by Andrew Marr
Was there any direct connection between this national failure and the kind of people running the country? Industrialists and entrepreneurs were not part of the Tory magic circle and were not socially much regarded. Macmillan and Eden both suffered from a pseudo-aristocratic and sentimental attitude to class. With their First World War service and their inter-war worries about the effect of unemployment, they were inclined to admire the working classes from a decent distance and to disdain the ‘common’ speech and attitudes of upwardly mobile entrepreneurs such as Sir Bernard Docker. They lived privileged and upper-crust lives themselves, set in landed homes and surrounded by literature and art. It was a way of life to which the self-made would aspire too: Michael Heseltine would begin by mixing margarine and butter as he built his low-rent property business, and end with a grand country home and an arboretum. For the ruling class of the fifties, the businessmen, the engineers, the factory organizers were vulgar, vulgar, vulgar. Diplomacy; country sports and farming; the arts; high politics; even journalism were all interesting, but industry was a bore. As we have seen this did not stop large companies thriving or hold back individual entrepreneurs, very often immigrants unintimidated by class barriers. But it was hardly surprising that fewer bright British students went to work for the British motor industry or the chemical giants, compared to the best of the Germans and Americans going into their equivalents. In the fifties, foreigners were not yet talking pityingly of ‘the British disease’ but there was talk of the ‘stagnant society’. No one grasped the nettle.
41
The Egg-heads and Duffel-coat Rebels
One group of society was equally opposed to the Tory magic circle and the industrial entrepreneur. Its supporters wore heavy blue or beige duffel coats – the coarse, toggle-fastened woollen coats designed in Victorian Britain but which became truly popular on the Atlantic and Arctic convoys of the Second World War – and roll-necked pullovers, baggy tweed jackets, stout shoes. The men would be vigorously bearded. Their look proclaimed the opposite of stylishness or American influence. Their chosen music, too, was very different from the skiffle bands and the rock and roll beginning to infiltrate teenagers’ lives. For most politically minded left-wingers folk music was the sound of the times, heard in smoke-filled and beery clubs across the nation.
Folk music became popular throughout the UK in the fifties, though it has been swamped in memory by the eruption of pop soon afterwards. It was particularly strong in Scotland where singing traditions among farm-workers and miners, and the vast popularity of Robert Burns, underpinned an audience for ‘the people’s music’. Edinburgh had been chosen at the end of the forties as the site of a new annual international festival of the arts (selected just ahead of Bath because it had rather less bomb damage) focusing on the traditional elite arts – opera, classical drama, ballet and fine arts. By 1950 there was growing irritation among the poets and singers at the centre of the Scottish literary revival at the way Scotland was being excluded and, by 1951, an alternative people’s festival was established. Trade unions, the Communist Party, left-wing councillors and others backed the project, which in turn kicked off the post-war folk scene in Scotland. There were lectures about the danger of American culture swamping British culture, concerts and get-togethers with Gaelic musicians, films, choirs and specially written plays – but, within three years, at the height of the Cold War, the Edinburgh people’s festival was closed down by the trade union movements on the grounds that it was a Communist plot. (It was Communist-tinged but it was hardly a plot.)
Outside Scotland the folk movement was strongest in the Northern and Midland regions of England and the West Country, though folk clubs spread everywhere and by 1957 there were supposed to be some 1,500 of them in Britain. There was something over-defensive about their self-proclaimed independence from American music, since the United States was undergoing its own folk revival at the same time, also strongly linked to left-wing politics and also defiantly ‘authentic’ in the face of the rising power of commercial music. Jimmie Miller, the best-known leader of the movement, had been born in Salford into a Scottish socialist family of militants and musicians and had had dozens of jobs in the 1930s before marrying the left-wing actress Joan Littlewood, and setting up experimental radical theatre projects with her. Later they split up and Miller wrote his best-known song ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ for an American folk musician, Peggy Seeger, when they fell in love. A committed Marxist, he changed his name to Ewan MacColl as he became central to the folk revival. Among his songs was ‘Dirty Old Town’, later made famous by the London-Irish band the Pogues. Other key figures were the former soldier and poet Hamish Henderson, who first began collecting traditional songs and stories from across the Western Highlands and Islands; and Norman Buchan, the Labour MP. There was great talent, great energy and great optimism. For a time it seemed that Britain might produce a music radically different from the raucous new noises of North America.
