Why 1948 was the luckiest year to be born

Telegraph

9 hours ago

What do King Charles, Lulu, Gerry Adams, Eliza Manningham-Buller, Ian McEwan and Ozzy Osbourne have in common? The answer is that they were all born in Britain in 1948, widely thought to be the luckiest birth year of the 20th century.
'Everything dropped unexpectedly on our plate at exactly the time we wanted it to,' says Deborah Moggach, born in June 1948 and the award-winning author of 20 novels, including These Foolish Things, which was adapted into the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. 'It was very unfair but also very reassuring, as if the world reflected one's own burgeoning feelings – of rebellion or ecology or sex or music. You felt a sense of companionship: as if you were leading the world, or the world leading you.'
There is always, of course, a danger of generalisation with social history. The experiences of Moggach, an English graduate of Bristol University who was brought up by a literary family in London, are different to those of a coal miner's daughter in Durham – or indeed those of King Charles or Ozzy Osbourne. Not only has no reputable study officially anointed the 1948-ers as the most fortunate cohort in history, a poll commissioned to generate publicity for Call the Midwife, a television show set in the mid-1950s, concluded – unconvincingly and unsurprisingly – that 1956 was actually the best year to be born.
The Telegraph dived into the data and the experiences of the 1948 generation – from healthcare to housing, education to employment, music to social mobility – to test the theory.
Childhood
The 1948-ers were the first babies delivered by the National Health Service. 'If you were born that year, you benefited from a well-funded NHS throughout your life,' says Mark Dayan, a policy analyst at think tank Nuffield Trust.
They also benefitted, he argues, from the rapid improvement in healthcare since 1890, a period that established the basics of modern medicine, from widespread vaccinations to blood transfusions. And although infant mortality rates in 1948 were nearly 10 times higher than today, maternity care had also made significant improvements during the first half of the 20th century.
As soon as the 1948-ers were safely home from hospital – and as long as they avoided the worst of polio and tuberculosis – the Family Allowances Act of 1945 provided a universal benefit of five shillings per week per child. Few children born in 1948 would have strong memories of rationing, which finally ended in 1954. None would have been old enough to take part in National Service, which stopped in 1960.
Meanwhile, many of their parents were enjoying the fastest rises in living standards in modern history. Amid low inflation, men's wages almost doubled between 1951 and 1961, despite working two fewer hours per week over the decade (42 vs 44). Families were increasingly lavish with this disposable income and leisure time. Car ownership rose by 25 per cent between 1957 and 1959, television ownership by 32 per cent. Sixty thousand people per week took a holiday at Butlins, while foreign holidays doubled in the 1950s (and doubled again the following decade).
This rising consumption, coupled with generous tax cuts, famously led Harold Macmillan to declare in 1957: 'Most of our people have never had it so good.'
The 1948-ers' parents seemed to agree, returning 'Supermac' with a majority of 100 seats in the general election of 1959. A cartoon in the Spectator pictured the prime minister surrounded by televisions and washing machines with the caption: 'Well, gentlemen, I think we all fought a good fight.'
The rise of the teenager
This rising leisure time, coupled with a post-war baby boom and increased urbanisation, led to the relatively new concept of the 'teenager', a word imported from America. By 1960, when the 1948-ers were on the verge of this milestone, there were some four million teenagers in Britain, fuelling significant spending on burgeoning industries such as fashion, cinemas, magazines and music.
'People start talking a lot about teenagers just when you yourself are becoming a teenager,' explains Dominic Sandbrook, an historian of post-war Britain and co-host of The Rest is History podcast. 'You have a sense of having your own tribe, a cultural self-confidence. If you're born in 1948, you're about to turn 15 when the Beatles break through – the perfect age. There's a popular culture that exists just for you, which didn't really exist before.'
According to Sandbrook, the 1948-ers also avoided the sense of cultural alienation experienced by many other generations. Having enjoyed a relatively innocent 1950s childhood of Airfix models, Eagle comics and Just William stories, and an exciting teenagerhood in the 1960s, there is never, he argues, 'a cultural shift that leaves them feeling confused or marooned. They're completely fine with Bowie in the 1970s. This is a generation that drunk deep from 1960's individualism – a lot of them ended up as Thatcher voters in the 1980s.'
The late-1960s also saw a raft of liberalising legislation under Roy Jenkins's tenure at the Home Office, making divorce and the contraceptive pill easier to obtain, while legalising homosexuality and abortion, just as those issues became relevant for some of those born in 1948. And although Jenkins's successor James Callaghan rejected proposals to legalise cannabis, it was still widely available. 'We could dabble and experiment without it being too venal,' says Moggach. 'The cannabis we smoked then was just enough to be pleasantly uninhibited – not this psychotic drug which kids are smoking now.'
So, were there any downsides to being young then? Moggach thinks hard. 'It hurt more at the dentist,' she says, eventually. 'And there was something about the era that could make you feel left out – everyone seemed to be having the most amazing time.'
Education
Many of those born in 1948 were schooled for free by Rab Butler's 1944 Education Act and supported through university by the introduction of means-tested grants from 1962. The number of UK universities more than doubled in the 1960s, with Harold Wilson's government adding a further 30 polytechnics. Public expenditure on education more than doubled in the decade after 1952.
