Home Growing up in Scotland: A Century of Childhood

Play on the iPad, play on the phone, play on the computer, watch TV.

The life of most Scottish children today.

Protected, connected, adored.

Pew! Pew, pew, pew!

From Brownies to badminton class, the children's needs,

the children's safety are their parents' priority.

Dun, dun, dun-dun.

But Scotland's children haven't always been so privileged.

100 years ago, they were often seen but rarely heard.

Children almost didn't exist in their own rights.

Not really classed as individuals until they were adults.

But as the 20th century began, a new vision of childhood took shape,

characterised by JM Barrie's Peter Pan.

"Tinkerbell had disappeared. Before he could grow anxious, however,

"a tinkling of bells was heard."

Barrie's characters lived and played in a safe, green Neverland.

Most Scottish children were less fortunate.

VINTAGE RECORDING: Where can they play?

Where can children go in a city?

In the way stood slum housing, disease and war.

All would have to be defeated

before Scotland's children could truly flourish.

THEY LAUGH

In 1863, in the Royal Burgh of Wick,

24-year-old Alexander Johnston

founded the Johnston Photographic Company.

For generations, families would bring their children

to the Johnston Studios.

And today, their archive of 50,000 glass-plate negatives provides

a tantalising glimpse of Scottish children

and childhood on the cusp of change.

Nowadays, people are taking photographs every minute.

Then, a photograph would be very rare

and so you'd want to make something special of it.

What is being said here?

Why is she being photographed with these dogs?

I think it's to suggest that she's in touch with something

which is a part of nature.

These two dogs, I think,

are telling us

that she's having a good childhood.

So, a complete reversal of what went before

is that the best years of your life would be your childhood years

and life, in a sense, is downhill after childhood.

So, you want to prolong childhood and you want to protect it.

And there was much to protect children from.

Most would have known disease...and worse.

Another curious family picture,

and you think, "Is this a one-child family?"

Which would be quite rare at that time.

Quite likely, and it would be a very common experience for many children,

some siblings had been born and died.

As the century began,

the child mortality rates in Scotland's cities

were amongst the worst in Britain.

A 1904 report into child welfare revealed that in parts of Dundee

two of every five children born would not see their first birthday.

Eight schools featured in the report.

One of them was Blackness in the city's Hawkhill area.

Anybody live in a house like this?

ALL: No.

I live in a house.

Can anyone see the children at the bottom?

ALL: Yeah.

Do you think they're wealthy children or poor children?

ALL: Poor.

The 1904 report highlighted the dreadful living conditions

endured by local children.

Houses that had no toilet, no running water,

desperate conditions and so overcrowded.

There's nothing unusual in somebody having 10, 11, 12 children.

They didn't all live, of course.

What are we going to do when there isn't a toilet in the house?

Oh, no.

We're going to use a bucket instead of the toilet.

And that bucket was kept in the house all day,

and was put out at night.

Poverty, damp, overcrowding.

Where and how these children lived was making them ill.

"Nine years one month.

"Height, 37.3 inches.

"Weight, 30lb."

"She was a pale, thin child with bad appearance.

"She suffered from rickets."

"She only had five teeth."

"Tonsils enlarged, and hypertrophic..."

"Truncated body."

It found palpably that the better off you were the better you ate,

the better conditions you were in, the fewer illnesses you had,

the few instances of rickets, which was a very common ailment here,

and eye problems and breathing problems

and everything was related to what these children were being fed,

and how these children were being brought up.

The 1904 report uncovered one final and startling revelation.

Dundee was a city built largely on the fortunes of the jute industry.

It provided jobs for 40,000 women, often the main family income.

But balancing long factory shifts

and the needs of young children was close to impossible.

So mothers were going back to work

within certainly a fortnight of having babies

and they're working 12-hour days,

so they can't go home to feed the baby,

so the baby's being fed by a neighbour, possibly,

or a hard-pressed granny or even fathers who'd take on the job,

but what are two-week-old babies being fed?

Who knows? Obviously, you try to give them milk

but you just don't know what they were being fed.

Some of them were fed solids at that age.

The statistics were stark.

In the worst areas,

four out of five children died before their third birthday.

Who would like to live 100 years ago?

No. Not me. Who's glad they're born today?

In Dundee, and all across Scotland,

activists fought for improvements in children's living conditions.

