The thirteen years of Tory rule, wasted according to Harold Wilson, were followed by fifteen years when modern Britain rose and failed. ‘Modern’ does not simply mean the look and shape of the country formed during 1964–79, most of which is still here around us, essentially unaltered – the motorways and mass car economy, the concrete architecture, the rock music, the high street chains. It also means a belief in planning and management. This was the time of practical men, educated in grammar schools, sure of their intelligence, rolling up their sleeves and taking no nonsense. They were going to scrap the old and fusty, whether that meant the huge Victorian railway network, the grand Edwardian government palazzos in Whitehall, the historic regiments, terraced housing, hanging, theatre censorship, the prohibitions on homosexual behaviour and abortion, the ancient coinage and the quaint county names. Bigger in general would be better. Huge comprehensive schools would be more efficient than the maze of selective and rubbish-dump academies. The many hundreds of trade unions would resolve themselves into a few leviathans, known only by their initials. Small companies would wither and combine and ever-larger corporations would arise in their place, ruthless and managed on the latest scientific, American lines. Britain herself would cease to be a small independent trader and would merge into the largest corporation then available, the European Community. This was managerial self-confidence which would be smashed to pieces during the seventies and never recover.
Just seven men dominate the politics of these thirteen years. They are the three prime ministers, Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and James Callaghan; two other Labour politicians so important they stand alongside the premiers, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey; and two men who stood increasingly outside the management consensus, leading attacks on it from right and left – Enoch Powell, and Anthony Wedgwood Benn. All have appeared briefly in this history already but these were the years when they truly mattered. Of the five insiders none was born into remotely rich or powerful families. Four of them, Wilson, Heath, Jenkins and Healey, were grammar school boys, who had elbowed their way to an elite university education. The fifth, Jim Callaghan, had a rougher start. All of them had served in the armed forces during the war, except for Wilson who had been a civil servant. All were exceptionally clever men of wide experience brimming with the energetic certainty of those trained to hold power, not merely born to the role. Though they had many differences of outlook, in broad terms they could agree that Marxism destroyed freedom, and that the discredited liberal free market brought chaos and unfairness. For them, enlightened state management was the last big idea left standing.
So these were men more abrasive and less interested in pleasing the media than later, more nervous politicians. They were hurrying men, prepared to be rude, particularly to each other. Their language was blunt in private, sometimes in public. Heath would denounce ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’ and Healey would promise to make the richest in the land ‘howl with anguish’. In one important way these men did represent the Britain of their time. These were years of increased social mobility. The country was full of little Harolds and lesser Teds, bright men and women from lower-middle-class or working-class families who were rising fast through business, universities and the professions, who hugely admired such leaders. When Wilson talked of the scientific revolution that would transform Britain, his audience included tens of thousands of managers and engineers, in their off-the-peg tweed jackets and flannel trousers. When Heath promised that Europe would open up great new vistas for British industry, boardrooms and offices contained impatient self-made people ready to get cracking. Callaghan’s beefy working-class patriotism and conservative instincts were shared by millions of Labour voters, pro-trade union but staunchly monarchical.
But in other ways, they were already out of date. In the sixties and seventies, Britain was becoming a more feminized, sexualized, rebellious and consumption-addicted society. The political class was cut off from this by their age. They would rely on their children to keep them a little in touch. They might manage eventually, a brownish kipper tie or daringly wider lapels on their suits but they looked and sounded what they were, people from a more conservative and formal time.
For the vast majority the early sixties were experienced as a continuation of the fifties. Britain remained an industrial society and apparently a world power, whose future was believed to depend on factories churning out cars, engines, washing machines and electrical goods for export, and whose major cities were relics of the industrial revolution. Authority figures, police, teachers, judges and above all parents, were still clothed in the semi-military sense of order that derived from wartime experience. They were the butt of widespread mockery, in Alan Bennett’s early plays, in newspaper cartoons by Giles of the Daily Express, in television sketches by John Cleese and David Frost or in film comedies about bus-drivers and diplomats. The cross-looking men with moustaches and short back and sides were losing ground. But they were visibly still in power. Little islands of change were all around. Immigration was changing small patches of the country, the textile towns of Yorkshire and parts of west London, though it had barely impinged on most people’s lives. There was a growing snappiness and lightness of design, in everything from clothes to the shape of cars, an aesthetic escape from the seriousness of the immediate post-war period, which took different form year by year, but was experienced as a continuum not a revolution.
For some the country was just becoming more childish and less dignified. The refined, highbrow, purist modernism born among Europe’s intellectuals before the war, had had its last throw. Benjamin Britten’s musical austerities, Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic seriousness and the formal stillness of the sculpture of Barbara Hepworth were falling from fashion. Classical music was receding before ear-splitting tidal advance of rock and pop, driven by radio. In poetry, politics and incantation were returning. In painting, pop art and the pleasure principle were on the attack. Though it is a huge generalization, it can fairly be argued that simpler and more digestible art forms, suitable for mass market consumption, were replacing elite art which assumed an educated and concentrated viewer, listener or reader. Throughout these years there would be self-conscious moves to create new elites, to keep the masses out. There always are. They might come from the portentous theories of modern art or the avowedly difficult atonal music arriving from France and America, but these would be eddies against the stream, tiny whirlpools in the metropolis or at universities. The general move was for easier, brighter, sweeter stuff.
The two great rebels mentioned earlier, Enoch Powell and Tony Benn, were neither easier nor sweeter. They had shared much with the five insiders and, indeed, would remain insiders through part of this era, Powell until he was finally expelled from the Tory shadow cabinet for his anti-immigration speech of 1968 and Benn until his increasing radicalism made him the silly socialist Satan of the later seventies. They both rejected the consumer society growing around them in favour of a higher vision. Powell’s was a romantic dream of an older, tougher, swashbuckling England, freed of continental and imperial entanglements, populated by spiky, ingenious, hard-working (and white) people rather like himself. Benn’s was of a socialist commonwealth, equal, republican, dominated by scientifically minded people thinking everything through from first principles, rather as he saw himself.
Both visions required British independence, a self-sufficient island, which ran entirely against the great forces of the time. Both were fundamentally nostalgic. If Powell harked back to the energetic Victorians, Benn dreamed of Puritan revolutionaries. Both drew sustenance from people around them who seemed to be excluded from mainstream politics. For Powell, it was the Wolverhampton constituents who had immigration imposed on them, and the small shopkeepers drowning under red tape and taxes. For Benn it was the radical shop stewards’ committees on the Clyde or in Midlands factories, and his children’s generation, protesting against Vietnam. In return, viewed from Fleet Street or the pulpits of broadcasting, each man was seen as an irrelevance, marching off to nowhere. Yet Powell was the prophet after whom Margaret Thatcher would stride into power while Benn represented a militant leftism which very nearly seized control of the Labour Party itself.
The Little Spherical Thing
No period of British parliamentary history has been as well and copiously described by those who were there as have the Wilson administrations of 1964–70. Two of the key ministers, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey, wrote autobiographies which rank as the finest such books ever. The governments contained three diarists of superb quality and rare descriptive honesty. Richard Crossman blew the lid off cabinet confidentiality. Barbara Castle was the most effective female politician in Labour history. Benn’s diaries are simply unparalleled descriptions of the age. Wilson himself was no great writer. He nevertheless produced a monumental tome on the governments which sets out his side of the story, in wearisome detail. James Callaghan did the same. Two of the best biographies in modern politics, by Ben Pimlott and Philip Ziegler, were devoted to Wilson. Other very fine accounts of the time include biographies of all the key players, as well as a small bookshelf of further memoirs by aides, press officers, lawyers, newspaper-men, diplomats and backbenchers. There is also a large literature devoted to the various theories about whether Wilson was a Soviet spy and whether MI5 agents and assorted extremists really tried to remove him from office. As a result we know more about what individual ministers were thinking and doing, and more about their internal feuds with officials and each other, than is the case for any previous government. Among later ones, only the Thatcher years have been as carefully chronicled, though its diarists were never top-rankers.
Yet the figure bobbing at the centre of this oceanic ebb and flow of words remains strangely obscure. It was said of Stalin during his rise through the Soviet power game that he was a grey blur. Wilson too can seem a grey blur, moving from a stolid lower-middle-class boyhood in Huddersfield, where his main enthusiasms were school learning and the Boy Scouts, through a quiet fact-grinding career at Oxford, winning prizes but keeping well clear of the politically glamorous set, until he became an academic economist and wartime civil servant. In letters and contemporary descriptions he comes over as doughy, cautious, priggish – immensely able but not likeable. Early in his career he was used by others, from Beveridge to Cripps and Dalton, as a superior office-boy, there to gather the figures, marshal the arguments and snib the door each evening. He was old-young, growing a moustache in his twenties in order to look more mature, and living in bulging suits, with his famous pipe. Yet as we have seen he was rarely trusted. An early piece of exaggeration, when he claimed to have gone to school with children too poor to afford shoes, which was untrue and exposed as untrue, gave him a public reputation for slipperiness.
When he resigned with Bevan in 1951, many people saw this as a piece of pure opportunism – he could see Attlee was finished and thought the party would shift to the left. He was disparaged as ‘Nye’s little dog’ but his resignation speech was shrewd enough to leave the door open to a cabinet return. Then, having infuriated the right, he infuriated the left-wing Bevanites by waltzing back into a position very quickly. Later, pressed by the left to stand against Gaitskell, he was overcome with fear. The diarist Crossman recorded: ‘They all bullied Harold and threatened him and pushed at him and tugged at him and the little spherical thing kept twirling round in dismay . . .’ In Labour’s internal feuds he ratted, then re-ratted, then ratted again. In the early sixties he was a lonely figure at Westminster. The Labour right loathed him; the left merely despised him. Yet his sheer ability with numbers and increasingly with words kept him always in contention. When Gaitskell died suddenly, the left, without Bevan, had no other candidate than Wilson.
Sir Alec Douglas-Home became Prime Minister because Harold Macmillan was ill and conspiratorial. Harold Wilson became Labour leader because George Brown was a drunk and not nearly conspiratorial enough. Brown had assumed he would succeed, as Browns do. He was a richly talented working-class man, a lorry-driver’s son from south London who rose through the trade union movement and entered Parliament in the Attlee landslide of 1945. With huge black eyebrows, a round red face, charm and a killer glare, he established himself as a forthright and at times brilliant speaker and an able young minister. He could be famously rude but also delightful and winning, and when Gaitskell died was the obvious person to take over, at least from the point of view of the right and centre of the party. The trouble, as Tony Crosland put it, was that Brown was also ‘a neurotic drunk’. The party’s choice, he went on, was now between ‘a crook and a drunk’.1 Brown’s drinking was heavy and his personality mercurial. Later, his rants and self-pitying outbursts, his sudden disappearances, heroic sulks and astonishingly regular threats to resign from the Labour government would become legendary. A typical story about him, probably apocryphal, has him attending an official reception in Peru and, very inebriated, approaching a willowy figure in scarlet for a dance. Brown is repulsed and protests grandly that he is Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs; why could he not have a nice dance? The reply comes: for three reasons, Mr Brown. First because you are disgustingly drunk, second because that music is not a dance but our national anthem, and third because I am the cardinal-archbishop of Lima. The story, at least, demonstrates why Brown’s reputation would entertain, as well as appal, the Westminster village. Yet the drunk might well have beaten the crook, had not James Callaghan decided to stand as well. He had been encouraged by Wilson’s team, so splitting the anti-Wilson vote and losing Brown vital momentum. In the end, Wilson won easily, by the votes of 144 Labour MPs to Brown’s 103 – these were the days before trade unions or party activists were allowed a say.
Having won, Wilson’s reputation soared in a way which today seems hard to explain. All his weaving, double-crossing, opportunism and deceptions were now forgiven, or at any rate forgotten. The press hailed him as a youthful master of his craft, a devastatingly witty speaker, man of the hour. Wilson’s speeches had certainly improved immensely and he was an acknowledged maestro of the put-down and witty aside, essential in an age of open meetings and hecklers. He developed an acid line of attack on the easy targets of Macmillan and then Douglas-Home, and was full of vague but inspiring sounding thoughts such as ‘the Labour movement is a crusade or it is nothing’ and ‘we need men with fire in their belly and humanity in their heart’. Yet his political thinking, as distinct from his political tactics, was stodgily conventional. He thought Britain was badly run and old-fashioned but believed more central planning, preferably by grammar school-educated technocrats like himself, would solve the problem. He was hardly young, an old-looking forty-six, whose image was comfortingly respectable. He harped on about preferring beer to champagne, tinned salmon to smoked salmon, HP sauce to any other sauce, and being a quiet, provincial sort. He seemed prudish about sex, still the Methodist Boy Scout at heart, and in many ways out of kilter with the fashionable, risk-taking, youthful Britain all around him. So why did he seem so good?
Partly it was a simple matter of class. He might send his children to private schools and live in Hampstead, but Wilson came across as a simple and ordinary man, a breath of fresh air compared to the Old Etonians whose fumbling rule was ending. He was the political equivalent to the men breaking through elsewhere in public life – the tweed-jacketed lecturers of Kingsley Amis novels or David Frost with his nasal vowels on television or Richard Hoggart, the plain-speaking lecturer called at the ‘Lady Chatterley’ trial. He lacked deference. His calm impertinence delighted millions. Here, in a world still run by the old lot, was a clever new man who took it for granted that he was better than the old lot. In Frost’s off-the-cuff summation, it was smart Alec against dull Alec. Of course Wilson was not really any kind of outsider in politics. As an old Whitehall hand who had worked in the Cabinet Office and with Beveridge, who had visited Moscow and Washington for complex trade and business talks, he was formidably experienced by the time he took office, simply a different brand of insider. Yet he turned this to his advantage too. Britain had been going through a time of self-doubt, partly because of the seedy revelations of the Profumo affair and fears of moral decay among the old ruling class, but more importantly because of economic decline. Wilson’s propaganda triumph was to bring the two themes together. The country needed to sweep away privilege and cobwebbed aristocracy, and replace it with ruthless and ‘purposive’ modern planning. Faced with the choice between socialists of the far left variety and the capitalist toffs, Wilson found a third way that would have appealed to Tony Blair thirty years later. It sounded unanswerable, exciting, yet vague. It was science.
In his speech to Labour’s 1963 conference, the most famous he ever made, Wilson promised a scientific revolution which would require wholesale social change. ‘The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods . . . those charged with the control of our affairs must be ready to think and speak in the language of our scientific age.’ It was a time, after Sputnik, when the awesome power of Communist Russian science mesmerized and terrified the West. Wilson said he had studied ‘the formidable Soviet challenge in the education of scientists and technologists and above all, in the ruthless application of scientific techniques in Soviet industry’. As a democrat he rejected their methods but ‘we must use all the resources of democratic planning, all the latent and underdeveloped energies and skills of our people, to ensure Britain’s standing in the world.’ If one replaces the archaic fear of Soviet power and replaces it with the contemporary fear of the rising economies of China and India, then Wilson’s rhetoric, with its emphasis on wasted and under-educated skills, is strikingly similar to the language of New Labour in the twenty-first century.
For Wilson, the real answers were the same ones that the Attlee government had tried. State ownership and state planning would end the inefficiencies of the private system. There would be a huge expansion of university places, new state direction of R&D, even a state-sponsored chemical engineering consortium. He was offering an answer to the stop-go demand management of the Tory years. Instead, Labour would grow the economy through the supply-side reforms of better education and higher investment in science. This was the man who had been in the wartime ministry of mines, plotting the rationalization of the coal industry, who had been President of the Board of Trade in the late forties. It was the vision of an old-fashioned civil service man. But it sidestepped the weary ideological battles inside the Labour Party between right and left, and it sounded modern. From the late seventeenth century, ‘science’ always has done.
The problem Wilson would soon face was how to achieve a successful planned economy in a capitalist world. For all his abuse of them, the Tories had already set out on the same road. In 1962 suitably modern, scientific British businesses, such as Dunlop and Ferranti, were represented at the table alongside trade union leaders and Whitehall mandarins at the first meeting of the National Economic Development Council, or ‘Neddy’. As Labour would also discover, simply talking and making optimistic forecasts was entirely useless. The Tory industrial experience of the early sixties, from the failed attempts to get voluntary agreements on prices and incomes, to the direction of entire industries in order to combat regional unemployment, were there to be learned from. But the tactical fun of teasing a Tory regime to death meant more to Wilson than carefully studying how to be a success in Downing Street.
