Between the fall of old Clem Attlee’s Labour government and the return of Labour under cocky, wisecracking Harold Wilson, Britain went through a time which some believe a golden-tinted era of lost content. To others they were the grey, conformist, ‘thirteen wasted years’ of Tory misrule. Either way, this part of our past was truly a different country. Much of it has disappeared. You might climb into your Austin Sheerline for a visit to the Midland Bank, stopping off at a Lyons to read your News Chronicle or Picture Post while smoking a Capstan, looking forward to a weekend visit to the Speedway by tram. It was possible to imagine a different way of being British. To leaf through newspapers and magazines of the time is to glimpse just how very different the future might have been. There are the unfamiliar all-British cars with their bulky, rather innocent styling – Jowett Cars of Idle, Bradford, advertise their Javelins and Jupiters; or you could be ‘well-off in a Wolseley’. There is no sign that, just as the great age of the car begins, Britain’s sprawling independent car industry is about to be wiped out. Nor, for that matter, that the ‘freedom of the road’ will soon be replaced by a maze of new regulations, fines and documents; there are no motorways, no out of town speed limits. There are drawings of the coming passenger heliports.

People still look different. Few schoolboys are without a cap and shorts. Caught breaking windows or lying, they might be solemnly caned by their fathers. Young girls have home-made smocks and, it is earnestly hoped, have never heard of sexual intercourse. Every woman seems to be a housewife; corsets and hats are worn and trousers, hardly ever. Among men, a silky moustache is regarded as extremely exciting to women, collars are bought separately from shirts and the smell of pipe-tobacco lingers on flannel.

Above all Britain is still a military nation, imaginatively gripped by the Second World War, whose generals are famous public figures and whose new jet-bombers provoke gasps of pride. Military uniforms, which would be worn ironically by sixties hippies, were much more common on the streets. National Service had been introduced in 1947 to replace wartime conscription and began properly two years later. It would last until 1963. More than two million young British men entered the forces, most of them the Army. It brought all classes together at a young and vulnerable age, subjecting them to strict discipline, a certain amount of practical education, often to privation, and sometimes to real danger. Teenagers were introduced to drill, cropped haircuts, heavy boots and endless polishing, creasing and blancoing of their kit. In due course some would fight for Britain in the Far East, in Palestine or Egypt, and in Africa. Most would spend a year or two in huge military camps in Britain or Germany, going quietly mad with boredom. Some died. An estimated 395 conscripts were killed in action in the fifty-plus engagements overseas during National Service, while a couple of dozen are said to have been killed in secret experiments using chemical weapons at Porton Down in Wiltshire. Others were used as human guinea pigs in British atomic bomb tests and some killed themselves, as they might have done anyway. National Service mingled and disciplined much of a generation of post-war British manhood and helped therefore to set the tone of the times. Some of the anti-authority anger and sarcasm in the culture of the time derived directly or indirectly from National Service but so did the civilian habits of polishing, dressing smartly and conforming to authority in millions of homes. In general, it probably kept some of the atmosphere of the forties alive for a decade longer than might have been expected.

In other countries – Germany, France, Russia or Japan – the trauma and devastation of the Forties was still plain everywhere. In Britain, the last prisoners of war were being sent home. Bomb-sites were being filled in and functional, unromantic buildings were taking their place, but the lessons of the war were still being unpicked. People today who were children then recall, inevitably, the fifties as the normal time – the way we were and by implication always had been. Yet the urge for domestic tranquillity, with women at home, making jam and knitting, while men worked orderly and limited hours, was a conscious response to the pain and uncertainty of 1939–45 and the continued fears of nuclear war. Then, it felt new; to be at home and quiet was a kind of liberation. For the middle classes, there was also the memory of the pre-war years as a time of order. The return of Winston Churchill in 1951 added to the impression Britain really could return to hierarchies vaguely recalled from before the war. By the end of this period, in 1963, there were still nearly a quarter of a million people in ‘domestic service’ – maids, housekeepers, valets – and more than six hundred full-time butlers. Britain was still graced with thirty-one Dukes, thirty-eight Marquesses and a mere 204 Earls.1 Many private companies had an almost military feel at the top, with an officer class of gents and middle-ranking NCO types below them. Outside work the public was monitored by a self-confident officialdom, hospital consultants and terrifying matrons, bishops and park keepers, bus conductors and bicycling police officers whose authority was unconstrained by modern standards. Hanging, the physical punishment of young offenders, strong laws against abortion and homosexual behaviour by men – all these framed a system of control that was muttered against and often subverted, but through the early fifties little challenged. The country was mostly orderly. People were more or less obedient citizens and subjects, not picky consumers. Patriotism was proclaimed publicly, loudly and unselfconsciously, in a way that would quickly become hard to imagine.

In the mid-fifties, Britain is a worldwide player, connected and modern. Her major companies are global leaders in oil, tobacco, shipping and finance. The Empire is not yet quite gone, even if the new name of Commonwealth is around. Royal visits abroad, and delegations of exotic natives, feature heavily in news broadcasts and weekly magazines. Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are promoted as places for holiday cruises or emigration – sunlit, rich and empty. Collectively, they are a British California, a new frontier. Commercial liners, their flags fluttering, are waiting at Southampton. This is not a country which is closed to foreign influence, far from it. But the influences seem as strong from Italy or Scandinavia as from America – coffee-bars, Danish design, scooters and something promoted as ‘Italian Welsh rarebit’ (later known as pizza) are all in evidence. The awesome power of American culture is growing all the time over the horizon. But for a few years the idea of a powerful, self-confident Britain independent of American culture seemed not only possible but likely. Per capita, after all, Britain was still the second-richest major country in the world.

In public a front of national confidence was kept up. After the 1953 Coronation of the new Queen, there was much talk, albeit slightly self-conscious, of the New Elizabethan Age, a reborn nation served by great composers, artists and scientists. Not all of this was false, even in retrospect. In Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett, Britain did have some world-class musical talents. W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot were among the great poets of the age. Then, at least, it looked to many as if the sculptor Henry Moore and the painter Graham Sutherland were world-class figures. Churchill may have been really too old to be Prime Minister during the first few years of the fifties, but he was undoubtedly one of the few great figures of the time, an ageing colossus whose books were pouring from the presses, stamping his version of history on the public mind. Along with another star author of the fifties, William Golding, he would be a Nobel Prize-winner. In popular culture, the steady rise of television brought, at first, a traditionalist English upper-crust view of the world to millions of homes. This was the age of ‘Andy Pandy’ and gardening tips, of Joyce Grenfell and Noël Coward. It was also the time of Roger Bannister and his four-minute mile; the conquest of Everest; triumphs in yachting and football; even in the world of adventure and sport, Britain was doing well. With Nobel Prize-winning science in physics and biology, there was no sign yet of the brain drain of scientists to the United States.

Knowing what we know now, there were signs of social change everywhere from the disaffected teenagers just beginning to be discussed, to the rise of Maltese, Italian and home-grown crime dynasties, and the first wide-eyed, optimistic Caribbean immigrants. There was also much boredom and frustration. Working-class Britain was getting richer, but still housed in dreadful old homes, excluded from higher education, unless part of a small and lucky elite, and deprived of any jobs but hard and boring ones. Eventually, the lid would blow off. Yet to be British was something to be proud of. Even the mild hooligan element was home-grown; the exotic and expensive costumes of the Teddy boys, with their velvet collars, long jackets and foppish waistcoats, were modelled on English Edwardian dress.

Balcon’s Britain

Among all the people who expressed the most optimistic spirit of Britishness in this period the best example is a Jewish adventurer’s son from Birmingham, brought up in radical and suffragette circles. His films have already been mentioned, for Michael Balcon was the man behind the Ealing comedies and scores of other films. He was the great interpreter of these years, second only to Churchill in crafting how the British remember themselves in the middle of the twentieth century. In a world culture dominated by the United States he was determined that Britain should be distinct and his vision of the British family blended the high-mindedness of Attlee with the impatient spirit of the coming Tory years. Had we faced nuclear annihilation then one of Balcon’s Ealing comedies would probably have been the last work of art broadcast by the BBC’s young television service.2 He is worth spending a little time on because his success and failure offers a key, or guide, to the underlying uncertainties and paradoxes of the age. Balcon bottled the most pungent elements of the spirit of Britain in the late forties and early fifties, and through his films we can inhale them freshly now as if the intervening years had not passed.

The Ealing studios are still there. The white painted, functional offices and the vast hangar-like shed would be instantly recognizable to Balcon, and they are busy, being used again to make films. Even the pub across the road where Balcon’s team of writers and producers drank, smoked, dreamed and fought is not much changed, though Ealing is a multi-ethnic, trendy place compared to the relentlessly suburban, indeed dull part of West London it was when the film studios were established there in 1931. They were intended to be a small British redoubt against the power of American cinema. Certainly, it is hard to imagine a more dramatic contrast to the sprawl, bright light and self-importance of Hollywood. The studios could easily be mistaken from the outside as a provincial school. In a way, they were. During the thirties Ealing had bridged the nineteenth-century culture of the music hall and the new world of cinema, making popular comedies by the Lancashire musical stars George Formby and Gracie Fields. Balcon himself had been working for a range of film-makers, including Gainsborough and Gaumont-British, struggling with the sheer gravitational force of the Hollywood system before being lured there himself. It was not a success. He fell out spectacularly with Louis B. Mayer, who once bawled that he would destroy Balcon ‘if it costs me a million dollars’. Balcon is said to have replied that he would settle for less. He happily quit to rule Ealing through the heroic days of the war, the years of New Jerusalem and carry on until 1955, the year of Eden’s election. He enjoyed a continuity no politican could rival and he was as passionate about national cinema as they were about the nation.

Ealing was in some ways a miniature Britain of the period. It had its autocratic, eccentric leader. It developed a robust, vaguely socialist patriotism under the conditions of the war (though Churchill was dubious about some of the war films, and half-heartedly tried to ban a couple for being defeatist). And in 1945 Balcon and his colleagues voted Labour – what Balcon described as their ‘mild revolution’ but they quickly became hostile to the pressing rules and regulations of post-war life. Like Britain Ealing was badly underfunded and thrived on a make do and mend approach to film-making, the cult of improvisation. It too had a rich array of political views and immigrants, people from the colonies, White Russians, semi-communists and militant trade unionists. Yet they were all expected to show total loyalty and to work for only modest rewards. Many decisions were taken round a large table at which free and frank expression was expected – the cabinet table, as it were – and these sessions were followed by heroic drinking bouts at that local pub. If Ealing had an ideology it was a misty one, something to do with fairness, decency, the importance of the little man, and of standing up to bullies, be they Bavarian or merely bureaucratic.

In the films shopkeepers and fishermen outwit Whitehall officials and excisemen; small boys and little old ladies outwit criminal gangs. There is an unmistakeable edge: so many heroes are working class, so many villains are posh. But they are also culturally and morally conservative. In its war films, thrillers, psychological dramas and adventure movies as well as the famous comedies, Ealing almost entirely avoids sex and violence. Writing at the end of the sixties when British horror films and ‘sexploitation’ films were taking off, Balcon wryly reflected that ‘if there has been a sex deficiency in the films for which I have been responsible over the years no great or permanent damage has been done, as current films are more than making up for lost time . . . there are many things in life other than sex and violence. There’s love, for instance . . .’ In Balcon’s Britain, ‘love’ was not yet coy code for making love. As was said of a non-Ealing film, Brief Encounter, the post-war British ideal seemed to be ‘make tea not love’. Films of understatement, films of bitten lips and dramatic silences; and, in a phrase by the novelist E. M. Forster, films about an English nervous system which ‘acts promptly and feels slowly’ are a good guide to how different the country was back then. It was all very non-Hollywood. It was consciously intended as an alternative way of understanding the world. Balcon had talked about the need to project ‘the true Briton’ to the rest of the world. He wanted a cinema that would show the Americans, the French and the Russians ‘Britain as a leader in social reform in the defeat of social injustices and a champion of civil liberties . . .’ It was a noble vision yet like Britain, Ealing was too weak, too underfunded and improvisatory, to live up to its ambitions. After an extraordinary flowering of creativity in the forties and early fifties, Ealing fell back into romantic, self-congratulatory guff and the rest of the world moved on.

Small Rooms: How Governments Were Run in the Fifties

Churchill was about to be seventy-seven when he returned to office, which was an older age then than it is now. When he observed to his private secretary that he had never known a prime minister so old, the well-read civil servant replied that actually Churchill had – William Ewart Gladstone. Like Gladstone, he would still be Prime Minister in his eighties. (The Grand Old Man of the nineteenth century lasted a few years longer than the Grand Old Boy of the twentieth century perhaps because Gladstone had neither led Britain through a world war nor fuelled himself the while on brandy and cigars.) The Conservatives had radically overhauled their organization and policies during the Attlee years, in a way the party was unable or unwilling to do after later defeats. They had moved decisively towards the consensus for a Welfare State, a more centrist position than ever before, and they had very effectively played on the grimness and occasional absurdities of the rationing years. Having promised the unexciting agenda of ‘several years of solid, stable administration’, Churchill formed a government of cronies and old muckers, reluctant generals and businessmen. The best people were his wartime allies Eden, Macmillan and the education reformer, ‘Rab’ Butler.

Politics in the fifties, at least on the Tory side, was unimaginably different from politics today. There were the same rackety campaigning offices, the same ambitious young researchers dreaming of becoming ministers themselves and the same underlying ruthless struggle for personal power. But many more people were party members, the backbench MPs were more independent-minded, with more status in the country, yet far lazier, too; and above all, the top of government was small social circle which operated well out of the way of lenses, microphones or diarists. Churchill himself spent an alarming amount of his time playing the card game bezique and travelling, often slowly on ocean liners and, as would Eden and Macmillan, put great strain on the notion of genuine cabinet discussion, provoking ferocious rows, walk-outs and threatened resignations. When Churchill and his Chancellor, Rab Butler, hatched a complicated plot to save the pound, ministers were presented with a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum and furiously protested. When Churchill fired off an invitation to a summit with the Soviets after Stalin’s death, sending it while sailing in mid-Atlantic, his cabinet was equally outraged and eventually forced a climbdown. When Eden bitterly protested in cabinet that Churchill was breaking yet another promise about his retirement, other ministers complained that here was an important story about which they had been told nothing. Yet Eden’s Suez plot was hatched without important ministers having any clear idea of what was really happening. And Macmillan governed by playing ministers off against one another, expertly avoiding full and frank discussions in cabinet.

Most of the key political moments of these years take place like scenes on a small stage, in rooms containing a handful of people who know one another too well. As in Shakespeare, there are crowd scenes too – the rallies against Eden; the first Aldermaston marches; race riots and trade union mass meetings for yet another strike. But in terms of day-to-day power, they are noises off. Instead we have Macmillan visiting Churchill in the latter stages of his prime ministership, to find the old man in characteristic Number Ten pose, sitting in bed with a green budgerigar on his head: ‘He had the cage on his bed (from which the bird had come out) and a cigar in his hand. A whisky and soda was by his side – of this the little bird took sips later on. Miss Portal sat by the bed – he was dictating.’3

Eighteen months later, there will be the cosy private dinner in Number Ten, interrupted when Eden gets his first message about the nationalization of the Suez Canal, and is told he must hit Nasser quickly and hard, by one of his guests, the regent of Iraq, Nuri El Said. This guest will later be a victim of Eden’s failure, having his guts ripped out by the Baghdad mob and dragged, still living, through the streets attached to the back bumper of his car. Later still, there will be the famous procession of ministers being asked privately, one by one, who should succeed Eden by the drawling aristocratic kingmaker, Salisbury, ‘Wab or Hawold?’ They choose Macmillan. Edward Heath, the chief whip, has to go and break the news to Rab Butler that, though almost every newspaper says he will be the new Prime Minister, they are all wrong and he has lost out. Again, two men in a dramatically lit room overlooking Horse Guards Parade: ‘As I entered, his face lit up with its familiar, charming smile . . . there was nothing I could do to soften the blow. “I’m sorry, Rab,” I said, “It’s Harold.” He looked utterly dumbfounded.’4 After that, Macmillan’s first move is to summon Heath to dinner, to reshape the government. They have to barge through a crowd of journalists – Downing Street in those days being completely open to the public – and Heath is tripped up by one, tumbling into the car which races up Whitehall to Macmillan’s haunt, the Turf Club. There another member of the club, sitting at the bar with the evening newspaper announcing the identity of the new Prime Minister, looks up, sees him and politely asks whether he had had any good shooting lately. No, laments Macmillan. Pity says the clubman. As he and Heath turn towards the dining room for oysters and steak, the man politely drawls, ‘Oh, by the way – congratulations.’5

Much later Macmillan finally decides he too must retire. He has had great pain and difficulty pissing and wrongly thinks it might be cancer. Another small room: sitting in his hospital bed wearing pale blue pyjamas, with a silk shirt and cardigan (but without a bird on his head) he tells the Queen. Later, he suggests she should summon Alec Douglas-Home to replace him. There are literally dozens of similar examples of how political life was carried on among the top Tories during this period. Of course, there have been many Labour cabals, from the paranoid huddles in Harold Wilson’s Downing Street to the notorious Blair and Brown deal at Granita restaurant in Islington in 1994. But nothing quite matched the tight little world of the Churchill and Macmillan era. If they were not dining in the Commons or a handful of gentlemen’s clubs in St James’s – Macmillan belonged to five clubs – they were shooting grouse together or meeting in villas in the south of France. It is sometimes said that Churchill’s government, stuffed with old friends and relatives, was unusual. But of Macmillan’s all-male cabinet, a mere two out of sixteen had not been to a grand public school, with Eton the most heavily represented. Astonishingly, within months of his becoming Prime Minister, Macmillan was leading a government in which thirty-five ministers out of eighty-five, including seven in the cabinet, were related to him by marriage.6

There were outsiders too, including Powell, Heath and later Margaret Thatcher. Ernie Marples, a former sergeant-major and building contractor who would help create Britain’s first motorways, was another self-made man in the government; so was Reggie Bevins of Liverpool. Most of them felt awkward and ill-at-ease, not quite officer class in the Conservative hierarchy of the fifties. The social make-up of the Tory administrations contributed to their weakness and eventually the collapse of their authority. The charmed circle of intermarried grandees were so much the country’s traditional ruling order that their natural instinct was to play down crisis. Not in front of the servants, children or voters seemed to be their private motto. Because all was not well, this would fatally destroy their authority. In the ‘satire boom’, rule by toffs would be discredited. Their silent struggles for power would eventually spill into the public domain, giving us political catchphrases like ‘Establishment’ and ‘magic circle’. Sex scandals and spying scandals would persuade people that there really was something rotten in the old order. Rather as New Labour connived with the press in the 1990s to mock John Major’s administration to death, so Harold Wilson and old Labour would join hands with Private Eye and playwrights to despatch the last government of grandees.

Churchill in Old Age

When Churchill returned to power in 1951, all this was still far ahead. The old order seemed to have re-established itself far more quickly than the smashing defeat of six years earlier implied. And it was an old order. Churchill was undisputedly the greatest Englishman alive. Yet he was now fighting time. Two years into his last premiership, just after giving a speech to visiting Italians in Downing Street – always history-obsessed, he had been lecturing them on the Roman legions in England – he slumped down with a major stroke. Hurried to bed, he nevertheless recovered enough to hold a cabinet meeting the following day, though saying little. But he then deteriorated so fast his doctor thought he would die. He lost the use of his left arm, spoke only in a slurred mumble, and was unable to stand. He was hurried to his home at Chartwell. There, over two months, he recovered. It is an astonishing story in several ways. First there is the spectacle of Churchill’s amazing willpower and stamina, bringing him from near death to a position where he could make a major speech to the Tory conference and then engage in full Commons exchanges within a few months. Even more astonishing, the country did not know at the time what had happened. There were vague rumours but the Prime Minister’s grave illness was kept secret to all outside a very close circle. In the end he broke the secret himself, mentioning it a couple of years later in Parliament, by which time it no longer mattered much.

Before this stroke, and indeed after it, other ministers found the old lion entirely exasperating. He had brilliant moments, both in set-piece speeches and in conversation. But he was a speaking memorial to his own greatness and therefore naturally inclined to ramble on. He was described as ‘senile’, ‘past it’ and ‘gaga’ in the memoirs of other members of the cabinet. They wrote of their hatred for him as well as their love. Sometimes he let his private secretary write a speech for him. Sometimes he forgot what he was going to say half-way through a sentence. Sometimes even foreign leaders such as the US President, Harry Truman, expressed boredom at his long-windedness. But the person most angered, hurt and frustrated was Anthony Eden who felt that after ten years of waiting, and half a lifetime at the top of the Tory tree, it was his turn to govern. Prime ministers always find it hard to give up. Churchill resisted Eden by frequent promises that he was likely to go at some time in the future, always then putting it off. He would reshuffle his ministers, offer Eden unsuitable alternative jobs, row with him, then raise his hopes only to dash them again.

