Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  ‘Some of the methods used to prevent coaches not involved in the stoppage from carrying on were far removed from the peaceful picketing allowed by law,’ reported the Manchester Guardian on Tuesday, 23 July (three days after Macmillan’s Bedford speech), about the ongoing national (outside London) busmen’s strike. ‘Drivers were attacked and beaten, tyres were slashed and windows broken – sometimes to the danger of passengers as well as crew.’ Later that week at Headingley the West Indies were again on the rack, with the England fast bowler Peter Loader celebrating his hat-trick by dancing a fandango, very different to cricket’s still customary low-key displays of emotion. But Philip Larkin on the Friday was more interested in The Archers. ‘Don’t you adore Carol Grey’s voice when Toby S. [Toby Stobeman] is making love to her?’ he asked Monica Jones. ‘It quite broke me up over my leathery tinned tongue tonight: she goes all small & unconfident. She’s the only woman on the programme I’ve ever liked. I’m getting to the point where I want to bang a skillet on Prue’s [Pru Harris, later Forrest] head.’ A less inveterate grumbler, Florence Turtle, spent the weekend in Suffolk, and on the train back to London ‘a passenger remarked that he thought Liverpool St Station must be the dirtiest station in the world, a remark that I must agree with’. Harold Macmillan was more satisfied when his Monday audience with the Queen turned to the question of where the eight-year-old Prince Charles was to go to boarding school next term: ‘She has chosen Cheam – a good preparatory school, solid but not smart.’6

  In fact the royals and those around them were in for a tricky few months. ‘A pain in the neck’ was young Lord Altrincham’s memorable description of the Queen’s voice, in a trenchant article on the monarchy in the August issue of the National & English Review; he added that the unfortunate impression she gave in her speeches was of ‘a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect and a recent candidate for Confirmation’. Altrincham (the future John Grigg) largely blamed the monarch’s ‘tweedy’ entourage – a ‘tight little enclave of English ladies and gentlemen’ – rather than Elizabeth herself, but that did not stop a torrent of abuse. The Daily Express inevitably led the way; in the Daily Mail the political commentator Henry Fairlie accused the peer of ‘daring to put his infinitely tiny and temporary mind against the accumulated experience of the centuries’; Altrincham received some 2,000 letters of complaint and a punch in the face from a member of the League of Empire Loyalists; and Macmillan noted his luncheon guest Churchill as ‘splendidly indignant’. Even so, a poll of Daily Mail readers found that as many as 35 per cent agreed with Altrincham, compared to 52 per cent disagreeing – and that among younger readers the split was actually 47–39 in his favour. Summing up ‘this unofficial national debate’ later in August, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote in the New Yorker that there were indeed ‘many loyal and thoughtful English’ who would be ‘glad to see a bit of fresh air blown into the stuffier recesses of palace protocol’; she pinned her hopes on the ‘forceful ventilating influence’ of the Duke of Edinburgh, ‘whose breezy common sense and intelligence make short work of red-tape trimmings’. The Queen’s first minister was less convinced. ‘After luncheon, a sharp little discussion with Prince Philip,’ recorded Macmillan at Balmoral on 1 September. ‘He is against our having a nuclear power. The tone of his talk confirms me in the view that he will try to play up to the Left. He may honestly think this to be in the Queen’s interest. But I don’t altogether like the tone of his talk. It is too like that of a clever undergraduate, who has just discovered Socialism.’7

  One month later, and the controversy was still alive. ‘Mr [Geoffrey] Howe is the chairman of the Bow Group, and as impertinent a young whipper-snapper as ever needed his breeks dusting,’ was how the Spectator’s new Westminster correspondent ‘Taper’ (Bernard Levin) described the launch of that Tory pressure group’s magazine Crossbow. ‘He spent a good deal of his speech insulting Lord Altrincham in a particularly offensive, ham-fisted and naive manner.’ A Sunday Dispatch photo caption a few days later about Princess Alexandra was a reminder of the royals’ increasingly fish-bowl world – ‘a princess plays tennis – in slacks’ – before news broke that, to coincide with the Queen’s North American tour, New York’s Saturday Evening Post was publishing a critical piece on the royals and their great cheerleader, Richard Dimbleby. The Sunday Express headline provided a pithy if not a balanced summary – ‘MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE RIDICULES ROYAL FAMILY IN USA. ASTOUNDING ATTACK ON THE QUEEN. SHE IS CALLED DOWDY, FRUMPISH, BANAL’ – and one of its readers, Nella Last in Barrow, reflected that ‘after listening to his prim, waspish voice on “Any Questions”’ she had pictured Muggeridge as an ‘ageing Peke’. The People also weighed in, a front-page piece calling his article ‘ruthless’ and ‘tasteless’. Next day he was banned from appearing on that evening’s Panorama, and later in October the BBC’s board of governors not only disinvited Altrincham from Any Questions? but decided not to renew Muggeridge’s contract. ‘This chap will never go on the air as long as I am director-general,’ declared Lieutenant General Sir Ian Jacob, and, as a military man, he was as good as his word.8

