Boundaries of childhood: growing up in Scotland 1930-1975

Abstract

Much has been written about the history of childhood: little has been written about the history of being a child. This gap is particularly acute in the debate about the loss of British children’s ‘freedom’ to travel and play independently outside the home since the 1970s, as reflected in recent historiography such as Mathew Thomson’s Lost Freedom. As Thomson acknowledges, there is some core information missing: we have little understanding of what it was actually like to be a child in mid-century Britain before this change occurred, or of nuances of region or geography.

This thesis aims to fill some of this gap by establishing a child-centred history of how twentieth-century Scottish children saw the world around them and understood their place in it. By re-focusing attention on rural and small-town childhoods, it contributes to a broader understanding of childhood, the study of which is often disproportionately concentrated on the city child. Structured around case studies of children growing up in rural, small town and larger urban communities, the research adopts an innovative methodology using children’s own drawings as well as oral history to examine how children experienced independent movement and participated in the world outside home and school.

Through putting the experiences of children back into their own history, the thesis reveals how urban and small-town children, ‘always outside,’ felt keenly the boundaries of class, religion, poverty and expectation, and how some of these differences played out more viscerally amongst children than they did for adults. Furthermore, the study demonstrates children’s continued role as contributors to their household economies: a finding particularly but not solely applicable to rural children. This challenges the accepted historical chronology, based on the work of Hugh Cunningham and others, as to when children shifted from being producers to being consumers and shows that in Scotland the boundaries of childhood were slower to change than they seem to have been in England or North America.