The first years of the 20th century

were marked by vocal and successful campaigns -

to remove children from factories,

to provide free school meals.

There are the philanthropists and reformers

who think we can actually turn this around and change it.

That's part of the optimism of the early 20th century,

that we can actually do something.

Hand in hand with that concern with child welfare

came a fundamental development in the concept of modern childhood...

..that the child was more than a creature to be helped and raised.

The child was an imaginative and creative individual.

In Aberdeen, Isaac Benzie's department store

was a place where that imagination could be indulged.

What are these? Dominoes!

Same number!

The first half of the 20th century is talked about as the golden era of

childhood and toys, so rather than the world being all about adults,

children are starting to be incorporated into life and culture.

Bear! That's not a bear!

This is where the turtle goes.

People generally were having better standards of life,

so they could have the luxury of indulging the children more,

and again, in terms of thinking about the child,

they were looking at more and more different things

for children to play with so they could develop the children

and the children's imagination more.

The first decades of the 20th century

saw the introduction of mass-produced toys.

Now for the drivers.

One, two, three... Four. Argh! What's happening here?!

I have a selection of some of the toy trains

that any young boy

would be delighted to get.

And these are made with what we would call tin plate,

so very cheaply mass-produced, very thin metal,

but we have a lovely little note with it,

from the man who donated them,

saying that he remembers playing with them from around 1914 to 1920,

and he said he pushed them about the nursery floor and further afield,

making use of carpet patterns and carpet edges

for the rails for the locomotive to ride on.

Toys split along gender lines.

Dolls for the girls.

Meccano for the boys.

But there was always someone who tried to break the rules.

This is a clockwork train, and this is much heavier

because it's got the mechanism in it, it's much fancier.

Would have been more expensive toy.

And really it's... They're a good...

kind of a good reflection on technology of the time,

and the production of the toys

and again how they moved around and were played with.

As well as mass-produced toys,

the 1930s saw the birth of the Scottish comic strip.

In the 8th March edition of the 1936 Sunday Post,

Scotland's most famous comic strip characters

made their first appearance.

If you can do talking heads... I can use the...

You know, speech bubble, speech bubble, speech bubble, right along.

Yeah. Yep.

In the starring role was a sprawling Scottish family,

the legendary Broons.

I think I'll do it on language, so if...

If they're having problems with language,

Granpaw's the one that'll...

will have it written using really broad Scots

that nobody could understand.

80 years on, the Broons are still alive and kicking.

They've been entrusted to scriptwriter Morris Heggie

and artist Peter Davidson.

Together, they shape the characters

in the style of their original creator, Dudley D Watkins.

Well, this is the very first episode of the Broons,

from the first fun section in 1936. A very simple script.

The Broons are out to get their photograph taken

at a professional photographer's.

Maggie Broon, who was the slim, glamorous Broon, and then,

my personal favourite, the ugly duckling, Daphne Broon. Joe...

Joe was the sportsman, he was the footballer, the boxer.

It ended up with the Broon Bairn.

She was the baby of the family.

So that was the line-up, and it was...

beautifully set out and drawn.

The great thing about the Broons is that they're all so happy.

They're crammed into a tenement

in Glebe Street in Auchentogle,

but they're all happy to be there.

They enjoy sharing beds, sharing the table, fighting over food.

11 characters in the one Glebe Street tenement,

not unusual in the Scotland of the 1930s.

But the shape of Scottish families,

the number of children, was already changing.

In the 1930s, most demographers

are thinking we're in for a declining population

because we're not reproducing ourselves.

So there's a very dramatic drop in children per family.

I think, in many ways,

it is a decision taken by women

to not replicate the lives of their mothers,

who they could see being worn down

by having too many children to look after.

And that means that if they have fewer children they can value more,

spend more time with each child,

so that the nature of the family does change.

Scottish society was shifting away

from Auchentogle's most famous extended family.

But Dudley D Watkins' portrayal of children at play would endure.

The Broons and their mischievous first cousin Oor Wullie

painted a world of children who flourished outdoors.

In the '20s and '30s,

around the development of children there was the idea of fresh air and

exercise being really good for them.

As well as their, you know, brain development,

there was the physical development,

so you were encouraged to play outside.

The grandson of an Italian immigrant,

Frank Ferri grew up in the Leith of the 1930s and '40s,

when scraps of waste ground could become a football pitch,

a battlefield or an Olympic stadium.

