by Jeremy Black
A centrepiece was the first major post-war public building, the Royal Festival Hall (1951), which was the lasting legacy of the Festival of Britain of that year. Intended to mark a century since the Great Exhibition, this festival was held on the bomb-damaged south bank of the Thames. It brought together an incoherent melange of themes, including new technology, a better Britain and aspects of traditional culture. The Festival, which was visited by close to 8.5 million people, reflected confidence, or at least interest, in new solutions and a Labour vision of progress, but, in fact, most people were less confident than at the time of the Great Exhibition.
Whatever the success of the Royal Festival Hall, the ugliness of much subsequent Modernist building led to depressing, if not inhuman vistas. Unfortunately, the Modernist movement in architecture was visibly important in the transformation of British cities from the 1960s, not least in the building of new city centres and tower blocks, although less so in small-scale domestic architecture.
Like the First World War, the Second hit religious belief and observance. There was a fall in denominational membership, especially of the Church of England. The 1950s, however, were not a period of obvious crisis. Church attendance ebbed, for both the Church of England and the Methodists, but not greatly; while the Catholic Church and the Church of Scotland remained strong. Elizabeth II’s (1926–) coronation in 1953 was very much an Anglican ceremonial, and there were many signs of vitality. These included the building of a new Coventry Cathedral, the construction of churches in New Towns and other newly built neighbourhoods (which was a major drain on Church revenues), and the popularity of Billy Graham’s (1918–) evangelical missions and of the theological writings of C.S. Lewis (1898–1963), such as The Screwtape Letters (1942) and his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955). Graham is an American, and his impact displayed the multi-faceted nature of trans-Atlantic relations. Significantly, he also operated outside the context of the established Churches.
The successful staples of the 1950s, on the West End stage and in the lending libraries and the standard bookshops, largely echoed those of the 1930s. Audiences flocked to see plays by Noël Coward (1899–1973), both old, such as Private Lives (1930), and new, for example Look After Lulu (1950), as well as plays by Terence Rattigan (1911–77) (The Winslow Boy, 1946) and William Douglas Home (1912–92) (The Chiltern Hundreds, 1947). The audiences were also very large for the short stories Agatha Christie adapted for the stage, notably The Mousetrap (1952). Hercule Poirot, like P.G. Wodehouses’s Jeeves and Wooster, still appeared in novels that offered nostalgia but without appearing helplessly anachronistic, which in many respects they were. Christie herself acknowledged this in her novel At Bertram’s Hotel (1965), as the pre-war opulence and level of service could be maintained only by the criminal underpinning of the hotel.
Yet, there were also changes. The late 1950s were to be the stage for the ‘Angry Young Men’, a group of writers who felt very much at odds with their Britain as a result of their sense that the post-war reforms of the Labour government, followed by 1950s affluence, had produced a vulgar materialist society that was disagreeable in itself and frustrating to them as individuals. They were impatient alike with traditionalism and the new, commercial values of ITV, the independent television channel, and they struck at what they presented as the ‘phoniness’ of social mores. These works, by John Wain (1925–94), Kingsley Amis (1922–95), John Braine (1922–86), John Osborne (1929–94) and Alan Sillitoe (1928–), however, were less a cause of long-term cultural change than were the pressures stemming from the greater post-war impact of American culture (much deplored by Priestley) and the foundation in 1955 of ITV.
The 1960s
Although prefigured in the 1950s, the causes and symptoms of long-term cultural change (as well as of short-term fashions) came thick and fast from the 1960s. The post-war baby boom and increasing affluence both had a major impact. Youth culture in particular became much stronger and also had a far more powerful influence on the overall cultural life of the country. Whereas, in the late 1950s, British singers had essentially imitated American models, The Beatles were homegrown and were exported successfully to the US, which was rare for British popular culture. In the winter of 1960–1, in a period with rising sales of records, they established themselves as the band for Liverpool teenagers. Yet, to become national, The Beatles had to be repackaged to conform to what was seen as appropriate at that level. In 1961, the band abandoned their leather jackets for smart suits, and their manager, Brian Epstein (1934–67), gained them a recording contract with the music giant EMI. It was newly responsive to the commercial possibilities of pop, cutting-edge popular music aimed at the young, and understood that it was no longer appropriate to expect performers to behave as they had been told to do in the 1950s.
