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| First 'Library 33' hardback edition, 1964 |
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking book 'Generation X'. The title is now legend - it would go on to be used by the 1970s UK punk band who cited the original paperback as the source of their name, and, then in 1991, the term re-appeared, this time as the title for Douglas Coupland's 1991 cult novel. A few years later there was even the 'Generation X' Marvel Comic, a spin-off of their popular X-Men series.
The 1964 book of 'Today's Generation Talking About Itself' was published in a 9s 6d hardback by Anthony Gibbs & Phillips Ltd, 33 Beauchamp Place, London SW3, along with the much more familiar 3s 6d paperback under their Tandem imprint. This book is still a vital source of learning about the lives of teenagers in a Britain still a few years away from 'Swinging' - but it was already deemed out of date, and out of print, by the time the rapidly evolving '60s came to an end.
The cover was designed by Creative Associates Ltd, with classic pop art-style quotes from newspaper headlines with (mostly negative) press about the nation's teenagers. It was exactly this kind of crude journalism that made this book so necessary - and within lies a remarkable range of interviews with teenagers from up and down the country - the first Generation X.
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| US Edition, Fawcett Gold Medal Books, 1964 |
The first ‘Generation X’
“You’d really
hate an adult to understand you. That’s the only thing you’ve got over them -
the fact that you can mystify and worry them”
“I think old
people are ridiculous. So phoney, everything they do is false. I’m rude to my
mum and ignore my dad, and that’s how it should be”
“My life will
probably be quite futile. Most lives are. But then the general prospects for
the future are not too bright, are they? The human race seems to have made a
right old mess of things hasn’t it?”
“Security can be
a killer, and corrode your mind and soul. But I wish I had it”
Fifty years ago the paperback ‘Generation X’ hit the
bookstands. Its aim was clearly set out in the first lines of the
foreword: “to get young people talking
about their hates and hopes and fears”. What did they feel about marriage,
politics, religion, sex, violence, responsibility, or anything else they wanted
to talk about?
Back in 1964, a great deal was being written about
the nation’s youth, but almost nothing by them. They were not the first
generation to be dubbed ‘teenagers’, but just like the Teddy Boys, Cosh Boys or
the Juvenile Delinquents of the ’50s, here were the young being labelled or
denounced by their elders with typical headlines hell bent on tarnishing a
generation as “Immature, Irresponsible...No regard for Law” - mostly in
response to the seafront clashes at Margate or Clacton between the Mods and the
Rockers. Generation X offered up a timely response with a collection of
interviews with the nation’s youth, offering up a rare insight into the voices
that made a generation tick. A concept became an unexpected overnight success
for its publisher Tandem Books, and significantly, packaged in a classic pop
art cover with that punchy title - which has since been reinvented again and
again over the past five decades...
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| Danish hardback edition, Samlerens Forlag, Copenhagen, 1964 |
There’s no doubt that Generation X is a quintessential 1960s
icon. Its teenage interviewees, post-war baby boomers who have grown up in a
landscape of increasing wealth and materialism, speak candidly about their
distrust of politicians, their discovery of the birth control pill and their
fear of a Third World War. The backdrop is a soundtrack of Beatles-style beat,
or the rhythms of Blue Beat fresh from Jamaica, easy-to-come-by jobs, modern
jazz and ‘continental’ films. But what makes this book so intriguing is just
how it came about. Neither a formal academic study nor a product of a marketing
study – Generation X was the end-result of a complete accident.
In 1963, Jane Deverson, then a 23 year old reporter for
Woman’s Own magazine, was commissioned to write a feature about the nation’s
youth. She travelled around Britain to interview young people in coffee bars,
youth clubs, at home - but the material Deverson collected was not considered appropriate
for the conservative pages of Women’s Own. Deverson, whose father Harry, was
the Picture editor of Picture Post Magazine (it had folded in 1957, but Post’s
famous picture stories of ordinary people at work and play were legend), was
certain that she had collected something special which shouldn’t be simply
consigned to the dustbin. An agent friend arranged a meeting with journalist Charles
Hamblett - twenty years older than Jane Deverson, but passionate about the
writings of the Beat Generation, and fresh off the plane from Hollywood having
penned books about youth icons like Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando. They
agreed to continue the work Deverson had begun. An inspirational meeting in
Dublin with the playwright Brendan Behan cemented the pact. Behan told them:
“You’ll find they have
nothing to say except for a lot of old talk. Still, it’s better for them to say
nothing out of their own mouths than to have a lot of old ‘unprintables’
passing judgments on them without knowing what they’re talking about”
As well as adding further interviews and soliciting poems
and letters from teenagers up and down the country, Hamblett added another
vital ingredient - and that was the title itself, ‘Generation X’. Looking back
after half a century, Jane Deverson believes
“it was partly ‘X’ as in the unknown - teenagers were a mystery, it was also so
shocking at the time, because it was like an ‘X’ film - because no one had up
to then asked them what they thought”.