Folk continued to be much enjoyed by a minority. Stars like Billy Connolly cut their teeth on folk. But outside the Celtic nations, the revival was pretty much doomed from the beginning. Any movement so suffused with nostalgia and gentle humour, played on instruments with minimal amplification, is unlikely to cut the mustard in an age of urban consumerism, when the commercial drive is to record and sell short, fast songs for a young and fickle audience no longer interested in the struggles of their grandparents. Any movement so resolutely unfashionable, so tousled, hairy and serious, was unlikely to defeat styles and songs efficiently marketed for the new teenage market. The parallel enthusiasm for modern jazz, which excited the English middle-class youth at the same time, and which seemed so rebellious in a land still contemptuous of ‘negro’ culture, fizzled away for similar reasons. Live performance in small clubs and songs that went on for too long, and were simply too complicated for everyone to enjoy, surrendered to quick, easy music. In a battle between the ‘authentic’ and the cool, when the fight is pitched for young urban consumers, it is easy to see what will happen. In the end, for all its beauty and vigour, Britain’s folk music revival of the fifties was another exhibition of impotent local revolt against the coming age of America.
So was the political cause which so many of the folk and jazz enthusiasts cherished, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. One of its leading figures, the popular historian A.J. P. Taylor, later reflected that CND, like the Establishment politicians it opposed, simply overrated Britain’s position in the world: ‘We thought that Great Britain was still a great power whose example would affect the rest of the world. Ironically, we were the last imperialists.’ For a while, the campaign sent a jolt through politics and seemed to all those contemplating the swift extinction of life on the planet far more a moral act than politics as usual. It had begun with a campaign to end the radiation-spreading testing of nuclear weapons, which was causing great alarm. Popular writers, notably J.B. Priestley, and the elderly mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, wrote influential articles proclaiming the moral necessity of renouncing such world-destroying weaponry entirely. The New Statesman appealed to Khrushchev to disarm and to its surprise got a reply back from Moscow, albeit an unhelpful one. The Labour left were almost all committed ban-the-bombers as of course was the Moscow-funded Communist Party of Great Britain. These strands, along with Quakers, pacifists and certain journalists, eventually found themselves sitting together in the appropriately named Amen Court, home of Canon John Collins of St Paul’s Cathedral, where on 15 January 1958 the new organization was created. A month later, more than five thousand people turned up for the inaugural meeting at Westminster; some were arrested when they went on to protest at Downing Street.
Though CND would fail to persuade any major British party to renounce nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War and failed as well to halt, never mind reverse, the build-up of American nuclear weaponry on British soil, it did succeed in dividing the Labour Party and seizing the imagination of millions of people. For a ram
shackle left-wing organization, it behaved in a thoroughly modern and media-savvy way. Its symbol, designed by a professional artist, Gerald Holtham, in 1958, and based on semaphore, became an international brand almost as recognizable as Coca-Cola: suddenly, all those duffel coats and black jumpers had some decoration. The Aldermaston marches, first from Trafalgar Square towards the base and later in the opposite direction, were never enormous but they did attract massive press coverage. Its more militant wing, the Committee of 100, using direct non-violent action, managed to get the 89-year-old Lord Russell arrested by police, a considerable act of public relations. Yet it was as Taylor described it, a movement of egg-heads for egg-heads. Another historian reflected that it was a classic ‘anti-political movement of the educated, the affluent and the disaffected, a movement rooted in the leafy suburbs of the middle classes, not the slums or council estates’. Its members tended to be liberal on other issues too, and to be contemptuous of the organized and stodgy routines of politics, Labour politics in particular. By the end of the fifties, radicals found Labour entirely unappetizing. Now, why was that?
