‘Fancy calling an election on the day of my History "O" Level’: teenagers write about age and adulthood in late 1980s Britain

‘Grrrr! It makes me so angry!’ a sixteen-year-old Welsh boy from Newport wrote to the social research organisation Mass-Observation on the eve of the 1987 election. He was vehemently anti-Tory and pro-Labour, calling Thatcher ‘a stereotyped dictatorial Matriarch’ and her cabinet ‘crusty codgering eunuchs’, but his mother was wavering between the SDP-Liberal Alliance and Labour ‘because she felt sorry for the [Alliance] candidate’, as her son recorded gleefully. Another good reason not to vote Tory, this Mass-Observer wrote, was ‘fancy calling an election on the day of my History “O” Level – of all the nerve!’. This very lengthy (and funny) account, alongside a plethora of other contemporary child-authored sources, reveals the new ways in which teenagers were negotiating age in the emerging ‘risk society’ of the late 1980s. In the face of multiple societal crises, they embraced their ‘not-yet-adult’ identities far more wholeheartedly than they had in the 1950s and 1960s, but suggested that adults were dangerously silly as well.

Dr Laura Tisdall is a Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Newcastle University.