A spike from an old railing, that was your javelin.

A slate from a roof became your discus.

A big brick, a huge brick you'd pick up that'd...

We called it a yocker.

And that was your shot put.

And these were all the things...

A set of hurdles and a track.

In fact, we used to pinch the barrels from...

the slats from the barrels, strap them to our feet when we had

a wee bit of snow, and try and pretend they were skis.

Or you would take the iron rungs off the barrels, and that was called

a girder, and a stick, and that kept you amused for hours.

You know? The activities you could get involved in was only as...

as boring as your imagination. As simple as that, you know?

The freedom afforded to children of Frank's era

would terrify the parents of the 21st century.

You see children doing things

that we're just not used to them doing today.

Lying in the middle of streets.

An eye-opener, really, to the fact

that children could move around in ways that we've just...forgotten,

and would feel uncomfortable about.

Your parents never saw you whatsoever until you were hungry.

You would shout up to the windows, "Ma, gie me a piece and jam,"

so she'd wrap a piece and jam in a piece of newspaper

and throw it over, you'd have that, and you'd continue playing,

until it was tea-time.

In the summertime, your mum never saw you.

Or you'd maybe just jump on a tram car with your mates

and go for a wee tram run.

Frank and his young friends profited from the 14 tramlines

that crossed the capital. The whole city,

and the countryside around it, became their playground.

You could take a tram trip to the Braid Hills,

and you'd maybe light a wee stove in your wee Tate Lyle tin,

which you used to boil some water in,

some loose tea leaves, and sugar,

and you'd make yourself a pot of tea

and a packet of sandwiches.

You had a lemonade bottle full of water to supplement you.

And let's face it, that was the countryside to us in these days,

you know, where you saw livestock, sheep

and things like this, you know?

And in a time when Scottish children were expected to roam free,

trams offered one further source of illicit amusement.

It was just sort of devilment. You'd maybe jump on a tram,

hold on the handrail for maybe 100 yards, and time it to jump off.

But occasionally, the conductor might grab a hold of you

and force you to pay your penny,

and keep you going on for longer on the journey

than you'd intended to, you know?

Used to do it on the back of a horse and cart.

And shout, "Come on, cuddy up," and that's what you shout, cuddy up,

so you'd hang onto the back of this lorry or a horse and cart.

The horse and cart was amusing, because the driver would turn around

and realise you were there and crack his whip at you, you know?

These were the wee bits of excitement you got into.

For all those fond memories,

city children at play in the 1930s faced genuine dangers.

In 1934, 1,400 children were killed on Britain's roads,

25 times more than the present day.

Even in the first half of the 20th century,

there was a lot tram traffic in the bigger cities.

There were less cars, but obviously

it was still busy, and there were horses and carriages so street play,

if you were right in the centre of a city, could be quite dangerous.

After their spin on the trams,

Frank and his friends would head off for more adventures

at the local picture hall.

The 1930s and '40s were the golden age of children's cinema...

..when the actions of Hollywood heroes

were mimicked in playgrounds across the country.

One particular movie I remember seeing,

it was all about the Stone Age.

Dinosaurs and volcanoes and lava, people caught in lava.

And Stone Age axes.

So we come out of there and we'd grab a slate from a roof and...

using twine as string,

and tie it to a piece of stick, and that was your caveman axe,

so we emulated whatever we saw on the screen, you know?

Knocking the hell out of your backside

because that was your horse.

HE LAUGHS

So you'd run around and even raise up and things like make noises

like a horse, you had a great imagination.

All your own sound effects, you know?

HE LAUGHS

The first half of the 20th century saw a huge improvement

in the condition of Scotland's children.

They had more entertainments, they were healthier...

..but many still lived in slums,

and concern for their moral welfare

was seen as a role for the Scottish Churches.

Scotland's largest religious youth organisation was the Boys' Brigade.

By 1939, it had almost 35,000 members.

The BB gave us a discipline, you know?

I was brought up in what today is called a deprived area.

Most of the BB companies were formed in areas that were deprived.

You could almost point them out.

Marching through 1940s Dundee, the 5th Company of the Boys' Brigade,

led by Pipe Major Stuart Cunningham.

The pipe band and the company formed up in a place called Bellfield,

being led, at the moment, by myself.

It took me a few weeks.

I used to go up at night to Dudhope Park and practise.