Had the pair of them not been the most powerful men in Britain, and had it not been rather cruel, it would have been almost funny. Churchill had become increasingly doubtful as to whether Eden would be any good as Prime Minister, lecturing him about the importance of keeping in with the Americans, snapping at his suggestions and complaining to friends that he didn’t think ‘Anthony can do it’. If all else failed Churchill, as ever, used jokes. When the death was announced of a minister’s father, Churchill greeted yet another delegation sent to urge his retirement with a mournful reference to the deceased, ‘Quite young, too. Only 90.’7 Age and illness would be a big theme of the Tory years, as they had been in the latter stage of Attlee’s government. Eden was frequently ill with a biliary duct problem made worse by botched surgery. By the time he finally got the top job halfway through the decade, he was physically depleted. Macmillan later said of him that he was like a racehorse who had been trained to win the Derby in 1938 but was not let out of the starting stalls until 1955. So why did Churchill carry on for so long? Undoubtedly, part of the reason was that he simply could not bear to let go. But there was a nobler reason. The old man did have a cause.

Churchill’s life had been dominated by war. He came from a grand military family, brought up surrounded by the stories and mementoes of battles won. He went to fight for the Empire in the Sudan then saw the Boer War at first hand as a war correspondent who was captured and escaped. In the First World War he was a highly controversial First Lord of the Admiralty, then a colonel in France. After it, as War Secretary, he tried to strangle the Bolshevik revolution with an entirely unsuccessful Western war in support of the Whites against Lenin. His great years were as Britain’s war leader in the world fight against Fascism. Many of his critics, from socialists who remembered him sending tanks against trade union strikers to Little Englanders, reviled him as a natural warmonger. So it is interesting that his last great crusade was an attempt to stop a war, this time a nuclear one. Whether it was the wisdom of age or vanity about his unique role as global statesman, Winston Spencer Churchill became the world’s leading peacenik. His speeches resounded with dark warnings of the catastrophe just ahead. As early as the 1950 election campaign, speaking in Edinburgh, he had coined the modern use of ‘summit’ when calling for a leaders’ parley with the Russians. The arrival of the hydrogen bomb increased the sense of world panic and Churchill worried in particular about an American atom bomb strike against the Chinese in North Korea (as indeed did the Chinese).

He was struggling with a new world, understanding the nuclear threat but also thinking in a highly traditional way. As soon as he returned to power in 1951 Churchill had fired off worried requests for information about the ease with which Russian paratroopers could seize strategic locations in London, and the carnage that would be caused by different kinds of surprise nuclear attack. Above all, he thought that if the atom bomb menace existed, Britain had better be as menacing as she could manage. In December 1951 he had authorized Britain’s first nuclear test and at the Monte Bello islands off Australia, HMS Plym, one of the war-surplus frigates which had escaped being broken up or mothballed, was instead vaporized by Britain’s first nuclear bomb. Then in 1954 he gave the go-ahead, with weary resignation, for work on a British hydrogen bomb as ‘the price we pay to sit at the top table’. He told his cabinet, ‘If the United States were tempted to undertake a forestalling war, we could not hope to remain neutral . . . We must avoid any action which would weaken our power to influence United States policy.’8 Britain would only have a voice in restraining America if it was itself a player: ‘the fact must be faced that, unless we possessed thermo-nuclear weapons, we should lose our influence and standing in world affairs.’ But for Churchill it was precautionary despair; his real campaign was for a new settlement between capitalist West and Marxist East.

London and Washington did not see eye to eye on nuclear matters, as we have seen. Britain had been abruptly cut off from American nuclear secrets and in the early fifties Britain was more immediately threatened. Russian bombers could not yet reach the United States so American bases in Britain, and RAF ones, would make this country the first Soviet nuclear target. Dreadful estimates of the carnage were circulated through Whitehall. Yet for the Americans, nuclear war was still something that happened abroad. Churchill saw the death of Stalin as a heaven-sent opportunity to reopen friendlier relations with Moscow. Though as passionately anti-Communist as ever he was worried that the US President, his wartime comrade Dwight Eisenhower, was too rigidly anti-Russian. Churchill frankly thought ‘Ike’ stupid and unable to comprehend that nuclear weapons were far more than the latest military technology. This reflected an accurate gulf of perception. Eisenhower believed nuclear weapons were a mere extension of ordinary weaponry and would soon be regarded as conventional. Eisenhower and his Secretary of State Dulles in turn feared that in his dotage Churchill had become an appeaser; though Churchill always used the term ‘easement’ or ‘settlement’ of East–West relations as his preferred description. Again and again he tried to persuade Eisenhower of the virtues of a superpower summit, and offered to go to Moscow himself alone – at a time when the Americans would not dream of setting foot on Soviet territory – to clear the way. Dulles was strongly hostile. Churchill bitterly called him ‘that bastard’. At last, having got an insincere half-promise from Eisenhower that he could at least contact the Soviets about some meeting on neutral ground, he fired off the invitation too early, became embroiled in a white-hot cabinet row, and had to watch his vision crumble. At the top of the rival powers, no one but him really wanted to make peace just then. Everybody was too busy preparing the next generation of nuclear devices, thinking more like generals, less like statesmen. Churchill was arguing for détente twenty years before it happened. Perhaps he had been doing it with a selfish tremor, hoping for a final triumph, but as visions go it was quite something for an eighty-year-old.

Churchill’s other overseas initiatives were less impressive. He was losing the battle about the Empire and knew it, even as he wrapped himself in mystical prose about the new young Queen and the coming Elizabethan age. If the real conflict was with the Soviet Union and her allies, what price Britain’s other post-imperial commitments? What price trying to hang onto control in Palestine, where desperate refugees were determined to settle, and where Jewish terrorists were killing British soldiers? What price Britain’s piggy-in-the-middle role in Greece, trying to protect an unpopular monarchy against a communist insurgency? A little later on, trying to hold on in Egypt, or Iran, would prompt the same question. The private thinking of Whitehall was laid out in a fascinating memo from top officials to a cabinet committee shortly after the Americans had upped the ante in the nuclear race by exploding their first H-bombs. The British cabinet paper was frank about the overall position: ‘It is clear that ever since the end of the war we have tried to do too much – with the result that we have only rarely been free from the danger of economic crisis.’

About Europe, Churchill had long been inclined to make dramatic-sounding suggestions. He had offered to merge British and French citizenship during the darkest days of 1940. After the war he was not averse to a fully politically united Western Europe, though he assumed the British Empire could not be a full member. When he came back to power one of the most immediate issues was whether Britain would join early moves towards that united Western Europe. In 1950, the ailing Labour government had decided against, though after very little thought. When the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, announced that his country intended to share sovereignty over iron and coal with West Germany, so binding the two old enemies tightly together in their industrial effort, he gave the British government an ultimatum. Attlee was out of the country and Ernie Bevin was already very ill, describing himself with no exaggeration as ‘half-dead’. It was left to Herbert Morrison to give a hurried response. He had been at the theatre and was found by officials at the Ivy restaurant in London’s Covent Garden. The plan which would one day lead to the European Union was explained to Morrison in a back room, piled with chairs.9 He thought for a moment and shook his head. ‘It’s no good. We can’t do it. The Durham miners won’t wear it.’ For many Tories, watching from the sidelines, this was a disastrous mistake. Macmillan, who had been observing things from Strasbourg, where he was in Bevin’s vacated hotel room, thought the decision catastrophic, later telling his constituents it was ‘a black week for Britain’ and the country might pay a ‘catastrophic price’ for isolating itself under the socialists from Europe.10 So there was general expectation that Tory Britain would change tack.

There was already a strong case for doing so. The Empire was falling away. Relations with the Americans had already been damaged over the atom bomb, as well as disputes about Palestine and Greece. Here was a moment for the Tories to decide to ride another horse too, and join the young European club. Churchill declined to do so. Offered the chance to take up common European defence, he ridiculed the notion, to the despair of Macmillan and some of the younger Conservatives. He showed no interest in deeper involvement. He was the last imperialist whose rhetoric about the ‘English-speaking peoples’ was more heartfelt than his suggestions of anti-Communist alliances between Italians, Belgians and the French. Washington was pivotal to his world as Paris never could be, still less Brussels. He wanted summits on the H-bomb and a place on the world stage, not local deals with provincial nations half-desolated by war and invasion. The Foreign Office, where Eden was esconced, was also hostile to entanglements with the Europeans – not surprising, either, perhaps, since its grand embassies and worldwide reach made iron and steel deals near at hand seem parochial. The manner of Churchill’s decision-making on Europe, though, was worrying to his contemporaries. It was never properly discussed in cabinet. It was as much a shrug as a decision. It was never announced. It was never thrashed through. It might as well have been taken in the Ivy. Perhaps, as with nuclear peace-making, it was just too early for the decisive move. Yet there is an unmistakeable sense of anti-climax about Churchill’s last government. Outside the world was changing. New leaders were coming to prominence. Here, it seemed, Britain was being distracted by one moving curtain-call too many.

Strikes and Money: Jack Is All Right . . .

Conservatives of the fifties have had a particularly bad press for their willingness to stick with the Attlee consensus, allowing the country’s underlying economic weakness to worsen. There is much in this. Churchill had fought the 1951 election promising to defend the new Welfare State and was inclined to speak wistfully of the case for coalition government in peace as in war, a theme first heard in 1945. He felt warmly towards the small Liberal Party and had half promised to help them by introducing some kind of proportional voting, though this was quickly scuppered by the Conservative hierarchy. He railed against class war and deliberately appointed the moderate, appeasing lawyer Walter Monckton to deal with trade union and labour matters. Yet there was one moment when Britain might have experienced a Thatcher-sized jolt, a British revolution thirty years early. It came on Churchill’s watch in 1952 when his young Chancellor, Rab Butler, proposed cutting the pound free from the system of fixed exchange rates agreed after the war at Bretton Woods. The scheme was called ROBOT. In detail it was fiendishly complicated, because of Britain’s network of obligations to so many other countries using sterling as their reserve. In essence, though, it was very simple. The pound would float partly free, or rather fall dramatically against the dollar, thus giving Britain’s struggling exporters a huge one-off boost. The government would be unable to fund its old obligations, the huge overseas defence establishment, and much of the new Welfare State. Grand housebuilding projects would be put on hold and unemployment would initially rise. But on the other hand, the bleeding of reserves and the periodic balance-of-payments crises would be a thing of the past. Britain would get the chance of a fresh start, not unlike post-war West Germany. Imports would be cut, exports would rise, sterling’s freedom in the world would be re-established and the alternative future of a genteel, endless decline might be averted. It was nothing less than a free-market national coup which would, among other things, infuriate the Americans. The historian Peter Hennessy has compared it to the desperation of the Suez war: ‘ROBOT was the desperate and risky response of frazzled yet clever men who had run out of both caution and alternative ideas.’11

ROBOT, which was never revealed at the time, caused a rare row over matters of high principle inside the government and was eventually scuppered by the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and by Churchill’s own growing unease about its domestic implications. It was the kind of scheme which might have been pushed through by a determined, vigorous Prime Minister armed with a mandate for change but was too much for an old man elected on a blandly consensual ticket. And it was the only example of such radical thinking for years to come, at least at this level of government. For the most part, this was a government which ran on domestic autopilot. Above all, in the eyes of later critics, it failed to take on rising trade union power. The unions had swollen in numbers to record levels of membership. Their leaders tended to be working-class men who had left school in their teens to cut coal, drive lorries or load ships before becoming full-time organizers. In the fifties, they still had personal memories of the General Strike of 1926. Bitterness about the Depression had been partly assuaged after Labour repealed anti-union legislation, giving them powerful immunities in the case of strike action.

These national leaders, men such as Arthur Deakin, Sam Watson and Bill Carron, tended to be patriotic and socially conservative, ready to back the Bomb and Nato, and aligned against the left in Labour Party confrontations. They were well able to do deals with middle-of-the-road Tory ministers. More were Catholics than were Communists. But their greatest card was the economy. Very high rates of employment, high demand from customers starved of goods, and relatively high corporate profits meant that there was an insatiable demand for skilled labour. It was easy for firms to pass on higher costs caused by generous wage settlements. And in terms of days lost to strikes, Britain’s record was not bad in the fifties, better than many economies which were growing faster. Butler at the Treasury confessed that he had no wages policy, only ‘Walter’s friendship with trade union leaders’ and when Monckton and Churchill did a deal to stop a bus-drivers’ Christmas strike because it was too ‘disturbing’, the Prime Minister phoned Butler late at night to tell him the good news. On what terms had he settled, the Chancellor nervously asked. Churchill replied, ‘Theirs, old cock! We did not like to keep you up.’12

Why fight the unions? It was a horribly difficult task, anyway. In a statist economy, ministers were abnormally close to the power of the public sector unions. By later standards, an astonishing number of industrial workers were employed by the State – some 1.7 million people in transport, the mines and the power industry alone. Again and again, from the railways to the power stations, from bus workers to coalminers, to engineering, Monckton and his successors bought them off. Ministers knew perfectly well what they were doing. In his diary for June 1955, for instance, Macmillan, when Chancellor, reflected on the settlement of a railway strike which had done ‘much harm’ to the economy. He comforted himself with the thought that the men got little more than they could have had earlier which ‘may have a deflationary effect and do something to stop the see-saw of wages and prices which has begun to show itself in the last year or two’. By 1958, as Prime Minister, he steeled himself to hold out against just the kind of transport strike that Churchill would have settled with a phone call. Yet Macmillan too never quite took it seriously and anyway by then the unions were changing in ways that made it harder to cope with them, not easier.

Built up over decades by amalgamations and local deals, they were sprawling baggy monsters which bore little relation to organization by plant or industry. A single factory might have a maze of competing and mutually suspicious unions operating inside it. This led to the growth in power of the shop stewards, often younger and more militant people who had filled the power gap during the war years when their elders were away. They could get deals for the people around them which were better than national agreements. By the mid-fifties there were scores of thousands of them. It was ruefully noted that Britain now had more shop stewards than soldiers. Wildcat strikes were more common than full-scale national disputes and they caused more disruption and uncertainty. Meanwhile as the old guard died off more left-wing leaders were quietly moving up the union hierarchy. A good example was Frank Cousins, a former miner and truck-driver from Nottinghamshire who was running the road hauliers in Churchill’s day and who became leader of the Transport & General Workers’ Union in the year of Suez when more than half a million T&G men voted for him. He was Macmillan’s antagonist in 1958 and became a major headache for successive Conservative governments, leading strikes in the car industry, among busmen and elsewhere before being brought into the 1964 Labour cabinet by Harold Wilson. For a time he was the most famous, or infamous of the Brothers; but there were plenty of Cousins.

If strikes were one small cloud on the edge of the sunny skies of the Tory years, inflation was another. It was always there in the fifties, getting worse as the decade continued, but not yet quite a crisis, although with so many older people living off annuities and savings, it began eating into the lives of many middle-class families. The problem was simple to describe, hard to sort, particularly after the rejection of radical measures such as ROBOT. The country was exporting all it could but its appetite for manufactured imports was insatiable. Britain no longer had enough overseas investments and was not earning enough through producing well-made, competitively priced goods, in order to earn the living its people now thought they deserved. In other times the gap had been easily closed by ‘invisibles’ – earnings from banking, insurance and shipping, where Britain remained a world leader. It might have done so in the fifties and sixties too, except that Britain was spending such an historically vast amount of money on defence in peacetime, and spending that money abroad. In effect, the weaker British economy was subsidizing the fast-growing West German one because of the huge expenditure on the British Army of the Rhine.

The entirely predictable result of the balance of payments gap was that the pound was under constant pressure. There were periodic devaluations which damaged the reputation of the politicians in charge at the time – though the 1949 Labour devaluation is widely credited with kick-starting the Tory good times which followed. Trying to maintain British power through the sterling area (not just most of the Old Commonwealth, except Canada, but other countries including most of Scandinavia and traditional trading partners such as Portugal) meant that defending the value of the pound was an issue inflamed by pride and political sensitivity. In the Tory years it was another problem postponed. Defend the pound and Britain’s global self-image or let it fall and help Britain’s exporters? ‘Stop-go’ saw sudden tightenings of fiscal policy, then a stab on the accelerator, as government tried to break into a new era of growth, before slamming on the brakes to deal with the resulting surge in inflation. Until the post-war Bretton Woods system broke down in 1971 there would be regular arguments about devaluation. For politicians at the time, it was like trying to solve a puzzle with one too many parts.

The Purge

It is 24 March 1954, late in the afternoon outside Winchester Castle. The great hall of the medieval building, with its famous fake of Arthur’s Round Table – created in the 1300s and painted for Henry VIII – is now empty. It has served duty all day as a courtroom. Now guilty verdicts have been passed and long since, the prison sentences meted out. But still the prisoners have been kept in the small whitewashed cells under the castle, an elderly Rolls-Royce waiting to take them to jail. The trial that had just finished made front-page headlines for days across Britain, and there were fears of a minor riot when the guilty men were led outside. They included a young peer of the realm, Edward John Barrington Douglas-Scott-Montagu, known as Lord Montagu of Beaulieu; a Daily Mail journalist called Peter Wilde-blood; and a gentleman farmer, Major Michael Pitt-Rivers. Montagu had just been sentenced to twelve months in prison and the other two, eighteen months. Their crime had been conspiring to induce two RAF men to commit indecent acts – in other words, they were homosexuals.

There was a great purge of homosexuals going on in the Britain of the fifties, whipped up by the newspapers and by a clique of politicians and officials. The press had been full of salacious if untrue stories of wild orgies fuelled by champagne, the corruption of boy scouts and, perhaps worse than all this, of men who had associated with their social inferiors. So there was, perhaps, some reason to worry that when the three men were led away there would be angry attacks by the good burghers and women of Winchester. And indeed there were such scenes. But the attacks, the hammering of umbrellas, yelling, hissing and shaking of fists, was directed at the car taking away the prosecution witnesses. When eventually Montagu, Wildeblood and Pitt-Rivers were seen by the women who had waited so long, the mood was rather different. As Wildeblood himself wrote later: ‘It was some moments before I realised they were not shouting insults, but words of encouragement. They tried to pat us on the back and told us to “keep smiling”, and when the doors were shut they went on talking through the windows and gave the thumbs-up sign and clapped their hands.’13 Much later, when Wildeblood was finally released from prison, he found his neighbours and colleagues just as supportive. The English are often unexpected.

Homosexual acts between men had long been illegal, but so long as they happened discreetly and in private, and did not involve minors, they had been relatively rarely prosecuted. The war, as we have seen, saw an increase in homosexual activity. After it, however, the official mood changed dramatically. In the last full year before the war there had been 320 prosecutions for ‘gross indecency’, a common way of describing homosexual behaviour. By 1952 the number had risen to 1,626. The prosecutions for attempted sodomy or indecent assault were up from 822 to over 3,000. If these still seem relatively small numbers, the ripples of fear and intimidation spread far further, and in general the number of homosexual offences known to the police had risen from 1938 to 1955 by 850 per cent. A small number of men were responsible. The crackdown had started under Herbert Morrison. But the toughest years were under the Conservative politicians of the fifties. The purge was led by the former Nuremberg interrogator of Nazi leaders, Churchill’s Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe. With him was the Director of Public prosecutions, Theobald Mathew, who would often attend court to watch the ‘buggers’ be sentenced, as well as Sir John Nott-Bower, a Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police determined to rip the cover off London’s ‘filth spots’. They were supported by a press which ran articles on the secret world of mincing pansies, or explained to stout-hearted readers ‘how to spot a homo’. There were special drives to root out buggery in the Army and worried Whitehall inquiries into alleged lesbian conspiracies in the RAF. Lesbianism was not, in itself, a crime, allegedly because Queen Victoria had refused to believe it existed, but was an offence in the armed services.