42
Labour Destroys its Future
When the Conservatives have been out of power, they have tended to think and work hard to change themselves and win it back, the six or seven years after 1997 being an exception. When Labour has lost power it has tended, after due thought and consideration, to tear itself into small pieces. This was the case in the fifties, in the seventies and again most spectacularly in the eighties. In each case it was essentially a fight between the Labour left and right but as befits a party of altruists it was often also highly personal and vicious. Labour has not had grand family, old school tie or clubland cliques as the Tories have. It has had gangs instead. Through most of his time, Attlee had kept the socialist gangs apart and quiet, though he began to lose control when Britain rearmed at the time of the Korean War. From then on, it was mostly gang war. On one side, there were always left-wing true believers who believed the country could be dragged to a pure version of socialism – romantics, generally in love with English and Scottish revolutionary socialism, or with Marxism, or both. They were the ‘if only’ faction. If only the trade unions could be won by the left, then true socialist policies could be imposed on the party. If only the gang at the top could be kicked out. If only we could force Labour MPs to do what their constituency parties told them to. If only we could capture the national executive committee, or the conference arrangements committee, or some committee or other. If only we could get in, we could nationalize the top 200 companies and then everything would change for ever.
Few of them, unfortunately for their cause, were working class. Michael Foot was educated at fee-paying boarding schools and came from a family of Cornish puritans and nonconformists, drunk on books – his father, a solicitor and a Liberal MP, left a collection of 52,000 books, including 240 bibles, which gives some indication of the family tone. Dick Crossman, whose diaries would later lift the lid on the Wilson years, was a wealthy lawyer’s son and Oxford academic. Barbara Castle was from lower down the social tree, a tax-surveyor’s daughter who nevertheless went to Bradford Grammar School and Oxford. Ian Mikardo was unusual in being the child of poor Polish immigrants – his father’s command of English was so poor he is said to have thought for a while he was living in New York, not London – who trained as a rabbi. The great exception was certainly working class. The first leader of the If Onlies was Nye Bevan, the former miner and the minister who had created the National Health Service, before his ‘health before guns’ resignation. By the mid-fifties his great years were behind him. Though he made some wonderful speeches in Opposition and was tough enough to break with his closest supporters over the issue of nuclear weapons, much of his behaviour seemed petulant and self-regarding. Of his great enemy Hugh Gaitskell, he would spit that the man was ‘nothing – nothing – nothing’ or assert, ‘He’s an intellectual, I’m a miner.’ Barbara Castle, who never had an entirely easy relationship with Bevan, noted when she was sitting beside him on a conference platform: ‘I have made a perturbing discovery about him. His favourite doodle is writing his own name.’ Like a political Dylan Thomas, his lavish talents were only matched by his skill in lavishly squandering them. As we have seen, in office he had been a great reforming minister. The bigger the job, the bigger the man he became. In Opposition, his charisma was less well employed and his vanity was more damaging. He became smaller.
He seemed to carry round with him a kind of portable audience, essential to his well-being, foils to his wit, witty though many were themselves. Yet Bevan had a bewitching charisma that made him the focus for the left, whose positions included an increasingly reflexive anti-Americanism and a doctrinaire insistence on nationalization and central planning. Bevan was as distrustful of the Soviet Union as the rest of the Labour leadership. There were no illusions about Moscow, particularly after an angry dinner in the Commons at which Khrushchev warned Labour that they must ally with Russia ‘because if not, they would swat us off the face of the earth like a dirty old black beetle’. Though he was easily beaten by Gaitskell in the leadership battle in 1955, Bevan’s supporters were a formidable crowd in the party throughout this period. In 1952, fifty-seven Labour MPs abstained in a motion on Tory defence spending, which was a measure of their size. The ‘Keep Left’ group had become the ‘Bevanites’, votaries even as they protested their sturdy independence. They were a clique, with their own newspaper, Tribune, and their own social gatherings in the Commons, at Crossman’s London house, at a country house, Buscot Park in Oxfordshire, and in Soho restaurants. They saw themselves as the romantic, rackety and principled opponents of the upper-class traitors who were taking over Labour. Soon, inevitably, they were being called a party within a party.