Some people must have thought,

"What's that stupid man doing up there, whirling that stick about?"

But it was all to make a show on that particular day, you know?

And it turned out quite well.

Today, the 5th Dundee Company are a little down on numbers.

Their best efforts at drill

might not find favour with older generations,

for whom marching and uniform

were seen as methods of instilling an almost military discipline.

The belt, you used to get a bit of cloth,

put it down between the brasses.

I had a small brush, a toothbrush, and rubbed with Duraglit, you know,

to give it that extra shine.

You got an inspection, to make sure you were clean, you know?

The officer had a look at you.

Put your hands up, looked at your knees, you know.

And so that was the preparation.

Part of the discipline was

in-built into the organisation at that particular time.

The Boys' Brigade had been created

to keep children on the Christian path, away from moral danger.

But, in 1939, a more serious threat emerged...

..the threat of bombs dropped from German aircraft.

On 31st August that year, at precisely 11:07am,

the order came to evacuate 200,000 children

from Scotland's towns and cities.

Immediately, children had to go to prearranged assembly areas,

stations, where trains are waiting for them.

Advances in military technology

had placed Scotland's children directly in the firing line.

By the middle of the 1930s,

it had become obvious to most countries in Western Europe

that if there were to be another world war, another global conflict,

one of the key components of that conflict

would be bombing of civilian areas.

And if you think of the traditional housing in Scotland at that time,

in the city centre, tenements, large numbers of people

crammed into a very narrow area.

So, the children had to be protected.

Although we were still just children...

..we were very aware...

..that this was extremely serious and that it was war.

Ten-year-old Helen Campbell

found herself suddenly leaving her city home,

along with thousands of others.

We got on those trains and we hadn't a clue where we were going.

Very quiet, very subdued.

I think a lot of children cried later...

..when reality set in and they weren't going home.

It took three days for the operation to take place.

It was a huge undertaking.

Helen was taken to the village of Lochwinnoch in Renfrewshire.

This is the one. I'm pretty sure.

Braedine.

More than three-quarters of a century later,

she's back at the cottage that became her home.

It's smaller than I remember.

Yes. Very happy memories, yes.

I think we were incredibly lucky

in where we were billeted.

They treated us as though we were relatives.

I think they were quite relieved

that we knew how to eat at table and so on.

Other city children were less well-suited to life in the country.

The 1939 evacuation revealed a deep social divide.

The country suddenly realised that there were two parts to the country.

One was the reasonably well-off middle classes,

and the other half of it were people who were desperately poor.

A lot of the children turned up...

Well, to put not too fine a point on it, dirty, smelly,

suffering from things like impetigo, which was rife.

What it did show, I think, was how wretched was the housing stock

in most of Scotland at that time, especially in the cities.

Helen, like many evacuees, returned home after only four months.

The German bombs, much feared in August 1939, hadn't yet appeared.

But older problems remained...

most notably the living standards of Scotland's children.

And, in 1948, images of those shameful conditions

would become notorious around the world.

This is Picture Post, which was a photo journal magazine.

It was a new medium, really.

Reaching out, by this time, this is from 1948,

to a really huge audience.

So, this article is looking at the forgotten Gorbals.

The interesting thing for us here

is that children figure very prominently

in the depiction of that world.

Photographers were going off into slums

to actually seek out these children, and the play...

..as a symbol, one suspects, of a kind of lost freedom.

The photographs, taken by Londoner Bert Hardy,

were wired around the world.

Scotland's manifest failure to provide for her children,

and the Picture Post captions that described Hardy's photographs,

were equally damning.

"In her Commercial Road home, Mrs Greening has borne 13 children,

"but lost seven from pneumonia."

There is another picture up here, a lovely picture, actually,

of two boys sitting in the stairwell

of an obviously decrepit, falling-down tenement.

You can just see the toilet.

Although it's in black and white, it looks completely filthy.

And the caption says,

"Where the young can sit and read.

"No room to sit around at home, no place to sit around in the yard.

"If a fellow wants to read his comic in peace,

"he can do so on the stairs."

So an image that is really pointing to the way

in which these buildings are unsanitary.

But also, it's not just that physical thing.

It's also that they don't provide the right environment

for children to play, the right sorts of freedoms.

I'll have a cup of tea, as well.

There was 12.

We had 12 of a family, 12 kids.

Two bedrooms. So, all the lassies were in one bed,

the boys were in another bed.