The Beatles’ debut single, ‘Love Me Do’, was released in October 1962, and they set the sound for change. The popular music gave Britain a ‘feel’ that was very different to the ‘feel’ it had had as the world’s leading empire. So, more generally, did the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and the London of Carnaby Street and the mini-skirt. On 25 June 1967, 500 million people, the biggest live television audience of the era, saw The Beatles perform ‘All You Need is Love’ on the BBC’s Our World programme, an attempt to show what the newly developed satellite-linked TV could do to create one world.
The popularity of The Beatles and other exponents and signs of the new, in turn, sapped respect for older patterns of behaviour. Conformity to the rules of the past was out, and the relationship between the social hierarchy and the ‘Swinging Sixties’ was uncertain; and one negotiated by this hierarchy accommodating new patterns of behaviour.
The Beatles came from the north of England, but soon left for the capital. Just as, in film, working-class dramas set in the north had a vogue, but were subsequently absorbed by a more metropolitan focus, so the same was true of popular music. Indeed, British youth culture was soon reconfigured towards fashionable middle-class interests. Thus, the hippies and drugs that became prominent in the late 1960s reflected the affluence, ethos and Americanism of middle-class south-eastern youth, such as Mick Jagger (1943–), rather than their northern working-class counterparts. The Beatles took to the new culture, especially to drugs and Asian mysticism, providing it with a ‘sound’. The Beatles changed their style and sound, from their debut album Please Please Me to the 1964 album A Hard Day’s Night, and then to the 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The role of students in the pop culture of the 1960s was particularly important, and the majority of them came from a middle-class background. Many of these students had the money to spend on drugs, attending pop concerts and playing at radicalism in large part because of the affluence of their parents.
In the 1960s, massive open-air concerts focused the potent combination of youth culture and pop music, but this music, and its commercialism was, subsequently, to be challenged by punk, a style that set out to shock and to transform popular culture. Yet, to reach a wider audience, punk, in turn, had to be taken up by record companies and television.
There were also potent shifts in society as a whole from the 1960s, with a stress on the individual, and on his or her ability to construct their particular world. It would, however, be misleading to ignore earlier pressures for change in the 1950s. Indeed, images of sex played a much greater role in life in the late 1950s, not least in newspapers, novels and films, than they had done a decade earlier. Nevertheless, the outcome of the 1960 Lady Chatterley trial, with Penguin Books acquitted of the charge of obscenity, indicated that the new decade would be one of change, and this rapidly followed from 1963, gathering pace thereafter. This was a period in which fashions, such as the mini-skirt and popular music, both stressed novelty. Songs and films, such as the film Tom Jones (1963), featured sexual independence.
Hedonism focused on free will, self-fulfilment and consumerism, and the last was the motor of economic consumption and growth. The net effect was a more multifaceted publi
c construction of individual identities. This stress did not lend itself to a classification of identity, interest and activity in terms of traditional social categories, especially class.
The nature of social developments can be gauged by considering changing assumptions. The mores expressed by detective writers reflected their eye for social values. In Patricia Wentworth’s (1878–1961) The Listening Eye (1957), Ethel Burkett writes to her aunt about her sister
… who had taken the unjustifiable step of leaving an excellent husband whom she complained of finding dull. ‘As if anyone in their senses expects their husband to be exciting’ wrote Mrs Burkett. ‘And she doesn’t say where she is, or what she is doing, so all we can hope and trust is that she is alone, and that she hasn’t done anything which Andrew would find impossible to forgive. Because what is she going to live on?’