Wilson’s zigzagging through Labour factions had hardly been glorious but it had made him ruthless. He turned this ruthlessness against the Conservatives, making unfair but funny attacks on Douglas-Home’s inability to understand economics except with matchsticks, and his archaic background as a Fourteenth Earl. (Though the Prime Minister famously hit back by mildly replying that he supposed – when you thought about it – he supposed Mr Wilson was the Fourteenth Mr Wilson.) Wilson’s chutzpah and increasingly self-confident style have been ascribed by many people to his political secretary Marcia Williams. Later she would become a byword for clique and scandal but she was a brilliant and loyal if unpredictable player in Wilson’s inner team. She was described by another member of it, the press secretary Joe Haines, as possessing ‘a brilliant political mind – probably better than any other woman of her generation’. She would rant and rail at Wilson and treated him at times like a naughty schoolboy. Many believed she had had an affair with Wilson. ‘Funny fellow, Wilson,’ said Macmillan. ‘Keeps his mistress at Number Ten. Always kept mine in St John’s Wood.’ By another account, she once confronted Mary Wilson and told her she had had sex with her husband several times years before ‘and it wasn’t satisfactory’. She and he always denied this and would set libel lawyers (successfully) on journalists who repeated such stories. Even so, since Wilson’s death some have gone much further, asserting that the Russians had blackmailed him about Marcia, persuading him to work for them. This seems highly unlikely. The Mitrokhin archive seems to clear him. What can safely be said is that she helped build up his morale, challenged his complacency and, until her apparent bullying became intolerable, probably made him a better politician than he would otherwise have been.
Some Bad News, Minister . . .
Labour came to power confronted by economic choices which would torture it in office and come close to destroying it for good when it was finally defeated at the end of the seventies. From the first weekend in October 1964 when Wilson, his Chancellor Jim Callaghan and the other senior ministers picked up their briefing papers, appalling dilemmas stared them in the face. On the face of it, the economy was not doing so badly. Inflation was still low, though rising. Unemployment was relatively low. Productivity was respectable, though falling behind Britain’s competitors. Strikes were a problem. Britain’s falling share of world markets was a problem. But these were all issues voters might have expected a fresh, vigorous, forward-looking new government to be able to grip. A darker story was laid bare in the official briefings. Britain under the Tories had been wildly overspending. It was living on borrowed money. Britain’s balance of payments was eyed with increasing worry and suspicion by its creditors, the Americans above all. Longer term, the only solution was for the British economy to become more successful, growing faster without sucking in inflation. Labour had ideas about that – more investment, more planning, a better educated workforce. But this would take time. And there was no time.
When Callaghan arrived in Downing Street on the Friday evening after the election, his predecessor, the easy-going Tory Chancellor Reggie Maudling, is said to have passed him on the way out, stopped with his coat on his arm and apologized: ‘Sorry to leave such a mess, old cock.’ He wasn’t talking about the furnishings. Callaghan’s Treasury officials presented him with 500 typed pages, arranged into forty-nine sections. They showed that the deficit the Tories had left him was far worse than previously thought, some £800m and that he would have to begin with a programme of savage spending cuts and tax rises. Even then the pound, still a world ‘reserve’ currency, would be under constant pressure. This was bad enough. Labour had been elected promising a more generous welfare system, better pensions, spending on schools and much more. That was immediately in jeopardy. Prized national projects including the supersonic airliner project jointly developed with the French, Concorde, were under threat of being axed. The Governor of the Bank of England, Lord Cromer, regarded by Labour ministers as a Tory reactionary, was quickly insisting that the deflationary squeeze must be tighter still and that other pet Labour projects such as the renationalization of steel must be dropped. He only desisted when Wilson warned him that, in that case, he might have to hold an immediate election on the theme ‘who governs Britain?’ – familiar later on, but in the 1964 context meaning, elected politicians or bankers? It was hardly surprising that the new team felt shocked and somehow betrayed. Callaghan, who had lost his Baptist faith years before, began to pray again.2
Cuts and tax rises apart, there was one other obvious policy choice, which was to devalue the pound and in effect try to start again. Initially devaluation was entirely ruled out by Wilson, Callaghan and Brown who met privately on the Saturday following the 1964 election. They saw it as humiliating for Britain, cruel to poorer nations keeping their money in sterling, and possibly deadly for the Labour Party which was still saddled with the memory of devaluation in 1949. Beyond that, buffeted by the pressures on the pound and the brusque demands to cut and to tax, their only answer was – more planning. As we have seen the Conservatives had already been taken by the idea. Beeching’s brutal reshaping of the railways had been an early example of the new ruthlessness. Meanwhile ‘Neddy’ had begun work three years before Labour came to power. Industrialists and trade unionists were sitting round large tables, creating working groups and setting plans for growth – in exports, personal consumption, government spending, capital investment. Under Maudling, the Tories had also tried voluntary restraint in prices and incomes and a National Plan.
This was all meant to be French. In the early sixties, Paris was in vogue among the politicians, just as Parisian philosophers, film-makers and singers were in vogue among the beatniks in their black turtlenecks who frequented the coffee bars a mile north of Westminster. France’s system did not use production quotas or targets like the Soviet bloc. Instead ‘indicative planning’ meant the state directing money and materials into particular industries, regions and products, while obliging French banks to invest in new factories and techniques. This had begun in the shattered post-war nation of 1947 under the brandy merchant’s son and father of the EU, Jean Monnet. Fifteen years on, France was connected by new rail and road systems, her town planning seemed radical and effective compared to the mess of British cities, and from jet fighters to cars, engineering to plastics, she appeared more technologically successful than her old adversary. But Britain did not have the crisp centralism of the French political elite, nor the self-confident young technocrats being churned out of the new system of elite education created by President de Gaulle’s post-war revolution, the enarques. Britain had mutually suspicious captains of industry and union barons, plus a few economists and a highly independent, rather anti-manufacturing City. Under the Conservatives cheerful growth figures were duly agreed, and bore absolutely no relation to what then transpired. There were no levers.
It might have been thought that Labour, preparing for power, would have taken note. Nothing of the sort. George Brown, after swallowing his bitter disappointment at failing to become Labour leader, was soon dreaming of a dramatic new role for himself as knight commander of the British economy. The Tories’ trouble, he told the Labour conference, was that they didn’t really believe in planning, which was why it was not working. Faith was needed, said Brother George. Whether or not it still moved mountains, then faith would at least move factories and output figures. It was the same vague, cheerful, fairies-in-the-garden faith in science and professionalism articulated by the wartime planner Harold Wilson. Yet professionalism, never mind science, was sadly lacking. Brown wanted to run a new ministry which would oversee everything, dominating even the Treasury. Like many Labour people he believed that the Treasury was rigidly conservative and therefore to blame for economic failure. As he later wrote, ‘we were all . . . expansionists at heart.’ To take on the self-confident Treasury, as well as the Bank of England and by implication the City, might be regarded as rash. To succeed it would certainly need wily and careful preparation. Yet in a hurried, amateurish way the home policy committee of the Labour Party drew up its plans in 1963 to create a new department to run the economy. This would be known variously as the Ministry of Economic Expansion, the Ministry of Production, and eventually the Department of Economic Affairs, or DEA. No single document was ever produced giving details of how the DEA would work; its relationship with the Treasury; or its ultimate powers. The final agreement to go ahead with it was completed by Brown and Wilson late at night in the back of a taxi during the short journey between a London hotel and the Commons. Brown later conceded with uncharacteristic understatement: ‘I think it is a pity that we didn’t produce a “blueprint” setting out precisely what we wanted to achieve.’3
Meanwhile over at the Treasury some of the brightest minds were planning how to frustrate Brown’s intended coup. In scenes which might have come from the post-1980 television satire Yes, Minister, a new dividing line was drawn through the building which left George Brown’s DEA with a scattering of empty rooms and almost no staff. To find out about the economy Brown’s newly appointed private secretary, Tom Caulcott, had virtually to steal the key economic briefing papers and smuggle them to Brown at his home. Many of the key staff Brown had hoped to use in the DEA were hurriedly switched to jobs in Downing Street or the Treasury itself before he could get his hands on them. In this stiff-collared boycott of facts, people and equipment, Caulcott even had to snatch a typewriter. Bullying and hectoring, Brown would eventually get his department up and running. In a blaze of energy he would then write another and more detailed National Plan. Yet without the oversight of taxation and spending controls operated by the Treasury machine his authority was not based on much beyond personality. Increasingly desperate, Brown went charging off round Whitehall on unexpected and often tempestuous personal visits, storming at other ministers. Breaking Whitehall protocol, he insisted on a private phone line that went directly to his desk, avoiding his private office. But the civil service is harder to beat than that. Caulcott simply arranged with the Post Office to have Brown’s phone bugged. And to ensure his private office knew when he was setting off on another personal mission, they had a discreet buzzer attached to his door which would alert them as he left so he could be followed.
Unaware, Brown drew together the usual industrialists, trade union leaders and civil servants and hammered out proposals for a British economic miracle, more detailed than the Tory version, but equally lacking in levers. His first move was to create a ‘Declaration of Intent’ committing both sides of industry to voluntary wages and prices controls and within his first year he had a full-blown National Plan, with economic planning councils set up across Britain. One sympathetic biographer called this ‘a huge personal achievement, the result of working immensely long hours, breaking every convention to get his own way and successively bullying and charming and ultimately exhausting those whose support he required’.4 There was much shouting at officials, much searching for key documents hidden by the Treasury, which had by now taken to calling its would-be rival the Department for Extraordinary Aggression. The trouble was that by the time Brown’s deal-making marathon had been completed, the economy was in such trouble voluntary controls were impossible. The Treasury had squeezed the DEA into irrelevance before it properly got going.
Crossman, the cabinet minister and diarist, was worried as early as December 1964 at the absence of economic strategy as the pound came under increasing pressure. Both Callaghan and Brown were routinely describing the situation privately as desperate; Labour’s promises to its supporters, including pensioners, were already impossible to fund. Crossman recorded: ‘The pound is still being nibbled away and I feel the cabinet isn’t very firm or very stable because the central leadership isn’t there, the sense of priorities, the sense of grip that you need. Yes, we’ve got a remarkable man in Harold Wilson and a good man in George Brown . . . But what we still lack is that coherent, strong control which is real policy.’5 Roy Jenkins, later to become Chancellor himself, recorded a similar assessment. So long as the pound remained expensive compared to the dollar, ‘there was hardly an event in the world which did not produce a British currency crisis. And the only way of dealing with such a crisis was a new package of hastily approved deflationary measures which seemed bereft of any strategic framework.’6 This left the DEA a marooned and rudderless creature once the cuts had destroyed its growth targets. Brown was moved to the Foreign Office in 1966 and the department was passed around until eventually it came under the personal control of Wilson, an idea that came to him in the middle of the night after he had been woken by his adored but delinquent labrador, Paddy. That did no good, and the DEA died.
Empty Pots and Magic Boxes
In other areas, Labour was on the move. Tony Crosland, a dashing ex-paratrooper and admirer of Hugh Gaitskell, has featured earlier in this history for his rebellion against socialist puritanism and his seminal book The Future of Socialism, which called on the left to accept the consumer society and the mixed economy. By 1965, as MP for Grimsby, he was a rising Labour star, a glamorous, cheroot-smoking, rough-tongued man known for his ferocious attacks on the public school system. He had recently married the exceptionally beautiful divorced American journalist Susan Catling, acquired two stepdaughters and moved into a house in London’s Notting Hill, no longer the scene of riots and not yet the backdrop for glossy films. Wilson had made him Education Secretary after offering the job to Crosland’s friend and rival Roy Jenkins, whose children were at private schools. Crosland’s next two years would make him one of the most controversial, reviled and admired ministers in the history of British schooling. His wife Susan wrote a book about him which is as tender and eloquent a portrait of a twentieth-century British politician as exists, but in it she also revealed a couple of sentences he uttered to her which have been hung around Crosland’s reputation ever since. Luckily for posterity, the journalist in her trumped the pious memorialist. It was late one night in their home when he had been at a wearisome dinner with teachers’ associations. Crosland’s tread was ominous as he mounted the stairs.
He stopped at our bedroom door.
‘Good evening. You’d better come in the study.’
I put my novel aside and got smartly out of our bed, wondering what had caused this latest vexation.
‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England,’ he said. ‘And Wales. And Northern Ireland.’
‘Why not Scotland?’ I asked out of pure curiosity.
‘Because their schools come under the Secretary of State for Scotland.’ He began to laugh at his inability to destroy their grammar schools.7
By 1965 the post-war division of children into potential intellectuals, technical workers and drones – gold, silver and lead – was thoroughly discredited. The private or ‘public’ schools still thrived, with around 5 per cent of the country’s children creamed off through their exclusive portals. For the other 95 per cent, ever since 1944, state schooling was meant to be divided into three types of school. In practice, however, there were just two. For roughly a quarter of children there were the grammar schools, offering traditional academic teaching, including much memorizing and strict discipline. The grandest of these were the 179 direct-grant schools, effectively independent of central government and often with strong traditions of their own – schools such as Manchester Grammar, Haberdashers’ Aske’s, Elstree, and King Edward’s in Birmingham. They tended to be long-established schools, town academies or old foundations, with uniforms, badges and school songs to match. Their brighter children would be expected to go to the expanding university sector and to become professionals. Alongside them, also traditionalist in atmosphere but with less independence and status, were some 1,500 ordinary grammar schools, maintained by the local authorities.
For the other three-quarters of state-educated children there were the secondary moderns, frankly second-rate and often in buildings which reflected their lower status. As one writer observed in 1965, ‘modern’ had become a curious euphemism for ‘less clever’. Some of these schools were truly dreadful, sparsely staffed, crowded into ancient and unsuitable buildings and sitting almost no pupils for outside examinations before most were released to start work at fifteen. At A-level, in 1964, the secondary moderns, with around 72 per cent of Britain’s children, had 318 candidates. The public schools, with 5 per cent, had 9,838. The third kind of school originally planned in 1944 was to have been the technical school, teaching specific practical skills on German lines, but these had been forgotten. In practice there was therefore a sharp, public, sheep-and-goats division of the country’s children which took place at eleven years old through the ‘eleven-plus’ examination. It in turn was based on an IQ test supposed to scientifically measure intelligence. Among those who made it to the grammar schools, many hated being separated from their old friends – George Best and Neil Kinnock being among the innumerable examples of eleven-plus successes who then bunked off or frittered their school days in a mood of rebellion. Many of the majority who were rejected and sent to the secondary moderns never got over the sense of rejection and failure. John Prescott never forgot that his brother passed, and was given a bicycle while he failed and wasn’t. Rifts opened in families. Siblings turned on each other.
Any schooling system has some problems. Most involve unfairness at one stage or another. Academic selection and examinations require children to fail, as well as to succeed. But by the late fifties, there were larger complaints. The IQ tests were shown not to be nearly as reliable as first thought. Substantial minorities, up to 60,000 children a year, were at the ‘wrong’ school and many were being transferred later, up or down. Different education authorities had wildly different proportions of grammar school and secondary modern places – division by geography, not examination. A big expansion of teachers and buildings was needed to deal with those post-war baby-boom children who were now reaching secondary school. Across Britain, there were rotting buildings and a shortage of around 60,000 teachers. Desperately looking for money, education authorities snatched at the savings a simpler comprehensive system might produce. Socialists who wanted more equality, among whom Crosland had long been prominent, were against the eleven-plus on ideological grounds. But many articulate middle-class parents who would never have called themselves socialist were equally against it because their children had failed to get grammar school places. With all these pressures, education authorities – that is, local councillors, not national politicians – had begun to move towards a one-school-for-all or comprehensive system during the Conservative years. Tory councils were doing this, as well as Labour ones. The Conservative Education Secretary, a man on the left of his party, Sir Edward Boyle, found that ninety of the 146 education authorities in England and Wales were making some moves towards comprehensive schooling by 1962.8
So when Crosland took over, the great schooling revolution, which has caused so much controversy ever since, was well under way. There were already comprehensives, on the Swedish model, and they were much admired for their huge scale, airy architecture and apparent modernity. The first had been Kidbrooke in Blackheath, south-east London, which opened for 2,200 girls in 1954. Grammar schools across the country were fighting back, particularly in cities with a strong sense of their history, such as Bristol and Nottingham, but across the country generally they were losing ground. What Crosland did was to hasten their destruction. He did this not by ordering the education authorities to go comprehensive but by requesting them to, in what has been described as the most famous circular in the history of the education department, directive 10/65. He did not say how many comprehensives must be opened nor how many grammar schools should be shut down. But by making government money for new school building conditional on going comprehensive, the change was greatly accelerated.