Sisters Pat and Anne Samson grew up

in the Glasgow of Bert Hardy's photographs.

Born in the Townhead area of the city,

they both volunteer at the local homeless mission.

We'd an outside toilet that you used to have get up through the night

and go outside, down to the outside toilet, which was...

And I think there was four different families used that toilet.

I couldn't imagine how it was for my ma and da, having all those kids,

know what I mean? It was quite a...

Trying to feed them all and clothe them all.

My mother and father gave us what they could but...

it was a very poor childhood, so it was.

The poverty that Anne and Pat experienced growing up in Townhead

would be an inspiration for the Sussex-born artist Joan Eardley.

A 1955 BBC film shows Eardley painting five-year-old Anne.

Over seven years, she painted the whole Samson family.

Anne, Mary, Pat, Brian, David.

He was the blue-eyed boy.

She used to come round the streets, painting in the streets,

and my brother used to watch her quite a lot.

Our Andrew, he's the oldest.

And he asked for one day, he says, "Here, can you paint me?"

And he used to disappear after school and my mother says to him,

"I'd like to know where you're going after school.

"I go to a woman's hoose."

That's me. She always told me my face was round like a turnip.

I had carrot-red hair and the squint in the eye.

I think the squint in the eye was a part of the... It was quite...

It attracted her. Aye.

The way Joan painted them, it was just splash, splash, splash.

Aye, it was dead fast,

and you couldn't imagine how this is going to end up a painting.

Turning out. But we'd get a piece and treacle. And a threepenny bit

I mean, a threepenny bit got you a lot of sweeties then,

which... My mother couldn't really afford to give us all sweeties.

After her early death,

Eardley's paintings of street children

sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Joan used to give us sketches,

she would sketch something, if she made a wee mistake,

and we used to go out and make aeroplanes out of them.

We used to fire them all over the place.

My ma used to burn them.

"Don't bring that rubbish in!"

But you didn't know then, God love her, she was going to be famous.

Artists like Eardley, photographers like Bert Hardy

both created alluring images of Scotland's children.

But behind the compositions, the pictures spoke of crushing poverty.

The next 50 years would see Scottish authorities labour to build

environments more suitable for children.

But Scotland was more than the sum of her squalid cities.

The clean, pure countryside had long been understood

as the perfect place to grow up.

This is a place that children

were encouraged to imagine childhood taking place in.

However, there's a danger of romanticising that childhood

because that childhood was also a very, very hard childhood,

one where children continued to be economically important,

and so children may have thrived in that situation

but it was also probably very tough.

The children of Scotland's crofts and farms

were expected to work hard from a tender age.

Their childhood was little removed from that of their grandparents.

If you were at home, you were on hand to help in any way you could.

Lifting tatties, hoeing, snedding neeps.

Always very frightening when you're close to a flashing blade.

Writer Jane Yeadon grew up at Tombain Farm in Moray

during the '40s and '50s. Hers was a typical rural childhood.

We would have to get up early, tying the cows up, milking,

and I suppose, at that time...

everybody else was in the same boat.

Despite the hard work, there was a vast playground on hand,

a place where the imagination was boundless.

You had to entertain yourself an awful lot.

And at the time I had planned a career in the circus...

..and so the steading here...

..I used to look down on the lesser orders,

which were the cats,

because we didn't have much in the way of company.

You had to really bond with animals

and so I was going to be a lion tamer.

Entertainment was make do and home-made.

Communities, if not idyllic, were certainly tight knit.

And, for children, little had changed since the last century.

I've always thought I was very privileged.

My folk were always there, and every farm that we went to,

they treated you as if you were their bairn.

I think that's a great gift.

It's left me feeling a very warm bit in my heart about this...place.

Across the fields, in the big houses,

Scotland's landowners raised their children

in an altogether different way...

..in the traditional and distant manner of the British upper classes.

We lived in a nursery wing, which is now my office,

and we had nannies or nursery maids.

So essentially most of the sort of looking after

and caring for the children was done by them.

Of course, my mother had oversight and of course my grandmother

had oversight as well,

but the... minutiae was left to the nannies.

We got a very good education.

I was schooled in the schoolroom.

We had a governess, and I remember the one who taught me,

a Miss Earl, she came from London, originally...

..and she used to sing My Old Man's A Dustman.