Thus, Ethel’s sister is demanding change and willing to seek it herself, notably by breaking family constraints; while Ethel still offers a traditional view of husbands sitting in judgment.
Whatever the developments of the 1950s, the 1960s did represent change, not least in legislative action, although this was scarcely a situation unique to Britain. The death penalty was abolished and racial discrimination declared illegal in 1965, while abortion was legalized in 1967 by the Abortion Act. Homosexual acts between consenting adults were legalized in 1967 by the Sexual Offences Act; although the Act was in part designed to control homosexuality, while the legislation was not extended to Scotland until 1981. The Divorce Reform Act of 1969 and the Equal Pay Act of 1970 sought to improve the position of women, although the latter Act excluded the large number of female part-time workers, a group that also received scant support from the trade unions. As more generally throughout the Continent and in North America, social paternalism, patriarchal authority, respect for age and the nuclear family, and the stigma of illegitimacy, all declined in importance.
Religion
Although Churches played a role in reform, notably in opposing capital punishment and (in some cases) supporting the decriminalization of homosexual behaviour, the permissive legislation of the 1960s flew in the face of Church teachings, and left the Churches and particularly the Established Churches confused and apparently lacking in ‘relevance’. This was especially serious for an age that placed more of an emphasis on present-mindedness than on continuity with historical roots and teachings. Belief in orthodox Christian theology, especially in the nature of Jesus, and in the after-life, the Last Judgment and the existence of hell, lessened, while Christian social behaviour in the shape of activities such as membership in Church clubs and attendance at Sunday school declined. Absolute and relative numbers of believers fell rapidly, particularly for the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, the Methodists and the Scottish ‘Wee Frees’. Already in 1951, Rowntree and the Lavers’ English Life and Leisure had noted a decline in attendance among Nonconformist congregations.
The Church of England appeared divided and unsure of itself (see also p. 268). The issue of relevance was raised in 1963 in Honest to God, a widely read book by John Robinson (1919–83), Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, that sought to address the inability of the Church to cater for many, especially in run-down urban areas, by pressing the need for a determination to respond that would include a new liturgy. Cranmer’s prayer book English, based on the Book of Common Prayer of 1549, was criticized as antiquated, and was replaced by a series of new liturgies. These themes echoed down the following decades. Weekly attendances by Anglican congregations fell below a million in 2007, and, with congregations ageing and churches crumbling, Stephen Cottrell (1958–), the Bishop of Reading, complained in 2009 that the Church of England did not reach out to the bulk of the population. It was symptomatic of the role of consumerism that his analogy was to shopping: ‘we have become known as just the Marks and Spencer option when in our heart of hearts we know that Jesus would just as likely be in the queue at Asda or Aldi’.
The Established Churches also had to confront challenges from within the world of religion. Aside from serious internal rivalries, they were affected by other Christian Churches, by traditional non-Christian faiths, and by new cults. The tensions within the Church of England reflected long-standing differences, but were also indicative of a rapidly changing public culture, as well as of profound divisions. Liberal Anglican theologians challenged conventional views and caused great controversy, notably David Jenkins (1925–), Bishop of Durham from 1984 to 1994, who held unorthodox (but widely representative) views on the Virgin Birth and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. York Minster, where he was consecrated, was struck by lightning in 1984, which was seen by some evangelical critics as divine judgment. The vote by the General Synod in 1992 to accept the ordination of women priests led over 440 clergy to leave the Church of England, mostly for the Roman Catholic Church. In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI (1927–) permitted Anglicans to join an ordinariate that would bring them into full communion with Roman Catholics while retaining elements of their Anglican identity. By then, the issues of homosexuality and of women bishops had proved highly divisive.