By 1970 when Wilson was defeated, a third of children were at comprehensives and a mere eight education authorities were holding on to the old division. The revolution simply rolled on. Edward Heath, devoted to his old grammar school, had promised to stop bullying education authorities into destroying grammar schools. Crosland’s 10/65 was duly withdrawn, and Heath appointed that ultimate enthusiast for the grammar schools system, Margaret Thatcher, as Education Secretary. She duly announced a presumption against further shake-up and change. But what happened? Out of 3,612 proposals for compre-hensives sent to Mrs Thatcher, she turned down just 326 and the proportion of children at comprehensives nearly doubled again, up from 32 per cent under Labour to 62 per cent under this thoroughly Conservative politician. As one of her biographers flatly pointed out, ‘for all her strong prejudices against them . . . Margaret Thatcher approved more schemes for comprehensive schools, and the abolition of more grammar schools, than any other Secretary of State before or since.’9 Heath, who fought a tough campaign as Prime Minister to save his local grammar school in Bexley, blamed the desire of Tory-led authorities to save money by replacing boys-only and girls-only grammars with co-ed comprehensives. He also confessed: ‘The tide was strong, but I do wish in retrospect, that the many supporters of selection had all campaigned more vigorously before it was too late.’10
There had always been a contradiction in the way comprehensives were sold, which was neatly summed up by Wilson when he promised that they would offer ‘a grammar school education for all’. Since the essence of grammar schools was that they selected only the brightest children, this was plainly a ridiculous suggestion. Yet Wilson was reflecting back something that was deeply rooted among parents and many Labour voters, which was a simple enthusiasm for ‘good’ education, meaning traditional teaching in a disciplined environment, popularly associated with grammar schools. Most other countries, after all, had traditionalist, even rote-learning education in a single state system without the division of schools by academic ability. If the Germans and Americans, the French, Russians and Swedes could do it, why not the British?
It was the singular misfortune of the comprehensive experiment that it coincided with a move away from traditional education to what was called child-centred teaching. In the long run, this may well have been more important than any structural reorganization of schools. Instead of viewing the child as an empty pot, happily large or sadly small, into which a given quantity of facts and values could be poured, the new teaching regarded the child as a magic box, crammed with integrity and surprise, which should be carefully unwrapped. Perhaps a more organic metaphor is called for. The young sapling should be watered and admired, not tied to a stick, nor pruned. Here was a fundamental disagreement about the nature of humanity and social order. Philosophically it goes back to the French thinkers of the eighteenth century but it was fought out in concrete form in British classrooms throughout this period. The old rows of desks facing a blackboard began to go, and cosily intimate semicircles of chairs appeared. Children of different abilities were taught in the same room, so that they could learn from each other, causing some chaos and boredom. Topics replaced lists. Grammar retreated and creativity advanced. Teachers began to dress informally and encourage the use of an Adrian or Sara, rather than Sir or Miss. Corporal punishment went from state schools entirely and on the vast, windy sites of the seventies comprehensives, with their modernist airiness, discipline loosened. The elite remained mainly in private schools, taught much as their parents and grandparents had been. But across the country millions of parents shook their heads and wondered. Hostility to comprehensives, which would swell through the eighties and nineties, was much of the time really hostility to trendy teaching, the spirit of the sixties which was being marshalled and organized in scores of teacher training colleges.
Crosland’s legacy went far beyond comprehensives. He was a high spender on education, as was Margaret Thatcher, both believing long before Tony Blair that there was no better way of investing taxes than in ‘education, education, education’. In particular, he oversaw a big expansion of higher education, the creation of thirty polytechnics to supplement Britain’s universities. These were to develop the technical and practical higher education enjoyed by Germans and French students but which was sadly lacking in the fustier and more academic British universities. This offended the universities, not surprisingly, who had been hoping for a major expansion in their own right. The Robbins Report had reminded the country that just 5 per cent of British youngsters went into higher education, as compared to 25 per cent of Americans or 12 per cent of French. There was a major expansion underway, from the trendiest of all, Sussex University at Brighton, to the ‘redbricks’ which were in fact often concrete, granite or plate glass erections, from Liverpool to Bristol, Aberdeen to Southampton. But Crosland argued the then-fashionable case that Britain needed technical and industrial colleges on the German model far more than universities. Britain had to get away from ‘its snobbish, caste-ridden hierarchical obsession with university status’.11 Later, the wheel would come full circle when the polytechnics and other colleges would simply be allowed to call themselves universities, but at the time the Crosland ideology seemed on a par with his crusade for comprehensives, a vigorous attack on the old and traditional in favour of a more efficient and egalitarian new Britain.
Perhaps the proudest educational achievement of the Wilson years was the Open University. It too was nothing if not new. First proposed in 1962 by the same Michael Young who had co-written Labour’s 1945 manifesto, the Open University was hatched in government by Jennie Lee, a Scottish miner’s daughter, and Nye Bevan’s widow. Originally described as a ‘university of the air’, the OU was meant to offer higher education to millions who had not had the chance to go to a campus university. Lee was determined that it should offer serious, heavyweight degree courses, taught by academics with a strong reputation. Attacked by the Conservatives at the time as ‘blithering nonsense’, it aimed to use television and the postal service to teach degree-level courses in everything from the sciences to history and law. It has been one of the most successful and liberating acts by a post-war government in education. Its critics attacked it first for being not elite enough, and later for attracting too many middle-class women but by the mid-2000s, the OU was being ranked in the top five British universities for teaching quality and had given qualifications to some 600,000 of the 2 million people who studied with it. This is often credited as Wilson’s great contribution, and he was a great supporter; but Jennie Lee was the heroine of a hundred committee fights to create it.
As for Crosland he would go on to serve as the Environment Secretary who warned the high-spending local authorities in 1975 that ‘the party’s over’ but the destruction of Labour’s own high-spending instincts in the economic storm of the seventies blew away the easy optimism of his political philosophy. In 1977, still hoping to be Chancellor and after enduring a dinner sitting beside a woman whose conversation about the EEC he said was killing him, Crosland died of a stroke at the age of fifty-eight.
Roy Jenkins’s Britain
The greatest changes of the Labour years were achieved by Roy Jenkins, a man Wilson had always distrusted. Back in the Tory years when he was slim and dashing, Roy Jenkins had set out his case for social reforms which would remove the State’s powers over individual freedoms. He argued that the ‘ghastly apparatus of the gallows’ must go, as well as judicial flogging; that the persecution of homosexuals should end, as Wolfenden had suggested; that the Lord Chamberlain’s powers to censor stage plays must also end; that the ‘harsh and archaic’ law forbidding almost all abortions should be changed; that the divorce laws, which caused unnecessary suffering, should be reformed; and that the immigration laws needed to be made more civilized. Through the mid-sixties, all these changes happened. Hanging went in 1965, before Jenkins became Home Secretary, but there was a softening on immigration in 1966, flogging went in 1967, the same year as the liberalization of abortion law, and the decriminalization of private homosexual acts between men aged over twenty-one. State censorship of plays ended in 1968, and the following year, the divorce laws were liberalized. Jenkins had also called for changes to the laws on suicide and on alcohol licensing, and those came later; but it was a formidable drum-roll of libertarian change, without precedent and never matched. Ever afterwards, Roy Jenkins has been either praised or demonized as the most liberal Home Secretary in British history, the man more responsible for the permissive society than any other. But though he himself called his first spell at the Home Office ‘the liberal hour’ one of the oddities of this is that Jenkins was personally responsible for few of these measures. They were private members’ bills.
The abolition of hanging, on a free vote in 1965 was led by the Labour backbencher Sydney Silverman. He was building on a rising tide of disquiet about judicial death in Britain. The 8 a.m. ritual carried out from condemned cells throughout the country, often using a portable gallows transported from Pentonville Prison in London, with its pinions, white hood, last glass of brandy and unmarked grave in prison grounds, had been followed with intense interest throughout modern times. By the mid-fifties many thought the practice uncivilized. Famous writers such as Arthur Koestler, scourge of the Stalinists who had faced death himself, and famous broadcasters such as Ludovic Kennedy, were gaining a public hearing against capital punishment. That might have remained an elite interest, had it not been for some hangings that caused more general queasiness.
In 1952 two teenagers were involved in the murder of a policeman during a robbery. The one who actually fired the shot, Christopher Craig, was sixteen at the time and therefore escaped the rope. But he was accompanied by Derek Bentley who at nineteen was old enough to be hanged. He was being held by police when the murder occurred and he had the mental age of a child, but was judged guilty. Despite a national campaign for clemency and a letter signed by more than 200 MPs, the hardline Tory Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, one of the judges at Nuremberg, whom we met earlier busily persecuting homosexuals, ordered Bentley’s execution to go ahead. On 13 July 1955 a young mother, Ruth Ellis, was hanged for the murder of her faithless lover, the last woman to be executed in Britain. The following year the man who had killed her, Britain’s famous executioner Albert Pierrepoint, pub landlord and member of a family of public hangmen, resigned from his job. He had ended the lives of 433 men and seventeen women, ranging from frightened boys who had been in the wrong place, to some of the worst Nazi war criminals. Many believed he had retired out of a sense of disgust. This was far from the case. Pierrepoint had been having an argument about his last fee when he turned up one cold morning to find the prisoner had been granted clemency. Later he would revise his original view and support abolition.
Though there was still formidable public support for hanging, MPs were becoming increasingly unhappy about it. Silverman formed a national campaign to end the death penalty. In 1957 the Tory government radically slimmed down the offences which demanded capital punishment, to five forms of murder. The number of hangings fell from an average of fifteen a year in the first half of the fifties, to about four a year. The executions still however included some odd decisions, such as the putting to death of Hendryk Niemasz who appeared to have killed while he was sleepwalking. Against this background, the anti-hanging majority in the Commons, which had before been frustrated by the pro-hanging House of Lords, became steadily more assertive. In Silverman, a left-wing pacifist from a very poor Jewish family who had served time in Wormwood Scrubs for his views during the First World War, the anti-hanging movement had a persistent and eloquent leader, able to win over such notable non-liberals as the future Home Secretary and Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan. In two days in August 1964 three men were hanged for murder, a 21-year-old Scot who had killed a seaman, and who was executed in Aberdeen, an Englishman in Walton Prison in Liverpool, and a Welshman in Manchester’s Strangeways Prison. They were the last. Hanging was abolished for almost every offence – in practice, ended completely – in 1965. Initially the abolition was for a trial period of five years; it was then formally abolished. This did not make Britain strikingly liberal by Western standards, though executions went on in France, by guillotine, until 1977 and continue in the United States now.
The Sexual Offences Bill which ended the indictment of homosexuals, was led by another Labour backbencher, Leo Abse – also as it happens a Jewish left-winger, from a poor background and, like Silverman, a passionate lawyer, regarded with a mixture of admiration and suspicion by the Labour front bench. Here too, politicians were reacting to a changing mood, if not among the whole public, then at least among what would later be called with easy disparagement, the chattering classes. John Wolfenden, whose report in 1957 had called for the decriminalization of homosexual acts in private between consenting adults, was a public school headmaster. His committee included the whole card-deck of great and good professionals, from presbyterian clergy and a professor of moral theology to Tory MPs. After his conclusions were rejected by the Conservative government, the campaign spread, though it was a cliquish affair. It opened with a letter to the Spectator followed by another to The Times. Lord Attlee was a supporter, as was A. J. Ayer, the philosopher. When the Homosexual Law Reform Society was formed in May 1958, its founders included clergy, publishers, poets and MPs, few of them homosexual themselves; its first full-time worker was a married vicar, Andrew Hallidie Smith. Its first big public meeting at London’s Caxton Hall attracted a thousand people.
Harold Wilson’s government was privately divided about legalizing homosexuality; in general the more conventional working-class members of the cabinet were least enthusiastic and the liberal intellectuals, such as Crosland and Jenkins, were most supportive. If anything, the Conservative benches, packed with former public schoolboys, were privately more tolerant than the Labour ones. Wilson was judged to be privately hostile to reform. Yet as with hanging, the tacit support of the Home Office and its guarantee of enough parliamentary time to get the measure through, helped to win the day. And as with hanging, in Abse the measure had a hyperactive and persistent advocate. A factory worker and communist sympathiser before the war, who fought in the RAF before becoming a lawyer, Abse would go on to show time and again that backbenchers need not be lobby fodder but can affect real change. He was a curious, peacock character whose application of Freudian analysis to other politicians caused much mirth and offence later on: a whiff of his style can be had from the title of his book Fellatio, Masochism, Politics and Love, published in 2000. In time the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 would be criticized by gay activists for not going nearly far enough in giving equality before the law. The age of consent was higher and ‘privacy’ was judged very narrowly indeed, leading to a spate of indecency convictions after the law was passed. But it was a landmark nevertheless, building on the shifts in attitude that had begun in the fifties and perhaps even earlier, during the war.
If the anti-hanging movement can be traced to the executions of Bentley and Ellis, and the homosexual reform movement to revulsion against the purge of the fifties, the abortion law reform movement can be traced to two unrelated, horrible stories. The first was the rape of a fourteen-year-old girl by some guardsmen in a West London barracks shortly before the war. After one doctor refused to perform an abortion, on the grounds that since her life was not in danger he would be breaking the law, another doctor, Alick Bourne, stepped in. He performed the operation and was duly prosecuted. Bourne defended himself on the grounds that the girl’s fragile mental health meant that the abortion was, in practice, essential. He won and became an instant hero to the small female campaign which had been set up to reform the abortion law in 1936. (From their point of view, this was a mistake: Bourne would later recant, declaring that mass abortions would be ‘the greatest holocaust in history’ and in 1945 he would become a founding member of the anti-abortion group, the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, or Spuc.) The second event was much more widespread. It was the Thalidomide drug disaster of 1959–62. This alleged wonder drug, which helped sleeplessness, colds, flu and morning sickness, was responsible for huge numbers of badly deformed children being born, many missing all or some of their limbs. Opinion polls at the time showed large public majorities in favour of abortions when the foetus was deformed. This was far more influential than the actions of the Abortion Law Reform Association, which had just over 1,100 members at the time.
Abortion was also clearly a class issue. In the early sixties an estimated 10,000 private abortions were taking place in Harley Street and other West End clinics, where relevant paperwork had been obtained and plenty of cash had changed hands. At the other end of the social scale, horrific back-street abortions with coat-hangers, chemicals and rubber pumps were causing injuries and some deaths. Around 35,000 women a year were being treated in National Health Service hospitals for botched abortions. Even if one takes a middle figure between the 100,000 and quarter of a million illegal abortions then taking place (vagueness about numbers is inevitable, given the hidden and private nature of the abortions) this suggests very large numbers of young women were exposing themselves to terrible risk. By the mid-sixties, botched abortions were the main cause of avoidable maternal death. It was a theme that would be crucial to the MP who took on this reform, the next in the series of backbench nation-changers.
David Steel, a Scottish Liberal who had just been elected to the Commons in a by-election, was still in his twenties and just two years out of law school. ‘The Boy David’ would go on to lead his party and be the first Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, but his dogged battle to legalize abortion was the most controversial fight of his life. He had come third in the ballot for private members’ bills in 1966 and initially thought he would try to pilot through homosexual law reform, until he realized the level of hostility in Scotland (where the law would remain unchanged for years to come) meant it could only be an English and Welsh measure. A serious-minded young man, Steel had been much impressed by the Church of England’s recent report on abortion, arguing the Christian case for its moderate use, and attended an abortion for himself before deciding. But essentially, he was put up to it by Roy Jenkins. Like Silverman and Abse, he had much expert opinion on his side – not a Wolfenden Report or the passionate books of philosophers, but the World Health Organization, which had declared in 1946 that health meant ‘complete mental, physical and social well-being’. This implied that mental suffering to the woman could be grounds for abortion. It was written into the bill and today of the 180,000 abortions taking place each year in Britain, all but 2 per cent of them are on just such grounds.
Though these were the most famous, or infamous, moments of Roy Jenkins’s ‘liberal hour’ they were not the only ones. The old law on divorce, which generally required evidence that one party had committed adultery, and therefore the whole jig of private detectives, cameras, hotel rooms and often staged ‘in flagrante’ moments, would finally be ended in 1969 by the Divorce Reform Act. This was also part of the Jenkins agenda, and he had wanted to see it through two years earlier. The new law allowed divorce if a couple had lived apart for two years and both wanted it, or if they had lived apart for five years and one partner wanted divorce. This ‘irretrieveable breakdown’ clause, often oddly called ‘no-fault divorce’, was followed by a rocketing rate of divorces rising from around 7 per cent of marriages in the late fifties to close to 50 per cent now. The causes of this domestic revolution are many, and include greater publicity about sexual gratification, domestic violence and greater female financial independence. But the 1969 Act was a huge factor.