HE LAUGHS

Of course, there were lots of sort of dark corners,

frightening for young children.

So one could let one's imagination run wild in a place like this.

All the ghosts here are friendly.

Never mind what the nannies actually thought,

they're all friendly.

The nursery in Monymusk is of course a long way removed from the

back closes of the Gorbals,

but the children of Scotland's upper classes knew their own hardships.

My brothers and sisters and I,

we would see our parents for an hour between five and six.

That was the sort of magic hour when we only had our parents.

MOURNFUL VIOLIN MUSIC PLAYS

It would have been very difficult to make the transition from

what you and I regard as...

..normal, and our children come

sit on our laps and they come and joke and tease and everything

else with us.

They... They were more distant.

That's just the way it was.

Archie's parents brought up their children with the ferocious

detachment of the British upper classes.

But by the 1950s,

the wider Scottish population was receiving earnest instruction from

the Government in how to bring up their children

in a rather different way,

into what would come to be called the nuclear family.

Mum, dad and two or three children.

I always give Baby fruit juice first thing.

The extra vitamin C is so good for him.

And at the same time, I can make sure that Sheila and Angela do get

busy in the bathroom before Father wants to shave.

This was a time of colossal state intervention, of the NHS,

of family allowances.

What is she wearing?

It's called an apron.

Of Government advice on what to eat and how exactly to eat it.

ALL: Use fork and spoon in manner neat

to deal with stony fruit or sweet.

Look at that.

There have always, I think, been

authority figures trying to tell parents what to do.

'What is up with their hair, though?'

That's the way they used to wear it.

ANNOUNCER: Washing the hands also means brushing the nails thoroughly.

Mothers are particularly being focused on to be more clean and

hygienic in the way they bring up their children.

ANNOUNCER: Something in the meat gave the boy food poisoning.

That something was a germ, and germs, invisible to the naked eye,

are often highly dangerous.

And it's the family and the mothers that are also being told,

not just by the state, but by a whole new group of experts,

such as psychologists and social workers, what to do.

By the time Father comes home, Baby is in bed.

Now a child's safety began at home.

And EVERYTHING was a potential danger.

ANNOUNCER: That pot of stew could be dangerous.

As dangerous as a stick of dynamite in the hands of a child.

So it starts to shape an environment that we would recognise as more like

our own idea of home and family, in which, within a protected setting,

the child does have freedoms, does have affection, does have love,

but there are limits to that freedom.

My chief concern is to see the family get a well-balanced diet.

Everything was in black and white. I'm so glad we have colour.

Like green!

The post-war period in the 1940s and early '50s is, I think,

a breakthrough for children's welfare.

And for a time, it looked likely to be a breakthrough in other areas,

in particular the environments where children would live and play.

Scotland's slums were to be replaced by bright, modern tower blocks,

inspired by the father of modern architecture, Le Corbusier.

They called it the radiant city,

and the idea was that you could rebuild cities

in these really tall blocks

and that every block would form a neighbourhood, and that would be

the community in the one block.

And he envisioned them having schools, community centres,

swimming pools, shopping, all within the block.

A new utopia for families would be built across Scotland.

People were very keen to have...

better quality homes.

So the idea of having enough bedrooms that all your children

had separate bedrooms. The idea of having hot running water

and inside toilets and a bath, you know, it was really exciting.

An alternative new vision of the city of the future.

This is the living room.

It's quite a big kitchen, it's quite handy.

In the summer of 1967,

Cathy Treasurer and her family exchanged an Aberdeen tenement

with a shared toilet for this 12th-storey flat.

And we have two cupboards, fairly big cupboards.

Full of rubbish!

The 19-storey Seamount Court flats replaced the slums

of Aberdeen's Gallowgate.

And the best bit, out on the veranda.

Away out and get some fresh air.

You come out here and you can sit out in the sun.

If I was a bit taller I'd be able to see better!

But it's nice out here.

My two grew up here.

Look, it's Mum.

I like these. When we start moving in here, we see how big we are.

It's like getting measured on a wall, except we get measured by the

veranda gate. The size we are -

look at the size of me compared to the size of you,

when we moved in here.

Cathy's daughters, Donna and Maria,

have fond memories of growing up at altitude.

And then there's later.

And the plants, we used to plant the Livingstone daisies

and had the flowers on the veranda.

It was a happy place and it felt like home because, I mean,

grandparents were close as well,

and the centre of the town, and you were very familiar with it.

