A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  On the hot afternoon of 12 August 1955 John Osborne was lounging on an old Rhine barge tied up near Hammersmith on the Thames, the cheap houseboat where he was living. He had written Look Back in Anger over nineteen days, consumed with revulsion about the state of the country, and sent his wispy typescript to as many agents and theatre managers he could find an address for. Every one had briskly refused it. Osborne was in a hole. He had acted his way round the more obscure theatres of provincial England and was flat broke. A vegetarian, he and his house(boat)-mate had been reduced to gathering nettles from the riverbank to boil and eat. The creak of rowlocks signalled the arrival of Devine, a fat man sweating in a small boat, before he was hauled up on deck by Osborne. Devine had loved the play, and now cross-questioned Osborne; he had a prejudice against homosexuals and in favour of working-class actors and Osborne satisfied him on both counts. Look Back in Anger is now almost universally regarded as a classic, perhaps the single most important English play of the second half of the twentieth century. The story barely matters here. What did matter was the stream of bright, sarky bitterness that flowed from the main character, Jimmy Porter, as he bickered and ranted in the company of his wife and best friend. It was a resentful, disillusioned young voice, frustrated with what had happened to Britain. Later it would be echoed in a hundred bitter rock songs and in countless novels of youthful angst, and in films. But it had not been heard on a stage before. When the play was finally produced by the Royal Court, the third in its season, immediate reactions were unpromising. The critics were hostile. Binkie Beaumont had come, but then walked out at the interval. Early audiences seemed unenthusiastic. Osborne’s mother was told by the theatre barmaid: ‘They don’t like this one, do they dear? They don’t like it at all. Never mind, it won’t be much longer. We’re having Peggy Ashcroft soon. They’ll like that. But they don’t like this one. Not a bit of it.’

  The history of theatre is the history of legends. No newspaper review of a British stage play has been remembered quite like Tynan’s review of Look Back in Anger in the Observer, published on 13 May 1956. It is widely thought to have single-handedly saved the play from being taken off. It was certainly a rave review, describing Osborne’s work as a minor miracle showing qualities Tynan had despaired of seeing on stage. He thought it would be a minority taste, but continued: ‘What matters, however, is the size of the minority. I estimate it at roughly 6,733,000, which is the number of people in this country between the ages of twenty and thirty. And this figure will doubtless be swelled by refugees from other age-groups…I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.’ The heart-on-sleeve emotion and directness of the review made waves. Yet other newspapers had spotted it too; the Financial Times found it ‘arresting, painful and sometimes astonishing…a play of extraordinary importance’ and the Daily Express felt it was ‘intense, angry, feverish, undisciplined. It is even crazy. But it is young, young, young…’ Furthermore, it was not until the play was shown on television, in extract by the BBC in October and then in full by the new ITV in November, that it really became a success.

  Meanwhile, if the meeting between Devine and Osborne on the houseboat provided the first act of this story, there was a much more remarkable one to come. Though the accounts differ in detail, the substance is clear. Laurence Olivier had been to see Look Back in Anger and, like so many, took against it as ‘a lot of bitter rattling on’. But the American playwright Arthur Miller was in London because his girlfriend Marilyn Monroe was making a bad film with Olivier. Miller was intrigued by the title of Osborne’s play. He persuaded Olivier to take him to see it and found it wonderful. Afterwards, Devine came over and asked whether they would meet the young author. They went to the bar. Though Osborne says the remark came later, and to Devine, Arthur Miller tells the story thus: ‘a few inches to my right I overheard with some incredulity, Olivier asking the pallid Osborne – then a young guy with a shock of uncombed hair and a look in his face of having awakened twenty minutes earlier – “Do you suppose you could write something for me?” in his most smiling tones, which would have convinced you to buy a car with no wheels for twenty thousand dollars.’ The part would become that of Archie Rice, a fading and seedy music-hall entertainer in Osborne’s savage demolition job on Harold Macmillan’s delusional Britain. Osborne was quick to point out that he had been researching the declining music hall world well before Olivier asked for a part in The Entertainer. But it was an astonishing request. Olivier was then the sun-king of British acting. Though his marriage was collapsing in private, he and Vivien Leigh were the royal couple of the stage and screen, courted around the world, offered the greatest parts, apparently wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. For him to ask a young playwright at a fringe theatre for a role seemed like Lord Mountbatten of Burma rolling up and asking for a job as deckhand on a battered Hull trawler.