Attacking homosexuals helped sell papers and certainly played to the prejudices of many politicians and clergymen but there was more to it than that. The early fifties was also the time of maximum fear about Communism, subversion and spying. Not without reason. The atom bomb spy Klaus Fachs had caused appalling damage to British intelligence by the time he was exposed in 1950. In 1951 two of the famous KGB spies, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had defected to the Soviet Union. Though a proper version of their story would not break publicly until 1955, the British government was under American pressure to show that it was tough on subversive networks. This was not formally discussed at home but friendly overseas journalists were briefed. In October 1953, the Sydney Daily Telegraph reported that Cmdr E. A. Cole of Scotland Yard had spent three months in Washington consulting with the FBI after ‘strong United States advice to Britain to weed out homosexuals as hopeless security risks, from important government jobs’. With the arrival of Nott-Bower as the new Commissioner of Police ‘the plan was extended as a war on all vice . . .’ So moralism and national security worries intertwined. The homosexual, so the thinking went, had to live a double life. He was open to blackmail. He moved in mysterious circles. He was morally weak. The homosexual was therefore by definition a security risk. Burgess and Blunt had indeed lived secret sexual lives and the habits of essential deception, the feeling of belonging to a hidden and important circle, connected seamlessly to their lives as spies. Nor was the blackmail argument ridiculous. A few years after the Montagu case, John Vassall, a homosexual clerk who worked at the Admiralty and had been photographed in Moscow by the KGB at a gay sex party, was uncovered as a spy. Vassall was a conspicuous consumer, living far beyond his means, yet no one had asked the obvious questions about where his money was coming from. Again, there was much speculation about a wider homosexual and traitorous network, this time involving ministers too.

The gap in official logic was that homosexual men were open to blackmail and had to live a secret life precisely because of the law that was now being so vigorously and aggressively enforced. Some men were self-confident enough to survive, the Labour MP Tom Driberg for one, who used the Commons toilets to proposition an impressive array of fellow politicians as well as parliamentary staff, and Macmillan’s colleague, the lover of his wife, Lord Boothby. But others, including the Conservative MP Ian Harvey, convicted of an offence with a soldier in Hyde Park, and the actor John Gielgud, arrested in Chelsea in 1953, were not so lucky. There was a very extensive and semi-open gay world in theatrical circles – Alec Guinness had been fined for importuning in 1946, for instance, but had escaped press attention by giving the false name Herbert Pocket. Other celebrities of the time such as Noël Coward and the impresario Binkie Beaumont hardly bothered to hide their sexuality. But the wave of prosecutions caused terror among those living outside the charmed circle of theatrical and political power.

Montagu had fallen into the middle of the police operation first suggested by Washington. A premier peer of the realm, he was about as well connected as it was possible to be. In his time with the Grenadier Guards, he had served in Palestine during the worst of the Jewish terrorist attacks, and had an informal supper with the King, Queen and future Queen Elizabeth. In the advertising world, he had helped launch the patriotic new comic, The Eagle – the idea of a north country vicar called Marcus Morris who himself, said Montagu later, had ‘a distinctly unclerical sexual appetite, as he adored showgirls’. The peer would go on to become famous for his national motor museum at Beaulieu, help found English Heritage and marry twice. But he was bisexual, something he had suspected at Eton and was confirmed in the Guards. At one party in London, the aristocratic officers were entertained by a young naval rating doing a striptease who would later become a national treasure as the jazz musician George Melly. Yet Montagu always insisted that he had made no improper advances to two boy scouts, the reason for his arrest. Having been acquitted then, he was drawn into the later Wildeblood case. The prosecution stooped to forging an entry in his passport to try to discredit an alibi, used illegal tapping of phones, entered and searched private houses without warrants, and put appalling pressure on two RAF men to inform against their ‘social superiors’, in order to avoid many years of imprisonment for themselves. The witnesses, as they later admitted, had been carefully coached in their stories.

Peter Wildeblood’s unusual response to the prosecution was to declare openly and unashamedly that he was a homosexual or, in the language of the day, an ‘invert’; and had a right to be treated with respect. He declined to apologize. His language was very far from the gay liberation rhetoric of modern times but it was clear and dignified: ‘I am no more proud of my condition than I would be of having a glass eye or a hare-lip. On the other hand, I am no more ashamed of it than I would be of being colour-blind or of writing with my left hand.’ He pointed out that Lord Montagu had done patriotic service in the Grenadier Guards and that Montagu’s co-accused cousin, Pitt-Rivers, had served bravely in the war, while Wildeblood himself, though he turned out to be a terrible pilot, had served with the RAF as a meteorologist in Africa. These were all, apart from their sexuality, entirely normal members of the patriotic, upper-middle-class Establishment, about as different from the Cambridge spies in their views as it would be possible to be. And, of course, since homosexuality is spread throughout society, some of the Establishment was gay, too. Lord Wolfenden’s famous committee, formed in 1954 to consider the law on homosexuality, was headed by a former public school headmaster and university vice-chancellor, and included Tory politicians, a senior official in the Girl Guides, a judge, and so on. When Wolfenden later discovered that his own son was gay he wrote asking him to keep out of his way and ‘to wear rather less make-up’. The committee, however, took evidence from Wildeblood among many others and after three years of private hearings in the Home Office, duly recommended in 1957 a change in the law, legalizing private homosexual activity between consenting adults aged over twenty-one.

By then the country’s mood seemed to have changed. There was a feeling that the tactics used against Montagu and the others were unfair and underhand. The hostility to government interference and meddling, which had contributed to the fall of Attlee’s Labour administration, was beginning to stretch to private matters. When Wilde-blood was released from prison, he found his working-class neighbours in Islington to be cheerily friendly. When Montagu was released from Wakefield prison, where his fellow inmates had included Fuchs, he got a similar reception, though it was not universal. At lunch, in the fashionable Mirabelle restaurant in London’s West End, he recalled ‘one or two of the neighbouring tables disapproved. The atmosphere became unpleasant and remarks were made which were obviously meant to be overheard with intent to wound.’ At this point, however, the then Leader of the Opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, who was also lunching there, intervened. ‘He could see perfectly well what was going on. After a while, he laid down his napkin and crossed the room to our table. “How nice to see you back,” he said, holding out his hand, which I shook with surprise and gratitude. The action silenced the surrounding hostility.’14 There was continued hostility to homosexuals then and there is today, but the so-called permissive society of the sixties was already being forged by public reaction in the second half of the Tory fifties to cases such as these. For now, Parliament disagreed. In the first parliamentary debates on homosexual law reform, the Home Secretary, Maxwell-Fyfe, said he did not think the country would wear such a change. Had he been present in the Mirabelle restaurant, or had he stood a few years earlier outside Winchester Castle he might have realized he was already out of date.

The Spies: Tom and Guy in Moscow

Britain’s spy networks were far more effectively hidden by upper-class connections than by the homosexual inclinations of a few of Moscow’s men. The full story of the Cambridge spies does not belong here but to the thirties and the divided loyalties of the anti-fascists. The tale of how a cluster of rebellious former public schoolboys came to believe that the fight against poverty and Hitler required their allegiance to the bloodthirsty regime of Stalinist Russia, and then how they infiltrated the British intelligence and diplomatic services before and during the Second World War, is well known. The sons of a diplomat, a naval officer, an Anglican clergyman and a cabinet minister, they were about as traditionalist and patriotic in their upbringing as it was possible to be. They remained quintessentially English afterwards too. The Labour MP and journalist Tom Driberg visited one of them, Guy Burgess, a few years after he had dramatically defected with Donald Maclean. (And it was dramatic: Maclean’s pregnant wife had just cooked a special ham for dinner at their home near Churchill’s country house, when Burgess arrived and raced him off to Southampton for the overnight ferry to St Malo.) In Moscow, Driberg found Burgess outside a hotel, ‘his bird-bright ragamuffin face . . . tanned by the Caucasian sun’. Burgess explained his job involved trying to get the Russians to translate and publish the novels of E. M. Forster. In his flat Burgess strummed the Eton boating song on his piano and proudly showed that his suit still had a stitched badge reading ‘Messrs Tom Brown of Eton, High Street, Tailors’.15 The Moscow defectors would die there, mildly regretful but entirely unrepentant, while two further traitors, Sir Antony Blunt, who became Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, and the economist John Cairncross, privately confessed and were left unexposed and unpunished for much of their lives.

Did they matter, really? They did. Between them British traitors helped the Soviet Union acquire nuclear weapons earlier than would otherwise have happened, passed huge amounts of information to Stalin’s secret police, were directly responsible for the deaths of scores of British and other Western agents at the hands of the KGB and, in Philby’s case, managed to stymie an American attempt to create an uprising in Albania, so keeping that wretched country under the heel of one of the most primitive tyrannies of modern times. Their story has been made ‘glamorous’ by the gilded associations of pre-war Cambridge, and the idealism of being anti-Nazi when part of the British Establishment were not. Films and countless books, some by the spies themselves, have romanticized them. Yet the consequences of their spying were squalid and dangerous. Nor were they actually the most successful spies – less ‘glamorous’ characters such as Alan Nunn May, a scientist, and Fuchs, were more important. It was the Dutch-born George Blake, who escaped from occupied Holland at the age of twenty, joined the Royal Navy, was recruited by MI6 and captured by the Communists in Korea, who probably caused most damage. He had been shocked, he later said, by the effects of American bombing of Korean villages and passed the names of 400 British-controlled agents in Germany to the Russians, with predictable consequences for many of them. Some think he was brainwashed. Blake was caught and in 1961 was given a prison sentence of forty-two years, which remains the longest sentence ever imposed by a British court. He, of course, was not a dapper and well-connected Old Etonian with friends to tip him off.

What is it about the British and spying? Other Western nations had their post-war spying scandals, particularly the Americans and the West Germans. But nowhere was quite so gripped as Britain by the actions of Soviet agents. Class and sex are undeniably part of the answer. But there is another half-buried theme – British anti-Americanism. Philby claimed all his life that he was a British patriot who felt that the country was simply allied with the wrong side. Another student in the same Cambridge college as Philby at the same time (though they never knew one another) was Enoch Powell who came to much the same conclusion a few years later. This anti-Americanism was something which could bring together patriotic right-wingers and left-wingers in a common cause. Washington was constantly warning London about intelligence lapses and the possibility of traitors. But even when Russian defectors brought descriptions of Maclean and Philby to MI5, they were languidly dismissed; unless there were even more traitors, even higher in the system (and Philby was close to the top) then disdain and smugness must have been to blame for the grotesque failures of security.

Once traitors were discovered there was then a national case for not making too much of it because of the angry reaction from the American intelligence services, on whom Britain relied very heavily. Politicians were obliged to explain or failed to explain, the defections and the rising suspicions of third and fourth and then fifth men still uncovered. Macmillan, as Foreign Secretary in 1955, was obliged to knock down the idea that Philby might be a Russian spy who had tipped off Burgess and Maclean four years earlier (he was, of course, and had). Later, after yet more spies had been uncovered, Macmillan was told by an excited Sir Roger Hollis of MI5 that the organization had arrested Vassall. Macmillan seemed dejected at the news and when Hollis said he didn’t seem very pleased, replied: ‘No, I’m not pleased at all. When my gamekeeper shoots a fox, he doesn’t go and hang it up outside the Master of Foxhounds’ drawing room; he buries it out of sight.’ Macmillan, by now Prime Minister, lamented that there would be a great public trial, the security services would be blamed, and ‘there will be a debate in the House of Commons and the Government will probably fall. Why the devil did you “catch” him?’ More concerned about harassing the press, Macmillan got two scalps when journalists refused to give their sources for allegations concerning Vassall and were briefly imprisoned. It was not surprising that people suspected an Establishment cover-up by chaps who belonged to the same clubs and did not like their dirty washing flapping in public.

Public Laughter

Had anyone been asked to define British humour in the aftermath of the war, they would probably have come up with the genteel, meticulous cartoonists of Punch whose neatly cross-hatched ink world stretched from Westminster and the Home Counties to the more remote areas of the Scottish Highlands but included little in between. They might have mentioned the rude postcards of the seaside tradition, fat overhanging bosoms and little Willies. There were some rather lame newspaper comic-strips; the radio surrealism of It’s That Man Again; the exuberance of Flanders and Swann; and on film, the warm, ultimately optimistic humour of George Formby and the Ealing comedies. From the late thirties to the mid-forties the world had been harsh enough perhaps, without harsh laughter too.

What Britain had had, above all, was music hall. Even in the fifties musical reviews were still being widely performed, weaving a little light innuendo among the songs. Few of the hundreds of once-famous double acts, singers, comedians, slapstick artists, clowns and acrobats from the Victorian and Edwardian heyday of music hall had been recorded, though they provided the main form of mass entertainment for half a century. This was a powerful culture which required skilled, physically tough and consistent artistes who could sing, dance and tell jokes, the original ‘variety acts’. Some of the fun can still be glimpsed in modern Christmas pantos and seaside summer shows, though these must be a pale shadow of that lost, garish gaiety. After the war there was a surge of one-way traffic as music hall acts were taken up by the BBC Light Programme and when, in the fifties, television began to take off a final generation of people who had learned their trade in small seaside and provincial theatres, would arrive to hoof it, clown and sing for the cameras. Bruce Forsyth, Jimmy Tarbuck, Ken Dodd, Eric Morecambe, Ernie Wise and their rivals were the last products of the old musical theatre and its relentless demand for all-singing, all-dancing comic talent. In its way, music hall is as important to the smell and colour of twentieth-century Britishness as rock music. It has just had less effective PR.

Below the surface, new kinds of comedy were slouching unsteadily towards those microphones, cameras and footlights. One could write a useful contemporary history by simply asking of any particular time: what made people laugh? To be British now became bound up with a string of radio and television shows, their catchphrases, lateral logic and increasingly rude jokes. The harder tone of new British comedy came most obviously from two sources. One was the absurdity of many people’s army experiences during and after the war. The other, with the later satire boom, was the absurdities of private boarding schools. No democracy had mobilized a greater proportion of its people in the world war. No country sent more of the children of its elite to boarding schools with strange rules. What followed from these two incontrovertible facts was very funny indeed. It meant elongated, grotesque faces; weird nasal voices; nonsense words that could send apparently normal people into hysterics – a private British world created some of the most chippy, eloquent people on the planet in the sixth decade of the twentieth century. One of the most idiosyncratic and energetic aspects of British culture could be called popular surrealism. It was not the surrealism of experimental film-makers or painters, but of Max Wall, Goons and eventually Pythons as well.

The name ‘Goon’, picked up from Popeye cartoons, seems to have begun with Spike Milligan. In the opening stages of the war, Milligan had played childish boredom-repelling games with fellow gunners around their battery in Bexhill. Milligan was a working-class child of the British Empire. His father was Irish, and had performed in music halls as a youth, alongside another boy called Charlie Chaplin who then disappeared off abroad. He had then joined the British Army, like his father before him, so that Spike was born in India and brought up there and in Burma. It seems to have been a golden time before his father lost his army job in pre-war defence cuts and the family had to return, settling in Catford, south London. Poorly educated, Spike got a job as a clerk until he was sacked for stealing cigarettes. He taught himself to play the trumpet and dabbled in politics – joining the Young Communists and according to one report, flirting with Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts too. Then in 1939, as he recalled later, an envelope arrived containing ‘a cunningly worded invitation to participate in World War II’.16 Army service bored and frightened Milligan but it was the making of him.

Tens of thousands of soldiers found that the fear of death, nutty regulations, stupid officers and the incompetence of the war machine, required a more raucous, sardonic humour than they had been used to at home. Spike was sent as a signaller to North Africa, where he was duly shelled, lost friends and was injured, always playing jokes and making up games to pass the boring times. As the fighting moved north through Italy, he saw another gunner take part in one of the Army variety shows put on to amuse the troops. This was Harry Secombe, a commercial traveller’s son from Swansea, who, like Spike, had been a clerk before the war. The two were soon working together, part of a loose association of military comedians and musicians who would eventually tickle the nation when they returned (Dick Emery, Benny Hill, Frankie Howerd and Tommy Cooper among them). Meanwhile in India, Peter Sellers, a young half-Jewish impressionist was busy impersonating Sikh officers and RAF commanders. Michael Bentine, an Old Etonian intelligence officer and actor, would later complete the quartet, the most influential act of British comedy surrealism in the fifties, and one of the most important ever. Almost all of them had some music-hall connections – Sellers’s mother and grandmother had been singers and dancers, and Secombe’s family was saturated in music-hall culture. But they had all added a new twist, the result of those transforming army years.

The Goon Show was subversive without being party political, or even conventionally political at all. Spike Milligan described it as ‘against bureaucracy . . . its starting-point is one man shouting gibberish in the face of authority.’17 Of one of the Goons’ classic villains, Milligan said that it was ‘a chance to knock people who my father, and I as a boy, had to call “sir”. Colonels, chaps like Grytpype-Thynne with educated voices, who were really bloody scoundrels. They’d con and marry old ladies; they were cowards charging around with guns.’ And one of his producers, Peter Eton, said later: ‘We were trying to undermine the standing order. We were anti-Commonwealth, anti-Empire, anti-bureaucrat, anti-armed forces.’ Milligan, Secombe, Bentine and Sellers were demobilized into the rationed, bureaucrat-dominated Britain of the forties so it is hardly surprising that their humour was aimed at unthinking patriotism and official bungling. It was exactly what people wanted and needed, however nervous the BBC felt when the show began broadcasting in 1951. Older listeners found it alarming and baffling, but millions were quickly mimicking the silly voices, appalling puns and nonsense words of Goonery. Milligan remained prickly about being working class, and was political enough to support the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament away from the microphones. His comedy was meant to sting. Yet there was a warmth about the Goons that drew some of that sting: had it been otherwise it is unlikely that the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales would have been quite such enthusiastic fans.

All Fall Down: Suez

Some sense of the popularity of the Tories’ crown prince throughout Churchill’s sluggish and frustrating last government, Anthony Eden, can be gauged from his reception in the 1955 election when Churchill had at last retired. Most of the time he travelled in his own car, declaring that ‘if I cannot travel in my own country without an armed guard, I would rather retire from politics.’ But when he went by train, women arrived at the windows at each stop with huge bouquets of flowers. Here was the man who had stood up to Hitler, decently waited for Churchill to retire and was now a great architect of post-war global peace. Shortly after the election, Eden invited the new Soviet leader Khrushchev to London. (Despite a completely drunk translator, the visit had gone well, though at one point Khrushchev was introduced to the huntin’-and-shootin’ Tory politician, Lord Lambton, as ‘a shooting peer’. The Soviet leader solemnly and sympathetically shook hands with Lambton, assuming that this meant he was under sentence of death and shortly to be shot.) Eden was at root an intensely patriotic man, who thought Britain’s Commonwealth links far more important than deeper entanglements with Europe. Among his weaknesses were his inherited foul temper and a racist disdain for Arabs. But for most people in 1956 Eden seemed an almost beau ideal, the man for the moment.

Suez is often seen as a very short era of bad judgement, a crisis whose origins are obscure and whose consequences are hard to discern. This sells it short. Suez was about Britain’s colonial history. It had begun as something very personal, a duel between an English politician of the old school and an Arab nationalist leader of the new post-war world. Anthony Eden and what he represented for the Britain of the mid-fifties are worth dwelling on. Through most of Eden’s life he had been a glittering and glamorous figure, hugely admired across the political spectrum, a global peacemaker and statesman. Remembered by one colleague as ‘half mad baronet, half beautiful woman’, Eden had come from a landed, if sometimes eccentric family. During the Suez crisis he was seen in Washington as the epitome of alien English snobbishness. In fact one of his forebears, a baronet of Maryland, had been a great friend of George Washington and supporter of the American Declaration of Independence. Another had written a pioneering study of the poor, warmly praised by Karl Marx. Eden was never absolutely sure of his paternity – his mother was vivacious – but it was probably the wild, spendthrift, artistic Sir William Eden. He was a baronet out of the pages of a satirical novel, much given to hurling joints of roast lamb out of windows and, when riding to hounds, jumping closed level-crossing gates without waiting for oncoming trains. He had a terrible temper and used language so bad that, when he was presiding over local police courts, Durham miners would come simply for the pleasure of hearing him swear.18

The boy Eden, a beautiful casket seething with unstable genes, went on to Eton. He fought bravely in the First World War, during which his oldest brother was killed in the trenches and his much-loved younger brother was killed at sea, days after his sixteenth birthday. A liberal-minded Tory MP from 1923 onwards, Eden rose to become the Foreign Office minister who had face-to-face negotiations in the thirties with Mussolini, Hitler – the two men discovered they had fought opposite one another in the trenches, and drew maps of their respective positions – and Stalin, whom Eden thought was a kind of oriental despot. After becoming Foreign Secretary and helping form the pre-war system of alliances and League of Nations agreements, he dramatically resigned in 1938 in protest at the appeasement of Nazi Germany, finally returning to serve Churchill, again as Foreign Secretary, from 1940 to 1945. A brilliant linguist, highly cultured and with a deep love of modern art, a lover of many women, a genuine diplomatist, he was familiar by the mid-fifties with most of the world’s leaders. In 1954 at Geneva he had arranged a key conference to try to keep peace in the new Cold War world, a summit seen then as a last throw to prevent the Third World War.