Individualism in society and culture and the rise of the ‘private sphere’ was also seen in religion, notably in the extent to which individuals chose (and changed) their churches, rather than being bound by that of their forebears. The rise of ‘fundamentalist’ evangelical Christianity, inspired from America, notably with Billy Graham’s crusade in the 1950s, focused on a direct relationship between God and worshipper, without any necessary intervention by clerics and without much, if any, role for the sacraments. Certain aspects of this Christianity, especially its charismatic quality, appealed to some Anglicans, creating tensions within the Church of England.
The Christian tradition also became more diverse, in part as a consequence of the participatory character of worship introduced by immigrants from the West Indies. In addition, non-Trinitarian religions, that do not regard Jesus as the Son of God, such as the Christadelphians and Jehovah’s Witnesses, grew in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. The long-established Mormons had 90,000 members in Britain in 1970 and 150,000 in 1992.
Moreover, from the 1960s both ‘new age’ religions and Buddhism appealed to large numbers who would otherwise have been active Christians. They proved better able than the Churches to capture the enthusiasm of the many who wished to believe amid a material world where faith had become just another commodity. Faddishness also played a part, as with The Beatles’ pursuit of Indian mysticism. In 2006, the Home Office approved a pagan oath for use in the courts. The 2001 census recorded 31,000 pagans, but estimates suggest that the real figure is over 120,000. The popularity of cults was also a reflection of the atomization of a society that now placed a premium on individualism and on personal responses. Such a society was peculiarly unsuited to the coherence and historical basis of doctrine, liturgy, practice and organization that was characteristic of the Churches.
This point begs the question of whether the earlier decline of religious practice and belief had not itself permitted the development of just such a society, rather than the society causing a decline. In part, it is necessary to stress the diversity of the 1960s and subsequent decades, and to note our limited knowledge and understanding of popular religion and what is termed folk belief. It is unclear, for example, how best to understand the lasting popularity of astrology, which was a staple in the popular press. More generally, Christianity did not collapse; it declined, and there were still many committed Christians, as well as a large number who claimed to be Christian but did not go to church or chapel, and also of conforming non-believers. Nevertheless, belonging without believing and believing without belonging became more significant in Christian attitudes and practice.
Gender
Women’s liberation arose as a second wave of feminism, although, as with other movements lacking a centralizing structure, this was highly diverse. Conventional assumptions were widely attacked, including nuclear families, the authoritarian role of men w
ithin households, and sexual subservience. Demands for the recognition of an independent sexuality focused on heterosexual activity, with an assertion of women’s rights to enjoy sex, to have it before marriage without incurring criticism, and to control contraception, and, thus, their own fertility.
There was also pressure for more radical options. Lesbianism was affirmed, and connections opened with the gay men’s movements. Legislation played a significant role, as with other social changes of the period. Indeed, for change to become reform it had to pass through legislation. The Sex Discrimination Act of 1976 had considerable impact on the treatment and employment of women. The police were encouraged to take a firmer line against wife-beating and child abuse; and major efforts were made to alter public assumptions about rape. Thus, the idea that clothes or conduct of a certain type in part excused rape was totally rejected, although the percentage of rape allegations successfully prosecuted remains very low. Aside from demands for legal changes, feminism led to calls for changes in lifestyles and for social arrangements that put women’s needs and expectations in a more central position.
Jobs and lifestyle became more important as aspirations for women, complementing, rather than replacing, home and family. The number of married women entering the job market escalated from the 1960s, and more women returned to work after having children; a marked change to the social assumptions of the first half of the century. The expansion of white blouse occupations brought increased opportunities for women to choose their own lifestyle. Positive discrimination in favour of hiring and promoting women, however, worked most to the benefit of middle-class women, fortifying social differences and, thus, serving as a reminder of the continued role of class as an issue. The expansion of higher education, from the implementation of the Robbins Report in the early 1960s, contributed greatly to the growth in opportunities. By 1990, 14 per cent of women were educated past the age of eighteen, compared with only 1 per cent in 1959.
