightly they are sexist adverts.

The idea that a woman's life would be magically.

Look how happy she is because she's now got a new cooker.

And that was a lot of adverts of this time.

Anything that was to do with the kitchen or the children, they would have these smiling women in the adverts, because this has changed her life.

That was the expectation that many women experienced in the 1960s.

And these pieces of technology were sold in a way that was suggesting their lives would change.

That they would make them happier that their family would be happier, that they would be a better mother, a better housewife if they had these pieces of technology.

And you can only get them, if you obviously you could afford to have them.

And if you're the big advertiser so many women, it suggests that more and more people were becoming prosperous or affluent.

Then an affluent society is true.

There's other examples of that too.

Car ownership went up.

You can see in that picture, just to the side.

The iconic mini, this is one of the most famous pieces of British design.

The mini was cheap enough, that more and more people could own it.

And car ownership went up across the Sixties.

And by the end of the Sixties, there's over 11 million car owners in the country.

Holidays began to change.

The traditional holiday is the seaside holiday.

And I live in a seaside town.

And I know that over time, that's gone down.

Less people are going for a kind of a traditional seaside holiday these days.

More and more people are going abroad.

And in the 1960s, if you could afford it, you saw the beginning of that.

The start of what we would call package holidays to places such as Spain.

You had better technology, things like colour televisions in your living room.

New fashion we've already talked about that.

And new art.

So all of these things suggest a prosperous society an affluent society.

You aren't going to worry about your clothes, if you're struggling to pay for electricity or that you need heating.

It's only when those basics are settled, that you can do the rest of it.

So clearly there was quite a lot of people who could.

Because they were able to own cars, colour TV's go on holiday and so on.

So in some parts of society, there was clear raising of kind of people's prosperity level.

They were getting a little bit better off.

On the other hand though, there is a different story and that's the story of poverty.

Now, these pictures come from a collection of photos taken in Birmingham in the early 1960s.

And there's a lot in this particular catalogue from the University of Birmingham.

And they all show scenes like this, which is a typical scene from an inner city area.

An area of deprivation.

You can see the quality of these houses.

They're clearly quite old.

Many of the windows will have been either smashed or they might be boarded up, or they might be draughty.

You have got areas like this, where a building has been knocked down, presumably to put something else in it's place to rebuild, but that's not happened yet.

And you end up with these building sites everywhere.

And all of these areas, which children grow up in are not particularly prosperous.

And they're living in housing conditions like the woman and the family you saw at the start that are actually really terrible.

And they're not worried so much about whether or not they have a colour TV.

They're worried about whether or not they could stay in their house and other more kind of pressing concerns.

So you've got a prosperous world, prosperous part of England and a part of England, which is actually struggling and which is not being carried along with everybody else.

Now I'm just going to remove myself because you need to be able to read this.

Here you go.

Here are four other examples of the way that parts of Britain I should say, were still experiencing poverty.

So A, in 1967, 3 million families were living in slums or overcrowded conditions, 3 million.

So slums or overcrowded condition.

B, 14%, which is seven and a half million people lived in poverty.

That includes 2 million children.

So extremely poor.

By January, 1966, over 10,000 children were in care because their families had been made homeless.

So homelessness is clearly still a problem.

And over 300,000 elderly people lived with no bathroom, kitchen or indoor toilet.

This is something we're going to talk about more in a while.

That the basics of what's even in your house it's not the same then as it is now.

So off these statistics, these different pieces of data` that we can study and get a picture of what the past is like.

I want you to pause the video in a moment.

I want you to answer this question here.

If you were a historian studying child poverty, which of these would help you do that? And if you were a historian studying housing conditions, which of these would help you do that? This means I'm just going to check that you actually can kind of take the information from these pieces of data as you should.

And see how they might be useful for historians who've studied slightly different things.

So pause the video here and we'll come back in just a second.

Let's have a look at how you did then.

So historians studying child poverty would make a great deal of use out of a statistic that said there were 2 million children in poverty.

And that 10,000 children were in care because their families had been homeless.

So we can see a lot of children had very difficult experiences during the Sixties.

However, historians studying housing conditions, they would make great use of the data that tells us 3 million people still lived in slums or overcrowded conditions.

And that 300,000 elderly people lived with no bathroom, kitchen or indoor toilet.

Now that might surprise you, nowadays it's hard to imagine a house that doesn't have an indoor toilet.

But we're only talking the 1960s here, the decades that my parents grew up in and that many of your grandparents would have grown up in.

The 1960s are not that far away.