So what of Nasser? If Eden was the model of a kind of Englishness, Colonel Gamel Abdel Nasser was the original of the anti-colonialist autocrat who would become familiar over the decades to come – charismatic, patriotic, ruthless, opportunistic. Driving the British from Egypt was the cause that burned in him from his teenage years, and not surprisingly. Egypt, though nominally independent under its own king, had been regarded as virtually British until the end of the Second World War. It had been the centre of the fight against Rommel’s Afrika Corps, and the pivot around which Britain’s domination of the Middle East revolved. The oil fields of Iran and Iraq which kept Britain working, the Suez Canal through which a quarter of British imports and two-thirds of Europe’s oil arrived, the airfields which refuelled planes bound for India and Australia – all this made Egypt a hub; a pivot; Britain’s Mediterranean naval. Most British families contained someone who had served in Egypt at some time. What was less special was the casual contempt British people tended to reserve for the Egyptians themselves, or ‘wogs’ as they were more commonly known. Churchill had reacted to one moment of earlier Egyptian insubordination by shouting that if they didn’t look out ‘we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter’.

Before the Second World War Egypt had been forced to sign a treaty making it clear that the country was under Britain’s thumb. Eden’s head was even placed on Egyptian postage stamps to mark this humiliation. One wartime episode makes the relationship clear. In 1942, as Rommel’s tanks drew nearer, and Churchill was fulminating about Cairo being a nest of ‘Hun spies’, the British ambassador told Egypt’s King Farouk that his prime minister was not considered sufficiently anti-German and would have to be replaced. The King summoned his limited reserves of pride and refused. It was, he insisted, a step too far, a breach of the 1937 treaty. Britain’s ambassador simply called up armoured cars, a couple of tanks and some soldiers and surrounded King Farouk in his palace. The ambassador walked in and ordered the monarch to sign a grovelling letter of abdication, renouncing and abandoning ‘for ourselves and the heirs of our body the throne of Egypt’. At this royal determination crumbled. The king asked pathetically if, perhaps, he could have one last chance? He was graciously granted it and sacked his prime minister. Life went on, the war went on. But Egyptians took note. Down in the Sudan a young Egyptian army officer, Lieutenant Nasser, seething with indignation, complained in letters to friends about the surrender and servility shown to the British. Colonialism, he said, ‘if it felt that some Egyptians intended to sacrifice their lives and face force with force, would retreat like a prostitute’.

The son of a postal worker, Nasser was soon at the centre of a group of radical army officers, Egypt’s Free Officers Movement, discussing how to get the British out and how to build a new Arab state, socialist rather than essentially Islamic. At this time, and later under Nasser, the Muslim extremists, whose thinking would one day influence al Qaeda, were being persecuted and even executed. Nasser was a ruthless, quietly determined man who naturally attracted followers; when King Farouk was eventually ousted by the Free Officers in July 1952 it took just two years for the young Nasser to oust the interim leader and seize control of the country himself. For him, this was good timing. After the war Arab nationalism had made things much tougher for Britain. Its oil interests began to be challenged. Visiting British ministers found themselves stoned by Arab crowds. To Churchill’s fury, Iran’s prime minister, the popular and independent-minded Mohammed Mossadeq, had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. Though he was overthrown in a CIA-organized coup two years later (organized by a president’s grandson, the gloriously named Kermit Roosevelt), Mossadeq’s action was a curtain-raiser for what Nasser would do in Egypt. In Iraq, a British-sponsored king and prime minister were holding on by their fingertips and would later both be murdered by mobs. In Jordan, the British soldier who had commanded an Arab Legion there since 1939, Sir John Glubb, known as Glubb Pasha, was sacked by the young King Hussein in March 1956; an Arab now wanted an Arab in charge of his army. Though it seems a small matter now, at the time it was seen as a slap across the face for London, provoked by the uppity Arabism sweeping the region. Eden blamed Nasser for this, and told a junior minister: ‘What’s all this poppycock . . . about isolating and quarantining Nasser? Can’t you understand that I want Nasser murdered?’19

Egypt was where the confrontation between old colonial power and the new Arab nationalism was always going to take place. Britain’s military base at Suez, guarding its interest in the canal, was more like a small country than a barracks. It was about the same size as Wales, with a vast border which was expensive and difficult to defend, so much so that Attlee had considered closing it and pulling out shortly after the war. The base depended for survival on supplies and trade with the surrounding Egyptian towns and villages. But in the latter days of Farouk’s reign, it was already being boycotted by nationalist Egyptians. One incident produced another. The tension rose. Off-duty British servicemen were shot. After one act of bloody retaliation involving the slaughter of poorly armed Arab policemen holed up in a building by British soldiers, the Cairo crowds turned on foreign-owned clubs, hotels, shops and bars and set them alight. Britain found herself facing a guerrilla war.

Eventually, following yet another coup, London began to negotiate a British withdrawal – there were, after all, other bases nearby, notably in Cyprus, where however another nationalist guerrilla war was going on, and in Jordan. Eden, then Foreign Secretary, came to think that withdrawal was inevitable and pointed out to his colleagues that ‘we are ourselves in serious breach’ of the treaty, having eight times as many troops in the country as stipulated. To start with, all was civilized enough. Nasser even briefly met Eden, though he didn’t much enjoy being lectured by the British leader in fluent Arabic. He complained later that Eden in the grandiose surroundings of the British Embassy, which made the British ‘look like princes and the Egyptians like beggars’, treated him like a rather dim junior official. The agreement stipulated that Britain would keep her rights over the canal, a deal soon broken by Nasser.

At this stage, how great a threat was Nasser? His ability to rouse Arab opinion was impressive, and he wanted to make himself a spokesman for the non-aligned world generally. His Cairo Radio, broadcasting across the Middle East, was the al Jazeera of its day, though considerably less independent. At different times in the coming crisis Nasser would be compared by British politicians and newspapers to Mussolini and Hitler, presented as a stooge of the Soviet Union, and then as a regional Arabist menace. He was a dictator, certainly. He was also a socialist of a kind, with great plans for a healthier, stronger, better-educated country. He wanted to spread his power throughout the Arab world, beginning with the Yemen, Syria, Sudan and Jordan. Like Saddam Hussein, he had used poison gas against enemies and, like him, was regarded with alarm by other Arab rulers. Like Saddam, Nasser believed in the destruction of the then new State of Israel.

Yet he would have remained a local irritant had it not been for a catastrophic blunder by Washington. Nasser’s great ambition was the creation of the so-called High Dam at Aswan, a gargantuan project which had been dreamed about since the mid-forties and which might transform Egypt’s economy. Three miles wide, it would create a 300-mile-long lake which would give the Egyptians eight times as much electric power as they then had and increase the country’s fertile land by a third. It was much more than just another civil engineering project. Nasser talked of it being ‘seventeen times larger than the greatest pyramid’. With Aswan, here was a new Pharoah bringing a new age to Egypt after centuries of colonial humiliation. The problem was that such a dam was also far beyond the resources of Nasser’s Egypt. Loans had been discussed for years and in 1956 Nasser had every reason to think that the Americans, followed by the British, were about to sign the cheques. Partly out of pique when he thought he was being given an ultimatum, Nasser’s ambassador implied they could get help from the Russians and Chinese if the American terms were not good. The US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, abruptly cancelled the offer. Nasser was livid. To show his anger and to find a new and secure source of revenue, he abruptly retaliated by seizing control of the Suez canal, triggering the coup with code-words given to a mass public rally.

If the dam was not just a dam, the canal was not merely a canal. It was the ultimate liquid motorway, a vital artery of world trade, connecting Europe through the Mediterranean, with India, Australia, New Zealand and the Far East. In the days before mass air freight the only other way was round the Cape, infinitely further, slower and more expensive. Years before Eden had called it the jugular vein of the British Empire, and in the mid-fifties a quarter of all British exports and imports came through it. It wasn’t only Britain. Three-quarters of Europe’s oil came from the region, half of it through the canal. Indeed, a sixth of the whole world’s cargoes went through it, some fifty ships every day, all of them paying tolls. Because of its international importance and the fact that it had been built by a French engineer, using French and British money, it had since 1888 been administered as an international facility, not an Egyptian one. It was run by a company, 44 per cent of which was in turn owned by the British government, thanks to an inspired piece of High Victorian entrepreneurship by Disraeli. It was not hard to see how this streak of colonial-owned internationalism running through Egypt felt like a violation. Nasser’s plan, having seized it by military force just days after Dulles turned down his loan request, was to use payments from canal traffic to finance the next phase of his dam. The legality of the seizure was much debated around the world but to the British government Nasser’s action was simple theft and a clear breach of international treaties. Worse, you couldn’t leave Egyptians running something as sophisticated as a canal. Worse still, if it was allowed to stand, this act of impudence or bravado would inspire other Arab radicals and threaten the whole region.

Since Nasser’s act had been provoked by Washington, and since his revenge hurt Britain and France, Washington’s allies, it might have been expected that President Eisenhower would staunchly back action against Nasser. The situation turned out to be rather more complicated. For one thing Washington was pursuing a vigorous policy of trying to turf out the old colonial powers from the Middle East in favour of America herself. The US had oil of her own but was always worried about the future and acutely aware that two-thirds of the then known world reserves were in the region. Special deals had been made with the Saudis and Iranians. This economic interest was augmented by loud and pious anti-colonialism, particularly from the Secretary of State, Dulles, a devious and sanctimonious character who hated British imperialism with a Founding Fathers fervour. He also loathed Eden, who cordially returned the feeling. Next, there was the intense worry in Washington about the Russians, who were making menacing noises about the liberal regime emerging in Hungary. Next, there was the ticklish question of the Panama Canal which was controlled by the United States in a similar way to Anglo-French control in Suez. Ike and Dulles wanted no agreement emerging from the Middle East about international control of waterways which might affect Panama. Finally, by 1956 President Eisenhower was in the throes of trying to be re-elected on a peace and prosperity ticket and was outraged by his allies’ untimely sabre-rattling. For all these reasons, America would prove to be Britain’s enemy in her confrontation with Nasser, not her friend.

Little of this was understood in London, where Eden’s tough line with Nasser was hugely popular. The Conservative Party was roaring its support. The Labour Opposition under Hugh Gaitskell sounded if anything even more bellicose (as it would later in the opening phases of the Falklands War, under Michael Foot). With a couple of exceptions – the Manchester Guardian and the Observer – the press, commentators and cartoonists were all on-side, and demanding punishment. The new science of opinion polling, and individual messages of support pouring into Downing Street, showed that public opinion agreed. Nasser must be sorted out. But timing in politics is everything. Under American pressure, there followed months of diplomatic manoeuvring during which Eden and his passionately anti-Nasser Chancellor, Harold Macmillan, began to lose the initiative. There were international conferences, proposed compromise deals under which the countries dependent on the canal would have a new role in administering what would formally be Egyptian property, and intensive negotiations at the United Nations. Britain kept hinting that it might yet come to war. Eisenhower and Dulles insisted that a peaceful solution should be found. By saying that America would have no part in trying to ‘shoot our way through’ to the canal and by referring to the problem of colonialism, they encouraged Nasser, who brusquely rejected all outside initiatives. America’s attitude also encouraged Moscow, which led the diplomatic charge against Britain and France. Throughout this episode and despite the crisis caused by Russia’s crushing of the Hungarians, the US and the USSR stood shoulder to shoulder against London.

This all felt increasingly ominous. And then a possible shortcut presented itself through the unlikely agency of Israel. It depended on America in the mid-fifties almost as much as it does half a century later, but the Israeli government believed Nasser and his pan-Arabism was a threat to their existence not properly appreciated in Washington. Egypt had taken delivery of large quantities of Soviet bloc armaments, including the latest jet fighters and bombers; Nasser’s anti-Israeli rhetoric was bloodcurdling and he was increasingly closely echoed by the Syrians and Jordanians. The Suez crisis gave the Israeli government a one-off opportunity to strike their most serious enemy, and even enjoy Western air support while they did it. Thus came about the plot finally hatched by Britain, France and Israel to finish off Nasser. Harold Macmillan, the Chancellor, had originally suggested that Israel be used to attack Egypt from one flank, and the idea was enthusiastically taken up by Churchill in retirement. When first mentioned to Eden he thought it eccentric and dismissed it. But as the international talks dragged on and the government began to lose support and momentum at home, the idea of a plot resurfaced.

We do not know all the details for the very good reason that Eden insisted no notes were taken at the key cabinet committee discussions. He even insisted that private diaries of the time, including Macmillan’s, be torn up or burned. But the Israelis approached the French who revived the idea. Israel was being harassed on her borders by guerrillas. The French, fighting a vicious colonial war in Algeria, thought Nasser was a menace to their interests there as well as in the canal. The specific plot, for an Israeli attack to be followed by an Anglo-French demand for a ceasefire, which would be refused and then followed by a ‘police-action’ intervention, was dreamed up by the French war hero, General Maurice Challe. So cloak-and-dagger discussions began. The place at which the details were hammered out was a modest borrowed villa at Se`vres outside Paris, a house that had once been a French resistance hideout. Eden’s Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, attended, reluctantly, having tried to disguise himself by wearing a battered old raincoat as he left London. (It did not work.)

There he met his French opposite number, the Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, the country’s chief of staff, Moshe Dayan, and Shimon Peres from the Israeli defence ministry. It was not an easy meeting. Britain had a close defence agreement with Jordan, another enemy of Israel at the time, and it was not so long since Israeli terrorists had been killing British soldiers. For their part, the Israelis deeply mistrusted the British. The French were also suspicious after Britain’s decision a year earlier to shun the new Common Market. Finally, the deep secrecy of the meetings created its own layer of mistrust, particularly since Eden was obsessive about nothing being written down. (Eventually the outline agreement was written down, at the Israelis’ insistence, and initialled by a British negotiator.) At the Se`vres house, with the help of local fish and wine, a deal was finally done. Those present solemnly swore not to reveal the details during their lifetimes, and for good reason. The agreement to ensure that French paratroops from Algeria and a British invasion force from Malta and Cyprus could attack, theoretically to separate the two sides, but in fact to grab back control of the canal, was wholly illegal. It required that ambassadors, other ministers, the head of MI6 and the Commons as well as the White House, must all be kept in ignorance. That, at least, was done highly successfully. Despite leaks from Paris to the CIA, President Eisenhower never guessed what was happening until it was too late.

Meanwhile the mood in Britain had changed. Anti-colonialism, the international rule of law and the rights of young countries were all issues which enthused Labour and the left generally. The United Nations, Nato and the European Convention on Human Rights, still smelled of fresh paint. As American hostility to military action became clearer, some MPs and commentators began to have second thoughts. Eden, rather like Thatcher and Blair later, complained that left-wing intellectuals were stirring things up against him, while ‘The BBC is exasperating me by leaning over backwards to be what they call neutral and to present both sides of the case.’ There was nothing quite like the drama of the Hutton Inquiry and the resignation of the BBC’s Chairman and Director General in 2004, yet at a fundamental level the earlier clash went further: Eden made menacing noises about taking the BBC under direct government control. According to BBC lore, troops were placed in a building on the Strand, awaiting orders to take over the BBC’s external services in Bush House: meanwhile the Corporation’s engineers there had been issued with sledgehammers and told to destroy their own equipment rather than let it fall into the hands of Eden and the government. Inside the government, some ministers became uneasy about the whole escapade. Sir Anthony Nutting, a Foreign Office minister, would resign in protest, though without the public drama achieved by Robin Cook before the Iraq War. And as with the Iraq War nearly half a century later, late in the day when the opposition really organized itself, crowds turned out to protest and private unease spilled into public anger.

For the first time in modern British history, large numbers of people came onto the streets of London to challenge a government going to war. The Suez demonstrations would be followed by the great anti-Vietnam clashes of the sixties and the marches against Tony Blair’s Iraq War, but in the fifties nothing like this had happened before. Suez split Britain down the middle, dividing families and friends. It brought the Prime Minister into angry conflict with Establishment institutions and Establishment grandees. Lord Mountbatten is said to have warned the young Queen that her government were ‘behaving like lunatics’ and a former Royal aide believed she thought her premier was mad.20 Because of Suez a generation of politically aware younger people grew up rather more contemptuous of politicians generally, readier to mock them, keener to dismiss and laugh at them. The decline of respect for the craft of politics would probably have happened anyway in modern Britain. But the events of the winter of 1956 hastened that decline.

Even the military was affected. The call-up for Suez provoked widescale desertions and minor mutinies across Britain. Some 20,000 reservists were called back and many declined to come, some scrawling ‘bollocks’ across their papers. In Southampton, Royal Engineers pelted a general with stones. In Kent, there were similar scenes among reservists: ‘More or less to a man they refused to polish boots or press uniforms or even do guard duty. They spent most of the time abusing the career soldiers for being idiots. The army could do nothing . . .’21 It went further than Kent. In Malta, in the unpleasant surroundings of the Qrendi airstrip, Grenadier Guards ‘fuelled by NAAFI tea, marched through the camp . . . down to the building where the officers were housed.’ They were angry about conditions as much as politics but earned a stiff lecture from their commanding officer on the dire consequences of mutiny. Shortly afterwards, though, the Reservists of the 37th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment of the Royal Artillery were at it again, marching through the Maltese camp to protest and shouting down their regimental sergeant-major.22 These were minor incidents, undoubtedly, and had much to do with boredom and irritation among reservists brought suddenly to dusty, unpleasant camps, yet headlines in the press about army mutinies and protest marches sent shockwaves through the forces.

The biggest single difference between the Suez and Iraq crises was, of course, that the Americans did not want war in 1956 and were determined for it in 2003. Anguished letters and telephone transcripts tell the story of mutual misunderstanding. From Eden’s point of view, the US was preventing any real pressure against Nasser while talking grandly about international law. He gave enough broad hints, he thought, for the White House to realize that he and the French prime minister were ready to use force. At different times Eisenhower’s team had given the impression that they accepted force might be necessary. Dulles had talked of making Nasser ‘disgorge’ his prize. So while Britain could not tip off the Americans about the dangerous and illegal agreement with Israel, or give military details, there was a general belief that the Americans would understand. This was an error. From Eisenhower’s viewpoint, his old allies had dropped him in the dirt at the worst possible time, during an election and when the Russians were brutally crushing the Hungarian uprising with 4,000 tanks and terrible bloodshed. Eisenhower and Dulles had failed to pick up persistent hints and worried reports from CIA agents in Paris and London, just as they had failed to understand the consequences of cancelling their help for the Aswan dam. America in the mid-fifties was a young superpower, still flat-footed. This time, it had been fooled by both sides.

So, on the early morning of 5 November 1956, British and French paratroopers began dropping from the air above Port Said. A huge British convoy which had been steaming for nine days from Malta arrived with tanks and artillery and the drive south to secure the Suez Canal began. So far, only thirty-two British and French commandos had been killed, against 2,000 Egyptian dead. In a military sense, things had gone smoothly. The politics was another matter. When the invasion happened, Eisenhower and Dulles exploded with anger. According to American White House correspondents, the air at the Oval Office turned blue in a way that had not happened for a century. Dulles seriously compared the Anglo-French action to that of the Soviets in Budapest. Unfortunately, at much the same time as Eisenhower was hitting the roof of his office, Nasser was hitting the floor of the canal – with no fewer than forty-seven ships filled with concrete. He had done the very thing Eden’s plan was supposed to prevent. He had blocked the canal. For the first and last time, the United States made common cause with the Soviet Union at the UN to demand a stop to the invasion. The motion for a ceasefire was passed by a crushing sixty-four votes to five. World opinion was aflame. India, eight years independent, sided with the Soviet Union, which was threatening to send 50,000 Russian ‘volunteers’ to the Middle East. In the event, as the British troops were moving south, having taken Port Said and with the road to Cairo open to them, they were suddenly ordered to stop. An immediate ceasefire and swift pull-out was being ordered by London, not because of the views of irate squaddies in the Home Counties or the private views of the Queen, or fulminations in Moscow. Britain was being humiliated by the United States in a way that had not happened since the War of Independence.

On the ground, clear-sighted about their national interest, and uninterested in American anger, the French were prepared to keep going. Britain was in a different situation. It came down to money, oil and nerves. The pound was again being sold around the world, with the US Treasury piling in to viciously turn the screw. Fuel was soon running short and, in what seemed like a return to wartime conditions, British petrol stations briefly required motorists to hand over brown-coloured ration coupons. Britain needed emergency oil supplies from the Americans which would have to be paid for in dollars. Britain didn’t have enough dollars. Another loan was needed. Harold Macmillan turned to Washington and the International Monetary Fund to ask for help. The US Treasury Secretary, George Humphrey, told him, via Britain’s new Washington ambassador Sir Harold Caccia: ‘You’ll not get a dime from the US government if I can stop it, until you’ve gotten out of Suez. You are like burglars who have broken into somebody else’s house. So get out! When you do, and not until then, you’ll get help!’

