A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  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.

  54

  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, mo
st 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’. 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.

  55

  A History of British Pop

  By the beginning of the sixties all the essential ingr
edients 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.