For the children, Aberdeen's flats made wonderful playgrounds.

On the top of the car park, that was the great place for roller-skating,

wasn't it? And the bikes. What else have we got?

That's Greig Court, that's the other high-rise. They're the same as ours.

There was an ice-cream van that used to come and stop behind

Porthill Court there. So, I would always be shouting up to my mum,

and she'd throw her purse down with some money in it.

I don't know why she never hit anyone on the head with this purse,

but I always managed to catch this purse.

Oh, look! That's when we had the phone in.

Eventually got a phone.

A phone with a wire.

A phone with a wire. You've had some lovely hairdos, haven't you?

I have had some lovely hairdos.

SHE LAUGHS

Aberdeen made a success of its tower blocks.

But the picture across Scotland, and particularly in Glasgow,

was far less positive.

It clashes, really, with that idea that children,

although they need to be protected, they need freedom.

There is increasing concern not just about their own mental health but

also the mental health of, often, their mothers, who are cooped up in

these high-rise settings.

I don't think there was a kind of neglect of children

in the design of them,

but in the way people actually lived in them,

it did become very difficult for children and for families.

Whether children always experienced it in that way is another thing.

Children are remarkably resilient,

and it's often adult anxieties about the environment

that is the most powerful.

In Glasgow, at least,

Corbusier's grand plans proved a less-than-perfect fit for children.

Much more successful were Scotland's new towns.

Cumbernauld was new in more than one sense.

Not just a new town but a new concept of community living.

Children were central to the designs.

There was lots of play parks, lots of amenities, in terms of sports.

No-one ever needs to cross a road.

People are channelled under and over the motorways.

Cumbernauld was built with underpasses, so that children could

avoid traffic, so you could just go everywhere on your wee bike

or your roller-skates.

The accident rate is only one-fifth of the national average.

Little surprise that Cumbernauld was chosen as the setting of Scotland's

favourite coming-of-age film,

Bill Forsyth's 1981 classic, Gregory's Girl.

You've got to put me in the team, miss.

I want to sign something.

What a dream!

TIN-OPENER GRINDS

Behind the love story,

the film captures how Scottish families were changing,

how children were being left to their own devices.

This was the era of the so-called latchkey children.

The nuclear family - mum, dad,

and two or three kids around the dinner table -

was now a thing of the past.

CHILD CRIES

Mirror and brake. That's the way, relaxed position!

Brake!

TYRES SQUEAL

That's the way.

Come here, you.

Hi, Mike. Call me Dad, Gregory. Or Pop or something.

It makes me feel better when you call me Dad or Father.

How are you, anyway?

Oh, fine. We're all very well.

Your mother... You remember your mother?

Yeah, I remember Mum. She was asking after you just the other day.

I told her we met briefly in the hallway last Thursday

and you looked fine.

The certainties of the 1950s family had given way to the instabilities

of the 1970s.

Divorce becomes...

..easier.

There is a creeping tolerance of

different sorts of family structures.

Think I should tell her some jokes?

Feminism provides a critique of those earlier ideas about the

absolute need for mothers to be with children for this period of time.

Don't do blue coffees here, Madeline...

Gregory's mother is never seen, and it's his younger sister who provides

emotional support.

Do you dream about her?

That means you love her.

It's the one that you have dreams about that counts.

What do you dream about?

Just ginger beer and ice cream.

I'm still a little girl, remember.

Scotland's new towns represented a huge step

towards creating child-friendly environments.

But there was one further step to come for those who could afford it.

The modern suburb.

Cul-de-sacs, speed bumps, green spaces.

The suburb, actually, is an interesting solution.

The suburb, with its cosier cul-de-sacs, which is, clearly,

also a class solution as well.

It does provide that kind of safer, managed freedom.

A garden is what people think children should be living in

and playing in

and learning from, because a garden has got nature but it also is

contained by a hedge or a fence or a wall, or something like that.

So gardens are the perfect place for children to grow up in.

The modern Inverness suburb of Balloch was built in the mid-'80s,

a stone's throw from Culloden's battlefield,

and for a growing family, it seemed a perfect choice.

We needed more bedrooms. And this fitted the bill.

We never thought the time that this would be the long-lasting house

but we've grown to really like this area.

It's quiet, residential, really nice people round about.

The Bennetts raised their two children here.