By now, the Egyptian air force had been destroyed and 13,500 British troops, with 8,500 French troops, had landed at Port Said and were making their way south towards the canal. Rather embarrassingly the Israelis, led by Ariel Sharon, later to be a controversial prime minister, had long ago reached their destination and stopped, so there was no real need to ‘separate’ anyone. But the game was up by then. With the country split from Buckingham Palace to the barrack room, Eden’s health and nerves gave way. To many it seemed as if Nato itself was on the verge of breaking apart. After a brutally direct phone call from Eisenhower, ordering him to announce a ceasefire, Eden called his French opposite number Guy Mollet, who was begging him to hang on. According to French sources he told him: ‘I am cornered. I can’t hang on. I’m being deserted by everybody. My loyal associate Nutting has resigned as minister of state. I can’t even rely on unanimity among the Conservatives. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Church, the oil businessmen, everybody is against me! The Commonwealth threatens to break up . . . I cannot be the grave-digger of the Crown. And then I want you to understand, really understand, Eisenhower phoned me. I can’t go it alone without the United States. It would be the first time in the history of England . . . No, it is not possible.’23

The ceasefire and the withdrawal that followed were a disaster for Britain, which left Nasser stronger than ever. It finished Eden, though not before he had lied to the Commons about the Anglo-French-Israeli plot at Se`vres. He said: ‘I want to say this on the question of foreknowledge, and to say it quite bluntly to the House, that there was not foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt – there was not.’ This can be compared to the French copy of the protocol of Se`vres agreed six weeks earlier which begins by stating quite bluntly: ‘Les Forces Israeliennes lancent le 23 Oct 1956 dans la soirée une operation d’envergure contre les Forces Egyptiennes . . .’ The canal was eventually reopened and reparations agreed, though the issue of oil security then assumed a new importance. Britain was left chastened and stripped of moral authority, Washington’s rebuked lieutenant.

The effect on the US is also worth recalling. Eisenhower and Dulles had been driven by pique masquerading as high Christian principle, and their handling of the crisis encouraged the Arab nationalism which would return to haunt America in later decades. Eisenhower misled the American people about his true state of knowledge of Britain’s readiness to use force. His public statement that he abhorred the invasion because the US did not approve of force to settle international disputes sat oddly with his earlier interest in using nuclear weapons in Korea. The Russians took note and were almost certainly more belligerent afterwards. As a result of Suez, the French distanced themselves from America. It led to the Franco–German axis which endures to this day. The politics of the Middle East changed radically. Britain would not again possess independent power or influence in the region. The age of American power there, based on support for Israel and the oil alliance with the Saudi Royal Family, leading to so much later controversy, properly began after Suez. Much later, according to the then Vice President, Richard Nixon, Eisenhower had second thoughts about Suez, calling his decision to crush Britain his greatest foreign policy mistake. Dulles, who was desperately ill with cancer, told the head of the hospital where he died in 1959 that he reckoned he had been wrong over Suez too.

Other consequences of Suez were less predictable. It provoked the arrival of the Mini car, designed in the wake of the petrol price shock caused by the seizure of the canal. It even affected the fast rate of decline of the shipyards of Clydeside and Tyneside, whose small oil tankers were soon replaced by supertankers built at larger yards overseas. These, it was discovered, could sail round the Cape and deliver their cargo just as cheaply as smaller ships using the canal. Had this been realized a few years earlier, Eden might never have gone to war, and might be remembered now as one of our finer prime ministers. But it wasn’t and ‘Suez’ became four-letter shorthand for the moment when Britain realized her new place in the world.

Muddle or Logic? Two Soldiers

Harold Macmillan’s arrival as Prime Minister meant a swift acceptance of American power. Was there another way? The man who was so like him and yet so unlike him, Enoch Powell, certainly thought there was. But Macmillan, devious and wily, was the better politician. ‘First in, first out’ was the brutal, accurate jibe about him. Having been even more gung-ho about Nasser than Eden himself, it was he as Chancellor who felt the full impact of the run on the pound and led the political retreat. Unsettlingly, Macmillan was also having a series of private meetings with the American ambassador in London during the height of the crisis, advertising himself as Eden’s deputy and suggesting ways in which the ceasefire and withdrawal could be sold to Tory backbenchers.

Macmillan and Eisenhower knew each other from the war and while it cannot be said that the Americans actually replaced Eden with a complaisant Atlanticist – the switch-over was done in the old Tory way, by a cabal agreement inside the cabinet – they certainly got the man they wanted. Macmillan swiftly tried to put Suez behind him and, greatly to France’s disgust, was soon pleading with Washington for help in nuclear weapons. For a brief period Bevin’s belief in the possibility of a genuinely independent British bomb had been vindicated. But this period lasts no longer than five or six years, the gap between the time it took for the new British bomb, to be dropped by long-range jet bomber, to be made militarily usable, and the moment in 1958 when Macmillan realized that British bombing and missile technology was already out of date and insufficiently threatening to deter a Russian attack.

Remaining in the tiny nuclear club wasn’t the only route that Macmillan could have taken but nuclear weapons seemed a relatively cheap shortcut to retaining the full fig of global swagger. Macmillan bluffed when he could, authorizing the first British H-bomb explosion, at Christmas Island, in May 1957. It was partly a fake, a hybrid bomb intended to fool the US into thinking its ally was further ahead than we really were. The next year at a crucial showdown between British and American scientists in Washington, the British Aldermaston team persuaded Edward Teller’s men from Los Alamos that Britain was just as far advanced in the theory of nuclear weaponry. Teller conceded that the laws of physics seemed to apply on both sides of the Atlantic and for a brief time the cooperation of 1940–5 was resumed although, after Suez, any illusion of equal partners working together was an obvious sham. Perhaps Britain, like France, could have broken away from the American-run military command of Nato and returned to developing her own nuclear weapons and strategy, joining full-heartedly with the new Europe. It would have been expensive and altered the shape of the post-war world but an entirely different path was available to Britain after Suez, even if it seemed a stony and unattractive one. Macmillan never considered it.

The stony path was the terrain of a politician to whom Macmillan was almost allergic. One morning in 1962, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Home, walked into the cabinet room in Number Ten to find the Prime Minister quietly shuffling the place-names around the table. He asked the cabinet secretary what has going on. Had someone died? No, came the reply, it was all to do with Enoch Powell: ‘“The PM can’t have Enoch’s accusing eye looking at him straight across the table any more.” And poor Enoch was put way down the left where Harold couldn’t see him.’24 It is not a bad symbol for the age. Avoiding eye contact with unpleasant choices was part of the art of governing and for much of this time governments got away with it rather successfully. Powell, a brilliant romantic driven by a cold, intense logic, was tormented by the choices ahead, from the economic effect of an ever-growing state, to the consequences of the loss of Empire and the effect of immigration on traditional Englishness. His answers to these questions would change over time and some would destroy his political career, but he never stopped following his agonized conscience. Macmillan, by contrast, was perfectly well aware of hard choices ahead. His diaries are full of foreboding and he could write crisp, clearsighted private papers. He pushed decolonization hard and struggled to get Britain into the European Economic Community. But confronted by the most dangerous questions, such as whether union power and state spending needed to be reversed, he seemed rather more interested in staying in office and reassuring the people that all would be well. He was a great actor, a wonderful showman. And he put Powell so far out of eyeline that he couldn’t see him.

Much though they disliked one another, Macmillan and Powell had several important things in common. They had both been soldiers and both carried a certain guilt that they had not been killed fighting Germans. Harold Macmillan had fought exceedingly bravely in the First World War. He was wounded repeatedly. He survived without ever forgetting how many of his friends and the soldiers serving under him had not. He had a shuffling walk, much mocked when he became Prime Minister as some kind of aristocratic affectation. It was, in fact, caused by shrapnel from a German shell. Powell, a much younger man, had been an intelligence officer with the Eighth Army in the Second World War and said much later, with a touch of the characteristic Powellite emphasis: ‘I should like to have been killed in the war.’ Both men were haunted. Both also came from humbler families than Macmillan’s marriage and pheasant-shooting, or Powell’s perfect diction and fox-hunting, might have suggested. Macmillan’s family had been Scottish crofters before going into the book trade, which bought him his privileged upbringing. Powell was the son of a Birmingham schoolmaster who rose through mental power and ferocious hard work. Both men were well read, particularly in the classics, and gifted at languages, though Macmillan lacked Powell’s brilliance and preferred English novelists and political biographies. They shared a belief in Britain’s unique destiny. The differences between them were chemical – and generational.

Harold Macmillan was a high-minded Victorian reformer, who grew up to the sound of horse-drawn carriages and the spectacle of the old Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. A young Tory, his conscience was stirred by the awful poverty of the Depression, notably in his Stockton constituency. His politics in the thirties became radical to the point of extremism. He hired the former secretary of Oswald Mosley’s New Party, a former Marxist. He called for widespread planning of the economy, including the abolition of the Stock Exchange and the bringing of the trade unions into the heart of economic decision-making. He was remarkably close to the politics of Tony Benn fifty years later. He might well not have stayed with the Tories had the war not intervened. After it, he was still a stirrer, suggesting renaming the Conservatives the New Democratic Party. By the time he returned to government in 1951, his ideological wildness had matured into a paternalistic mildness, a horror of right-wingers and left-wingers both. Like Winston Churchill the son of an American mother, he hoped to show that in an American world, Britain could still play the role of a wise if wobbly parent, ‘Greece to America’s Rome.’

Enoch Powell, eighteen years younger, was no less romantic. But he was formed by the university study, the Indian army and the last days of the British Empire. Unlike Churchill or Macmillan he loathed the Americans to the point where he seriously believed, during 1944–5, that the next war would pit Europe and Russia on the one hand against the anti-imperialist United States on the other. Greece to their Rome? Had Powell not been a distinguished Latinist he would probably have preferred to torch Rome. Where Macmillan was vague and paternalistic in his thinking, Powell had a disconcerting habit of beginning with first principles and then following his logic wherever it led, which was often to uncomfortable places. Sovereignty, independence and race were not woolly abstractions for him. He distrusted wit and showmanship – though like his Labour doppelgänger and friend Michael Foot, he was always more of a showman and a personality politician than he admitted. Enoch Powell came relatively late to hunting. But compared to Macmillan, he was the wilder horseman, notorious among friends for throwing himself off while leaping unwisely over high fences with unknown drops. Macmillan was the ultimate master of staying in the saddle and would rule for years. Powell never would, but his anger matters as much for the British story as Macmillan’s affectation that things were under control. Together, these two men make up the inner argument that animates the thirteen Tory years, even when looking the other way. Macmillan had the power but not the ideas. Powell lacked the power, most of the time. But he would find the ideas.

The Revolt of the Chicken Farmer

Ideas matter. And because ideas matter, so too does the story of an Old Etonian Christian Scientist, former RAF fighter pilot, chicken farmer and unsuccessful turtle rancher called Antony Fisher. In the high years of socialism and planning, from 1945 onwards, Fisher stood out as an utterly self-certain individualist and anti-socialist. ‘Communism is the poison offered to the people; socialism is the cup in which it is given; and the welfare state is the tempting label on the bottle,’ he liked to say. In the Britain of the forties and fifties these views made him an eccentric. Once this country had been the world centre for liberal economics, famous for its people’s distrust of big government – a land without identity cards or intrusive central government. Now even its Liberal Party was a keen supporter of the post-war consensus (the party, after all, of Beveridge and Keynes). There were some standing out against it. Not many, but some. Their unlikely spiritual teacher was Friedrich von Hayek, an exiled Viennese economist, who came from the very heart of cosmopolitan intellectualism where socialism, communism, Freudianism and fascism contended. A cousin of the daunting philosopher Wittgenstein, he would help reconvert the British to their old doctrines of economic liberalism.

Hayek had arrived in London to teach economics in 1931 and developed a close rapport with another economist Lionel Robbins, the son of a London market gardener who had been taken up by that creator of the Welfare State, William Beveridge. Hayek and Robbins formed a crucial partnership at the London School of Economics, a subversive friendship which would help, eventually, to change the intellectual climate of Britain. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, was one of the most influential books of the age, a full-throated attack on socialism which was received with contempt by many but admired – with reservations – by both George Orwell and Keynes himself. But a book is not a movement. Liberal economists did begin to meet regularly in Switzerland from 1947 but for Britain the key moment came with the arrival on the scene of Fisher, now an almost entirely forgotten man. He had been traumatized by watching the death of his brother during the Battle of Britain and rebuilt his life as a Sussex farmer. A staunch individualist, he had been entranced by Hayek’s book and managed to meet his hero after the war. Hayek told Fisher not to try to become a politician but instead to try to win the battle of ideas by forming some kind of institute or organization to fight the rotting influence of the State. It was a message Fisher never forgot. Luckily for him, the State stepped in to help him spread it. In 1952 his herd of cattle contracted foot and mouth disease and had to be destroyed. Fisher used his compensation money to visit the United States.25

There he not only picked up the latest free-market thinking but visited a huge experimental ‘broiler chicken’ farm at Cornell University, where 15,000 birds were being raised under one roof. This, thought Fisher, was exactly what the meat-starved British needed. It was illegal to import the chunky American poultry central to the new factory farming, so the (anti-regulations) Fisher was reduced to covering two dozen fertilized White Rock eggs with silver foil and bringing them through in his hand luggage as ‘Easter Eggs’. Back in Sussex he built sheds with gas heating systems and an overhead rail system to bring in food. Soon twenty-four chickens became 2,400 and then 24,000. Within a few years, his family were raising 1.25 million birds, Buxted Chickens had been formed, and Fisher was a very rich man, the most successful poultry farmer in Europe. Across Britain, affordable roast chicken became a staple of the Sunday lunch table, thanks to Fisher. And with the money they made him, he was able to fund the Institute for Economic Affairs, undoubtedly the most influential think tank in modern British history. Set up by Fisher and the eccentric ex-paratrooper and Liberal, Oliver Smedley, the IEA was intended to combat the socialist influence of the Fabians.26 Soon they would be joined by others, Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon. Hayek would be proved right. It was the seeding of ideas that mattered most, not conventional political careers.

The IEA first touched British politics during the winter of 1957–8 when inflation was rising above 4 per cent and wage settlements were in double figures. Like so many political crises of the time this one occurred in deepest private. The question was whether government spending should be cut back as part of a wider drive to curb the amount of money in the economy. Banks were also to be instructed to cut back credit. Macmillan was far more worried about confrontation and unemployment than he was about rising prices. His Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, disagreed. He was insistent that savings had to be made to squeeze inflation and save the pound. His enemies thought Macmillan an unprincipled coward. He was certainly driven by a ruthless enthusiasm for staying in office. But there was another side to the Prime Minister. Brought up in the intellectual shadow of Keynes, he thought that seriously painful cuts were perhaps not necessary and that the economy was already slowing. Though Macmillan was inclined to dither, haggle and to split the difference, this was a shrewd call. And around him he had many spending ministers, looking after the armed forces, the hospitals and welfare, who were bitterly against cutting back. He feared some of them might resign.

On the other side of the argument, as it turned out, were the real resigners, Thorneycroft and his two junior Treasury ministers – the wealthy, sarcastic, ruthlessly logical and nearly blind Nigel Birch, and Enoch Powell. Their insistence that it was vital to control the money supply was not just a technical position, but was intertwined with a personal suspicion of corporatism and the big state that was close to the more intellectual economic case now being pushed by the newly formed IEA. Lionel Robbins had been advising the three ministers, despite much sucking of teeth by more consensus-minded officials, and Fisher’s men would come to see Thorneycroft and his fellow rebels at Macmillan’s Treasury as heroes. They provided the intellectual ammunition and connected through Powell to younger Tories, and gained them as converts. Powell had already been introduced to Hayek’s thinking. In the months before the three Treasury ministers resigned, they had been dropping in on one another for a rolling conversation which showed they had all concluded the same thing – that government spending was too high and had to be severely reined back. Against the instincts of their own officials as well as their colleagues, they put together a planned series of cuts, including a 50 per cent increase in the cost of school meals, freezes on pay rises and the removal of family allowances for the second child. It would have hit five million families, including millions of the very middle-class mothers whose support the Tories most needed.

It was a deliberately tough and provocative package, and battle was duly joined in the cabinet. If there was ever a moment before the great political smash-ups of the seventies when ministers could have gripped the issue of inflation and asserted themselves against the consensus of Whitehall and the unions, this was it. Day after day, the arguments raged back and forward. Compromises were offered, partially accepted, and then rejected again. Tempers grew shorter. The Treasury team trooped in and out of Number Ten. A special cabinet was held on Friday, then again on the Sunday. But Thorneycroft, despite being accused of ‘Hitler tactics’ by irate colleagues, would not budge. Macmillan, anxious to get away for a tour of the Commonwealth, would not concede the cuts. All three ministers then resigned. Thorneycroft would later become chairman of the Tories under Margaret Thatcher. Birch would struggle with his growing blindness and never return. Powell’s stormy career had many more crises in it yet. In apparently throw-away but actually carefully considered words, Macmillan dismissed the whole matter as ‘a little local difficulty’, appointed a new team, and swanned off abroad exactly on schedule. It seemed stylish, insouciant, masterly. From it, immediately, nothing flowed. Some cuts were made by the new Chancellor. The economy was in fact turning down, which suggests Thorneycroft’s medicine would have been grim indeed.

Yet this was a turning point – away from the ideas of free marketeers and towards the last phase of the planning economy which would end in disaster. That, in turn, would eventually produce Thatcherism, the IEA’s final triumph and the time when Antony Fisher’s eggs came home to roost. Before that could happen, another pre-election boom was engineered in 1959 and a new idea for improving British economic performance began to take hold, the central plan used by the French. By 1961 there was a ‘pay pause’ to try to hold down inflation, and then the establishment of a grand chat-in, the National Economic Development Council, or Neddy, which brought industrialists, civil servants and trade unionists around a table to discuss how to produce more. Reggie Maudling virtually ordered the carmakers to build new factories in Scotland, Merseyside and Wales in order to combat rising unemployment. The following year saw a 4 per cent growth target. The run-up to the 1964 election under a new Prime Minister featured a giveaway budget by Maudling, by now Chancellor, which would later be blamed by Labour for leaving an atrocious economic crisis. Almost all the weapons used by Labour to try and plan their way out of economic decline, from pay and incomes targets to national plans and regional directives, were already in place under Macmillan and his successor Alec Douglas-Home. All would fail. Antony Fisher knew why.

Things that Fall on your Feet

The best answer was clearly for British industry to produce more that the rest of the world wanted to buy, reliably and at the right price. Was that impossible? In the fifties there were plenty of successful British corporations. There were the oil giants such as Royal Dutch-Shell, product of a merger in 1906 and by then a vast international business, headquartered in London. There were the consumer combines, notably Unilever, another Dutch and British joint venture dating from 1928 which squatted across everything from soap powder to sausages, toothpaste to frozen food, and which was run on the latest principles of market research, ruthlessly targeted advertising and properly trained managers. There was the privatized-again steel industry. The Steel Company of Wales whose vast Port Talbot works in South Wales (‘the city of steel which never sleeps’) employed 20,000 people and could boast one of the most modern mill systems in the world. Other private steel firms, at Consett for instance, were also working at full pelt and seemed competitive with their European rivals. There was ICI, the chemical combine created in the twenties, which enjoyed a near-monopoly in many products, which employed 6,000 research workers and by the end of the fifties was spending more on R&D than all Britain’s universities combined. There were electronic companies like Ferranti’s and the sprawling engine-making, light bulb, fridge and washing machine group AEI; the still-successful engineers such as Rolls-Royce and Vickers and tightly run metal-bashers like Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds.

These and other groups were not allowed to sit pretty, or lack for competition. The fifties had seen the start of ruthless ‘corporate raiding’ by tycoons who took over, broke up and reorganized flaccid and poorly managed firms. There was much talk of learning the latest American management techniques; the big US advertising companies were already growing in London and influencing British thinking; better design was being eagerly sought out from Italy, Denmark and France. In his Anatomy of Britain (1962) the journalist Anthony Sampson paints a vivid picture of one of the new property tycoons who was making a fortune by breaking up the inner city portfolios of great old companies and putting up new developments – what he called his ‘Canalettos’, the new skylines of booming Britain.