Then there was the Theatres Act of 1968, again taken through by a Labour backbencher, George Strauss, one of the founders of Tribune, which finally ended the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship role after a particularly controversial verdict against a play at the Royal Court, Saved by Edward Bond. The Lord Chamberlain of the time, Kim Cobbold, was privately grateful for the end of his role. Though shows like Hair and Oh, Calcutta! quickly exploited the new freedoms of the stage to the disgust of Middle England, there was hardly a tide of filth spewing across the stage. Over the next decade or two, the plays which were genuinely controversial would be rare enough to produce media cyclones; yet hardly anyone called for the return of the Lord High Censor and his blue pencil.
Jenkins turns out to be the single most influential politician of the sixties, though never Prime Minister himself. All of these measures were given vital help by him, following a personal agenda he had set out years earlier and vigorously pursued by exercising personal decision-making and persuasive powers in the cabinet and Commons. Most private members’ bills fail because they run out of time for debate (something controlled by the government). Jenkins ensured there was plenty of time. He helped pick and coach backbench leaders for reform. On numerous occasions he spoke for them. So why had he not led the charge himself? The simple answer is that Wilson’s cabinet was a lot less liberal than Jenkins was, with three or four ministers utterly opposed to each of these measures. Wilson was hostile, for instance, to the ending of stage censorship, partly because he was nervous about the forthcoming stage version of Private Eye’s satirical ‘Mrs Wilson’s Diary’. The Secretary of State for Scotland, Willie Ross, was hostile to almost all the reforms. And often, backbenchers who supported one liberalization would be against another. So Jenkins proposed what he called a ‘stratagem’ whereby he would give backbenchers time and freedom to attack first, while allowing himself the liberty to speak in their support. This allowed his cabinet critics to vote against the changes, which were carried after very long and highly emotional late-night debates.
All transpired just as Jenkins had hoped. He felt he was at the cutting edge of a war about what it meant to be civilized. Against him and the reformers were many clergy, including the Roman Catholic Church; millions of quietly conservative-minded citizens; and much of the political Establishment. When he arrived at the old ministerial rooms of the Home Secretary (long since gone) he found an air of gloom and some very suspicious officials. There was an indicator board in one corner of his office with the names of prisoners awaiting execution. Hanging was only suspended, as it were. Originally the board had shown the names moving steadily towards the date fixed for their hanging. Jenkins had it moved out and replaced with a fridge for white wine and soda.
After supporting the abolition of hanging, and after refusing to authorize the birching of a prisoner, he became a hate-figure among many ordinary policemen as well as for the grassroots of the Tory Party, something he seemed to regard as an honour. Yet he was not liberal on everything. He believed that crime would be cut more effectively by catching more criminals and getting more guilty verdicts, than by horrific punishments. One of his most important changes was to bring in majority verdicts for English juries (Scotland had always allowed them) rather than the old rule that they must be unanimous. Many of Jenkins’s critics on the right opposed this. As he noted with a certain smugness much later, seventy-four Conservatives voted against, ‘including Mrs Thatcher, who went into the lobby against the change which has contributed more to the conviction of professional and dangerous criminals than any measure which was introduced by her four Home Secretaries’.12
The social changes were rarely argued through with clarity, or indeed honesty. Abse later described the arguments he used about homosexuality, accepting that it was a pitiable medical condition that required treatment, as ‘absolute crap’. Despite endless public debate, the abortion reformers entirely played down the significance of psychological health as a reason for a termination, passionately arguing that the bill was not a charter for abortion on demand – which it certainly became. The use of separation as ground for divorce, rather than proof of adultery, was said to be a measure which would strengthen marriage; if so, it was clearly a failure. It was argued and assumed that the end of hanging would not increase the rate of murder or violent crime. Both would soon rise sharply.
All these measures had the backing of small and dedicated campaigns, generally only a few thousand strong. Each depended on celebrity intellectuals of one kind or another, to finally slaughter legislation which went back to Victorian times – and in the case of hanging, far earlier. Whether it was the philosopher Bertrand Russell inveighing against the anti-homosexual laws, or Laurence Olivier giving evidence against theatre censorship, or the British Medical Association helping turn the mood on abortions, this was a social revolution led by eggheads and experts. It showed just how influential apparently marginal people could be in the Britain of the late fifties and mid-sixties. Liberals, though unimportant politically, indeed at their low point of the century, were particularly influential – not only Steel on abortion and Ludovic Kennedy on the death penalty, but through the parliamentary enthusiasm of their leader Jo Grimond. The left-wingers and intellectuals around Tribune, who were being elbowed aside by Wilson, also had a real influence on these non-economic issues.
The model for egghead-led change had been the famous court case of October 1960, Regina v. Penguin Books Ltd at the Old Bailey, better known as the ‘Lady Chatterley’ trial. Again, Jenkins was there: he had been the only MP on the committee of liberalizers whose work eventually produced the Obscene Publications Act of the previous year, now about to be tested. Defending Penguin’s right to publish an unexpurgated text of Lawrence’s novel about the love affair between a lady and a gamekeeper, with its phallic romps through the undergrowth, its scenes of copulation and buggery and, not least, its use of the words fuck and cunt, had brought together a coalition of the permissive. From the Bishop of Woolwich to E. M. Forster, these were the people who might be expected to append their names to letters to The Times about the evils of colonialism, or turn up at a pro-homosexual rights meeting, or support CND – the people who would be satirized mercilessly by Michael Wharton of the Daily Telegraph in his Beachcomber column, and by the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster. The list of witnesses for the ‘Lady Chatterley’ defence included Oxbridge professors, clergymen, famous writers, a future Tory MP, and a poet laureate. It was a unique coming together of liberal and intellectual strands in British public life. Left-wing and liberal Christian thought had been in the ascendant in the Church of England during and after the war, as we have seen; the wartime Archbishop William Temple was still being quoted at the ‘Lady Chatterley’ trial. The big publishing houses were often in the hands of men of the high-minded liberal and centre-left, Sir Allen Lane himself or Victor Gollancz. The leftish newspapers such as the Observer, Manchester Guardian and News Chronicle, not to mention the resurgent Daily Mirror, were at the height of their influence. As with abortion or the divorce law, expert advice was used to intimidate and mock the self-appointed guardians of tradition; and to good effect.
The tactic of finding irreproachably serious and well-regarded authority figures to front radical change, so confusing the forces of tradition, was first tested over ‘Lady Chatterley’. Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC, an Old Etonian, ex-Grenadier Guard, summing up for the prosecution, was explicit about the historic nature of the choice before the jury. There must be, he pleaded, ‘some standards of morality, some standards of language and conversation, some standards of conduct which are essential to the well-being of our society’. Since the war the country had been suffering from increasing sex obsession, a lack of restraint and moral discipline. The jury had heard a long list of experts, Griffith-Jones concluded: ‘Members of the Jury, you will not be browbeaten by evidence given by these people . . . You will judge this as ordinary men and women, with your feet, I trust, firmly planted on the ground.’
But what was ordinary now? His question as to whether male jurymen would permit their wives or servants to read such a book caused hoots of laughter round the country. Their verdict against him concluded what had been a kind of genteel liberal carnival, the opening act of the permissive society that was coming. It would mean the publication of books which, unlike Lawrence’s, were mainly to be read with one hand – John Cleland’s eighteenth century porn-novel, Fanny Hill, Pauline Reage’s sado-masochistic novel The Story of O, and much else. In this sense the high-mindedness of the anti-censorship brigade would be quickly confounded. They had stood their ground on Lawrence, or James Joyce, elite writers. Doing so, they ushered in freedoms which would swiftly be exploited in ways they had not intended or foreseen. That, however, is the nature of freedoms.
Thus, small groups of the upper orders changed the rules of British life and found themselves unprepared for the torrent of change that followed. Some of the fastidious homosexual rights campaigners of the fifties and sixties were appalled by the shameless exuberance of the gay-lib movement. Many of the abortion rights campaigners, including David Steel himself, said later that they had not expected the sheer number of terminations that were then permitted. The argument about hanging raged more strongly, if anything, after abolition than it had before it. There were still strong conservative voices expressing unease and anger. In the Lords, the war hero Viscount Montgomery of Alamein said he favoured the age of homosexual consent being fixed at eighty. The Chief Scout protested about England going the way of ancient Greece and a bishop warned that the country was rife with ‘buggers’ clubs’. A world away, in a Midlands secondary school, an art teacher with strong Christian principles began planning her campaign against lewdness. Mary Whitehouse’s Clean Up TV campaign would, from 1964, make her a major national figure who spoke for millions. Judges, local councils and hundreds of clergy who did not agree with the Bishop of Woolwich, would later be joined by journalists who had had second thoughts about the sixties – men such as Malcolm Muggeridge, Christopher Booker and Bernard Levin.
It is always dangerous to define an era by a few high-profile events taking place in London; yet, across Britain there is no doubt that traditional values were under attack and falling back in confusion. The reforms of the Jenkins era could all be regarded as denationalizations or ‘social privatizations’ in that they involved the State giving up powers that it had once had, backing away from its old authority. They can be seen as the social and moral equivalent of the industrial privatizations of the Thatcher years, when the State surrendered economic powers and ownership. The left tended to think people’s private lives should be their own, even if they made choices traditional Christian society regarded as immoral; but that people’s working lives, from how much they earned to where they worked, were fit for State interference. The right had a reverse view, that the State should uphold traditional moral codes with the full rigour of the law, but keep out of the economy as much as possible. The lasting changes made by each side are the ones in which politics did pull back, leaving the State smaller both morally and economically.
Did they make the country more civilized, as Jenkins and his supporters believed, or did they make it coarser and more dangerous, as right-wing commentary has alleged? Despite serious rises in violent crime, there is little campaigning for a return to hanging. Censorship too, seems something few modern Britons are keen on. Though divorce has become commonplace, causing great unhappiness as well as liberation, tougher laws to force people to remain married are on no political party’s agenda. Homosexual rights have been increased; again, the movement seems all one way. Abortion, affected by changes in medical technology and by the influence of evangelical organizations, is probably the most disputed of the sixties reforms, and the one most likely to be revisited. A fair verdict is that the changes allowed the British to be more openly themselves, and that while the results are not always pretty, the apple of self-knowledge cannot be uneaten again and returned to the tree.
The Democracy of Narcissism
Much the same divided response still resonates about the whole decade. Why do the sixties seem to matter so much? Why is it that on television, in magazine articles, net debates, in books and in conversation, so much time is spent on a few events, involving a tiny number of people in a few places? There is almost autistic repetitiveness to our scratching of the images, from Minis to minis, Beatlemania to Biba, as if there are secrets still hidden there for us to uncover, some hidden pattern that gives order to history. The truth is that we have never really left the sixties. We have simply repeated them, and that goes for those who were only born later. Sixties music, shopping and celebrity culture have been spread far beyond their first makers and participants, to almost everybody in the land.
The essence of British culture in the early twenty-first century, from drug abuse to the background soundtracks of our lives, the ‘celeb’-obsessed media to swift changes in fashion, the pretence of classlessness, the car dependency, was all set down first between around 1958 and 1968. We are still living then, or at least in a slightly tired copy of how the sixties were for the elite. There was a brief political interruption in the mid-seventies when Britain was said to be ungovernable and punk pogo’d past, but it was only a pause. As the eighties’ economy revived, the sixties’ basic preoccupations – escapism, personal fulfilment, and shopping – returned with full force. This was a time when the mass consumer culture first arrived, our democracy of narcissism. First time round, of course, it was fresher. Pioneers have an innocence their imitators lack. Sixties culture was made by people who had no idea they were setting patterns for the future.
The pop songs of the early Beatles or the Kinks were not foremost neatly packaged commodities as all pop songs later became. When Mary Quant set up her shop she was a rotten businesswoman. The fun was in the clothes. No business with so little grip on cash could be cynical. When the protest poets first howled, or artists staged happenings, there was just a fragment of a flicker of a hope that it might change something. This innocence extends even to the mistakes – the belief that drugs can make urban life more benign, rather than dirtier and more dangerous; or that tower-blocks would bring a bright, airy future to the urban working classes. And it extends to that desperate search for alternatives, other ways of living. These included anarchist utopias, Jungian analysis, Eastern religion, radical feminism, all tumbling one after another with the speed of changes in musical fashion. This ‘counter-culture’ was discredited and left behind. It survives as fragmented sub-cultures only. But the push back against the great force of the shopping age was, like so much else in these years, vigorous and gripping. No new ideas have come since.
At the time, of course, the sixties were a minority sport. The King’s Road and the Royal Court were as foreign to most Britons in 1965 as the King and Royal Court had been in 1765. The majority who lived through the decade have personal memories of rather conventional suburban and provincial lives. Though city centres were being torn up and new housing replacing old, from Manchester’s dreadful Hulme estate to the government-award-winning Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, most working-class people were living in old-fashioned housing, brick terraced houses in the English industrial cities, tenements in Glasgow or Dundee. There were brighter coloured new cars on the roads, but much of the traffic was still the boxy black, cream or toffee-coloured traffic of the fifties. People did have money in their pockets but it was still being spent on holidays at Butlin’s and the seaside rather than on decadent parties. The great working-class prosperity of the Midlands, based on the last fat years of manufacturing industry, was only just paying dividends in holidays in Spain. Wilson might be promising the white-hot heat of technological revolution, but British factories were the sprawling, dirty, assembly-line centres of class conflict they had been for decades. For children the authority figures of the wartime era, the formally dressed fathers, teachers with short haircuts and shorter tempers, remained all too visible. Schools still used corporal punishment. Mothers tended to cook and clean at home. The Britain which proudly displayed volumes of Churchill’s war memoirs on bookshelves, and stood up in cinemas for the national anthem, did not disappear when Ringo Starr grew his first luxuriant moustache.
So in one way the story of ‘the sixties’, in inverted commas, is elitist. A relatively small number of musicians, entrepreneurs, writers, designers and others created what the rest now study and talk about. If you weren’t listening in the Cavern Club in the early days, or at the Isle of Wight when Dylan went electric, if you never dodged the police horses at Grosvenor Square, or heard Adrian Mitchell and Allen Ginsberg in the Albert Hall, or sashayed out of Bazaar with a bright bag of swirly-patterned clothes . . . then sorry, Babe, you missed it, and you missed it for ever. Most of us did miss it – too young, too old, too living-in-the-wrong place. But then most people missed the Wild West and the French Revolution, and the rest of the events that come with capital letters.
Yet apart from its small number of players the new culture was far from elitist: it was shaped by working-class and lower-middle-class people who had never enjoyed this level of cultural power before. The northern cities of England, Liverpool above all but also Newcastle and Manchester, were sending their sons and daughters south to conquer, even if it was only on radio and television shows. It is hard to recall now, but the Beatles’ voices, and the Geordie accents of the Animals, sounded almost shocking to the metropolitan and Home Counties listeners of the mid-sixties. The children of lorry drivers and dock workers, cleaners and shop assistants, found themselves being lionized in expensive new nightclubs and standing in line to be introduced to the Queen.
This combination of racing consumerism and pop democracy matters as much as the old debate about the sixties – whether this was a time of liberation and hope, or the devil’s decade when respect for authority collapsed. The consumer market as we live it now requires constant surface change, throwing out the almost-new in favour of the newer-still. At a deep level, it needs to be shallow. It also requires almost everyone to be part of it. It both trivializes and democratizes: look around. Compared to that the political significance of pop and the youth rebellion of the sixties was insignificant. The years of insolence destroyed much about traditional Britain but not in order to usher in some kind of anarcho-socialist paradise full of hairy people in boiler suits dropping acid, indulging in free love and cultivating allotments. No, that older Britain with its military traditions, its thousands of slow industrial and village backwaters, its racism, its clear divisions of class and geography, was being pushed aside so that our current democracy of shopping and celebrity could nose its way smoothly in. The people would not liberate themselves with class war, but with price war, not hippy communes but Happy Eaters. Even the old fixed patterns of male and femaleness could get in the way of a self-pleasuring economy. Androgynous fashion, long hair, the Pill, a new interest in the inner psychological life – an unabashed soppiness, if you will – really marks the sixties. It was when Britain went girlie. And what do girls do? Girls shop.