  ‘You go too flamin’ far when you criticise our Queen, who does more good than you if you lived to be 5,000 . . . signed, Eight (loyal to the Queen) Teddy Boys.’ So read one of the many patriotic letters to Altrincham back in August, but not everyone felt reassured by the nation’s youth. ‘We did not enjoy the horrid crowds of Leicester Square, Coventry Street and Piccadilly Circus,’ recorded Madge Martin that month after an evening in London to see Anna Neagle in No Time for Tears. ‘Surely these were exciting, gay places to be in at night, but now filled with the lowest type – Teddy boys with their friends of both sexes, etc. We had a cup of tea at Fortes – once the dear old Criterion – feeling tired and disgusted with this side of our dear London.’ In September a series run by the Liverpool Echo about widespread vandalism on Merseyside culminated with readers expressing their views. Mrs M. Green of 10 Bower Road, Huyton blamed working mothers – ‘when her day is spent largely outside her home, the pivot is removed and the family, as such, just disintegrates’ – but for most there was a single, unambiguous line of thought:

  We won’t get anywhere until the punishment fits the crime. It is scandalous that if one catches a delinquent in the act and cuffs his ear, one is liable to be hauled up for assaulting a juvenile. (M. Temple, 10 Abergele Road, Stanley, Liverpool 13)

  They ought to bring the cat in again: a few strokes with that would soon put an end to it. Teachers should be able to use the cane again to show children which is right or wrong. (Mrs White, Parkgate Road, Neston)

  Why not bring back the birch like the Isle of Man? (‘Disgusted’ (OAP))

  Mrs K. E. Lee of 32 Barnsbury Road, Liverpool 4 also had a question, or rather two: ‘What sort of homes do these little vultures come from and what kind of citizens are they going to be?’9

  The young themselves were bothered by neither issue. On 7 August, a month and a day after the Woolton church fête, the Quarry Men (not yet with McCartney) played for the first time at the Cavern in Liverpool. ‘We did some skiffle numbers to start off with but we also did rock ’n’ roll,’ recalled the drummer Colin Hanton. ‘John Lennon was passed a note and, very pleased, he said to the audience, “We’ve had a request.” He opened it up and it was from Alan Sytner [the club’s cantankerous owner] saying, “Cut out the bloody rock ’n’ roll.”’ Elsewhere these summer holidays, the 11-year-old Helen Shapiro first met the 10-year-old Mark Feld (later Marc Bolan), ‘this chubby kid’ whose ‘quiff would cover his face when he combed it forward’. Another 11-year-old, Bob Harris, was on holiday with his parents in Cromer when he passed an amusement arcade and heard the American singer Paul Anka’s ‘Diana’ coming from the jukebox (‘There was a magic to it that made me want to be a part of the world it came from’), while the 14-year-old Lorna Stockton (later Sage) went with a friend to Southport:

  Gail and I spent all our time and pocket money dashing from one jukebox to another t
o make sure that Pat Boone’s chaste hit ‘Love Letters in the Sand’ would be drowned out all over the windswept town by ‘All Shook Up’. The one was sweetness and light, the other inarticulate, insidious bump-and-grind . . . All the Elvises groaned and whimpered at once, and the waves rushed in and obliterated Pat Boone. And we clung to each other in a shelter smelling of orange peel and piss on the promenade, and shrieked with glee, like the Bacchae who dismembered Orpheus.