We've lived here for pretty much all of our lives.

All of my life.

Um... We moved in 1985...

I think I was about seven months old.

And then I was born three years later.

So it must be 31 years now we've been here.

The homes that lined the quiet suburban streets

offered plenty of space for growing children.

So, this is where me and my brother

used to hang out all our teenage years.

It was a bit of an extension onto the house.

And it was just for me and my brother,

who is texting on his phone right now.

Kirsty, get out of my room!

Sorry!

And this is my bedroom.

Welcome. I've still got my Disney VHSs in the corner

and my Spice Girls CDs.

And my little teddy that I got when I was born.

Belinda. I couldn't ever throw that one out.

And, yeah, had lots of fun, sleepovers and everything in here.

It was just a little girl's dream bedroom.

And outside,

the gardens and traffic-free streets

were the perfect place for a brother and sister to play.

When summers used to be hot in Inverness...

..we used to spend all our time out there playing hockey with everybody.

Kirby? Yeah.

All outside, that's what it felt like, anyway.

For 50 years or more,

architects and town planners worked to create the perfect environment

for Scotland's children.

But what none of them predicted was a new generation of children that

would rarely play outdoors alone.

Children of the virtual world.

Oh, it's bedtime!

The Patterson family live in central Dundee,

close to Blackness Primary School,

the area at the centre of the 1904 report that revealed shocking levels

of child poverty.

They play around us a lot more, maybe downstairs,

kind of around our feet.

They kind of play...

Generally after-school and after nursery they're quite tired,

so often, they're in the living room, watching TV.

Play on the iPad.

And play on the computer sometimes.

And watch television mostly.

Oh, there's a city.

There's a little city!

It is very easy to let them sit there and play because they're quiet

and you can get on with other things.

But, actually, that's not... That's not good either.

Compared to the children of the 1904 Dundee report,

the Patterson children are certainly healthier and probably happier.

So annoying. Wow! I got all of them!

But they are also far less independent.

I sometimes go out.

But it's normally rainy or something.

Or I'm not allowed.

I'm barely ever allowed.

Quite a lot of cars on this street,

because there's quite a lot of houses.

Even getting to the park at the top of the road,

the road at the top is very busy,

and they couldn't cross that on their own.

But the fear of being hit by a car has created reliance on cars,

where parents ferry their children between organised activities.

I do tennis, I do swimming, I do Brownies, that's on tonight.

Parents' lives now are...centre around their children.

And the children call the shots, in a way.

Why don't you just water them?

No.

But there's been a downside, in the loss, I think, for children

of any opportunity to do what they might want to do,

rather than being controlled by the people who are constantly worrying

about their safety.

Would you like it more if you could play outside more,

and walk to places more?

Hmm.

Maybe. Not really?

Not really.

" 'But, Peter, how old are you?' continued Wendy.

" 'I don't know, but quite young.

" 'I ran away the day I was born...' "

100 years before,

JM Barrie's Peter Pan offered a vision of childhood

where children could play in a perpetual Neverland.

That's not how things turned out.

Children have become more, if you like, emotionally treasured.

Their health is undoubtedly better.

Their schooling is better and more prolonged.

You could say in that way that this century is the century of the child.

But children have lost something, too.

Children don't get to play outside in the way that they used to.

I don't even think that's going back a generation,

that's not even going back 100 years.

This idea of children having less freedom.

But while our idea of childhood has radically changed, children haven't.

You know, the cliche of them playing with the box

the toy came in is true.

We're the kings of the castle!

Dan's the dirty rascal!

What shines through is their ability to play, to laugh

and, perhaps, surprisingly, to cope.

We, as adults, feel a strong sense of there having been a lost freedom.

But children are incredibly resilient

and find new ways to gain a freedom

that I think is an essential part of childhood.

Next time...

A century of controversy.

Scotland's children's homes...

..and the boys and girls sent to new families far away.

How government, churches and charities

treated the children of broken homes.

I hope you don't take the attitude that I'm a bad mother

because I'm far from it. I just can't cope, it's impossible.

How Scotland slowly learned to cope and, occasionally,

to love some of her neediest children.

If you looked at where I came from, my family home,

I was much happier in care. Yes.

I was much happier in care.

It's just so fundamental to my life.

They... They just wiped their hands of us.

And they still do it.

this is a modern-day collision. That's just how we're living.

BUSTLING STREET NOISE