Equal rights and feminism were only touching the surface. There was still a long road to travel. Too many wry memoirs recount the gross sexism of the new rock stars, the innocence of their ‘chicks’ and the hypocrisy of male student revolutionaries. The Pill might be on the way, and the Abortion Act would become law in 1967 but this is still a time of pregnant girls and knitting needles, the public shame of unmarried mothers, and gross domestic violence administered by drunken men. Equal pay was a long way away; many workplaces, from newspaper offices to engineering works, solicitors’ practices to bus depots, were utterly unwelcoming to women wanting work. From the early to middle sixties, egalitarianism was not a real social change but – as often happens at times of change – a philosophical one first. The shift was in what it might mean to be properly human. The old virtues of stoicism, buttoned lips and obedience were retreating. Traditions of submission and obedience, hierarchies of class inherited from medieval landowning, industrial capital and imperial administration, began to wobble and dissolve into something very different, a society which was dilute, porous and mushily self-forgiving. This took place not because bad people corrupted good people or, if you are ‘pro-sixties’, because noble revolutionaries ushered in an age of personal freedom, but because it suited a new economic system.
Biba, an iconic symbol, promised liberation for women and girls, but liberation through spending. Its founder Barbara Hulanicki was a girl from an exiled Polish family, born in Warsaw before the war, brought up in British-controlled Palestine until her father, a UN negotiator, was murdered by Zionist terrorists. She too was a kind of outsider, later raised under the influence of a bohemian aunt in Brighton, before the inevitable stint at art school, then the launch of a cheap mail order clothing company with her husband. Biba, named after a younger sister, brought together the new obsessions of glamour and cheap prices. Hulanicki had been mesmerized by Audrey Hepburn (‘her shape; long neck, small head, practically jointless’) and her first top-selling design was a pink gingham dress like one worn by Brigitte Bardot at her wedding.
Her succession of boutiques were dark, chaotic spaces in which customers could lose themselves, pick up and try on, discard and collect, and sometimes steal, a great gush of new designs which seemed to change every week. The clothes were being run up at speed in the East End and ferried over to the boutique several times a week. Turnover was spectacular and soon the celebrities would be fighting with the off-duty typists and schoolgirls for Biba designs – Mia Farrow, Yoko Ono, Princess Anne, Raquel Welch and even Bardot herself. As one admirer of the Biba experience said, it ‘was helping to create the concept of shopping as an experience, a leisure activity for the young’.13 The jazz singer, writer and professional flamboyant George Melly called it a democratic version of Mary Quant and Hulanicki herself said: ‘I always wanted to get prices down, down, down, to the bare minimum.’ The cheapness and disposability of the clothes was shocking to an older Britain in which millions of families made their own clothes, buying patterns from Woolworths and sewing them up by hand or with a machine, and knitting sturdy school jerseys or woollen dresses.
This was the beginning of the buy-and-throw-away consumer culture applied to clothing, and though it would brim with moral dilemmas later, in the sixties it seemed simple freedom for millions of women. This was underscored by the Biba look, that Audrey Hepburn gawkiness. These were clothes for girls without much in the way of breasts, girls who were not defined by motherhood and marriage, the girls who would soon be on the Pill, career girls about town, girls who felt free in ways revolutionary French philosophers would never quite understand. Biba would be destroyed by the inflation of Edward Heath’s Britain and by over-ambitious expansion into a giant department store selling everything from meals to Biba-branded baked beans – the greed and cynicism of its new owners, who thought it could be just another big shop. So, poor Biba: misunderstood by the left, as we will see, and by big business too.
A History of British Pop
By the beginning of the sixties all the essential ingredients of an urgent new market were in place. The commodity was music. Most histories of golden-age sixties rock groups follow a familiar pattern. There are the opening pages in which the kids discover Chuck Berry and Elvis thanks to the unreliable but glamorous Radio Luxembourg, the commercial station broadcasting to the UK from 7 p.m. onwards by the early fifties. (Its famous 208 signal concealed a strange history: the station had been built by French entrepreneurs, taken over as an organ of Nazi propaganda during the war, passed to the US forces and finally revived, funded by Ovaltine and football betting adverts, the only known contribution of the Grand Duchy to modern British culture.) These early revelations of American rock and pop will quickly be followed by one or more of the future stars suggesting to a friend that they form a skiffle group. Skiffle, credited to a jazz session musician and son of a Glaswegian violinist called Lonnie Donegan, used simple chords and home-made instruments like washboards to produce a brisk, jaunty, jazz-meets-country blues sound, unaffected and often humorous. Unlike jazz you did not have to be much of a musician to play skiffle – as John Lennon and ten thousand others found. Twenty years later, punk fanzines would print the finger positions for three basic chords and urge their readers to go out and form a band. This was precisely the lesson of skiffle. Lonnie Donegan’s hits would be faithfully copied in bedrooms and school halls round the country and, singing in a cod American accent, he would become the first British star to make the US hit parade.
Next in this composite history two seminal places would appear. One would be the coffee bar. Whether the El Toro in Muswell Hill or Liverpool’s famous Kardomah, or a thousand in between, coffee bars had become vital hang-out places for young people. Often opened by Italian immigrants, they offered a rare space where music could be listened to, away from family-crowded homes or unwelcoming adult pubs. They hosted the first juke-boxes and sometimes live music. The second place to feature was more important still, the art college. In the fifties art schools played a much more important role than simply producing the next generation of designers or sculptors. Many of them were Victorian or Edwardian institutions connected to local technical colleges and originally meant to provide the craftsmen who would help sustain a town’s clothing, ceramic, printing or other businesses. Before the arrival of mass university education, therefore, which would not really change things until the seventies, art schools were where bright and imaginative teenagers who failed to conform to the academic disciplines tended to end up.
John Lennon at Liverpool Art College, Ray Davies at Hornsey, Peter Townsend at Ealing, Ian Dury at Walthamstow, Keith Richards at Sidcup, Cat Stevens, the core of Pink Floyd and Roxy Music were just a few of thousands. The coffee bars were essential meeting places but the art schools were the true factories of popular culture. Art students had long been a recognized and much-mocked subsection of national life, in turtle-necked jumpers and CND badges. Such colleges had become vital rallying places and support systems for talented outsiders, relatively few of whom would end up as conventional artists. The great pop art pioneer Peter Blake, a Dartford electrician’s son, had begun to create paintings and sculptures out of the wrestlers, popular magazines, pin-ups and music stars around him. Supplementing his income by teaching in three London art colleges, Blake had a huge influence on younger people and was in advance of American pop artists like Andy Warhol. In 1961 he encouraged the young Ian Dury to start depicting what interested him – ‘tits and bums, gangsters, Teddy boys, Jayne Mansfield and Marlon Brando’ – but Dury was one of many, reaching out hungrily for a brighter, younger culture. Across the country, student designers found themselves working next door to would-be painters, graphic artists and film-makers, so ideas quickly hopped across. The characteristic Bridget Riley op-art lines of sixties dresses and shop windows had been stolen by students from the artists they mingled with; the RAF-style roundels and bold black arrows which appeared on the clothes of bands such as the Who, and became part of the Mods’ insignia, had been swiped from graphic designers and pop painters. The way the sixties and seventies looked came out of the fusion that happened in Britain’s municipal applied design institutions, places not quite paralleled in America or continental Europe.
This hunger for novelty and readiness to mingle disciplines became a big force in British music, too. For the art schools had early on been bastions of folk and jazz. Why would they not be? Here were gathered thousands of bright middle-class and working-class teenagers looking for fun and hoping not to be sucked into factory design shops or office jobs. By the later fifties, the art students would be listening to skiffle, R&B and the first generation of safely packaged, toothsome and relatively unthreatening British Elvis copies. First there would be grinning Tommy Steele, then Harry Webb the Hertfordshire pub singer, reincarnated as the eyeliner-wearing Cliff Richard, then the former tug-boat hand Billy Fury. A few years on, and future members of the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and the Who were imbibing radical ideas and new looks, as clearly the product of art school as any watercolour or well-thrown pot. Ian Dury and his friends got into trouble for using their paint brushes as drum-sticks, sending off a rumble through the rest of the building. That works as a metaphor too. The ultimate art school bands would come later still. Roxy Music, led by Brian Eno of Winchester art college and Bryan Ferry, the coalminer’s son who had been taught at Newcastle Art College by the original British pop artist Richard Hamilton, pioneered a decadent, clever-clever, intellectually sharp music loved by British audiences in the early seventies. Pink Floyd, the greatest of the concept album bands, is unimaginable without the art school background.
So, let us continue the composite pop star life story. You have been corrupted by Radio Luxembourg, learned to play in a skiffle band, hung around at coffee bars and had your imagination jemmied open in a provincial art school. What happens next? In a word, management. In the early sixties an unlikely sounding name and a pretty-boy face meant you had probably been discovered by ‘flash Larry’, or Larry Parnes, first of the Svengalis. The Svengalis feature early and often. Suddenly there is money to be made from tousled-headed boys.
Before pop the dominant popular musical styles produced low profits. Most public music was live – the piano and banjo players on music-hall stages, the star singers and then eventually the big bands of the dancehalls and the smoky subculture of jazz. Sheet-music made big money for talented composers like Ivor Novello and stage stars like Harry Lauder. Gramophone record sales had kicked off with recordings of early twentieth-century opera stars but the invention of the modern microphone in the twenties had then changed popular singing, allowing intimacy and variety of a new kind. So the recording industry had brought Gilbert and Sullivan, Louis Armstrong, the Ink Spots, Flanders and Swann, Vera Lynn, the crooners and many West End musicals, to millions of homes long before pop. By the end of the fifties there were four major British recording companies: EMI, Decca, Pye and Philips. Most of their profits came from classical music or comic recordings. Only since the spread of seven-inch 45s had records really been something teenagers could aspire to buying. Though first produced in the US as early as 1948, for working-class British youngsters they were still formidably expensive by the late fifties.
The other essential technological changes arrived at around the same time. First, loud electric guitars, invented by radio repair man Leo Fender in 1948, swiftly followed by his great rival Les Paul. Then transistor radios, originally invented in the mid-fifties to help Americans keep in touch after the coming nuclear war with Russia, and becoming popular for other purposes at the end of the decade. Without the mike, the electric guitar and the seven-inch record, rock and pop would not have happened. Without the radio, the vital cross-current influences would have been unheard. Everything conspired towards the moment. The post-war economic boom was putting money in the pockets of teenagers and young workers. The baby boom had increased their numbers. Better nutrition meant they tended to mature sexually earlier. And the mechanisms for the mass marketing of pop were already in place. Radio Luxembourg had broadcast its first Top of the Pops show in 1952. Within a few years television would follow – Rediffusion’s Ready, Steady, Go, a crucial show in the story of British pop – then the BBC’s Top of the Pops.
The earlier generation of American rock and blues pioneers had turned music into short, addictive bites lasting only a few minutes to be purchased anew every week or so. The radio, TV and magazine publicity machine was up and going. The equipment was in every second home, radios and record players turned out by England’s then-booming electronics industry. And ‘the workers’, all those teenagers with stars in their eyes, desperately strumming away at cheap guitars and handwriting lyrics and chords from the radio, were just waiting to be picked up in every major city in the land. Thus, in this fictional sixties success story, the Svengali duly arrives at the back of the coffee bar basement or the private club with a contract, bought from W. H. Smith in one hand and a flash Parker pen in the other; and a decade of argument about who is ripping off whom, is about to begin. Like Parnes and the most famous of all, Brian Epstein, who managed the Beatles, the agents and middle-men were often edgy outsiders too – both those men were gay when homosexuality was illegal, and Jewish, when anti-Semitism was rife.
And so the typical pop band history will roll predictably on – the early dodgy names for the band; the cover songs; the year or two of bouncing around the narrow roads of pre-motorway Britain in hired coaches between gigs at Butlin’s camps and provincial theatres; the first chart hit and the first invitation to Rediffusion’s headquarters to be filmed for television; the first Bentley and the first joint; the growing tension between the guitar heroes and the drummer, who never really fitted in, the purchase of a grand house in the Home Counties, the tragic early death of a band member, by overdose, car crash or drowning; and then eventually the split followed by the comeback.
Though the stories of British rock and pop bands follow a predictable trajectory, the stories of the earlier bands are more interesting simply because the story had not occurred before. It was freshly extraordinary, that fairy-tale rocket whoosh from backstreet poverty to international fame and huge wealth; so too was the darker tale of abuse and betrayal which almost always followed. Though pop was a business it was also a story about class and morality: almost every band history will describe the tension between the marketing of the music and the attempt by the band to stay in some way authentic or true to themselves. Many of course never tried to be authentic in the first place but the important ones did and it wasn’t always easy. The Kinks, four north London boys who affected a camp look and played rough, hard pop, were put into the most extraordinary confections of pink hunting jackets, ruffs and thigh-high suede boots to attract attention. Long before the New York Dolls or Velvet Underground, their gender-bending pose was also something the straighter American market found very hard to accept. The most famous band of all were bullied and cajoled by Epstein into ditching the rough jeans and leather Luftwaffe jackets image they had learned in Hamburg. To get their first recording contract, the Beatles were told to stop smoking on-stage, stop swearing, turning up late, and making spontaneous decisions about which songs they would play at their gigs. Oh yes, and they had to learn to bow smartly, all together, at the audience after every song.14 They agreed. It would only be later that their success gave them the freedom to tell their managers and advisers where to go.
The degree of control needed to make a band exciting but not too exciting would become one of the most amusing dilemmas in modern management. The harnessing of youth spirit for maximum commercial return proved as tricky and unstable as the early days of harnessing nuclear fission – though it was finally achieved by the eighties, when the death of punk allowed entirely commercial and packaged pop unquestioned dominance. In the early days it was not always quite as obvious that money would always trump vitality. There were still battles to be had. The Who was a west London band which had, like so many others, emerged from skiffle and been kick-started by the success of the Beatles. They were encouraged by their manager, Peter Meadon, to dress stylishly and address themselves to the new audience of Mods. But their violence and guitar-smashing, while delighting their live audience, kept them away from mainstream venues for ages. Throughout a stellar career during which they gave the Beatles a run for their money in the concept-album stakes, the Who were never properly tamed. Nor were the Kinks, whose song-writing genius Ray Davies became involved in a punch-up with an American television union official who had called the band a ‘bunch of commie wimps’, and managed to get them banned from the States for four crucial years. One band’s roughness and ire would provoke the next to go further.
Apart from keeping physical control of the new market, the big battle line was over the subject of the songs, which quickly moved beyond the easy boy-meets-girl and black American rip-offs of the early years. Rock was about escape, mainly from the urban and suburban Britain of its young consumers. For most, the teenage years would end in a conventional working life and marriage, which was more popular than ever in the sixties, with marriage rates peaking in 1972. But drugs, mysticism, gangs and sexual experimentation were some of the alternatives celebrated by pop culture, to the discomfiture of the record companies, the BBC, politicians and the newspapers. Some bands adopted a provocatively camp look, wore make-up and baited the short-haired traditional male. Songs such as ‘Lola’ and the Who’s ‘I’m a Boy’ discussed transvestites; there was a lolling libertinism in the Rolling Stones’ music which shocked watching parents.
Above all, the rate of experimentation and change in sixties pop itself was simply astonishing. A new sound, line-up of instruments, length of song and image seemed to come along every few months, and in 1966–8 every few weeks. It was a classic capitalist market-driven competition, with profits and status dependent on beating the rest, measured by sales, week after week. Among the great experimenters were Paul McCartney, who was feeding back discoveries about tape loops, modern composers and Bach into the music of the Beatles. As they became the ultimate über-group they however found the screaming at their concerts so loud that even they couldn’t hear the music and retreated more and more to work in the studio, which in turn produced longer, more complicated and reflective sounds. On it would go. The Stones’ blues-rock would challenge Merseybeat pop, the Mods would hit back, early versions of guitar-rock heavy metal suddenly appeared. The amphetamine-fuelled fast and short singles would give way to LSD-inspired albums with looping, hypnotic rhythms and surrealist covers. Acoustic protest songs were plugged in and went electric.
Hairstyles went from slicked to floppy to long to shaved, moustaches flowered and withered, huge mountain-man beards sprouted from the unlikeliest chins. Always the Beatles were pioneers, the first big stars to fall for Indian mysticism, sitars or the next drug craze and ultimately the first to find the pressures intolerable and to break up. The trajectory seemed impossible to beat. A band’s success was based on its members’ skills but also on their authentic claim to be kids from the streets whose anger, enthusiasm, boredom and wit reflected the actual Britain all round them, the lives of the people who would save up and buy their songs. Pop was music from below or it was nothing. Yet the successful musicians would be cut off from the world they came from by the money and the security needed to keep fans at bay until they were fated to sound introspective and irrelevant. Ultimately life in the bubble would prove airless and the music, or the band, would choke to death.