  Skiffle was by now at its apogee, with the catchy (especially for this six-year-old boy) ‘Last Train to San Fernando’ by Johnny Duncan and the Blue Grass Boys steaming through the charts. But a curmudgeonly Welshman, Frank Lewis, was less enamoured when on 2 September he saw ‘the Mountaineering Skiffle group’ play at the Globe pub in Barry: ‘The skiffle place was jammed with young people. Too many tunes all in one key. It begins to boredom [sic] after a while.’10

  Two days later, HMSO published a blue paper-bound volume, 155 pages long and priced at five shillings. This was the Wolfenden Report – or Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution – and its initial 5,000 print run sold out within hours. ‘It is a fine, thorough, dispassionate piece of work, which uses words more clearly than many best-sellers do,’ found Mollie Panter-Downes. Its two key recommendations were that prostitutes should be punished much more severely for accosting and that, more controversially, private homosexual relations between consenting adults should be decriminalised. ‘It is not, in our view, the function of law to intervene in private lives of citizens, or to seek to enforce any particular pattern of behaviour,’ declared the report about the latter aspect. ‘It follows that we do not believe it to be a function of the law to attempt to cover all the fields of sexual behaviour.’ Importantly, Wolfenden made clear that ‘this limited modification of the law should not be interpreted as indicating that the law can be indifferent to other forms of homosexual behaviour, or as a general licence to homosexuals to behave as they please’. The following evening on ITV, a programme on the report – preceded by a warning to viewers that it was unsuitable for children and might distress some adults – featured an anonymous doctor (his back to camera), who was asked by the interviewer, ‘Would you prefer to be normal?’ ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘I would – if there was a guaranteed cure – a hope – that I could become an ordinary normal person I would certainly welcome it. I think all homosexuals would like to be cured and marry and have children.’11

  Press reaction to the decriminalisation proposal was predictably mixed. Only two national dailies came out unambiguously against, namely the Daily Mail (‘leaving perverts free to spread corruption’) and the Daily Express (‘cumbersome nonsense’); The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the News Chronicle were almost wholly supportive; the Daily Telegraph worried that legalised homosexuality might spread like an infection; and the Daily Mirror initially sat on the fence, but eventually backed Wolfenden. Among the Sundays, the Observer was positive, but the Sunday Times warned against the undermining of the ‘basic national moral standard’, while in the Sunday Express the resolutely homophobic John Gordon wrote about ‘degraded men’ with ‘bestial habits’ and called the report ‘The Pansies’ Charter’. As for the weeklies, the Spectator asserted that ‘whatever feelings of revulsion homosexual actions may arouse, the law on this point is utterly irrational and illogical’. Most provincial papers were hostile, and the Scotsman declared flatly that it was ‘no solution to any public problem to legitimise a bestial offence’.

  The Mirror took a poll of its largely working-class readers. Within a week there were nearly 7,000 votes in, overwhelmingly wanting prostitutes cleared off the streets but narrowly against decriminalisation of private homosexual behaviour. As further votes came in, those overall preferences stayed constant, while it became apparent that there were significant regional variations: roughly 1 in 2 in the south of England wanting decriminalisation, compared to 3 in 7 in the north and only 1 in 6 in Scotland. A more authoritative opinion poll (though broadly in line) was Gallup’s, published later in September. This revealed that 81 per cent had heard about the report; that 42 per cent saw homosexuality as ‘a serious problem’, compared with 27 per cent ‘not very’ and 31 per cent ‘don’t knows’; and that 38 per cent agreed with decriminalisation, as against 47 per cent disagreeing. ‘Considering all things,’ commented Panter-Downes on Gallup’s figures, ‘this hardly represents the wave of scandalized indignation that many people thought would follow.’12

  The issue rumbled on through the autumn, with one Oxford undergraduate, Dennis Potter, reflecting in Isis that ‘inevitably the natural reaction of all of us who find the thought of homosexual behaviour repulsive or difficult to comprehend will be a troubled one’. Politically, the Home Secretary, Rab Butler, was inclined initially to legislate for decriminalisation, but soon found that he was out of line with mainstream Tory opinion and pushed the issue into the longish grass. The House of Lords did debate the question in December, with Lord Denning speaking for many when he condemned unnatural vices and insisted that the law should continue to punish homosexual conduct, albeit ‘discreetly’. Meanwhile, for homosexuals themselves, the secrecy and gnawing anxiety continued – perhaps typified this autumn by how Brian Abel-Smith, arguably the most gifted social scientist of his generation, felt unable to apply for a safe Labour seat (the retiring Hugh Dalton’s, in Bishop Auckland) for fear of public humiliation if his homosexuality was discovered. Earlier in the year there had been a sign of the Victorian permafrost starting to melt (with the Homicide Act, which restricted the use of the death penalty for murder), but for the moment this remained a right little, tight little island.13