“Marriage is the only thing that really scares
me...”
“Religion is for
old people who have given up living...”
“I’d prefer to do
something for the good of humanity...”
“you want to hit
back at all the old geezers who tell us what to do...”
...Quotes from Generation X
Deverson raises an
intriguing point. For me, Generation X was a breakthrough for this very reason,
but ever since I discovered a copy of the 1964 book languishing in a charity
shop some thirty years ago, I’ve always wondered whether Hamblett and Deverson
were indeed the first to gather the words and feelings of the nation’s
teenagers. It appears that there were previous attempts...
In fact during the
1930s, the BBC began to recognise the importance of hearing what young people are
thinking. Children’s Hour had been established in the earliest days of radio
broadcasting in the early 1920s, but a push to broadcast talks “suitable for
adolescents” gave birth to series like ‘the Under Twenty Club’, and then the
remarkable ‘To Start You Talking’ in 1943 (whose wonderful audio was uncovered
in the BBC Archive during my research) .
These projects can
be seen as the youth broadcasting versions of the kinds of work being that have
been undertaken in the Youth Clubs Movement, and Mass Observation, a survey of
everyday lives of ordinary people which had been founded in 1937. Each episode
of ‘To Start You Talking’ opens up with a short drama performed by the BBC’s
Schools Repertory Company. Each story like “Scrounging and Stealing”, “Wilful
Damage” or “All out for a Good Time”, re-enact the real words of young people
overheard talking in cafes, clubs or at the workplace. The idea was literally
to start the young guests talking - ordinary teenagers (that term wouldn’t be
used until after the War) who had been selected to take part as representatives
of the nation’s youth clubs. ‘To Start You Talking’ was on a mission. Apart
from just recording the social attitudes of the young about startlingly edgy
subjects for the BBC to be covering in wartime such as sex education and
picking up girls in the street, it oozed with the moral concerns over daily
life on the Home Front - from latch key kids on the prowl to the scourge of
Venereal Disease.
Fast forward just
twenty years, Britain was getting ready to ‘Swing’, when the Generation X’ers
were first coined. Today, they are 65 years plus with grandchildren, teenage
grandchildren even.
“There’s too much
jealousy over teenagers, and it stems from the old people. They hate our guts.
Only they can’t intimidate us the way they did in the past” Tony, age 16,
Liverpool
“Life is short. We’re
here to try and be happy, and to give happiness to others. The most important
thing in life is to feel wanted” Maureen age 16, Essex
“The Bomb – we are
going to have some fool using the bomb, so I think we should get rid of our own
bomb. It should be banned from the world”. Michael, age 16, London
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| Tandem Books, UK paperback, 1964 |
Generation X was
already a relic of a past age, and out of print by the end of the swiftly
changing 1960s. Nowadays, the term Generation X is more associated with the
title of the 1991 novel by the Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, which
kick-started a label for a new trend of counter-cultural drifting twenty
something Gen X’ers. I’ve never nailed firm evidence of the term Generation X
being used even before the 1964 book. Coincidentally though, I’ve recently
discovered that Jane Deverson’s own father had edited the photographs of a special
edition of ‘Picture Post’ magazine in 1953 entitled ‘The Queen’s Generation’.
It was an issue dedicated to hearing about the lives of ‘young people in a
changing world’ in the Coronation Year of the 25 year old Queen Elizabeth II.
The story had been imported
from Holiday magazine in the USA, and based around a photo essay provisionally entitled
‘Generation X’ by the great Hungarian-American photographer Robert Capa which
had been promoted in their December 1952 edition. In the end, neither the full
articles in Holiday nor Picture Post published in 1953 refer back to the ‘Generation
X’ idea. So I still believe that the term 'Generation X' is Charles Hamblett's -
until we can discover a far more concrete and well-developed use of 'Generation
X' than that attributed to Robert Capa back in 1952.
September 2014:
Unfortunately I am updating this piece with the very sad news that Jane Deverson passed away last month following a long illness.
My sincerest condolences to her family.
Please tune in to 'The First Generation X'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03wgt9r