Many houses had no indoor facilities.

In fact, recently I became aware of this particular fact that in 1966, when England won the world cup.

One of the world cup winners, Jack Charlton, he got a 1000 pound bonus.

And part of that he used to buy his mom a new house, which was the first time she'd ever lived in a house with an indoor toilet.

And he was a professional footballer.

So we can see the difference in kind of like our modern expectations of what a house would have.

And back in the Sixties, that for as many people, this was common that you'd have an outdoor toilet an outhouse.

Now, before we move on to the work, I just want you to just check that we know what we're talking about here.

What is meant by an affluent society? A, a society that is influenced by America.

B, a society where there is inequality between people.

And C, a society that is well off and where people have money to spend.

Which one of them is affluent.

Going to give you five seconds? Four, three, two, one.

That's absolutely right.

I know you've got it.

It's a well off society.

It's where people have money to spend.

People are more affluent.

Now I want you to pause the video in a moment and move forward and read through the details about Britain in the Sixties.

What ordinary people's lives were like, and answer these questions.

When you've done that.

I want you to come back and we'll check through the answers and then finish the lesson off.

So answer these questions as usual in detail, don't just give me one word answers.

I know your teachers will tell you that all the time.

Let's make sure we're writing in full sentences.

Let's make sure that you are using as much detail as possible, please.

Brilliant, let's go.

Pause the video here.

Move on.

Let's do the work.

All right, excellent.

Let's check through them.

I'm sure they're absolutely brilliant.

I'm sure that your answers are better.

They're more close I should say to our good answer, not just our acceptable answer.

So what appliances became more widely used in British kitchens? Our acceptable answer is washing machines and dishwashers.

But a good answer is a bit more detailed.

Appliances like washing machines and dishwashers became more widely used in British kitchens.

These became very valuable as they saved a lot of time for many women, as it was typically women who were responsible for housework like cleaning.

Just like I said earlier on.

Two, what changes were made in people's bathrooms? Acceptable answer, more bathrooms had indoor toilets.

Good answer, in the Sixties more bathrooms were built that had hot water and indoor toilets, which many families had grown up without.

And that's a very difficult thing to kind of wrap your head around sometimes.

I've already talked about the lack of indoor toilets, but many people grew up in the Forties, Fifties and Sixties.

And to have a bath to wash, it would be a tin bath.

It would be filled up through the kettle.

So having running hot water, I mean, that's quite a massive difference to their lives.

How did car use and holiday destinations change in the Sixties? Our acceptable answer is that car use increased and some people began to go to foreign countries for their holidays.

A good answer.

Car use and holidays changed.

God I lost myself there.

A good answer.

Car use and holidays changed, which went to show that some people were more affluent than before.

For example, car usage increased and over 11 million people owned cars like the mini.

Furthermore, some people began to fly to foreign holiday destinations like Spain.

And these holidays became gradually more common.

And you can see the bolded pink bits here where I'm trying to show you how we can try and get more evidence in our answer.

So it's not just having one full sentence, but it's backing up that point.

How many people still lived in poverty at the end of the decade? Over 5 million.

And let's put that into a full sentence.

So by the end of the decade, there were still over 5 million people in poverty.

Which really does help challenge the idea of the Swinging Sixties I think.

And number five, before we move on to the challenge question.

What can we learn from the picture sources about the housing that some people lived in during the Sixties? And a straightforward simple answer would be that they were poor quality and dirty.

But a good answer would give specifics.

So you can see that again with the bits that are bolded in this answer.

The picture sources show us that the houses were not at all suitable for people to live in.

They were often dirty and unhygienic as was shown in image D which says they counted 16 rats in one night.

The conditions in image A are also dreadful.

With dirty decaying walls and a bed without a mattress.

These images suggest that many houses were also overcrowded with multiple children and few rooms. So those pictures really help us get an insight into the ordinary lives that some people had.

And it tells us that in fact, the conditions they had were really not good enough and they needed to change.

Now, why was the impact of poverty different for many women compared to men? Requires a little bit of thinking this one.

The impact of poverty was different from any women, because they were usually responsible for raising children.

In the different sources it is usually the mother who is caring for the child.

And in many cases it is many children.

This means trying to keep them warm, fed and healthy.

This is clearly seen in the images, such as image B, which shows a mother, trying to care for a child while having no electricity or hot water.

The duty of childcare is usually expected of the mother.

So poverty impacted men and women differently.

And that's not to say it didn't impact men.

But the expectation on men was to be what we'd call the breadwinner.