Jack Cotton, a Birmingham boy made good, was living in a suite in the Dorchester Hotel, surrounded by surveyors, maps and paintings by Renoir, a jaunty business impresario – ‘short, red-faced, fifty-nine, with smooth black hair, shrewd eyes, a pointed handkerchief in his pocket with a bow tie to match . . . His cars are called JC1 and JC2.’ Then there was Hugh Fraser, the Glasgow draper’s son who was building a huge network of stores and other businesses across the country. In 1948 he floated House of Fraser and created a private company Scottish and Universal Investment Trusts (SUITS) which became a mighty force in the fifties; by 1957 he had bought London’s John Barker group, and two years later, Harrods. Then, another outsider, the Italian-born Charles Forte who had emigrated to Alloa in Scotland was quietly building a modest chain of roadside cafes into a huge hotel and catering business. He opened some of the first motorway cafés. From 1971 he added the Little Chef chain to his group and from 1978 he had control of the Happy Eater restaurants too, which while not necessarily the finest examples of cuisine, kept generations of travelling Britons fuelled. These men are also part of the story of the fifties, alongside the more familiar images of tweed-suited Old Etonians ambling around grouse-moors. Even in government the rumbles of modernization could be heard. The hyperactive Tory minister Ernie Marples, a self-made businessman and rare working-class arriviste in Macmillan’s cabinet, a fireball of energy in the Jack Cotton mould, was busy recasting Britain’s ancient transport system; the first parking meters, for instance, went up in London in 1958 in Grosvenor Square. Under his appointee and friend Dr Beeching, brutal cuts in the rail network would soon follow. Investment went instead to new roads and traffic management systems. During those thirteen Tory years, car ownership quadrupled to eight million and huge amounts of commerce was diverted from rail to lorries.

Britain’s car industry, which would later become the ultimate symbol of industrial failure, was looking strong. The tangle of small competing companies that had marked the pre-war industry had been radically pruned. In 1952 the two great rivals, Austin and Morris, came together to form the British Motor Company. Herbert Austin’s company at Longbridge, Birmingham, which traced its history to 1906, had dominated the inter-war years with its Austin Seven. This was the first British car which could be bought in large numbers by the less wealthy: good enough to be built under licence by BMW and copied by Nissan, it had sold nearly 300,000 by the outbreak of war. By 1948 a new range of Austins, the Princess and Sheerline, were spattered across magazine and newspaper adverts, and the A40 Somersets and Devons were arriving. Lord Nuffield, over at Oxford, had been one of the great industrial pioneers of modern Britain, building his first car just before the First World War, and still going strong enough at the time of the merger to become president of the new BMC. His Morris Eight and Morris Ten had won pre-war devotees. After the war, it was the Oxford company which produced the first great British car of the age of mass motoring, Alec Issigonis’s revolutionary Morris Minor of 1948. This would become the first British model to sell over a million, and would still be in production as late as 1971. Lord Nuffield had not been an immediate fan, describing the car as ‘that damned poached egg designed by that damned foreigner’.

The Great Arragonis

Alec Issigonis deserves a short aside in the narrative, a space for himself. He not only designed the Morris Minor but in 1959, the year Macmillan, at the height of his reputation, called a particularly successful election, he produced the Mini too. This was the nearest thing to chic Macmillan’s age produced, though of course Macmillan himself would never have bought anything so small and vulgar. Issigonis can lay claim to being one of the more influential figures in the history of the car in Britain as well as being about the only industrial designer anyone has heard of. The son of a Greek engineer living in Turkey who had taken British citizenship, and a German brewer’s daughter, his early years had been lived on the site of his father’s marine engineering business, watching the drawings transform themselves into engines.

He is as good an example as any of the benefit that immigration brought to the country. He was a war refugee: the First World War peace treaties had carved up the Ottoman empire and given Smyrna, the port where Issigonis lived, to Greece. The Turks won it back and many foreigners fled. Issigonis’s father died on the way and he arrived with his mother in London in 1922, virtually penniless. He learned engineering and industrial drawing in London before getting work first for Humber, then Morris. An unconventional designer, he loathed teamwork and mathematics, describing the latter as the enemy of every truly creative man. He learned in part by hand-making his own racing car, which he raced himself before the war; later he would ridicule such innovations as car radios, seatbelts and comfortable seats.

Issigonis’s Morris Minor had been radical in design and structure; it was the nearest of any British car to the Hitler-era Volkswagen Beetle. His Mini-Minor was commissioned in the immediate aftermath of the Suez crisis when petrol shortages had focused attention on the case for cheap, economical cars. The country was already latching on to the cheap bubble cars being imported from Italy and Germany, and soon being made in Britain too, at a Brighton factory. Issigonis’s brief was to produce something for the British Motor Corporation that could take them on, but was also a proper car, not a motorbike with pretensions. He not only made it look good, but by turning round the engine and placing it over the wheels, he found a way of packing far more space for passengers into a smaller area than any previous car. His design was so radical it needed a complete set of new machine tools to produce; Issigonis designed them, too. The Mini would become an icon of British cool, a chirpy, cheeky little car we liked to think represented the national character at its classless best. Yet the true story of the Mini is not quite as flattering to British industry. The early Minis were shoddily built, with a series of mechanical problems and poor trim; more importantly they leaked so badly people joked that every car should be sold with a free pair of Wellington boots and one journalist said he was keeping goldfish in the door pockets. Issigonis was short-tempered and intolerant with more junior design and production colleagues, who called him Arragonis and Issigonyet? He had spoken before about building a ‘charwoman’s car’ but the lower-income families the Mini was aimed at initially took against its unfamiliar shape, small size and austere lack of trim.

In fact, for a while, the car looked as if it would be a thundering disaster. The economics behind it were also, to say the least, obscure. The basic model sold at £350, much cheaper than rival small cars such as the Triumph Herald (£495) and the Ford Anglia (£380) and indeed BMC’s own old Morris Minor (£416). Yet it had been very expensive to develop and required its own machine tooling to make. How was this possible? Ford tore one apart to cost it and decided it would cost them more to build than BMC were selling it for.27 It seems unlikely there was any profit: in their urge to undercut its competitors, the makers of the Mini were ignoring the development costs and selling the car at a loss. (Company people say they continued to sell it at a loss for years.) BMC would eventually sell more than five million Minis but its success only came about thanks to what we would now call celebrity endorsement, and even spin. Issigonis happened to know Princess Margaret’s new husband, the photographer Lord Snowdon, and presented the glamorous couple with one as a birthday present. They were duly photographed whizzing round London in it. The Queen tried one out, and soon Steve McQueen, Twiggy, the Beatles and Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, were seen in them too. This was completely the opposite image to BMC’s and Issigonis’s original idea of a cheap, no-frills car for the working classes; conservative-minded people found their car taken up as a chic emblem of youthful impertinence. In the end, of course, whatever works, works. Yet the mechanical problems, lack of good teamwork and unbusinesslike pricing strategy show that there was a darker side to the Mini story from the first. Issigonis’s biographer concluded that ‘far from being a business triumph for the shaky British Motor Corporation, the Mini was the first nail in their coffin.’

Issigonis was a naif in the world of business but he was prescient in one respect. He hated mergers. The Austin-Morris one produced huge internal pain with two mutually hostile company bureaucracies locking horns. The results were not immediately obvious. Through the fifties BMC rationalized its cars and cut the number of engines used, while keeping its old Austin and Morris dealers happy. With fast economic growth and an insatiable appetite for affordable cars, the domestic industry did well. There was American competition but then, there always had been – General Motors had been a big player in the UK since it took over Vauxhall in 1928, and Ford had chosen Britain as its European base even earlier. By the sixties, German and French imports were also frequent sights on British roads.

Still, there were few signs of a domestic car industry in crisis. Other producers were marketing long-lived and successful models, from the sleek Jaguars to the stolid and stately Rover Eights and Rover 50s. Issigonis was not the only free spirit of the times – Rover went far down the road (at 152mph) towards a commercial jet-powered car. Yet industrial action was growing, despite managers who bought off the unions with generous settlements in an era when they could easily sell every car they made. There was a particularly bad strike at BMC in 1958. There were some strange management decisions, egged on by politicians. Ministers trying to bring employment to run-down parts of Scotland and the North of England persuaded BMC to create a cumbersome and expensive empire of new factories which it did not have the expertise to manage properly. Little of this was apparent to the ordinary observer then, the first years of popular motoring mania.

The Growth of Car Mania

Britain was slow to catch the motorway addiction. There had been a spate of road-building in the thirties but it was not until 1936 that the government took national responsibility for a network of major roads. All building then stopped when war began three years later. But America’s vast highways were an inspiration to British engineers; and Hitler’s Germany had been known for its gleaming new autobahns. With Britain’s cramped, slow, badly congested roads full of military vehicles, in 1941 a cabinet committee was being urged to consider ‘motorways’ as a vital part of post-war construction. The man responsible was Frederick Cook, a gifted and pushy highways engineer, though his committee included Attlee, Ernie Bevin and the founding Director General of the BBC, Lord Reith. Lord Leathers, the wartime transport minister, duly announced that Britain had been converted to the idea of ‘motorways to be reserved exclusively for fast-moving traffic’ while warning that they must not be developed on too grand a scale as advocated ‘by some enthusiasts who are perhaps unduly influenced by continental analogies’. No Nazi speed mania here, in other words. The result was a Special Roads Act in 1949 which led eventually, when money allowed, to the motorways which began to carve up and transform the country.

In theory, motorway Britain had been only one of two possible options. The world’s first industrialized nation was still wired tightly together with a massive railway network. By the end of the fifties, British Rail controlled 17,800 miles of track linking most small towns and every city. It ran more than 7,000 stations and a million freight wagons, all of it worked by a massive staff – 475,000 people in 1961. But the system was making an equally massive loss and needed major investment. With cars becoming the dream of middle-class families, perhaps the railways at that scale needed some pruning. Instead an affable, moustachioed former ICI manager called Dr Richard Beeching came along and cut them to ribbons. Beeching was greatly admired at the time as a living symbol of thrusting new Britain. In the early sixties to ‘do a Beeching’ became flattering shorthand for ruthless management efficiency. Hired as the chairman of the railways, he conducted a ‘reshaping plan’ which proposed the closure of 2,361 stations and 5,000 miles of track – and that was just for starters. It was one of the most extreme liquidations in the history of British commerce, on a par with the collapse of the car industry a decade later, or the end of shipbuilding on the Clyde.

Suspicions have been heard ever since that the Beeching cuts were politically motivated. They had been prepared for by a secret committee on which sat industrialists but no railway people. They came a few years after a savagely effective strike by two railway unions which had reminded Conservative ministers that while a country could be closed down if it was linked by trains, this was very much harder if it was a lorry and car economy. The Tories had already denationalized road transport, putting 24,000 lorries back into the hands of private hauliers; everything from fish to potatoes, newspapers to engine parts, seemed to be transferring from rail. This was what ‘modern’ meant. And to cap it all, the minister in charge who had given Beeching his mandate to cut the railways until they made a profit, without taking social or wider economic interests into account, was hardly neutral on the issue.

Ernest Marples was a bouncy, chirpy Manchester engineering worker’s son who had won a grammar school scholarship and gone on to work as a miner, a postman, an accountant and a chef before his war service. A Labour activist in his youth, he was demobbed as a keen Tory and after becoming an MP, served as one of the few real modernizers in the 1951–64 governments. He brought in ‘trunk’ or automatic dialling, designed to make telephones more popular – until the late fifties, everyone had to call up a telephone exchange, give the number and wait to be put through by an operator. He had launched Britain’s Premium Bonds too, denounced by Harold Wilson as a ‘squalid raffle’ but instantly popular. Marples’s enthusiasm for the new extended most dramatically, however, to roads. He charged around the world looking for examples of the traffic systems of the future, and brought in the first yellow lines, the first parking meters, the first major roundabouts. He had formed his own civil engineering company, which would soon be responsible for West London’s Hammersmith flyover, and much else. Marples was not keen on railways, though. When challenged about the conflict of interest in having his motorway construction company, he simply passed the shares to his wife. Under him, Britain finally embarked on its motorway age.

Those were the days. The first was opened on 5 December 1958, an eight-mile bypass of Preston. No major road had been built for twenty years. British engineers had learned something about pre-stressed concrete from the French, but still had a lot to discover about motorway design from colleagues in the United States. It was all something of an experiment for the man in charge, John Cox of Tarmac, who had made his name building instant airstrips during the war. The Preston bypass had to be closed forty-six days later because of frost damage. Though the central reservation later allowed it to be widened for levels of traffic undreamed-of in the late fifties, it was still too narrow and its rather beautiful bridges, which had been designed to last for 120 years, were knocked down and replaced after thirty. Still, it worked and the experience was vital for the first long stretch of British motorway, a 67-mile stretch of the M1 linking London and Yorkshire, opened the following year. Built in only nineteen months, it had three lanes in either direction and that now humdrum novelty, the first motorway service stations. Marples opened the Watford Gap service station, run by Blue Boar, on 2 November 1959. Newport Pagnell opened six months later.

Britain has never been the same since. From then on, motorway building spread at a brisk pace. Stretches of the M60 and M6 appeared during 1960–3; the first section of the A1(M) was completed in 1961 and the M5 the following year. Scotland’s first motorway building, the M8 outside Glasgow, came in 1967. The early seventies saw a dramatic expansion, with the M4 linking London and Bristol, the M40 reaching towards Oxford and Birmingham and the cities of Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield all being interconnected. The first five-lane dual carriageway arrived outside Belfast in 1973 and it was only after the completion of the M25 round London in 1985 that the pace of building faltered. In the early years of the new century it virtually stopped. By then the network had grown from eight miles to 2,200 miles – and the A-roads servicing it greater still.

The creation of the motorway network has been called the first centrally planned roads system in Britain since the Romans left. It makes a pattern the Romans would have recognized, with London the hub, radial routes spinning out from it, and only the further West Country, rural Wales and northern Scotland ignored. The Romans might have been surprised at the absence of motorways across East Anglia, and the quantity of civil engineering lavished on the north and Midlands of England; but that is a consequence of the industrial revolution. Today’s motorways are more curved than the legions would have found acceptable, avoiding hills and towns – though the straightest stretch of all, part of the A1(M) near Stilton, is so because it follows the old Roman street for seven miles. The system is rational and heavily used, heavily policed, heavily taxed and has engorged a swathe of rural England. Even as late as 1985–2001, transport projects (mainly roads) took up a further tract of sparse land equal to three times the area of Nottingham. If usage equals success, then few acts of post-war political decision making have been as popular as the designing and building of what Margaret Thatcher called ‘the great car economy’. For every car or van on the roads of Britain in 1950 – 2.3 million of them – there were twice as many by the end of the decade and more than three times as many by the early sixties. By 1970 there were 12 million and by the end of the century, more than 24 million, ten times as many in half a century. This only gives part of the picture, because these cars are also used much more, going further and for longer. In the last fifteen years of the century, car journeys increased by nearly 30 per cent. Year by year, despite propaganda for a healthier lifestyle, high fuel taxes, congestion charging and widespread worry about global warming, the British drive more and walk, cycle or use buses less.

In the days of Marples it was believed that such an increase would also mean vastly more Britons being killed and maimed on the roads. This is one gloomy prediction that has been robustly disproved. Safety campaigns from the Tufty Club of the fifties to the Green Cross Code have had their effect but the real reason is that the British, who think of themselves as lovers of liberty, have allowed their freedom to be drastically curtailed on the roads. From the first general speed limits in the thirties to today’s ubiquitous metal snoop-force of remote cameras, Britain has developed a driving culture which kills proportionately far fewer people than most comparable countries. If there is a single heroine of that part of our motoring history it is Barbara Castle. A non-driving minister in her rather glamorous mid-fifties, Castle had been disappointed to be offered Transport by Harold Wilson in 1965. She had hoped to be Home Secretary. But she was formidably ambitious and media-savvy and quickly turned the job into a great personal success. When she arrived some 8,000 people a year were dying on Britain’s roads. Figures produced at the time suggested there would be half a million such deaths by the year 2000.

Castle’s Road Safety Act brought in the breathalyser to combat drunk driving, extended the trial 70mph speed limit and made it compulsory for all new cars to have seat belts. There was already a bill prepared but she toughened it up, rejecting random breath tests but making the penalty a year’s automatic disqualification. Castle revved up a storm. The Formula One racing driver Stirling Moss attacked ‘socialist hypocrisy’. Letters came in reading ‘You’ve ballsed our darts matches up, so get out you wicked old B’ or wishing her ‘evil Christmas and a whole year of unhappy days. These are the views of the public, you bitchy old cow.’28 Her long-suffering husband Ted, who did drive, was pursued by journalists eager to catch him over the limit, and had to confine himself to tonic water at public events. But in the test’s first year road deaths fell by 1,200. As Castle wrote in her autobiography, she was soon afterwards introduced to a London ambulance driver who told her that before the breathalyser, ‘their night’s work had followed a regular pattern. As soon as the pubs closed the accident figures shot up and they were operating at full stretch. Now, he said, they spent the night playing cards.’ Seatbelts, which saved the looks of thousands of people, and the lives of others, were equally vigorously opposed as an infringement on liberty and a diabolical liberty for women with large bosoms. But they helped stem the deaths. By the end of the century, with nearly three times as many cars on the road as when Mrs Castle took office, the numbers killed each year were less than half the toll in 1965. Compared to most similar countries, Britain’s roads are congested, but safe.

Slipping Through Our Fingers

To the ordinary observer, there was plenty to be cheerful about throughout British industrial life. The coal industry, though nationalized, was nevertheless at last rationalized and modernized. In these years, some 200,000 miners’ jobs went and super-pits were developed using newer and safer technology, while on the other hand, around Britain the first nuclear power stations came on stream. When Calder Hall was connected to the national grid in 1956 it was the world’s first nuclear power station providing energy commercially, and its Magnox gas-cooled reactor incorporated British technology. A further ten similar nuclear power stations followed. Here, as in the car industry – and lesser-known examples, such as industrial glass, chemicals and jet engines, not to mention the beginnings of the offshore gas industry – British technology was as good as any in the world. In an entirely different area, P&O was then the largest shipping line in the world with 366 vessels, seemingly dominating commercial traffic across the oceans. This was not, in short, the basket-case industrial economy that is sometimes misremembered. But during the fifties overseas competition was quietly surveying the British market and its complacent industrial giants, planning to attack.

The story of motorbike manufacturing can stand for other industries, too. In the early years of the decade, Harley-Davidson in the United States were complaining (unsuccessfully) to Washington about the unfair competition from the better, cheaper, British-made Triumph motorbikes – one of which starred in The Wild One, featuring Marlon Brando, in 1954. Another American manufacturer, Indian, gave up and began importing Royal Enfield bikes; rock stars and Hollywood actors were seen on British machines; there were more than 300 Triumph and BSA dealers in the United States. Yet in 1955 Yamaha began producing their first motorbikes, followed by Suzuki, using wartime aircraft manufacturing kit. At the end of the decade, when British motorcycle sales were at their all-time peak, Honda entered its first bike in the TT race. British executives toured Japan in 1960 and were horrified by the scale of production by the three rival companies: Japan was making more than 500,000 motorcycles a year, compared to a maximum UK output of just 140,000. Two years later these Japanese bikes were winning key races in Europe and a new manufacturer, Kawasaki, appeared on the scene. It was a story that would be repeated in electronics and cameras. In this period, West Germany’s share of world trade grew nearly four times as fast as Britain’s, while the Japanese were already in another league for growth. The Americans were racing ahead in starved, post-war markets all round the world.

It was the structure of Britain’s working world that was the problem, not the lack of hardworking people or enterprising companies – not even, at this stage, inflation or industrial militancy. On one side, the industrial companies were dwarfed by the vast nationalized corporations, sucking capital and talent away from the consumer industries that were becoming so central to people’s lives. ICI was vast, as has been described; but every three years, the Electricity Board spent enough capital to create a new ICI.29 On the other side, there were simply too many tiny companies, inefficiently and traditionally run without any knowledge of new management styles, product designs or marketing. By the middle of the fifties, of the nearly 300,000 British companies that existed, only around one in a hundred was actually listed on the Stock Market; the vast majority were under-capitalized traditional private businesses. The economic historian Keith Middle-mass describes a business ecology dominated by ‘the continued survival of a mass of small firms, reliant on sheltered domestic markets, which were unable or unwilling to reform their practices or their low productivity’.30

Was there any direct connection between this national failure and the kind of people running the country? Industrialists and entrepreneurs were not part of the Tory magic circle and were not socially much regarded. Macmillan and Eden both suffered from a pseudo-aristocratic and sentimental attitude to class. With their First World War service and their inter-war worries about the effect of unemployment, they were inclined to admire the working classes from a decent distance and to disdain the ‘common’ speech and attitudes of upwardly mobile entrepreneurs such as Sir Bernard Docker. They lived privileged and upper-crust lives themselves, set in landed homes and surrounded by literature and art. It was a way of life to which the self-made would aspire too: Michael Heseltine would begin by mixing margarine and butter as he built his low-rent property business, and end with a grand country home and an arboretum. For the ruling class of the fifties, the businessmen, the engineers, the factory organizers were vulgar, vulgar, vulgar. Diplomacy; country sports and farming; the arts; high politics; even journalism were all interesting, but industry was a bore. As we have seen this did not stop large companies thriving or hold back individual entrepreneurs, very often immigrants unintimidated by class barriers. But it was hardly surprising that fewer bright British students went to work for the British motor industry or the chemical giants, compared to the best of the Germans and Americans going into their equivalents. In the fifties, foreigners were not yet talking pityingly of ‘the British disease’ but there was talk of the ‘stagnant society’. No one grasped the nettle.