  Yet it was one of Olivier’s shrewdest career moves. This was the moment when the old theatre world, of magnificent Shakespearaan film productions, Royal Command performances and West End grandness bowed and gave way to a new, rougher Britain. It was a symbolic removing of swords, buckles and plumes in favour of loose civilian clothes and satire. Olivier was incomparably the most important figure in the story of post-war British theatre. In the thirties he had swashbuckled and starred alongside many of the great Hollywood divas. His wartime stage roles had brought him huge personal success – the scent of success, he reported back, was ‘like seaweed, or like oysters’ – and his knighthood and films, as well as his marriage to Leigh, made him a global star. Some idea of this is given by the guest list at a Hollywood party thrown to greet him in the late forties – Groucho Marx, Errol Flynn, Ginger Rogers, Ronald Coleman, Louis B. Mayer, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall turned up to pay court. Later, he would be the driving force behind Britain’s National Theatre; today one of its most important venues, as well as the annual awards for acting, are named after him. Actually, to compare him to a modern monarch is slightly to undersell Olivier at his zenith. Why then did he decide to ask Osborne for a part he must have known would be shockingly different to the romantic leads and tortured princes his public expected of him? Partly, it was boredom and the crushing effect of his marriage to the increasingly mad Vivien Leigh, which he was determined to leave. After various love affairs he would eventually marry Joan Plowright, one of Devine’s Royal Court regulars. He would not actually give up the great Shakespearean parts – a magnificent Othello was still to come – nor would he quite turn his back on Hollywood. But The Entertainer and his relationship with Plowright set him on a new direction. The answer was that Olivier was able to reinvent himself as a man of the modern world, no longer the codpiece and tights-wearing hero of mid-century.

  British theatre did something similar. It found a way of mattering despite the arrival of television and the continuing huge power of cinema. It is not coincidental that, while Britain was still bleakly under provided-for in the aftermath of war, British theatre in the Binkie years was extravagant, colourful and generally shallow, while when Britain set out on a mass consumer boom, British theatre turned darker and edgier. In each case, the stage offered a contrast to what was around it. Osborne’s Jimmy Porter bemoaned the lack of ‘good brave causes’ left in 1956; in 1946, as the Cold War began and with people still demobilizing from the army, such a sentiment would have seemed ludicrous. Similarly, the naive celebration of life which warmed London when Oklahoma! arrived after the war would not have made nearly such an impression on the richer city of a decade later. Live theatre would have to compete for writers and actors who found they could reach far bigger audiences and make better money elsewhere. Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey, The Entertainer and Oh, What a Lovely War! would all be filmed. Many of the key talents, the best actors and directors and producers, would head for the new virtual theatres at Lime Grove, Ealing and Teddington, the hangar-like television studios with no seats for an audience and a forest canopy of lights and microph
ones.