Admittedly, the 11+ system for grammar school entry was highly divisive, saddling young children with a sense of failure and leading to Wilson's attempts to introduce a comprehensive system after 1965. However, it is perhaps not coincidental that social mobility declined dramatically in the final quarter of the 20th century, in stark contrast to what the Sutton Trust calls 'the former golden age of upward mobility'.
'The 1948 generation experienced the most social mobility of any generation,' says Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford.
This, she explains, was especially the case for women, who started to go to university in much larger numbers. 'You also see a huge increase in women who had had children go into further education in the 1970s,' she says. 'There was a chance to have a second bite at education, retraining and upskilling, and giving them better opportunities in the job market.
'For those born in 1948, it's all brand new. There's a real thrill, a real adventure: you see women going into the arts and getting involved in politics and trade unionism. And although it's true that women born later have had it easier from the start, those born in and around 1948 knew it was going to be tough. Today, young women often say when they have children, 'I didn't know it was going to be this hard.' Women back then knew it.'
Employment and housing
A working woman born in 1948 would have benefitted from the Equal Pay Act in 1970, passed when she was 22, and the Employment Protection Act of 1975, introducing paid maternity leave (ideal timing given that the average age of a mother that year was 26.4).
The 1960s were generally a good time for anyone to enter the workforce. GDP per capita rose almost every year until 2008, while the average hours worked continued to fall steadily. Real wages increased by an average of 4.6 per cent every decade until 2008, whereupon many of the 1948-ers retired aged 60, the last year in which a majority could still take a final salary pension (this figure had fallen to 30 per cent only a year later). Real wages subsequently dropped every year between 2008 and 2014.
According to a report by the Sutton Trust, the managerial and professional classes more than doubled between 1951 and 1971, offering a raft of new employment opportunities to the 1948-ers.
'The 1960s expansion in education, welfare and local government sees people going into all different kinds of work,' says Todd. 'There are sons and daughters of domestic servants and factory workers going into white-collar jobs for the first time – although you don't see many of them becoming bankers.'
The big caveat to this thesis is, of course, unemployment, which remained below 5 per cent until 1976 but then averaged 9.4 per cent between 1978 and 1988. In May 1986, the unemployment rate hit 19.1 per cent in the North East compared to 10.1 per cent in the South East.
'Someone born in 1948 would have been 31 when Thatcher came to power,' says Sandbrook. 'If you were a working-class man, especially in an area of the country reliant on manufacturing, things could have been tough for quite a long time.'
For many, however, the 1980s were marked by huge growths in personal wealth and cushioned by a continuing period of extraordinary rises in house prices. If a 1948-er had bought their first property in 1970, they would have paid an average price of £3,611, taking their first step on the ladder just in time for annual price increases to hit double digits for the first time in 1971 and then rise by 50 per cent in 1973.
Later generations missed this boom: property prices increased by more than three-fold in the 1970s, compared to not even doubling in the 1980s. If you bought in 1990, your property probably wouldn't recover its value until 1996.
As long as their household finances could withstand the high inflation and interest rates of the 1970s, the property of an average 1948-er homeowner buying in 1970 would increase 65-fold by 2025. In London and the South East, those figures were even more eye-watering.
'My great-aunt died in the late 1960s and left me and my three sisters a house just off the Fulham Road,' says Moggach. 'We sold it for £12,000, divided up that money between us and I got on the property ladder. God knows what that house would be worth now [probably £3-£4 million]. We all just sat on our behinds and made thousands and thousands of pounds a year – it was insane.'
Today
Many 1948-ers certainly seem to have enjoyed a blessed life in the Goldilocks zone of wealth, health, personal liberty and state support from cradle to grave. But is 2025 a good time to be 77 years old?
Again, of course, it depends. Moggach feels terribly guilty about her good fortune and the prospect of being a burden on the NHS. 'Everyone I know is having scans and illnesses and tripping over and having new knees. I don't think it's a good time to be frail in any way. The state can't scoop you up, partly because people my age, who had it so easy, are now a drain on the state. I'm amazed that a younger generation hasn't risen up and breached the barricades.'
According to Mark Dayan from the Nuffield Trust, the NHS is actually better in some ways today than it was a decade ago, 'but access to care is getting worse and the state of social care is very bad'.
Not that this appears to be causing undue alarm for many 1948-ers. A report from the Office of National Statistics in April revealed that those aged over 70 are less likely to experience depressive symptoms than any other age group. Its other findings, which presumably enjoy a degree of correlation, include that they are more likely to trust other people, eat healthily, spend time outdoors and feel a sense of belonging in their community.
The only area in which the over-70s are more negative than younger people is in their hopefulness for the future – perhaps partly in the suspicion that no subsequent generation will ever have it quite so good again.