The Egg-heads and Duffel-coat Rebels

One group of society was equally opposed to the Tory magic circle and the industrial entrepreneur. Its supporters wore heavy blue or beige duffel coats – the coarse, toggle-fastened woollen coats designed in Victorian Britain but which became truly popular on the Atlantic and Arctic convoys of the Second World War – and roll-necked pullovers, baggy tweed jackets, stout shoes. The men would be vigorously bearded. Their look proclaimed the opposite of stylishness or American influence. Their chosen music, too, was very different from the skiffle bands and the rock and roll beginning to infiltrate teenagers’ lives. For most politically minded left-wingers folk music was the sound of the times, heard in smoke-filled and beery clubs across the nation.

Folk music became popular throughout the UK in the fifties, though it has been swamped in memory by the eruption of pop soon afterwards. It was particularly strong in Scotland where singing traditions among farm-workers and miners, and the vast popularity of Robert Burns, underpinned an audience for ‘the people’s music’. Edinburgh had been chosen at the end of the forties as the site of a new annual international festival of the arts (selected just ahead of Bath because it had rather less bomb damage) focusing on the traditional elite arts – opera, classical drama, ballet and fine arts. By 1950 there was growing irritation among the poets and singers at the centre of the Scottish literary revival at the way Scotland was being excluded and, by 1951, an alternative people’s festival was established. Trade unions, the Communist Party, left-wing councillors and others backed the project, which in turn kicked off the post-war folk scene in Scotland. There were lectures about the danger of American culture swamping British culture, concerts and get-togethers with Gaelic musicians, films, choirs and specially written plays – but, within three years, at the height of the Cold War, the Edinburgh people’s festival was closed down by the trade union movements on the grounds that it was a Communist plot. (It was Communist-tinged but it was hardly a plot.)

Outside Scotland the folk movement was strongest in the Northern and Midland regions of England and the West Country, though folk clubs spread everywhere and by 1957 there were supposed to be some 1,500 of them in Britain. There was something over-defensive about their self-proclaimed independence from American music, since the United States was undergoing its own folk revival at the same time, also strongly linked to left-wing politics and also defiantly ‘authentic’ in the face of the rising power of commercial music. Jimmie Miller, the best-known leader of the movement, had been born in Salford into a Scottish socialist family of militants and musicians and had had dozens of jobs in the 1930s before marrying the left-wing actress Joan Littlewood, and setting up experimental radical theatre projects with her. Later they split up and Miller wrote his best-known song ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ for an American folk musician, Peggy Seeger, when they fell in love. A committed Marxist, he changed his name to Ewan MacColl as he became central to the folk revival. Among his songs was ‘Dirty Old Town’, later made famous by the London-Irish band the Pogues. Other key figures were the former soldier and poet Hamish Henderson, who first began collecting traditional songs and stories from across the Western Highlands and Islands; and Norman Buchan, the Labour MP. There was great talent, great energy and great optimism. For a time it seemed that Britain might produce a music radically different from the raucous new noises of North America.

Folk continued to be much enjoyed by a minority. Stars like Billy Connolly cut their teeth on folk. But outside the Celtic nations, the revival was pretty much doomed from the beginning. Any movement so suffused with nostalgia and gentle humour, played on instruments with minimal amplification, is unlikely to cut the mustard in an age of urban consumerism, when the commercial drive is to record and sell short, fast songs for a young and fickle audience no longer interested in the struggles of their grandparents. Any movement so resolutely unfashionable, so tousled, hairy and serious, was unlikely to defeat styles and songs efficiently marketed for the new teenage market. The parallel enthusiasm for modern jazz, which excited the English middle-class youth at the same time, and which seemed so rebellious in a land still contemptuous of ‘negro’ culture, fizzled away for similar reasons. Live performance in small clubs and songs that went on for too long, and were simply too complicated for everyone to enjoy, surrendered to quick, easy music. In a battle between the ‘authentic’ and the cool, when the fight is pitched for young urban consumers, it is easy to see what will happen. In the end, for all its beauty and vigour, Britain’s folk music revival of the fifties was another exhibition of impotent local revolt against the coming age of America.

So was the political cause which so many of the folk and jazz enthusiasts cherished, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. One of its leading figures, the popular historian A. J. P. Taylor, later reflected that CND, like the Establishment politicians it opposed, simply overrated Britain’s position in the world: ‘We thought that Great Britain was still a great power whose example would affect the rest of the world. Ironically, we were the last imperialists.’31 For a while, the campaign sent a jolt through politics and seemed to all those contemplating the swift extinction of life on the planet far more a moral act than politics as usual. It had begun with a campaign to end the radiation-spreading testing of nuclear weapons, which was causing great alarm. Popular writers, notably J. B. Priestley, and the elderly mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, wrote influential articles proclaiming the moral necessity of renouncing such world-destroying weaponry entirely. The New Statesman appealed to Khrushchev to disarm and to its surprise got a reply back from Moscow, albeit an unhelpful one. The Labour left were almost all committed ban-the-bombers as of course was the Moscow-funded Communist Party of Great Britain. These strands, along with Quakers, pacifists and certain journalists, eventually found themselves sitting together in the appropriately named Amen Court, home of Canon John Collins of St Paul’s Cathedral, where on 15 January 1958 the new organization was created. A month later, more than five thousand people turned up for the inaugural meeting at Westminster; some were arrested when they went on to protest at Downing Street.

Though CND would fail to persuade any major British party to renounce nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War and failed as well to halt, never mind reverse, the build-up of American nuclear weaponry on British soil, it did succeed in dividing the Labour Party and seizing the imagination of millions of people. For a ramshackle left-wing organization, it behaved in a thoroughly modern and media-savvy way. Its symbol, designed by a professional artist, Gerald Holtham, in 1958, and based on semaphore, became an international brand almost as recognizable as Coca-Cola: suddenly, all those duffel coats and black jumpers had some decoration. The Aldermaston marches, first from Trafalgar Square towards the base and later in the opposite direction, were never enormous but they did attract massive press coverage. Its more militant wing, the Committee of 100, using direct non-violent action, managed to get the 89-year-old Lord Russell arrested by police, a considerable act of public relations. Yet it was as Taylor described it, a movement of egg-heads for egg-heads. Another historian reflected that it was a classic ‘anti-political movement of the educated, the affluent and the disaffected, a movement rooted in the leafy suburbs of the middle classes, not the slums or council estates’.32 Its members tended to be liberal on other issues too, and to be contemptuous of the organized and stodgy routines of politics, Labour politics in particular. By the end of the fifties, radicals found Labour entirely unappetizing. Now, why was that?

Labour Destroys its Future

When the Conservatives have been out of power, they have tended to think and work hard to change themselves and win it back, the six or seven years after 1997 being an exception. When Labour has lost power it has tended, after due thought and consideration, to tear itself into small pieces. This was the case in the fifties, in the seventies and again most spectacularly in the eighties. In each case it was essentially a fight between the Labour left and right but as befits a party of altruists it was often also highly personal and vicious. Labour has not had grand family, old school tie or clubland cliques as the Tories have. It has had gangs instead. Through most of his time, Attlee had kept the socialist gangs apart and quiet, though he began to lose control when Britain rearmed at the time of the Korean War. From then on, it was mostly gang war. On one side, there were always left-wing true believers who believed the country could be dragged to a pure version of socialism – romantics, generally in love with English and Scottish revolutionary socialism, or with Marxism, or both. They were the ‘if only’ faction. If only the trade unions could be won by the left, then true socialist policies could be imposed on the party. If only the gang at the top could be kicked out. If only we could force Labour MPs to do what their constituency parties told them to. If only we could capture the national executive committee, or the conference arrangements committee, or some committee or other. If only we could get in, we could nationalize the top 200 companies and then everything would change for ever.

Few of them, unfortunately for their cause, were working class. Michael Foot was educated at fee-paying boarding schools and came from a family of Cornish puritans and nonconformists, drunk on books – his father, a solicitor and a Liberal MP, left a collection of 52,000 books, including 240 bibles, which gives some indication of the family tone. Dick Crossman, whose diaries would later lift the lid on the Wilson years, was a wealthy lawyer’s son and Oxford academic. Barbara Castle was from lower down the social tree, a tax-surveyor’s daughter who nevertheless went to Bradford Grammar School and Oxford. Ian Mikardo was unusual in being the child of poor Polish immigrants – his father’s command of English was so poor he is said to have thought for a while he was living in New York, not London – who trained as a rabbi. The great exception was certainly working class. The first leader of the If Onlies was Nye Bevan, the former miner and the minister who had created the National Health Service, before his ‘health before guns’ resignation. By the mid-fifties his great years were behind him. Though he made some wonderful speeches in Opposition and was tough enough to break with his closest supporters over the issue of nuclear weapons, much of his behaviour seemed petulant and self-regarding. Of his great enemy Hugh Gaitskell, he would spit that the man was ‘nothing – nothing – nothing’ or assert, ‘He’s an intellectual, I’m a miner.’ Barbara Castle, who never had an entirely easy relationship with Bevan, noted when she was sitting beside him on a conference platform: ‘I have made a perturbing discovery about him. His favourite doodle is writing his own name.’33 Like a political Dylan Thomas, his lavish talents were only matched by his skill in lavishly squandering them. As we have seen, in office he had been a great reforming minister. The bigger the job, the bigger the man he became. In Opposition, his charisma was less well employed and his vanity was more damaging. He became smaller.

He seemed to carry round with him a kind of portable audience, essential to his well-being, foils to his wit, witty though many were themselves. Yet Bevan had a bewitching charisma that made him the focus for the left, whose positions included an increasingly reflexive anti-Americanism and a doctrinaire insistence on nationalization and central planning. Bevan was as distrustful of the Soviet Union as the rest of the Labour leadership. There were no illusions about Moscow, particularly after an angry dinner in the Commons at which Khrushchev warned Labour that they must ally with Russia ‘because if not, they would swat us off the face of the earth like a dirty old black beetle’.34 Though he was easily beaten by Gaitskell in the leadership battle in 1955, Bevan’s supporters were a formidable crowd in the party throughout this period. In 1952, fifty-seven Labour MPs abstained in a motion on Tory defence spending, which was a measure of their size. The ‘Keep Left’ group had become the ‘Bevanites’, votaries even as they protested their sturdy independence. They were a clique, with their own newspaper, Tribune, and their own social gatherings in the Commons, at Crossman’s London house, at a country house, Buscot Park in Oxfordshire, and in Soho restaurants. They saw themselves as the romantic, rackety and principled opponents of the upper-class traitors who were taking over Labour. Soon, inevitably, they were being called a party within a party.

As suspicions grew, Bevan attacked Gaitskell personally and in public. With support from such unlikely and untrustworthy sources as the right-wing press magnate Lord Beaverbrook, Bevan and his gang started to seriously scare other Labour leaders. Gaitskell told a particularly bitter conference that it was time to stop attempted ‘mob rule by a group of frustrated journalists’. A half-hearted attempt to expel Bevan from the Labour Party was matched by a half-hearted discussion among his followers about setting up a new socialist party of their own. Eventually Bevan returned to the front line as shadow foreign secretary and later deputy leader before dying of throat cancer in 1960. He did not read the new Britain well. His last party speech in 1959 predicted that when the British ‘have got over the delirium of television’, realized they were mortgaged to the hilt, and understood that consumerism had produced ‘a vulgar society’, they would turn to true socialism and ‘we shall lead our people where they deserve to be led’.35

On the other side of the divide were Gaitskell and his gang, variously described as the Frognal Set or the Hampstead Set, after the suburban north London house where the Labour leader entertained and, the Bevanites believed, plotted to abolish socialism and lead the people to a hell of television sets and home ownership. Gaitskell was another public schoolboy, who had been radicalized by the General Strike of 1926 and the Nazi thugs on the streets of Vienna in the late thirties. Like Harold Wilson he was an economist, who had served in government during the war. As Attlee’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had proved tough. It was his decision to fund rearmament partly by making savings by introducing NHS charges that provoked Bevan’s resignation from the cabinet and began that feud. (Gaitskell was probably wrong on the numbers, and Bevan right.) In public Gaitskell could come over as a prig, with little of Bevan’s champagne fizz. All his life he had been keen on uncomfortable truths. When a small child he had apparently once startled a passing woman who looked down at him by singing from his pram, ‘Soon shall you and I be lying / Each within our narrow tomb’. In later life he did not lose the disconcerting style. To become Labour leader after only nine years as an MP, replacing the venerable Attlee, without a strong base in the trade unions or on the left of the party, was nevertheless a remarkable achievement. Gaitskell’s mettle was soon tested over the Suez crisis when his party political point-scoring after earlier supportive noises made him hated on the Tory benches. For those who think the Commons has become too much of a bear-pit in recent decades, it is worth recording that Gaitskell contemplated giving up within a couple of years because the booing and shouting from the Conservative side was such that he felt he could not get a hearing in Parliament.

Gaitskell has been fondly remembered by historians partly because of the vivid enthusiasm of his young supporters who later rose to prominence themselves, Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland in particular, and partly because he died suddenly at fifty-six. He had many admirable qualities, including infectious enthusiasm for literature, music, dancing and life in general. He was stubborn, brave and loyal but his record as a party leader was not unspotted. He seriously contemplated loosening the party’s links with the unions, dropping nationalization and changing its name. This was bold but Gaitskell’s tactics were nearly disastrous. Against the advice of the young bloods, he attempted to remove the pro-nationalization clause four from the party’s rulebook as Tony Blair would do much later. In the more socialist fifties it was a fight too far over a matter of symbolism. Gaitskell retired hurt, in confusion. Beaten, at the high point of CND’s first crusades, on the issue of whether Britain should have her own nuclear weapons, he famously promised to fight, fight and fight again to save the party he loved, turning the defeat into a personal public relations triumph. But having rallied the right of the party, he then confounded them by his equally passionate hostility to British membership of the European Common Market. And he had a tendency to flirt with Tory England which did not endear him to the party faithful.

Yet what made Gaitskell truly interesting as a politician of this era was that he accepted and even revelled in the new consumerism. Bevan and his friends deplored the ‘affluent society’ and the ‘crass commercialism’ of the time and claimed to feel nostalgic for the colder if nobler vision of the forties. Gaitskell danced, and listened avidly to jazz records, and liked good food and clothes. He had few hang-ups, ideological or otherwise. Gaitskell and those in his set believed you could have a more equal society without it being cheerless or lacking in fun. The essence of this was set out in a hugely influential book The Future of Socialism, published in 1956. Its author, Tony Crosland, was one of the wilder spirits of Frognal who had fought in the war as a paratrooper and was busy rebelling against the harshly puritanical standards set by his well-off parents, who belonged to the Plymouth Brethren sect. Crosland argued that increasing individual rights should be as great an aim for reformers as abolishing capitalism, which was already mostly tamed. Education, not nationalization, was the key to changing society. Socialists must turn to issues such as the plight of the mentally handicapped and neglected children, to the divorce and abortion laws, and women’s rights in general, to homosexual law reform and the end of censorship of plays and books. Many of these things would dominate the Home Secretaryship of his friend Jenkins. He was against ‘hygienic, respectable, virtuous things and people, lacking only in grace and gaiety’. He concluded with a famous swipe at the puritanical Webbs, those Edwardian saints of Labourism: ‘Total abstinence and a good filing-system are not now the right sign-posts to the socialist’s Utopia; or at least, if they are, some of us will fall by the wayside.’36 This was a message that would prove popular with the new middle-class voters Labour needed, if not with the intellectuals and journalists around the party’s fringes. It was the moment, really, when for Labour the forties ended and, with no intermission, the sixties began.

Gaitskell himself was forgiven by the party for losing the 1959 election. Had he survived to lead Labour into battle in 1964 he would surely have won then and the story of Labour politics would have been strikingly different. By 1962 he was utterly dominant inside his party and increasingly seen outside it as a fresh start – letter-writers and newspaper journalists used language about him which anticipated what was said about Tony Blair before the 1997 election. Like Blair, he managed to come across as less of a party man, and more ‘normal’ than his great rival, a truly interesting Prime Minister in waiting. None of this was to be. In January 1963 after years of grossly overworking, suffering from a rare and little-understood disease of the immune system, he suddenly died. Though there were rumours afterwards that he had been killed by the KGB as part of a plot to put in Harold Wilson, whom the conspiracists believed was a Soviet agent, it seems more likely that this was mere biology interfering with politics, as it does. With a little more medical and other good-fortune, the prime ministers of post-war Britain could well have included Herbert Morrison, Rab Butler, Hugh Gaitskell and Iain Macleod, rather than Attlee, Macmillan, Douglas-Home and Harold Wilson. But Wilson it would be. The long-lasting significance of the struggle between the Bevanites and the Gaitskellites was that when he became Prime Minister, he was so crippled by trying to placate the various gangs that he could offer no clear direction for the country.

Leaving Mayhem: the British in Africa

A year after Macmillan’s triumphant re-election, he made a speech unlikely to be forgotten. One of the bitterer ironies of Suez had been that London, accused by both the Americans and Russians of being a nest of reactionary imperialism, was actually in the middle of frantically trying to get rid of the Empire. Indian independence was followed by swift dismantling in two other places, Africa and the Middle East. The Sudan, scene of British cavalry charges in an early war against militant Islamists, had become independent in 1956. The Gold Coast, one of the most prosperous African colonies, followed a year later as Ghana and they were followed in turn by a bewildering stream of former African possessions during the sixties – Somaliland (Somalia), Sierra Leone, the Gambia, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanganyika (Tanzania), Zanzibar, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Uganda, Nyasaland (Malawi), Swaziland and Basutoland, as well as the islands of Mauritius and the Maldives. Some of these countries had been British only for a short time, others had had large white settler populations who either returned home or tried, uneasily, to accommodate themselves to the new governments, but the scale and speed of the British scuttle produced remarkably little debate at home. On the far right of British politics, the League of Empire Loyalists protested but most of the country regarded it all with boredom or amusement.

In the late forties it had been felt both that Africa might become the core of Britain’s new world position and that her countries were far from ready for independence. Within ten years all this was forgotten. There was a rush to independence, urged on from London. No single speech made more of an impact in seeming to settle the argument than the one Harold Macmillan made in Cape Town in 1960, known for ever as his ‘wind of change’ speech. It was brave not because of what he said, but because the British Prime Minister chose to make it in the white supremacist South African parliament, in front of men who would be architects of apartheid, horrifying them and appalling a large swathe of Tory opinion back in England, where the right-wing Monday Club was formed in protest. Macmillan announced that there was an awakening national consciousness sweeping through Africa. He told his startled audience; ‘the wind of change is blowing through this continent’ and like it or not, this was simply a fact. Hendrik Verwoerd, the South African Prime Minister retorted that the Englishman was appeasing the black man, adding that they had enough problems in Africa without his coming to add to them.

Why had London lost its nerve? Partly, it was the mere experience of looking about. The French were getting out of Africa. So too were the Belgians, leaving behind an appalling and very bloody civil war in the Congo. Private correspondence of Macmillan’s suggests that he also thought the two world wars had made a fundamental change in the position of the whites around the world: ‘What we have really seen since the war is the revolt of the yellows and blacks from the automatic leadership and control of the whites.’37 It need not, however, be a bloody revolt. The experience of the Gold Coast, which became independent under Dr Kwame Nkrumah in 1957 with relative ease, suggested to London there was a gentler way of quitting.