  The West End, and the big provincial theatres, would continue to provide entertainment to the middle classes who wanted to see famous actors in the flesh, and who were prepared to try out new playwrights. Of those, Harold Pinter, whose The Birthday Party opened to bafflement in 1958 until it was rescued from likely oblivion by a single rave review, is widely acknowledged as the greatest. His famous pauses, mundane settings, intricate use of ordinary language and background political agenda provided a way of seeing and hearing modern Britain unlike any other. He followed earlier so-called absurdist dramatists, above all Samuel Beckett, who had been given his English premier of Waiting for Godot by the young Peter Hall in 1955 at the Arts Theatre Club, but Pinter was as English as Beckett was French-Irish. Yet the talent pouring out of British theatre through the sixties and seventies, from the satirists like Orton, the magicians like Stoppard, the sheer entertainers like Ayckbourn, through to the great political dramatists – Wesker, Arden, Bond, Hare – showed that television had failed to kill off live drama. Londoners, indeed any British people near a major playhouse, had the opportunity to be amused, provoked, obliged to think about the world around them, with as much live wit and anger on offer to them as in any modern nation. In the twenty-first century, as Hollywood stars make a regular pilgrimage to play or direct in London theatre-land, and with the flow of good contemporary work unceasing, theatre remains, against the odds, one of the little glories of British life.

  25

  Korea: Mao, Bugles, Tins of Cheese

  In March 1946, exiled from power, Churchill had made his famous ‘iron curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri. Across Central and Eastern Europe, behind that iron curtain, client Communist parties and Russian stooges had engaged in murder, vote-rigging, threats and eventually outright putsches – notably in Prague – to put themselves in power. Crisis followed crisis. Stalin had tried to throttle West Berlin, a crowded democratic atoll inside Soviet-controlled East Germany. He had hoped to persuade the West not to form an independent West German state with its own currency, but he failed. Much encouraged by Attlee and Bevin, the Americans led a massive airlift to keep the besieged city supplied. By the time the blockade ended more than 270,000 flights into Berlin had been made, carrying in fuel, food and clothing. It was an extraordinary act of succour and a dangerous one, which was wholly successful. Meanwhile there was a strong possibility of war between the Russians and the rebel communists of Tito’s Yugoslavia – Stalin had planned to assassinate Tito for insubordination. With American nuclear bombers in East Anglia, and the Russians also now possessors of the Bomb, the danger seemed all-consuming and the threat relentless. And in 1950 Britain was at war again, this time alongside the Americans and a wide alliance of other countries.

  Aside from military historians, Korea has become the forgotten war. Yet it was a genuinely dangerous global confrontation in which Britain played an important if subsidiary role. It was the first and only time when British troops have directly fought a major Communist army, Mao’s Chinese People’s Liberation Army; and it was a long and bloody conflict. Britain and her Commonwealth allies, fighting with a mixture of professional soldiers and young National Service conscripts, lost more than a thousand dead and nearly three times as many wounded. The overall UN casualties were around 142,000. All that was terrible enough, but it could have been much worse. The American commander, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, fresh from his role as effective dictator of post-war Japan, and considered by his President to be unhinged, was keen to open full-scale operations against Communist China itself. As they struggled against a peasant army across icy, rocky hills and through paddy-fields the US military contemplated using their new atomic bombs to lay down an irradiated dead zone between Korea and China. President Truman had no intention of allowing MacArthur to start loosing off nuclear bombs but a little later, in 1953, his successor, President Eisenhower, did raise the possibility of using nuclear strikes directly against China.

  In a memorandum to Attlee’s government, the British chiefs of staff wrote with elegant understatement that ‘from the military point of view…the dropping of an atomic bomb in North Korea would be unsound. The effects of such action would be world-wide, and might well be very damaging. Moreover, it would probably provoke a global war.’ Labour MPs wanted the nuclear bomb to be limited to use by the UN, a somewhat strange notion, and Attlee went to Washington to check that Truman was not about to engulf the world in atomic conflict. What no one in Whitehall or Washington knew then, though they might have guessed it, was that Mao had decided to use unfortunate Korea as a ‘meat-grinder’ war, in which the huge numbers of Western deaths would break the morale of the capitalist West and gain him vital credit with Stalin, so persuading Moscow to share nuclear secrets with Beijing. In March 1951, Mao told the Soviet dictator that his plan was ‘to spend several years consuming several hundred thousand American lives’. Had he been more militarily successful, the temptation to go nuclear would have been great. Though the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 is remembered, rightly, as the moment when the world came nearest to nuclear war, there was a serious possibility of it happening earlier, in Korea and China.