Flash, Snip, Smile: the Making of Celebrity
The contemporary cult of celebrity was born in the sixties too. All developed societies lavish attention on a small number of favoured people, rich, beautiful or talented. In eighteenth-century Europe it might be duchesses and court composers, in classical Rome orators and gladiators, in nineteenth-century Japan, warriors and courtesans. Details of their clothing, personal lives, foibles, family successes and disasters are gossiped about and vicariously enjoyed. They form a fantasy extended family, prettier and wickeder and more brightly coloured than the rest of us. What has changed in recent decades is the scale of celebrity devotion, this cargo cult of modern Britain. It has elbowed aside rival forms in television entertainment, invaded and occupied popular newspapers and produced racks of magazines breathlessly following the face-lifts, marital break-ups, boob jobs and births of celebs. All of this originated in the mid-sixties. The cloying, ingratiating tone of contemporary magazines such as Hello! and OK! when interviewing or describing some frozen-faced doll can be found in the write-ups of the young set in British newspapers, supplements and the arch glossies of the sixties. The origins of ‘Big Brother’ television exhibitionism are buried in game shows and agony aunt columns half a century old. The raising of footballers and musicians from being tradesmen-servants of the public to misbehaving gods began then too.
Celebrities are often mocked for being talentless. Some are, some are not. A tribute paid to the young and beautiful by the rest of us, the circle of celebrity is paradoxically both very small and very open. From the outside the celebrity world seems to be a closed, charmed place, a marquee guarded by men with shaved heads and sunglasses inside which rock stars and footballers, actresses and princesses, all magically turn out to know one another. Yet what the sixties discovered was that celebrity must be open too in the sense of letting in new people from the streets, or it congeals into a resented elite. Modern celebrity has no time for a Samurai class or for haughty duchesses – it must be a fantasy island we could all paddle our way to, at least in theory. Cultural democracy rules, even while parliamentary democracy struggles.
What was called Swinging London, or the Scene, was simply a small number of restaurants, shops and clubs where a small number of people were repeatedly photographed and written about. In Chelsea, Biba, Granny Takes a Trip, Bazaar and Hung on You were honeypots for the fashionable. In the evening it might be Annabel’s or Showboat or Talk of the Town. When in 1969 the Private Eye journalist Christopher Booker published his drily hostile look back at the decade, The Neophiliacs, he found that by the summer of 1965 there were a mere twenty or so people who seemed to be at the heart of Swinging London. They included the Beatles and Mick Jagger (the other Stones had not yet quite cut through), the model Jean Shrimpton, the designer Mary Quant, the painter David Hockney, the actors Michael Caine and Terence Stamp, the photographers Lord Snowdon, David Bailey and Terence Donovan, the cartoonist and editor of the Sunday Times colour magazine Mark Boxer and the interior decorator David Hicks.
All these ‘New Aristocrats’, Booker pointed out, were in some way concerned with the creation of images. This list, though it would lose and gain constantly at the edges, had some validity. Bailey himself would pump the publicity machine with his ‘Box of Pin Ups’ designed by Boxer. Booker takes up the story:
The list, which was virtually a Debrett guide to the New Aristocracy and their circle included: 2 actors, 8 pop singers, 1 pop artist, 1 interior decorator, 4 photographer/designers, 1 ballet dancer, 3 models, 1 film producer, 1 dress designer, 1 discotheque manager, 1 creative advertising man, 1 ‘pop singer’s friend’ and the Kray brothers from the East End who could only be described as ‘connected with the underworld’.
The contours of all this had been sketchily apparent a few years earlier, in the Profumo affair. Old money, big business, the traditional arts and politics were edging out of the spotlight, now only to be seen at the side of the stage. Instead working-class upstarts were arriving and stealing the show. Among the photographers, Bailey was an East Ham tailor’s son, Donovan a lorry driver’s son, also from the East End of London – indeed, the East End did very well with photography because it also produced Terry O’Neill who made iconic images of Shrimpton, Stamp and the Beatles, and the key British war photographer of the sixties and seventies, Don McCullin. Michael Caine was a Billingsgate fish porter’s son, Stamp the son of a tug-boat captain. The female pioneer aristocrats included that Polish asylum-seeker’s child, Barbara Hulanicki; Lesley Hornby of Neasden, better known as Twiggy who was the daughter of a carpenter and a Woolworths shop assistant, and Priscilla White, better known as Cilla Black, from one of the rougher ends of Liverpool.
Few of these people would have made it in the London of the fifties, forties or thirties. The same goes for the Beatles, Kinks, and innumerable others. (Jagger would have made it anywhere, any time, as a successful businessman.) The intertwining of Booker’s ‘New Aristocrats’ was as sticky and sinuous as the old Tory cliques of the fifties or New Labour’s Whitehall in the nineties. A few were there entirely because of their looks, such as Jean Shrimpton, the supermodel waif (the word ‘supermodel’ was, inevitably, first used in 1968). But the important thing was the great sucking-in of working-class talent, a transfusion that the old Britain badly needed. The incomers were fascinated by images and they were colonizing the new media opportunities – music, fashion, colour magazines, hairdressing, radio, television, advertising – that were not the property of the City and old money.
There was a DIY spirit that has not been recovered since. Quant had been cutting up lengths of cloth bought over the counter and selling them at Bazaar since the mid-fifties. Her iconoclasm matched and outpaced a Pete Townshend or Keith Moon, as she drew, sliced and sewed up a uniform that mocked the pleated, padded extravagances of the Old New Look designers. Taking on the fashion industry of Paris and the West End from a bedsit and a tiny shop was at least as bold as taking on American rock from a Liverpool basement. Quant’s shockingly short mini-skirts (named after the car, which she loved) were offensive enough for her window to be rapped by umbrella-toting male protesters and even the occasional brick to be lobbed. She always maintained she was trying to free women to be able to run for a bus, and to show off the beautifully fit, skinny bodies that post-war rationing had given young womanhood. But the sexual allure was what shocked. Michael Caine later recalled taking his mother down the Kings Road to see what all the fuss was about: ‘I said, here’s one now, and this girl walks by with a mini up to here. She goes by and my mother looked at her. So, we walk on a bit. She never said a word. So I said, what do you think, mum? She said: If it’s not for sale, you shouldn’t put it in the window.’15
Butterflies and Other Insects
If modern Britain found her soundtrack and her cargo cult in the sixties, she found her special vices too. In February 1967 Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were arrested at the latter’s Sussex manor house Redlands during a raid by police which uncovered amphetamines and dope. Richards and Jagger received jail sentences and heavy fines, though ended up serving no more than two days behind bars in Brixton before their appeals. The whole thing had been orchestrated by the News of the World and set off a heated national debate, with The Times leading the way to protest about the excessive sentencing. In a famous editorial, ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly Upon a Wheel?’ its editor William Rees-Mogg questioned the severity of the sentence, calling it ‘as mild a drug case as can ever have been brought before the courts’. A month later, The Times carried a full-page advert which declared the law against marijuana ‘immoral in principle and unworkable in practice’. The sixty-five signatories included medical experts, Nobel laureate scientists, some politicians, the novelist Graham Greene and the Beatles. By then the Beatles had been introduced to cannabis by Bob Dylan, and Paul McCartney was about to cause a further furore by admitting to taking LSD as well.
The purpose of the drugs had changed in the few years since the Beatles and others hit Hamburg. Once they had been used to keep performers awake, and then to calm them down after exhausting days or nights on the road. By the mid-sixties the agenda was rather more ambitious. LSD was a truth-bringer, allegedly opening minds to higher planes and brighter-coloured realities. This delusion was imported from the West Coast of America, though British writers had praised lysergic acid long before. Jeff Nuttall, a counter-culture writer of the time, declared that it was being launched as ‘something other than mere pleasure, as a ready window on the Zen eternal, as a short cut back to the organic life, religion and wonderment’.
Neither the raptures of the counter-culture and the druggy atmospherics of Beatles music during the years when they reinvented pop, nor even campaigners, not much different from those who had successfully backed the Jenkins reforms, would manage to shift the State’s hostility to such substances. Sex might be packaged and marketed and so might rock, but drugs were something else, the pleasure that would remain forbidden. Rock certainly helped extend the drugs culture. Heroin, the most dangerous example, spread steadily from a small and wealthy entertainment elite, through middle-class would-be rebels, until it finally emerged with gangs, dealers and all the paraphernalia of misery on council estates. In 1953 there were 290 known heroin addicts in Britain and by 1968 there were 2,780. These numbers are bound to be far below the true figure. On the same basis, the figure by the turn of the century was 25,000. Cannabis, a less dangerous and far more widely tolerated drug, was little used in the fifties outside small sub-cultures but by the mid-sixties there were between 2,000 and 3,000 arrests a year. The figure for 2000 was 97,000. Finally, while in the sixties cocaine was little used by comparison with other drugs, an academic survey suggested that by the new century, some 46,000 people in London alone were using the particularly dangerous version, crack cocaine. The sixties introduced mass drug use to Britain as the musical and hippy enthusiasts promoted it as a social and personal good. The authorities decided to destroy the drug culture as a social evil. Both were confounded. Nobody became wiser or more interesting through using heroin, LSD or dope, and the battle against drug use has been entirely lost. The victims began with a steady stream of performers and hangers-on who died from overdoses or drugs-related accidents and, more important by far, are the hundreds of thousands of poorer, less talented children who followed them after having far less fun.
Home Grown?
No sensible person would try to draw a neat line between British pop and its origins in America. For everyone except the Americans, rock is an import and a transplant. Rock and Roll was black American slang for having sex. It derives from the Deep South, via rhythm and blues and eventually mated with the country music of rural white America – which in turn had come from the folk music of Ireland, England, Scotland and France. Accelerated, amplified and sexualized, when it arrived in Britain it was immediately denounced as alien, indecent, anarchic, corrupting ‘Negro’ music, thoroughly un-British. This was not just the view of the occasional retired squadron leader sitting in his Kent garden. The hugely popular music magazine Melody Maker described rock as ‘one of the most terrifying things to have happened to popular music . . . The Rock-and-Roll technique, instrumentally and vocally, is the antithesis of all that jazz has been striving for over the years – in other words, good taste and musical integrity.’16
Modern jazz fans and folk music purists would try to hold the line for years. Yet the diabolic Elvis and all his works, were too big, too mesmeric, to be resisted. Few of the first performers and bands in Britain wrote their own material. Donegan sang in an American voice; thousands of would-be pop stars did endless covers of Bo Diddley, Little Richard and Fats Domino. Again, it was the breakthrough lead given by Lennon and McCartney in singing their own material that persuaded scores of other bands to follow. Even today and after a lifetime of hits, there is little about the music of the Rolling Stones that feels particularly English; Dusty Springfield had one of the loveliest voices of the age, but if you didn’t know you could have been forgiven for thinking that she was a black babe from Motown not a Catholic girl from High Wycombe.
Yet the British Isles had traditions which would feed back into the American musical revolution and change it dramatically, both in sound and content. We have discussed the art schools already. But there was also the folk tradition which was being revived even though the pop and rock stars rarely had first-hand experience of it. John O’Leannain (as his name should properly be written) and Paul McCartney both came from musical Irish families but had been cut off from their heritage. Bands such as Fairport Convention, which began in North London in 1967, taking its name from the house where they practised, and Jethro Tull, founded by the Scottish and Blackpool flautist Ian Anderson in 1968, would incorporate some of the feel of British folk back into rock; others like the Ulsterman Van Morrison would cross the lines repeatedly.
A stronger influence still was the music hall, or variety tradition, discussed earlier and the humorous or sentimental music played on pianos in the home. These can be heard in the brassy, knees-up sound of Beatles songs like ‘Strawberry Fields’ or through most of the Sergeant Pepper album, in which the stomp of the fairground and the wheezing of the circus organ are not far away. As Lennon and McCartney, who both lost their mothers early, put it, ‘Let’s all get up and dance to a song, That was a hit before your Mother was born.’ And beyond the Beatles, with their Liverpudlian nostalgia, a host of bands filled their lyrics with local references. To take just one example, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung of 1971 name-checks Preston railway station, Hampstead Heath and Piccadilly Circus, while their following album, Thick as a Brick, which was a huge hit in the US, not only addresses the mood of post-sixties despair – ‘the sandcastle virtues are all swept away in / the tidal destruction / the moral melee’ – but manages to ask ‘So where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?’
The most impressive and sustained attempt to create a distinctively British pop came from the Kinks and was at the time a huge flop. Banned from the US while others were breaking into American stardom, Ray Davies, a cussed observer of modern life, turned back to local subjects. He had always written pop songs about everything from the death of the dance-halls to the joys of the English autumn, but The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society of 1968 was on an entirely different scale. As Ray Davies put it himself: ‘While everybody else thought the hip thing to do was to drop acid, take as many drugs as possible and listen to music in a coma, the Kinks were singing songs about lost friends, draught beer, motorbike riders, wicked witches and flying cats.’17 He is not exaggerating. The title song calls for the preservation of, inter alia, Desperate Dan, strawberry jam, the George Cross, the ‘Sherlock Holmes English-speaking vernacular’, little shops, china cups, virginity, Tudor houses and antique tables, while attacking the new skyscrapers and office blocks. The album which sold in tiny numbers compared to the Beatles, worried and confused the critics who could not decide whether the Kinks were being serious or satirical. Today it is regarded as one of the great achievements of British pop in the sixties, a subtle mix of affection and derision, nostalgia and micky-taking, and no less essentially English for that. The Kinks were hugely influential not just on other bands of the time such as the Who, but on the later waves of ‘Britpop’. They showed that it was possible to write inspiring rock music about what was around you, without posturing as a New Yorker or Alabama boy, indeed without pretending to be (just a little bit) black.
Rock was an arena for dreamers or harmless humorists, the fun factory for weekend rebels whose stars were too busy buying country estates, Rolls-Royces and drugs to worry about the condition of the country. Little of it was political. As John Lennon told Rolling Stone magazine in 1971 when asked to assess the impact of the Beatles: ‘Nothing happened, except we all dressed up. The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything, it’s exactly the same.’ That feeling was shared by the counter-culture left who had been attending seminars and protest meetings about Vietnam, marching against capitalist stooges in the Labour Party and ranting about the need for revolution. Like the world of pop, it was essentially an American import. When counter-culture poets had put on an evening of readings at the Albert Hall in 1965, alongside the British contingent which included Adrian Mitchell and Christopher Logue, there were the New York and San Francisco gurus, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso. The poets were the most eloquent voices.
The American influence was, not surprisingly, strongest in the antiwar movement. When the Vietnam Solidarity Committee organized three demonstrations outside the US embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square, the second of them particularly violent, they were copying the cause and the tactics used to much greater effect in the United States. The student sit-ins and occupations at Hornsey and Guildford Art Colleges, and Warwick University, were pale imitations of the serious unrest on US and French campuses. There was even a (literally) pale imitation of the ultimate US underground movement, called rather pathetically the White Panthers. Their main revolutionary aim seemed to be free access to rock festivals, or what they called ‘the People’s music’. A two-week gathering to debate ‘the dialectics of liberation’ was organized at London’s Round House in 1967. The star speaker was the American Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael. The event finished with a speech of abject apology from one of the British organizers on behalf of ‘we deracinated white intellectuals, we who are bourgeois and colonizing in essence’. The conference’s intellectual guru was a Californian exile from Germany, Herbert Marcuse, whose central message was that the affluent society was oppressive, based on the creation of ‘false needs’ and impossible to change by conventional political revolution.
In the same year a French revolutionary named Guy Debord came to England with a call to arms. When he arrived at a Notting Hill flat to meet the promised group of twenty hardcore revolutionaries only three had turned up, and they spent the afternoon drinking cans of McEwan’s Export and watching Match of the Day.18 Not surprisingly, Debord gave up on the Anglo-Saxons. British revolutionaries in modern times have been so little real threat that they were easily and cheerfully incorporated into mainstream television comedy through the character of Citizen Smith of the Tooting Popular Front. Debord’s followers, however, taking the name ‘Les Enragés’, were heavily involved in the great Paris and Nanterre student uprisings of 1968. This was on a scale like nothing seen in Britain – nearly 600 students arrested in fights with the police on a single day and, at the high point of the revolt, 10m workers on strike across France. Hundreds of British students went over to join what they hoped would be a revolution, until de Gaulle, with the backing of an election victory, crushed it.