On the other side the vicious war of terrorism against white settlers and blacks who supported them in Kenya, a revolt by the mysterious organization Mau Mau, showed the dangers of hanging on. The Mau Mau rebellion was not an attractive liberation war. It lasted for years, and involved gruesome mutilation, dismemberments, rape and bizarre oaths, claimed to be linked to black magic. Very few whites were killed, but there was a terrible black toll. It did not help that the more experienced leaders such as Jomo Kenyatta, whom we will meet later in a less heroic role, was then locked up, leaving Mau Mau to be run by the young and the angry. The white settlers of the area, who had been among the richest and most self-confident colonials in Africa, responded with vicious militia tactics, taking cash bets for the number of Africans shot or ‘bagged’, and keeping scorecards, as if they were grouse. The security forces came between the two and suppressed the revolt with classic anti-subversion tactics, though its general found the settlers shady people: ‘I hate the guts of them all; they are middle-class sluts,’ he told his wife. By the end of the fifties, government forces had killed around 10,000 Kikuyu tribesmen and hanged another thousand. Some 80,000 had been put into grim so-called rehabilitation camps. Eventually only a hard core of Mau Mau were left and at one camp, Hola, eleven were murdered by the guards. The story went round the world and caused extreme embarrassment to the government; Enoch Powell made what some thought the greatest parliamentary speech of the century denouncing British behaviour. Meanwhile in Nyasaland, another bout of violent repression was going on, with fifty-one black protesters killed. So by the time Macmillan made his speech, it seemed that trying to hold on, to protect white settlers he anyway despised, was even more dangerous than getting out.

Macmillan and his liberal Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod, have had a good press ever since. They have been seen as liberal, fair-minded and realistic politicians, who realized that the time had come to push ahead even faster with decolonization, to hit the accelerator and forget the brake. They were undoubtedly influenced by the humiliation of Suez. It was the way the world was going. Yet the story of modern Africa should make anyone look harder at the timing and methods of British decolonization. This is the failed continent. Lines drawn on the map by British imperial administrators were left to help provoke appalling civil and tribal wars. Men trained at Sandhurst, brought up inside the British Empire, turned into corrupt dictators and in the worst case, that of Uganda’s Idi Amin, a monster. Few of those liberal, highly intelligent liberation leaders feted in London by the left during the fifties and sixties turned into great progressive figures back home in Africa – perhaps the only great exception being Nelson Mandela himself. Military coups, the imprisonment of opposition leaders, tribal feuds and famines followed and for all this, the former British rulers must take some responsibility. Did the British scuttle from Africa happen too fast, in a mood of political hysteria and without proper thought for what would follow? The sheer speed may not be as admirable as we have been taught to think.

Was there no example of successful British action in withdrawing from old commitments? Luckily for national pride, there is another story. It is not simply the tale of the other former colonies, from Singapore to the Caribbean, which thrived, or the prosperity of the so-called White Commonwealth nations. Not all wars were lost; in Korea, for instance, though Kim Il Sung survived to create a bleak and murderous dictatorship behind the armistice line, Mao was frustrated. But the best example of a war eventually won through intelligence, in every sense, is the one known simply as the ‘emergency’. It ran from 1948 to 1960 – which must make it the longest emergency ever.

Malaya had become a crucial part of the world’s industrial system thanks to seeds from a single tree, brought from Brazil to Kew Gardens in London and grown in a tropical plant house. From there, the rubber plants were taken to Malaya in the 1870s, and grew very nicely. By the post-war years, Malaya was producing a third of the world’s supply of rubber. With tin, this made it Britain’s most profitable colony, a rare exception to the rule. But by the late forties there was, almost inevitably, a Communist and nationalist insurgency against British rule. It went on for a dozen years and was, to all intents and purposes, a war. It has not been remembered as the Malayan War for a curious reason. The insurance policies of local businesses had clauses in them suspending cover in time of war; hence ‘emergency’.

After a bad start during which the Communists tied down a huge British force, murdered many rubber planters and their workers, and when atrocities were committed on the other side including by the Scots Guards against Chinese villagers, a new strategy was developed. It was the achievement of one of the British Empire’s last and least-known heroes, a clipped and driven soldier called General Sir Gerald Templer. He used helicopters as they had not been used before in warfare. He also moved entire villages away from the jungle to keep them from supporting insurgents and imposed curfews. But beside the unpopular measures Templer introduced a new ‘hearts and minds’ approach to win over Malaya’s Chinese villagers. Roads, clean water, schools, medical centres, elected village councils and relatively restrained policing did more to confound a Communist insurgency than the machine guns and helicopters. Eventually after the Communists were defeated, Malaya became independent under a friendly government. As Malaysia it has thrived. It showed what could be done by a thoughtful and intelligent departing imperial power. After Malaya, no Communist insurgency succeeded against British forces in Africa or Asia again. Had the Americans studied Malaya a little more closely, who knows what might have followed in Vietnam.

Notting Hill

From 1948 until 1962, roughly the period of the Malayan emergency, there had been virtually an open door for immigrants coming into Britain from the Commonwealth or colonies. The British debate over immigration had been hobbled by contradiction. On the one hand, overt racialism had been discredited by the Nazi enemy. Britain’s very sense of herself was tied up in the vanquishing of a political culture founded on racial difference. This meant that the few unapologetic racialists, the anti-Semitic fringe or the pro-apartheid colonialists, became outcast. Official documents would refer to the handful of MPs who were outspokenly racialist as ‘nutters’. So unthreatening were they thought to be that Oswald Mosley, who had been funded by Mussolini before the war and would have been a likely puppet-leader had Germany invaded Britain, was promptly allowed out of prison after the war, to strut on the back of lorries and yell at his small number of unrepentant fascist supporters. Ignoring him, the public propaganda of Empire made much of a family of races under the British flag all cooperating, loyally together.

In Whitehall, the Colonial Office strongly supported the right of black Caribbean people to migrate to the Mother Country, fending off the worries of the Ministry of Labour about the effects on unemployment during downturns. When some 500 Caribbean immigrants arrived in 1948 on the converted German troopship SS Windrush, the Home Secretary declared that though ‘some people feel it would be a bad thing to give the coloured races of the Empire the idea that, in some way or the other, they are the equals of people in this country,’ the government disagreed: ‘we recognise the right of the colonial peoples to be treated as men and brothers with the people of this country.’38 Britain, in short, believed herself to be the logical opposite of Nazi Germany, a benign and unprejudiced world-connected island. The Jewish migration of the thirties had brought one of the greatest top-ups of skill and energy that any modern European state had ever seen. The country in fact already had a population of about 75,000 black and Asian people and labour shortages suggested it needed many more. The segregation of the American Deep South, and the arrival of the ideology of apartheid in South Africa were treated alike with high-minded contempt.

And yet everyone knew this was not really the whole story. Prewar British society had never been as brutal about race as France or Spain, never mind Germany, but it was riddled with racialism nevertheless. Anti-Semitism had been common in popular novels and obscure modernist poetry alike. The actual practice of the British upper and middle classes had been close to the colour bar practised by Americans. Africans were tolerated as servants and musicians while in Britain, little more. White working-class people hardly ever came across someone of another colour: during the war, black GIs, though welcomed, had been followed around by awestruck locals simply wanting to touch them or hear them speak. Almost as soon as the first post-war migrants arrived from Jamaica and other islands of the West Indies, popular papers were reporting worries about their cleanliness, sexual habits and criminality: ‘No dogs, No blacks, No Irish’ was not a myth, but a perfectly common sign on boarding houses. The hostility and coldness of native British people was quickly reported back by the early migrants. And Hugh Dalton, a cabinet colleague of the high-minded minister quoted earlier, was also able to talk of the ‘pullulating poverty stricken diseased nigger communities’ of the African colonies.

For most people, questions of race were obscure and academic. The country remained overwhelmingly white and only tiny pockets of colour could be found until the sixties, most of them in the poorest inner-city areas. A quarter of the world was in theory welcome to come and stay. There were debates in the Tory cabinets of the Churchill, Eden and Macmillan years but for most of the time they never got anywhere. Any legislation to limit migration would have kept out white people of the old Commonwealth too; and any legislation which discriminated would be unacceptably racialist. Conservatives as well as socialists regarded themselves as civilized and liberal on race. By this they meant pick-and-choosy. For instance in the fifties, the Colonial Office specifically championed ‘the skilled character and proved industry of the West Indians’ against ‘the unskilled and largely lazy Asians’.39 Immigration from the Indian subcontinent had begun almost immediately after independence and partition, as a result of the displacement of Hindus and Muslims, but it had been very small. Sikhs had arrived, looking for work particularly in the industrial Midlands, and in the west London borough of Southall, which quickly became an Asian hub. Indian migrants created networks to buy and supply the corner shops which required punishingly long hours, and the restaurants which would almost instantly become part of the ‘British’ way of life – there were more than 2,000 Indian restaurants by 1970 and curry would become the single most popular dish within another generation. Other migrants went into the rag trade and grew rich.

So immigration continued through a decade without any great national debate. Much of it was not black but European, mostly migrant workers from Poland, Italy, France and other countries who were positively welcomed in the years of skill and manpower shortages. There was a particularly hefty Italian migration producing a first-generation Italian community of around 100,000 by 1971 to add to the earlier migrations which went back to the 1870s. There was constant and heavy migration from Ireland, mainly into the construction industry, three-quarters of a million in the early fifties and two million by the early seventies, producing little political response except in the immediate aftermath of IRA bombings. There was substantial Maltese immigration which did catch the public attention because of violent gang wars in London between rival Maltese families in the extortion and prostitution business (though to be fair to Malta, many of these people had arrived there from Sicily first). There was a major Cypriot immigration, both of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, as the divided island became more politically violent. Again, apart from the enthusiastic adoption of plate-smashing and moussaka in ‘Greek’ restaurants in British cities, there was no discernable public fuss. Chinese migration, mainly from the impoverished agricultural hinterland of Hong Kong, can be measured by the vast rise in Chinese fish-and-chip shops and restaurants, up from a few hundred in the mid-fifties to more than 4,000 by the beginning of the seventies.40 The Poles, carefully resettled after the war, were joined by other refugees from Stalinism, Hungarians and Czechs, again without any national response other than warm enthusiasm.

Thus, if there were clear rules about how to migrate quietly to Britain, they would have started first, be white, and second, if you cannot be white, be small in number, and third, if all else fails, feed the brutes. The West Indian migration failed each rule. It was mainly male, young and coming not to open restaurants but to work for wages which could, in part, be sent back home. Some official organizations, from the National Health Service to London Transport, went on specific recruiting drives for workers, nurses or bus-drivers or cleaners, with cheery advertisements in Jamaica for ticket-clippers on London buses. Most of the population shift, however, was driven by migrants themselves desperate for a better life, particularly once the popular alternative of migration to the United States was closed down in 1952. The islands of the Caribbean, dependent on sugar or tobacco for most employment, were going through hard times. As word was passed back about job opportunities, albeit in difficult surroundings, immigration grew fast to about 36,000 people a year by the late fifties. One historian notes the scale of the change: every two years ‘a number equivalent to the total non-white national population in 1951 was arriving in Britain’.41 The black and Asian population had risen to 337,000 by 1961. And it was concentrated, rather than widely dispersed. Different West Indian groups clustered in different parts of London and the English provincial cities – Jamaicans in the south London areas of Brixton and Clapham, people from Trinidad in west London’s Notting Hill, islanders from Nevis in Leicester, people from St Vincent in High Wycombe, and so on.

The way these people migrated and made their way had a huge impact on the later condition of post-war Britain and deserves analysis. The fact that so many of the first migrants were young men who found themselves living without wives, mothers or children inevitably created a wilder atmosphere than they were accustomed to in their island homes. They were short of entertainment and short of the social control of ordinary family living. A chain of generational influence was broken and a male strut liberated. Drinking dens, the use of marijuana, ska and blues clubs, and gambling were the inevitable result. A white equivalent might be the atmosphere of the Klondike gold-rush communities, not in general notable for their sobriety and respect for law. Early black communities in Britain tended to cluster where the first arrivals were, which meant in the blighted inner cities. There, as discussed earlier, street prostitution was more open and rampant in the fifties than it would later become; it is hardly surprising that young black men away from home often formed relationships with white prostitutes, and that some then went into pimping. This would feed the press and white gang hysteria about blacks (unsportingly well-endowed, it was thought) stealing ‘our women’. The combination of fast, unfamiliar music, the illegal drinking and drugs and the sexual needs of the young migrants combined to paint a lurid picture of a new underworld. It was no coincidence that the Profumo affair had involved a West Indian drug dealer alongside its cast of aristocrats, politicians, good-time girls and spies.

More important for the longer term, a rebelliousness was sown in black families which would be partly tamed only when children and spouses began arriving in large numbers in the sixties, and the Pentecostal churches reclaimed at least some of their own. Housing was another crucial part of the story. For the immigrants of the fifties, accommodation was necessarily privately rented since access to council homes was based on a strict list, dependent on how long you had been living in the area. We have already seen how the early squatting revolt was ended by the threat of participants being moved to the back of the council housing queue. So the early immigrants were cooped up in crowded and often condemned old properties – the gaunt Victorian speculative terraces of west London, or the grimy brick terraces of central Leeds. Landlords and landladies were often reluctant to rent to blacks. Once a few houses had immigrants in them, a domino effect would clear streets as white residents sold up and moved. The 1957 Rent Act, initiated by Enoch Powell in his free-market crusade, perversely made the situation worse since it allowed rents to rise sharply, but only when tenants of unfurnished rooms were removed to allow furnished lettings. Powell meant this to allow a cushion of time before rents rose. Its unintended consequence was that unscrupulous landlords such as the notorious Peter Rachman (an immigrant himself) could buy up low-value rented properties, usually with poorer white tenants in them and then – if only he could oust the tenants – pack in new tenants at far higher rents. Thuggery and threats generally got rid of the old. New black tenants, desperate for somewhere to live and charged much higher rents, were then imported. The result was the creation of instant ghettos, in which three generations of black British would live. The Brixton, Tottenham and Toxteth riots of the eighties can be traced back, in part, to the moral effects of early young-male migration and the housing practices of the fifties.

The other side to the story is the reaction of white Britain. As one Caribbean writer ironically put it, he never met a single English person with colour prejudice.42 Once he had walked down a whole street, ‘and everyone told me that he or she ’ad no prejudice against coloured people. It was the neighbour who was stupid. If only we could find the “neighbour” we could solve the whole problem. But to find ’im is the trouble! Neighbours are the worst people to live beside in this country.’ Numerous testimonies by immigrants and in surveys of the time show how hostile local people were to the idea of having black or Asian neighbours. The trade unions bristled against blacks coming in to take jobs, possibly at lower rates of pay, just as they had campaigned against Irish migrants a generation earlier. Union leaders regarded as impeccably left-wing lobbied governments to keep out black workers. They were successful enough for a while to create employment ghettos as well as housing ones, though in the West Midlands in particular black migrants gained a toehold in the car-making factories and other manufacturing. Only a handful of MPs campaigned openly against immigration. Powell raised the issue in private meetings though as a health minister he had been keen enough to use migrant labour. But anti-immigrant feeling was regarded as not respectable and not to be talked about. The elite turned its eyes away from the door-slamming and shunning, and escaped into well-meant if windy generalities about the brotherhood of man and fellow subjects of the Crown. Most of the hostility was at the level of street and popular culture, sometimes the shame-faced ‘sorry, the room is taken already’ variety and sometimes violent. The white gangs of the Teddy boy age went ‘nigger-hunting’ or ‘black-burying’ and chalked the ‘Keep Britain White’ signs on walls. They may have been influenced by the small groups of right-wing extremists, such as the Union for British Freedom, or Mosley’s remaining fascist supporters, but the main motivation seems to have been young male competition and territory-marking. These were, after all, the poor white inhabitants of the very same areas being moved into by the migrants.

All this came to a head in the Notting Hill riots of 1958. Rather like Suez a couple of years earlier, Notting Hill was more a symbol of change than a bloody slaughter. In fact, nobody was killed in the rampaging and by the standards of later riots, there was little physical damage. Furthermore, the trouble actually started far away from London, in the poor St Ann’s district of central Nottingham and only spread to Notting Hill a day later. Yet it was a large and deeply unpleasant outbreak of anti-immigrant violence which ran for a total of six days, across two late summer weekends. It was no coincidence that Notting Hill was the area where the rioting happened as distinct from, say, Brixton, which also had a very large and visible black population by the mid-fifties. It had the most open, well-known street culture for black people, near enough to Soho at one side, and the new BBC headquarters on the other, to be advertised and even celebrated by hacks, broadcasters and novelists. It was known for its gambling dens and drinking clubs. It had a resentful and impoverished white population but also, as two historians of British immigration put it, ‘It had multi-occupied houses with families of different races on each floor. It had a large population of internal migrants, gypsies and Irish, many of them transient single men, packed into a honeycomb of rooms with communal kitchens, toilets and no bathrooms.’43

Into this honeycomb poured a crowd first of tens, and then of hundreds of white men, armed first with sticks, knives, iron railings and bicycle chains, and soon with petrol-bombs too. They were overwhelmingly young, mostly from nearby areas of London, and looking for trouble. They began by picking on small groups of blacks caught out on the streets, beating them and chasing them. They then moved to black-occupied houses and began smashing windows. The crowds swelled until they were estimated at more than 700 strong, whipped up by the occasional fascist agitator, but much more directed by local whites. Racist songs and chants of ‘Niggers Out’, the smash of windows – though some local whites protected and even fought for their black neighbours, this was mob violence of a kind Britain thought it had long left behind. It shrunk away again partly as a result of black men making a stand, and fighting back with petrol bombs. There were 140 arrests, mainly of white youths, and though far-right parties continued to organize in the area, there was no discernible electoral impact, or indeed any more serious trouble. The huge press coverage ensured, however, that Britain went through its first orgy of national introspection about its liberalism and its immigration policy, while overseas racist regimes such as those of South Africa and Rhodesia mocked the hand-wringing British.

After the riots, many black people did ‘go home’. Returns to the Caribbean soared to more than 4,000. There, West Indian governments expressed outrage at the riot and made it clear that there would be no action by them to restrict migration in order to appease lawless white thugs. Indeed the Commonwealth, whose usefulness has been questioned elsewhere in this history, clearly functioned as a kind of doorstop to maintain immigration. It retained a loose association between Crown, obligation and common citizenship which felt real to politicians of both parties. Pressure to close the open border for Commonwealth citizens hardly increased in the Tory Party after the Notting Hill riots, though extra-parliamentary campaigns, such as the Birmingham Immigration Control Association, did spring up. Of course, given that the violence was directed against immigrants by whites, it would have been grotesquely unfair had the first reaction been to send people home. Labour was wholly against restricting immigration, arguing that it would be ‘disastrous to our status in the Commonweath’. The Notting Hill Carnival, begun the following year, was an alternative response, celebrating black culture openly. For many black migrants, the riots marked the beginning of assertion and organization. They were looked back on as a racial Dunkirk, the darkest moment after which the real fightback would start.

Only after Macmillan’s stunning 1959 general election victory did pressure really begin to build up for some kind of restriction on immigration to Britain. Opinion polls were now showing strong hostility to the open-door policy. Perhaps as important in Whitehall, both the Ministry of Labour and the Home Office wanted a change to help deal with the new threat of unemployment. This was a case of the political class being pushed reluctantly into something which offended their notion of their place in the world, the father-figures of a global Commonwealth. One study of immigration points out that what was truly remarkable was the passive acceptance by politicians and bureaucrats of Britain’s transformation into a multicultural society: ‘Immigration was restricted a full four years after all measures of the public mood indicated clear hostility to a black presence in Britain, and even then it was only done with hesitation.’44 And when the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act finally passed into law, it was notably liberal, at least by later standards, assuming the arrival of up to 40,000 legal immigrants a year with complete right of entry for their dependants. Even so, it had only gone through after a ferocious parliamentary battle, with the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell making emotional and passionate attacks on a measure which was still privately opposed by some of the Tory ministers involved. One particularly contentious issue was that the Republic of Ireland was allowed a completely open border with Britain. This may have seemed only practical politics given the huge number of Irish people living and working there already but it offended in two ways. By discriminating in favour of a country which had been neutral in the war with Hitler and declared itself a republic, but against Commonwealth countries which had stood with Britain, it infuriated many British patriots. Second, by giving Irish people a better deal than Indians or West Indians it seemed frankly racialist.

The new law created a quota system which gave preference to skilled workers and those with firm promises of employment. In order to beat it, a huge new influx of people set out in 1961 for Britain, the biggest group from the Caribbean but also nearly 50,000 from India and Pakistan and 20,000 Hong Kong Chinese. This ‘beat the ban’ phenomenon would be repeated later when new restrictions were introduced in the seventies. One historian of immigration puts the paradox well: in the three-year period from 1960 to 1963, despite the intense hostility to immigration, ‘more migrants had arrived in Britain than had disembarked in the whole of the twentieth century up to that point. The country would never be the same again.’45