They would be the ones working, trying to get enough money to pay rent, to put food on the table, et cetera.

The job of many women at this time.

And I don't want to say all because that wouldn't be fair.

But many women at this time, the expectation of them was to raise the family and to care for the family.

Which means they're the ones day after day that are trying to make ends meet.

They are ones that are trying to feed a family, perhaps with not enough food or not enough heat.

And so poverty affected them in a different way than it affected men.

So let's come back to this question that we asked this earlier on.

Were the Sixties a story of poverty or prosperity? We've clearly seen evidence for both.

So let's put this in the form of a question or a statement that we can argue with.

In the Sixties living standards got better and most people took advantage of this affluent society.

Affluent remember means better off.

Do you agree with this point of view? Now, I want you to write that down.

And I want you to try and come up with two points that would agree.

And two points that would disagree.

Try your hardest, see what you can come up with.

What points, what evidence have we collected from this lesson or our previous lessons frankly, or from our lessons on the Swinging Sixties of music and art and fashion.

What points would help us say yes, most people's lives did get better.

And they did take advantage of an affluent society.

And what evidence can you argue would disagree with this? What evidence can you use to disagree and say actually, no, they may have got better for some people, but in fact, many people, their lives didn't get better.

So pause the video, try come up with two bullet points on each side and then we'll come back and finish this off.

All right, let's go.

All right, perfect.

Let's see what you've got compared to what I've got then.

So I've put a few, don't worry if you, I mean, I only asked for two each.

So hopefully what you've got is similar to what I've got, but if not, if you struggled with it use some of these in your answer, add the ones that you haven't got.

It'd be really helpful to make sure that when you come to write this question, you really know what you're talking about.

So what points would agree? Well, many people had better homes, including kitchen appliances.

So home homes in general did get better for most people or many people.

More people than ever had indoor toilets and hot water.

That's really good thing.

Living standards clearly got better.

In that case.

There were more cars and holidays, which suggests that people are more affluent.

And I mean, it's worth pointing out.

Even small improvements are still improvements.

It may not be perfect, but if your living conditions are better by 1970 than they were in 1960, then things have got better.

And wages went up so people could afford things that they couldn't before.

But you could also disagree with this statement.

So for example, colour TVs, dishwashers, they were only really available to some people, not all people.

Because they were still quite pricey and not everyone would have been able to afford them.

There were still homes without indoor plumbing by 1970.

And there were 5 million people still in poverty by 1970.

So even though those things have improved, they've not been fixed.

Yes, there were foreign holidays, but very few people took them.

Sort of a very small percentage compared to holidays in the UK or at the seaside.

It took a while for those types of holidays to become common.

And as you've seen from the pictures, there are still lots of slum homes around the country.

So I don't know which side of this argument you would fall on.

You might agree that yes, broadly things got better, even if they weren't perfect.

Or you might disagree and say, "Well, actually one or two improvements is nothing compared to all the difficulties that people had." You might agree or disagree.

To answer this then I'll put some sentence starters on the board.

I've given you some words that might help you in your answer as well.

This writing frame will help you.

If you want to use it, you don't have to, but if you want to use it, this would be a really good way of structuring an answer.

On the one hand.

It's true that living standards got better because? Give me some evidence from your table.

How is that going to help answer your question? This shows us that, this tells us that, et cetera.

However, there is evidence to say that many people were left out such as and so on and so on.

Give me both sides of the argument, the best arguments always give me a balanced argument.

And then in your conclusion, what would you argue? What do you think the evidence is kind of leading you towards? So let's think about this, the big picture here.

What stories can be told about the Sixties? Are they Swinging Sixties? Are they affluent Sixties? Are they unequal Sixties? What should be clear by now? Is that the Sixties, there is no one story.

And in fact, there's lots of different stories depending on who you were and what you had access to.

And overall remaining three lessons, we're going to continue to break that stereotype and see what other stories can be told.

And how might we be able to have a slightly more nuanced, more developed, more educated view of how the Sixties really unfolded.

Let me just bring myself back here.

I would really like to see the work that you've done today because, putting together a balanced argument like that is quite tough.

And I want to see just how smart you are.

I want to see all the work that you've done.

So, if you want to, if you'd like to please ask a parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, tagging @OakNational and #LearnwithOak.

The work we've done this first three lessons is building up a really complex picture of the Sixties.

I'm really impressed that you're getting through it.

I think you've done fantastic.

And I can't wait to see you in our next lesson.

All right, perfect.

Have a great rest of the day.