British alternative politics in print had no equivalents to the Beatles, the Who or the Kinks. The underground magazines such as International Times, Black Dwarf and Oz copied the rhetoric, art work and cartoon style of similar American publications and lacked the salty, surly working-class energy of rock. The greatest confrontation with the state focused on whether Rupert Bear, as manipulated by the pen of Vivian Berger, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy with a particularly lewd imagination, was behaving obscenely. The cartoon strip was central to the long summer trial in 1971 of the magazine Oz. At the Old Bailey, despite the best efforts of the publishers’ barrister John Mortimer, the priapic Rupert was judged to be behaving disgracefully. Richard Neville, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson ended up with suspended sentences. Immortally, the young Berger told the jury that though he wanted to shock ‘your generation . . . also, I thought it was funny.’19 A teddy bear with a stiffy: it rather sums up Britains answer to revolution.
The counter-culture would curdle and gurgle away for fairly obvious reasons. It had no practical agenda. It was deeply hostile to organization. It was largely middle class and had no effective links to the working-class socialists who wanted higher wages and perhaps even workers’ cooperatives, but were less keen on long-haired students taking drugs, or indeed angry black people. Those parts of the new politics which would stick, would be anti racism; feminism, to the extent that it focused on practical and realistic ideas, such as equal pay and refuges for battered wives; and the gay liberation movement, which also had clear objectives, and also looked to the United States for a lead, particularly after the Stonewall riot. But the great irony is that the counter-culture, disdainful of sell-out pop music, was far less successful than pop at creating an indigenous British movement. It was dependent on passing American fads and voices as, by the mid-sixties, British pop was not.
Rhodesia: Rebellion of the Whites
While the message of the sixties still lives, other stories can dominate the newspapers for months on end, even years, and then are apparently forgotten almost immediately. Perhaps they are too painful to dwell on. The story of Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence, or UDI, and of the short-lived Federation that preceded it, obsessed four prime ministers in a row, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson and Heath. It filled front pages, elbowing out other contemporary crises such as Vietnam that now bulk vastly bigger in world history. It caused deep divisions in both the main parties, with their leaders condemned as race traitors or betrayers of Africa, according to taste. It produced bizarre summits on Royal Navy warships, and dramatic confrontations at the United Nations. It pitched the young Queen Elizabeth into a constitutional fight over the hanging of three Africans. Its cast of characters, Garfield Todd, Roy Welensky, and Sir Humphrey Gibbs, forgotten now, as well as Ian Smith and Joshua Nkomo, were for a time household names. But little of this is recalled in the history of the sixties. It sits uneasily with the war protests and the fashion, the music and the tower blocks. And the final outcome of the Rhodesian crisis, a vicious guerrilla war followed by the rule of Robert Mugabe, one of the most incompetent megalomaniacs to hold power at the beginning of the twenty-first century, was genuinely tragic.
The tragedy can be traced back to the imperial idealism of High Victorian days. Cecil John Rhodes was a sickly clergyman’s son from Hertfordshire whose head was filled with notions of British world destiny and whose bank accounts were filled with the vast profits of prospecting in the South African goldrush. Using diplomacy, threats, bribes and great cunning, Rhodes created a company to take concessions in the heartland of Africa, far north of the British Cape Province, and the Boer republic of the Transvaal. It was an area then known as Zambesia, now the nations of Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi. In it lived various tribes, notably the warlike Matabele. Cecil Rhodes’s vision of a vast British territory running from the far south of Africa to the very north was never accomplished but the central area, soon known as Rhodesia after him, was carved into new settler states. Bizarrely, the British government never took direct control and allowed Rhodes’s company effective autonomy, backed always by the threat of British force from outside. The white settlers, mainly from Britain and South Africa, would first use farming and mining concessions and then take complete political control of these vast, fertile and mineral-rich areas. In the north, a full-blown British colony, Northern Rhodesia, would exploit the copper of the area and attempts were made to ensure decent treatment of the dispossessed local Africans. In Southern Rhodesia, however, whose capital Salisbury had been named after the then Conservative Prime Minister, the settlers established a system of relentless racial discrimination much like South Africa’s, with a colour bar in employment and a ban on blacks owning land in cities or anywhere of agricultural value.
Though South Africans of British origin, and many Rhodesians, had fought in the Second World War, the overt racialism of the white elite was both a threat and an embarrassment to London. South Africa would eventually leave the Commonwealth in 1961. Malan, like many Boers, had been pro-Nazi and was an anti-British republican; he is generally credited, if that is the word, as the inventor of full-blown apartheid. The Attlee and Churchill governments feared Rhodesia would soon go the same way. To try to bind the stiff-necked settlers into a more benign system, London offered the lure of federation with Northern Rhodesia and what was then called Nyasaland. The latter two colonies were ruled from London, and had less aggressive polices towards native Africans. But Northern Rhodesia had the vast wealth of the copper mines so federation would give the whites of Salisbury access to an economic boom. In essence the deal, worked out by a brilliant Colonial Office civil servant, Andrew Cohen, was that in return for accepting a less ‘South African’ attitude to the black majority, the white settlers of Southern Rhodesia would be able to become far richer than they could from farming alone. In 1953, after intense haggling and bargaining about voting systems and land rights which depressed, then angered the few black representatives involved, a new country not much smaller than Canada was duly created: the Central African Federation.
To start with, things went relatively well. Embassies opened in Salisbury, tower blocks went up, international companies moved in. The government of Southern Rhodesia (later simply called Rhodesia, today Zimbabwe) fell under the control of a moderately liberal Christian mission school headteacher, Garfield Todd. For four years he nudged and tickled the white settlers towards a fairer system, enough to gain the cautious trust of the leaders of the twelve-to-one black African majority. Could it be that a liberal alternative to South Africa was being built on the continent? The leadership of the full Federation was taken by a railwayman, part-time boxer and anti-Communist union boss called Roy Welensky, the thirteenth child of a Polish Jew and a Boer mother who called himself ‘50 per cent Jewish, 50 per cent Polish and 100 per cent British’.20 He was a much rougher character. The contradictions between British Colonial Office hopes for a steady transition to democracy, the profound racialism of the whites of Salisbury, and the increasing restlessness of black people who saw other parts of the continent breaking from the Empire could not be contained for ever. Eventually the well-meaning Garfield Todd was ousted for refusing to back laws banning sex between blacks and whites, and for campaigning for a wider franchise.
The spark that blew the huge Federation to pieces came in the least expected place. Nyasaland, now Malawi, was a comparatively undeveloped area, with strong connections to Scotland through missionaries, dating back to the days of David Livingstone. There were very few whites living there. What its people did have was an independence leader of rare shrewdness and international savvy. Hastings Banda was a poor village boy encouraged by missionaries, who managed to get himself educated in South Africa, then the United States, where he got a politics degree at Chicago and became a doctor of medicine in Tennessee. He then got a medical diploma at Edinburgh, became an elder of the Church of Scotland, and practised as a doctor in Liverpool and London. He moved to newly independent Ghana and then, in 1958, he returned home in triumph to Nyasaland. Banda was a Christian, pro-British, anti-communist and uninterested in military rebellion. He was, in short, a difficult man to caricature as a rebellious extremist.
Yet, in a series of brilliant speeches and deploying the menace of vast, angry crowds, he persuaded Welensky that he was enough of a threat for force to be used. South Rhodesian troops were sent to the area and though the Conservative government tried to impose a news blackout, Scottish missionaries smuggled back news to the Scotsman in Edinburgh, causing protests around the world. Banda was imprisoned, as he had hoped he would be, but after wild accusations that he was choreographing a huge murder-plot against whites were proved to be nonsense, he was eventually released at London’s insistence. Nyasaland became independent and the Federation soon collapsed. Northern Rhodesia was helped to independence by the Conservative Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod, a genuine liberal who did a deal behind Welensky’s back with the man who would go on to lead independent Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda. Macleod was seen by many as the next Tory leader but this double-dealing, in a virtuous cause, led to him being attacked by the Tory grandee Lord Salisbury (grandson of the man after whom the country’s capital was then named) as an unscrupulous bridge-playing twister, ‘too clever by half’. The accusation of cleverness was of course fatal in the Conservative Party of the early sixties and Macleod’s career never recovered.
This left Southern Rhodesia, with its 220,000 whites and 2.5m blacks, standing almost alone. The settlers wanted independence inside the Commonwealth, on the basis of a constitution that excluded the black African majority from any shred of power. Had this been accepted by London, the anger among other Commonwealth states would have been enough to cause mass resignations and, quite possibly, the end of the organization. It was not simply a matter of keeping the Queen happy, or of retaining the last vestige of Britain’s formal imperial power-system. Public opinion by the early sixties was strongly hostile to the idea of apartheid being mimicked in a Commonwealth state. So there was an impasse. And to make it more impassive still, the laconic, difficult and wily figure of Ian Smith arrived on the scene as the new Prime Minister in Salisbury. Smith was a right-wing rancher, educated in South Africa, who had served in the RAF during the war and was idolized by his supporters. The old guard, led by Welensky, realized that simply declaring independence from Britain, and setting up a whites-only state, might be tricky. Rhodesia’s judges and soldiers had sworn allegiance to the Queen; Rhodesia’s finances and much of her trade flowed through the City of London.
Smith had no such qualms. He was quite prepared for UDI – a unilateral declaration of independence. This was hardly a re-run of the North American rebellion of 1776, but there were uncomfortable parallels. If, in the end, they were ready to go, what was Britain going to do about it? There was at least the option of sending an army and fighting – though in the American case, this had not worked out wholly successfully. But Rhodesia was thousands of miles beyond the reach of the Royal Navy and, in any case, this was a rebellion by whites who professed to be the front line against Marxist insurrection, many of them veterans of the British wartime forces. Would an attack on ‘kith and kin’ really be acceptable to British voters? Would its threat be taken seriously in Salisbury? On the other hand, would Rhodesian troops who had declared their personal loyalty to the Crown, fire back against British paratroopers if they landed?
This was the dilemma that Harold Wilson inherited when he took office in 1964. Pro-Rhodesian right-wingers had made things very difficult for Macleod and Macmillan as the Tories struggled to grapple with the break-up of the Federation. Now vehemently anti-colonialist left-wingers would make things almost as difficult for a Labour Prime Minister. Wilson began by warning Rhodesia of the serious economic consequences of UDI and by setting out conditions for British acceptance of an independent state, including unimpeded progress towards majority rule, the end of racial discrimination and no oppression of the majority by the minority – none of which was acceptable to Smith and his followers. Meetings in London did not help. Wilson then went on a disastrous trip to Salisbury. While there, he insisted on seeing the imprisoned African leaders, Nkomo and Sithole, and exploded with anger when they were ushered in to him thirsty and hungry. Only after Wilson threatened to lead his own staff into the shops to buy them something, did the Rhodesians offer water and food. Later, he endured rudeness and mockery from Smith’s ministers. Fatally, however, Wilson made clear that he would not use force under any circumstances, confirming in a broadcast that if anyone was expecting ‘a thunderbolt in the shape of the Royal Air Force, let me say that this thunderbolt will not be coming’. It was a mistake. Smith had been seriously worried by the prospect of Britain using force and believed Rhodesia would be unable even to try to resist. Perhaps Wilson was worried about the effect on the pound, or perhaps he was too mindful of the humiliation of Suez. At any rate, after Wilson’s admission, Smith realized he had nothing to fear (sanctions never worried him) and briskly went ahead in November 1965 to declare the country independent.
From then on the policy of trying to squeeze Rhodesia into submission with oil and other sanctions was tried, even though few in Whitehall thought it had a chance of working. There were too many ways in and out of the country, and too many middlemen prepared to trade. Rhodesia developed her own consumer industries and sold her tobacco and other farm produce via South Africa. The oil came in through Portuguese Mozambique. Wilson tried two more summits with Smith, both on warships anchored in the Mediterranean so that neither man would have to step on the other’s territory. Britain’s conditions for accepting independence became more and more humiliatingly slim, but Smith brushed them aside, secure in his support at home and realizing that Wilson had no effective threat to hold over his head. The British Governor of Rhodesia, Sir Humphrey Gibbs, with the Chief Justice, Sir Hugh Beadle, kept a tiny oasis of loyalty to the Crown in the old Government House, dining in black tie and toasting the Queen, even though his car and telephone had been cut off by Smith’s regime. But the brutal reality of UDI was underlined when three Africans sentenced to be hanged for murder were refused leave to appeal to London in 1968. The Queen, advised by Wilson, then used her prerogative of mercy and reprieved the three men. They were hanged anyway, an act described as assassination and murder in the United Nations. Smith went ahead with a new constitution regarded throughout the world as brutally unfair and racist. By the time Wilson left office in 1970 the Rhodesian dilemma was no nearer to being solved, and it would continue to hang over British politics into the Thatcher years, when the black majority finally won power.
The Smith regime, though regarded as a pariah state, would survive through an increasingly violent and complicated guerrilla war until finally giving way to one-party government by Mugabe. Zimbabwe’s fate would be an awful one, ravaged by violence, famine and disease, as Marxist leaders tutored in extremism by their white enemies eventually extracted a revenge – less on the whites, many of whom eventually fled, than on their own people. Could any of this have been prevented by a liberal-minded Whitehall which had never exercised real power in Salisbury since the days of Cecil Rhodes? Only, perhaps, by being prepared to go to war in Africa, this time not to win land and treasure but undo the consequences of earlier adventures and to oust the English-speaking white elites. It would have been a huge risk. The bloody experience of other European countries in African wars and Britain’s experience nearer to home in Northern Ireland, suggests that such a war might well then have run out of control and lost its original purpose. Harold Wilson, like his Tory predecessors and successors, decided that such a war was unthinkable. Had they had any inkling of the fate waiting for the people of central Africa, it is just possible that they might have thought again.
The Pound and the Viet Cong
Amid this maelstrom Britain, yet again, was close to bankruptcy. How to get a grip? Devaluing the pound might have given the Wilson government and the country the chance of a fresh start. In a world of fewer and floating currencies, the importance of devaluation is harder to understand now, but it was then the single most important issue facing Wilson. On the one hand, cutting the international value of your currency against others was an admission of failure on the world stage, a humiliation for any government. It would mean imports costing more so unless people bought fewer foreign goods it would mean more inflation. On the other hand it would make exports cheaper, giving British companies a chance to win back markets they were losing. If the government devalued and managed to keep a grip on the consequent inflation while industrial exports grew, then the country could in theory leap in one painful stride away from her economic problems. It was a little like dropping out of a race, intensively retraining, sweating out the fat, slimming down, working on the muscle tone, and then starting the next race better prepared – except that in the economy you never actually stop working. As for a racer, the embarrassment of dropping out would be pointless if there was not the sweat and retraining, the greater efficiency and improved productivity. It needed to be a shock to the system, not a rest from reality. Many people, including in the Labour government, seemed not to have realized this. They thought, when eventually they were prepared to consider it, devaluation would avoid the tough choices at home which, in fact, it absolutely required.
This was a choice which went beyond economics. Devaluation and world politics were inextricably linked. To devalue the pound in the mid-sixties meant Britain’s overseas spending would have to be dramatically cut back, just as the ROBOT floating pound scheme of 1953 implied. Those smaller pounds would buy fewer gallons of oil, foreign-manufactured guns and accommodation for troops. So it probably meant a further withdrawal from Britain’s world role, in particular ‘East of Suez’, the bases in Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Aden and the Gulf. That would irritate Washington, particularly as communist advance in South East Asia was the issue of the hour. The alternative was to try to keep the global role and borrow from the United States. This was certainly on offer but at a large political price. As President Johnson’s special assistant put it at the time, ‘We want to make very sure that the British get into their heads that it makes no sense for us to rescue the pound in a situation in which there is no British flag in Vietnam, and a threatened British thin-out both east of Suez and in Germany . . . a British Brigade in Vietnam would be worth a billion dollars at the moment of truth for Sterling.’21
In the Commons and during the 1964 general election, Wilson had mocked Polaris as being neither independent nor British, and indeed unable to deter. Yet in the later sixties and early seventies, HMS Resolution, Renown, Repulse and Revenge were duly launched. Their names came from battlecruisers and battleships that had been the pride of an independent Royal Navy; but the new submarines’ missiles were American by proxy and the same was true of their successors, the Trident submarines of today. Technological dependence now rendered any idea that this was a truly independent system absurd. In power, Wilson had the option of abandoning the nuclear option, since the submarines being built to take Polaris could have been adapted as conventional hunter-killer boats. He chose not to, and even in the mid-seventies to disguise the economics of the Polaris upgrade, codenamed Chevaline, from the cabinet sceptics. Crossman assessed the dilemma shrewdly, noting in January 1965 that Wilson was committing Britain to defence spending ‘almost as burdensome – if not more burdensome – than that to which Ernest Bevin committed us in 1945, and for the same reason: because of our commitment to the Anglo-American special relationship and because of our belief that it is only through the existence of that relationship that we can survive outside Europe.’