  The scale of the challenge in Korea after the Communist north invaded on 25 June 1950 quickly persuaded the British government that troops and ships should be sent to help the Americans and the flailing southern regime of Syngman Rhee. There was little disagreement, either in the government or the Commons. Compared to Vietnam, this was a consensual war, carried out under the freshly designed blue and white flag of the United Nations. On the North Korean and Chinese side, half a million men were engaged and, by the time the war ended, three million Chinese had fought in Korea. The Chinese later told their allies that they lost 400,000 men, many of them former anti-Communist soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek’s army cynically sent as useful fodder. Among UN forces there would be Australians and Canadians, Belgians, French, Dutch, Thais, Ethiopians, Greeks, Turks, Colombians and others. Wherever they came from most of those who found themselves in Korea hated the country. In winter, the front line was bitterly cold, at other times it was overrun with vermin. Human excrement was used to fertilize the fields which while hardly unknown in rural economies provided a pungent scent which remained in many veterans’ minds ever afterwards.

  British forces performed bravely in important battles but found the cultural divide with the Americans had grown even wider in the past five years. The most famous example was the heroic stand of the ‘the Glorious Glosters’ above the Imjin river in April 1951 when with other troops including Ulstermen, Canadians and Belgians, the first battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment found itself suddenly facing the full force of the fifth major Chinese offensive of the war. Hugely outnumbered, lacking heavy artillery or aircraft support and soon cut off by the advancing tides of communist troops, Brigadier Tom Brodie called for help from the Americans, explaining that the British position was ‘a bit sticky’. Not realizing that this was stiff-upper-lip for ‘catastrophic’, the American commander told him cheerfully just to sit tight. After the battle which followed, just 169 of the 850 Glosters were left for roll-call. Sixty-three had been killed, around 200 badly injured and the rest captured by the Chinese, who had themselves lost an astonishing 10,000 men in the attack. After four desperate days, the Glosters had been able to hold on no longer. At one point, responding to the bugles and trumpets used by the Chinese commanders to signal yet another charge, the Glosters’ drum-major was told to respond with every bugle-call he could remember; so the men fought under the strains not just of ‘reveille’ but ‘defaulters’ and ‘officers dress for dinner’. In another position, when the ammunition finally ran out, the Glosters were reduced to throwing tins of processed cheese at the Chinese in the (vain) hope they would be mistaken for grenades. Yet the action, for all its hopelessness and poignant comedy, did check the advance of the People’s Liberation Army at a vital moment. One historian of the war concluded that at Imjin, ‘the most political army in the world
encountered the least political – and was savagely mauled to gain its few sterile miles of rock and paddy…Across the breadth of the Korean front, Peking’s spring offensive had failed. Never again in the war did the communists mount an all-out assault which appeared to have the slightest prospect of strategic success.’

  There were further brave British actions by the Black Watch and, two years after Imjin, by the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. Three-quarters composed of young National Service conscripts earning just £1.62 a week, they held back the Chinese on a ridge nicknamed the Hook. Though eighteen-year-olds were banned from Korea many lied to see some action. British troops said the two worst-paid armies serving there were themselves and the Chinese. Throughout the war, of course, it was American commanders and politicians who directed strategy, perhaps the single most important and far-sighted action coming from the top when President Truman finally sacked MacArthur. By the time of the eventual armistice in July 1953 returning British troops, including prisoners who had endured appalling torture and malnutrition, found the public largely uninterested in them. There had been a major drive by the Chinese to indoctrinate British conscripts but with the exception of a spy who was later unmasked and a single Scottish soldier who, perhaps recalling the social cheer to be enjoyed in Scotland in the early fifties, opted to remain in Red China, it was ineffective. Though the Chinese political officers included some with fluent English, there was little communication: it seems that rich Geordie, Scottish and West Country accents completely defeated them.