As suspicions grew, Bevan attacked Gaitskell personally and in public. With support from such unlikely and untrustworthy sources as the right-wing press magnate Lord Beaverbrook, Bevan and his gang started to seriously scare other Labour leaders. Gaitskell told a particularly bitter conference that it was time to stop attempted ‘mob rule by a group of frustrated journalists’. A half-hearted attempt to expel Bevan from the Labour Party was matched by a half-hearted discussion among his followers about setting up a new socialist party of their own. Eventually Bevan returned to the front line as shadow foreign secretary and later deputy leader before dying of throat cancer in 1960. He did not read the new Britain well. His last party speech in 1959 predicted that when the British ‘have got over the delirium of television’, realized they were mortgaged to the hilt, and understood that consumerism had produced ‘a vulgar society’, they would turn to true socialism and ‘we shall lead our people where they deserve to be led’.
On the other side of the divide were Gaitskell and his gang, variously described as the Frognal Set or the Hampstead Set, after the suburban north London house where the Labour leader entertained and, the Bevanites believed, plotted to abolish socialism and lead the people to a hell of television sets and home ownership. Gaitskell was another public schoolboy, who had been radicalized by the General Strike of 1926 and the Nazi thugs on the streets of Vienna in the late thirties. Like Harold Wilson he was an economist, who had served in government during the war. As Attlee’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had proved tough. It was his decision to fund rearmament partly by making savings by introducing NHS charges that provoked Bevan’s resignation from the cabinet and began that feud. (Gaitskell was probably wrong on the numbers, and Bevan right.) In public Gaitskell could come over as a prig, with little of Bevan’s champagne fizz. All his life he had been keen on uncomfortable truths. When a small child he had apparently once startled a passing woman who looked down at him by singing from his pram, ‘Soon shall you and I be lying / Each within our narrow tomb’. In later life he did not lose the disconcerting style. To become Labour leader after only nine years as an MP, replacing the venerable Attlee, without a strong base in the trade unions or on the left of the party, was never
theless a remarkable achievement. Gaitskell’s mettle was soon tested over the Suez crisis when his party political point-scoring after earlier supportive noises made him hated on the Tory benches. For those who think the Commons has become too much of a bear-pit in recent decades, it is worth recording that Gaitskell contemplated giving up within a couple of years because the booing and shouting from the Conservative side was such that he felt he could not get a hearing in Parliament.
Gaitskell has been fondly remembered by historians partly because of the vivid enthusiasm of his young supporters who later rose to prominence themselves, Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland in particular, and partly because he died suddenly at fifty-six. He had many admirable qualities, including infectious enthusiasm for literature, music, dancing and life in general. He was stubborn, brave and loyal but his record as a party leader was not unspotted. He seriously contemplated loosening the party’s links with the unions, dropping nationalization and changing its name. This was bold but Gaitskell’s tactics were nearly disastrous. Against the advice of the young bloods, he attempted to remove the pro-nationalization clause four from the party’s rulebook as Tony Blair would do much later. In the more socialist fifties it was a fight too far over a matter of symbolism. Gaitskell retired hurt, in confusion. Beaten, at the high point of CND’s first crusades, on the issue of whether Britain should have her own nuclear weapons, he famously promised to fight, fight and fight again to save the party he loved, turning the defeat into a personal public relations triumph. But having rallied the right of the party, he then confounded them by his equally passionate hostility to British membership of the European Common Market. And he had a tendency to flirt with Tory England which did not endear him to the party faithful.