For many this was a positive argument for devaluation. The pro-Europeans in the cabinet hoped devaluation would help drive the country towards its destiny as an ordinary member of the EEC, and away from global pretensions. They felt that Britain had to break with America, despite the financial guarantees Wilson had wrung from Washington earlier. She had to change direction, devalue, join Europe. That, according to Barbara Castle, was what George Brown had decided: ‘We’ve got to turn down their money and pull out the troops . . . I want them out of East of Suez. This is the decision we have got to make: break the commitment to America . . . I’ve been sickened by what we have had to do to defend America – what I’ve had to say at the despatch box.’ Castle interjected: ‘Vietnam?’ and Brown replied: ‘Yes, Vietnam too.’ Belligerent, contemptuous, he feared that Wilson would simply go over to Washington and ‘cook up some screwy little deal’. Brown at least had a clear strategic direction. Wilson did not. Cooking up screwy little deals was his forte. He was the master chef of screwy little deals.
By now the complex nature of the choice facing him was apparent. Devaluation and the future of socialism; Britain’s relationship with America and attitude to the Vietnam War; and whether we could and should be in the European Community, were all completely interlinked. Had Britain broken with America during the most testing time in its Vietnamese agony, the story of the Atlantic alliance would have taken a very different turn. We would probably have entered the EEC much earlier and, again probably, have played a role closer to that of France in the following decades, less linked in nuclear defence or intelligence terms to Washington. What this would have meant for the British economy’s failing experiment in continental corporatism, and for the stability of the anti-Communist world, is impossible to say. Further, because many Commonwealth countries held their reserves in sterling in London, devaluing the pound would have been a one-off and unilateral cut in the wealth of friendly and often poor countries. Deciding about the value of the pound was also a choice about Britain’s place in the world.
Oddly, the thing that would do most to destroy Harold Wilson’s reputation on the left was also the policy for which Britain has most cause to remember him gratefully. We have seen some of the pressure he was under to commit British troops to Vietnam. The Australians had committed a battalion, President Johnston constantly reminded him; perhaps the Black Watch might be sent, or at the very least a military band? American hints had been mingled with those American threats about the pound; and Britain’s economic position was, as we have seen, weak enough. Whitehall mandarins and some of his own advisers thought he should have committed at least some troops, but though Wilson may have been tempted and though British special forces had been considered, he held back from doing so. He tried to buy the Americans off with words of support and stabs at a diplomatic solution, hoping to use his connections in Moscow and suggesting some intervention directly with the North Vietnamese. He managed to placate nobody. The initiatives infuriated Washington, while the anti-war marchers at home simply heard his supportive words for Johnson.
Wilson was berated in the streets as a murderer. His Secretary of State for Defence who had quickly realized the scale of risk that Vietnam posed and helped keep Britain clear, was rewarded on university campuses with cries of ‘Hitler Healey’. When the trade union leader Frank Cousins, briefly in the government himself, asked Wilson why he wasn’t taking a firmer stand against American war-making, Wilson furiously replied, ‘Because we can’t kick our creditors in the balls.’ One of Wilson’s later biographers made the case for the defence with steely eloquence. Losing all Washington’s friendship and financial support would have been devastating: ‘Few considered the implications for domestic social, housing, education, arts and science policies, including the probable effect on student grants. Few, indeed of those who attacked the prime minister and his colleagues simultaneously for helping the Americans abroad and not doing more to help the poor at home, ever came to terms with the bleakness of the choice.’ Yet, the same writer went on, it was over Vietnam that ‘the party of conscience seemed to lose touch with its soul’ and over Vietnam too that many who had pinned their trust in Wilson decided his principles were ‘a shattered crystal, beyond hope of repair’.22 Here, for once, he was doing the right thing, or the best thing, and it was over this that he was most denounced. Who said politics was fair?
Even Wilson’s close supporters were at times disgusted by his twisting to keep the options open. Tony Benn, a few weeks before Wilson went to the country to try to increase his majority early in 1966, had recorded: ‘My opinion of Harold was lower tonight than it has ever been before. He really is a manipulator who thinks that he can get out of everything by fixing somebody or something. Although his reputation is now riding high, I’m sure he will come a cropper one day when one of his fixes just doesn’t come off.’23 At almost exactly the same time, Crossman summed up Labour’s wider problem: ‘The main trouble is that we haven’t delivered the goods; the builders are not building the houses; the cost of living is still rising; the incomes policy isn’t working; we haven’t held back inflation; we haven’t got production moving. We are going to the country now because we are facing every kind of difficulty and we anticipate that things are bound to get worse . . .’
Wilson then had his successful re-election in March, when Labour’s tiny majority of three was replaced by one of ninety-seven seats. This ought to have ushered in his golden years. His dominance of the Commons had helped finish off Alec Douglas-Home, who was replaced by Edward Heath. The age of the grammar-school boys was truly established. Wilson, whatever his failures of vision, had fought a near-faultless campaign and won a mandate which obliged the British Establishment to accept that Labour truly was entitled to rule. He had shown himself a self-confident showman abroad, in Moscow and Washington, and had pursued frantic diplomacy over the Rhodesian crisis. Now, surely, his time had arrived. Yet there was plenty in the record of that first Wilson administration to give pause for thought – the dithering and manoeuvring over devaluation; the mutual suspicions about screwy little deals already dividing the cabinet; Wilson’s own habits of duplicity, notably over deflation and his attitude to British membership of the EEC.
At the centre of all the difficulties the government faced was the dilemma of devaluation. The Chancellor, Jim Callaghan, remained under almost intolerable pressure, as he had been from the day when he took office. At times he seemed close to giving way under the strain. Jenkins recalled a cabinet in July 1966 when Callaghan, later famous for being imperturbable, suddenly started talking away from the agenda about the appalling pressures on sterling. He suggested to the startled ministers around him ‘both that the objective situation was desperate and that his own nerve had cracked. Wilson hushed him up and brought the meeting to an end rather like a policeman trying to get a blanket around a nude streaker.’24 Indeed, Wilson regarded any talk of devaluation, public or private, as indecent. Once he, Brown and Callaghan had decided against it immediately after the 1964 election, it was known as ‘the unmentionable’. From then on a complicated three-way dance had been going on in private. Brown turned in favour of devaluation as one way to revive his hopes for expansion and the DEA. Callaghan dithered, but wanted any devaluation to be accompanied by the shock of deflation too. Wilson, against both devaluation and deflation, played the two of them off against each other, always worried that if Brown and Callaghan agreed, he would be scuppered. By July 1966 he was telling Barbara Castle in the Commons tea-room that Brown and Callaghan were plotting to get rid of him: ‘You know what the game is – devalue and get into Europe. We’ve got to scotch it.’25 This, however, was classic Wilson: Castle was an anti-European, so his words were calculated to flatter her. But at the same time the Prime Minister was telling pro-Europeans in the press that he intended to lead Britain into Europe himself. As the press magnate Cecil King related in his diary months earlier, Callaghan was confidently predicting that Britain would enter Europe: ‘the pledges were only given to keep Barbara Castle and her kind quiet . . . Apparently Wilson thinks that after a successful election he will be able to eat any number of words with impunity.’26
Europe had sliced the party horizontally, cutting through the vertical divisions of left and right. Generally the party’s activists and left-wing MPs believed that the Common Market was a ‘bankers’ ramp’, a capitalist plot whose rules would prevent true socialism in Britain. The strongest view that Wilson himself had about it all was that he strongly didn’t have a view. He had been against on the grounds that Europe would be ‘anti-planning’, which seems a little odd. But as he moved camp, he told Barbara Castle, according to her diaries, that ‘The decision is purely a marginal one. I have always said so. I have never been a fanatic for Europe.’ And later, when she accused him of presiding over a messy, middle-of-the-road muddle about conditions for entry, he complacently replied: ‘I’m at my best in a messy, middle-of-the-road muddle.’27 He did not holiday abroad and had a strong sentimental attachment to the Commonwealth and the provincial reassurance of traditional British life. Unlike Jenkins or Heath he had no friends in continental politics. When the referendum finally came in 1975, both Wilson’s wife and his political secretary Marcia Falkender voted against staying in, which probably hints at Wilson’s private instincts.
Yet in the late sixties British business saw the European Economic Community as an essential escape-route into a more modern and efficient world, words which triggered a response in Wilson. The press was overwhelmingly in favour. Some of his most effective colleagues, notably Jenkins, were vehemently pro. Whitehall opinion, though divided, was leaning that way too. Europe offered Wilson a new theme when he needed it. In 1967 he and the strongly pro-European George Brown gently perambulated their way around Rome, Strasbourg and Paris discussing possible British membership, though de Gaulle was still chilly. Brown spent much of the time insulting and clumsily chatting up secretaries. Soon afterwards Wilson formally announced a renewed British membership bid. De Gaulle, though dismissive in public, privately told the British ambassador in Paris that he envisaged a new kind of Europe, wider but also looser, and led by the strongest military powers, France and Britain, then Italy and Germany. It would allow for more national sovereignty. He implied that this complete reshaping of Europe should be cooked up between Paris and London, then publicly proposed by Britain, after which France would come in to support it. This was not only an early sketch of the kind of Europe that Britain would yearn for but a classic Gaullist swipe at the federal Europe being built from Brussels. It seemed an act of French disloyalty to their German and other continental allies. In London, unsure whether it was a devilish trap, officials urged Wilson to leak the idea to the Germans. The leaks infuriated almost everyone, de Gaulle most of all, and the idea died. Despite all this, and despite warnings that food prices would rise by up to a quarter as a result of British membership, talks went on. Shortly before Wilson finally lost power, the six member states concluded their own pre-British-entry deal which badly tilted the budget system and agricultural support against the UK and the other would-be joiners.
Devaluation and a Coup
Events – dear boy – duly forced the devaluation option into centre stage. Decade by decade, government by government, the impact of energy policy on British politics is a constant theme. One could write a useful political history which did not move beyond the dilemmas posed by energy supply. We can follow it from the winter of 1947 when the frozen coal stocks blew Attlee off course, through the oil-related shock of Suez and the destruction of Eden, to Heath’s double confrontation with the miners, ending in his defeat in 1974, the rise of Scottish nationalism fuelled by North Sea oil, and then the epic coalfield confrontation between Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill taking the story up to today’s arguments about global warming and gas dependency on Russia. The simple fact of a small and crowded island energy-dependent in an uncertain world has toppled prime ministers and brought violent confrontation to the streets.
It had its effect on Harold Wilson too, when the Six-Day War of June 1967 between Israel and Egypt led to an oil embargo on Britain by Iraq and Kuwait because of an alleged pro-Israel line from London. (Nasser, who made the allegation, of course recalled the Suez plot.) This, combined with war in Nigeria, hit Britain’s finances, hoisted prices and produced more selling of sterling. If this was not enough, two months later there was a huge national dock strike, shutting first Liverpool and Hull and then, one by one, most of the rest of the major ports including London. The economic effect was dreadful, the trade figures a national shock. Wilson lashed out at the strikers. A year earlier he had been even more vituperative about striking seamen, suggesting they were being manipulated by communists or, as he called them ‘a tightly knit group of politically motivated men’ who had failed at the ballot box. Though that strike finished soon afterwards, Wilson’s words, reckoned ‘bonkers’ by some cabinet colleagues, drove a further wedge between him and the left.
In the overheated atmosphere of July 1967 there was renewed talk of a plot to oust Wilson and replace him either with Callaghan or Brown. While the Prime Minister was away in Moscow, the pro-devaluers were talking. George Brown, characteristically, was threatening to resign and trying to persuade others to support him as leader; and characteristically failing. Others, including Benn, felt that if he did resign the whole government would fall. Equally characteristically since he had a weakness for grand hostesses, Roy Jenkins was at the home of Ann Fleming, who has featured earlier in this book. Wilson later told Barbara Castle that the plotting was directed by ‘Ministers who went a-whoring after society hostesses.’ Jenkins responded in his memoirs: ‘There was indeed a certain allegorical quality about the behaviour of all of us that weekend . . . Wilson kept up his adrenalin by going on an unnecessary trip to Moscow. George Brown went berserk at the Durham Miners’ Gala. And I went to stay with Mrs Fleming at Sevenhampton.’
Wilson was still determined to resist devaluation. When he discovered briefing papers on the pros and cons had been prepared by civil servants, he brusquely ordered them to be collected up and burned. This was now a personal fight, corrupted by the rivalries and ambitions which plagued the cabinet. The left-wing devaluers hoped to turn Labour at last into a proper socialist government. They preferred to keep Wilson as leader but would have ditched him if necessary. The pro-European devaluers would have liked to replace Wilson with Roy Jenkins. The ironies are multiple: as the arguments raged, some on the left toyed with leaving Labour and setting up a new left-wing party based on the trade unions to be called the Social Democratic Party. One of them was the young Neil Kinnock, who would later as leader unleash a ferocious war on another ‘party within the party’. The title SDP would later be taken not by the left but by Jenkins and many of the pro-Europeans who followed him. Meanwhile the devaluation crisis turned into an ungainly and undignified dance as George, Harold and Jim, with Roy and the rest joined hands, lurched away from each other, formed new sets and jigged towards humiliation. At moments, Callaghan seemed to think devaluation might be such a national catastrophe that it would force Wilson out, and let him in. Brown wanted it for strategic reasons and hoped against the odds it might usher him in as leader. Jenkins may not have been actively plotting, but was much enjoying his stellar reputation in the press and as a leading pro-European. Wilson was determined to fend off devaluation to protect his own position.
Eventually, on the morning of 3 November 1967, the senior economic adviser at the Treasury, Sir Alec Cairncross, told Callaghan at a private meeting that the dance was over. Nothing more could be done, the music had stopped. No further foreign borrowing was available. He would have to devalue. Both knew that Callaghan would have to resign. Though his biographer called this ‘the most shattering moment Callaghan was ever to experience in sixty years of public life’ he seems to have taken it calmly and set about preparing yet another round of cuts, the deflation without which devaluation would be pointless. This caused cabinet arguments and threats of more resignations. Wilson, after yet another last-minute attempt to borrow more to see Britain through, eventually accepted that the pound was impossible to defend even with American support. In a 6 p.m. broadcast on 18 November Wilson announced that the pound was being devalued by 14 per cent and that defence cuts, restrictions on hire purchase, or credit, and higher interest rates would follow too. Callaghan, as Chancellor, felt utterly humiliated. He wanted to leave the government entirely but was persuaded to take the Home Office instead. Wilson, who had after all just torn up what he had for so long insisted was essential to his strategy, seemed curiously chirpy. Normally an astute reader of the mood, he made an awesomely bad mistake in his broadcast by perkily informing the nation that ‘the pound in your pocket’ had not been devalued. In terms of its immediate purchasing power in the local shop this was of course true but the suggestion that the pound’s international fall in value could be safely ignored was ludicrous and instantly understood to be ludicrous. Wilson was also devalued, possibly by more than 14 per cent.
Roy Jenkins now became Chancellor in Callaghan’s place. Under him the Treasury finally regained complete authority. Wilson tried to get his friend and ally Barbara Castle in to run the DEA but Jenkins was having none of that. From then on Labour would become as much a party of Treasury orthodoxy as the Conservatives. After being one of the most energetic Home Secretaries of the twentieth century, Jenkins himself spent a remarkable couple of years as one of its more successful Chancellors. Though he never made it to Number Ten, in terms of personal influence, there is almost a case for renaming the Wilson years the Jenkins years. His 1968 budget increased taxes by twice as much as any previous budget ever, including the wartime ones, and he returned to the attack later in the year, and again in 1969. The last of these, Jenkins pointed out, led to the only excess of revenue over government spending in the period between Baldwin and Thatcher, ‘a massive turn-round in the balance of payments and a vast consequent replenishment of our gold and dollar reserves and overseas borrowing capacity’.28 He was, however, lucky as well as tough, as he generously acknowledged in his memoirs. It turned out that the Inland Revenue and Customs & Excise had dramatically undercounted the value of British exports. With the draconian budgets designed to make the best use of devaluation the mood altered. At last, it seemed, that that elusive ‘grip’ had been discovered. The trade figures improved. After so long, could it be that Labour had begun to discover a way to run the economy after all? As we will see, the answer was no, and Jenkins, along with Callaghan and most of the rest of the cabinet, must take the blame. For the other great issue was trade union militancy and in particular the rise in strikes. Grip regained on the nation’s finances would be grip lost on its industrial climate.