  ‘What the British people are waiting for,’ Macmillan reflected privately on 17 September with an alert reference to an ITV game show, ‘is the answer to the 64,000 question – how to stop rising prices & fall in value of money. They will (perhaps) accept measures to deal with these problems.’ In the context of sterling under severe pressure, he went on: ‘But they regard an exchange crisis (which they do not understand) as some kind of a swindle organised by foreigners.’ Two days later the Evening Standard included a review of Hamlet at the Old Vic: ‘Ophelia is played by a girl called Judi Dench, whose first professional performance this only too obviously is. But she goes mad quite nicely and has talent which will be shown to better advantage when she acquires some technique to go with it.’ Homeward-bound commuters, though, could not avoid the front-page headline: ‘Bank Rate Shock – Up To 7 per cent: Thorneycroft’s H-bomb shakes the City’. Peter Thorneycroft was Chancellor, and he had gone for a 2-per-cent hike heavily under the influence of the Governor of the Bank of England, Cameron (Kim) Cobbold, whose spokesman was quoted in strikingly robust language: ‘There has recently been a good deal of speculative pressure against the pound. People have been selling sterling. This will show them “where they get off”.’ The démarche temporarily did its job, confounding the instant, apocalyptic prediction of the cerebral merchant banker Siegmund Warburg (made privately to the Shadow Chancellor Harold Wilson and recorded in the diary of Wilson’s colleague Richard Crossman) that ‘it was a gamble which would not come off and we were in for a 1931 crisis, but this time with rising unemployment and rising prices simultaneously’, yet it still generated plenty of scepticism. The Spectator’s Keynesian economic commentator Nicholas Davenport was appalled, calling the move ‘the crowning folly’, while the more measured FT argued that unless there was real ‘determination in extending restraint to wages’, which in practice meant the government standing up to the unions, then ‘nothing will have been gained, and much will have been lost’.14

  There were two piquant consequences of this sharp tightening of policy. ‘It is alleged that there was a “leak” about the intention of the Government to raise the Bank Rate,’ Macmillan noted the following week, adding that ‘careful enquiries’ had found ‘no trace of any irregularity’. The ambitious Wilson, however, was on the case, and by October he was publicly demanding a form
al inquiry – a request eventually acceded to by a very reluctant Macmillan. The other consequence, barely noticed at the time, concerned the implications of an accompanying measure, the temporary forbidding of London banks to use sterling to finance third-party trade. Dollar deposits had already been mounting in Paris and London – in part reflecting the Cold War reluctance of Soviet and East European banks to trust their dollars to New York – and it was these dollars that some of London’s banks now sought to use in order to go on doing their business of financing international trade. Such were the origins of what would become known as the Eurodollar market. One of its pioneers was the visionary Sir George Bolton, a former Bank of England man but now chairman of the Bank of London and South America (BOLSA). In his pitch for the job earlier in 1957 he had asserted, ‘London has barely succeeded in maintaining its international banking system following the loss of political influence by the UK, the weakened position of sterling and the incapacity of the London Market to increase its foreign investment net.’ Accordingly, those London banks, like BOLSA, ‘whose main business is to maintain and develop a position in the foreign field will have to adapt their structure to meet the needs of the time’.15 The Euromarkets, starting with the Eurodollar market, would be the means of that adaptation – and a first, long step towards London returning to its pre-1914 glories as an international financial centre.

  Judi Dench’s was not the only debut that autumn. ‘Mr Ted Hughes is clearly a remarkable poet, and seems to be quite outside the currents of his time,’ wrote the august critic Edwin Muir in the New Statesman, reviewing The Hawk in the Rain. ‘His distinguishing power is sensuous, verbal and imaginative; at his best the three are fused together. His images have an admirable violence.’ The very different poet Robert Conquest generously agreed in the Spectator – ‘not just promising but very promising’ – though his friend Kingsley Amis held his counsel, perhaps mulling instead over the tepid critical response to the just-released Boulting brothers’ version of Lucky Jim. ‘The film has taken what was farcical in the book and turned it into a rowdy, slap-happy, knockabout comedy in which all that was social, significant, representative, etc., etc., is kept firmly out,’ reckoned Isabel Quigly, while Lindsay Anderson was even less forgiving: ‘The characters have been flattened, simplified and vulgarised. The temptations of realist shooting have been consciously resisted, and the story has been wholly abstracted from reality.’