Critical reaction was largely negative. J. W. Lambert in the Sunday Times was particularly hard on Anderson, not least his ‘curiously old-fashioned worship of what he calls the “working-classes”’, having failed to ‘notice that the very nature of this stratum of society is changing’. So too Angus Wilson, at 44 possibly not unjealous of the AYM. ‘We have rhetoric, exhortation, apocalyptic spine-chilling, smart-aleckry – each and all rather earnest and repetitive – but the total content is trivial,’ he asserted in the Observer. And soon after, on the Third Programme, the middle-aged critic Alan Pryce-Jones frankly accused the eight of contempt for the public: ‘They dislike it for one set of reasons if they are materialists. In that case, other people seem dull, gullible, and snobbish. If on the other hand they are transcendentalists, they accuse the public of lack of purpose, torpidity, unawareness.’ Still, Declaration sold some 20,000 copies, made a lot of noise and put Maschler firmly on the map.27
Also in October, on Saturday the 19th, an undeniably authentic working man, Billy McPhail, scored three second-half headed goals in Celtic’s 7–1 trouncing of Rangers in the Scottish League Cup Final, which was played with the usual heavy, laced ball. A third of a century later, long after the end of his professional career, McPhail would lose his claim in the courts for compensation, even though he had been suffering from pre-senile dementia since his thirties. Twelve days after his hat-trick, another Scottish working man, Lawrence Daly, attended a meeting at Glencraig Colliery, Fife – where there had been a plethora of unofficial stoppages over the past year – between National Coal Board management (including G. Mullin, Area General Manager) and National Union of Mineworkers’ officials (including Daly himself as local branch delegate). ‘The position at Glencraig is very serious,’ insisted Mullin. ‘We spent money on this pit and the output should improve. Unless there is improvement, I may be compelled by circumstances to recommend to the Divisional Board to consider whether it is worthwhile carrying this pit on or not.’ To which Daly riposted, ‘You have refused to listen to the complaints from Glencraig for 15 years.’ But Mullin was adamant: ‘I would say to you people here, let a man examine himself – and you Mr Daly are talking about a manager being to blame – I think you are just as much to be blamed for the atmosphere at this pit. That is the impression I get from your manner and demeanour at this meeting.’
Towards the end, after Mullin had referred to an under-official being recently threatened by a miner, Daly baldly asserted that ‘if men are treated as human beings that is not likely to happen’. Daly – an articulate, even charismatic man in his early 40s – had left the Communist Party the previous year and was starting to become the New Left’s emblematic working-class representative. ‘I can see how to carry on our cultural and intellectual work all right, and perhaps how to deepen and extend it,’ E. P. Thompson wrote to Daly earlier in the month after staying at Glencraig with him and his wife Renée. ‘But in the practical organisational side I am puzzled and depressed. I think there is a 50/50 chance that a new left party may in the end get formed, because I don’t see how the broader labour movement will be transformed without an electoral threat being presented on the left of the official LP.’28
Daly, with a fine tenor voice, enjoyed singing Scottish and Irish folk songs, but like many in the New Left had little enthusiasm for commercial pop music. Top of the charts at the start of November were the Crickets with ‘That’ll Be The Day’ – the vocal style as well as spectacles of their leader, Buddy Holly, an inspiration to the short-sighted John Lennon, by now at art college, while on Saturday the 16th, Six-Five Special was broadcast live from the 2i’s coffee bar in Soho. The line-up included the pink-haired rocker Wee Willie Harris, seen calling Gilbert Harding (an improbable presence) ‘daddy-o’; comedians Mike and Bernie Winters; and the Worried Men, whose Terry Nelhams would go on to become Adam Faith. The 2i’s’ most famous alumnus, Tommy Steele, was also present in a co-hosting role, just 48 hours before topping the bill at the Palladium’s Royal Variety performance, a bill that featured (among others) Gracie Fields, Judy Garland, Tommy Cooper, Vera Lynn and Alma Cogan. That night, the week after his ninth birthday – marked by an unprecedentedly informal, hand-in-the-pocket official photograph by Cecil Beaton’s usurper, the more modern-minded Antony Armstrong-Jones – there was no place in the royal box for Prince Charles, confined to quarters at prep school; but the Crazy Gang, lining up to meet the Queen, wore blue Cheam blazers and caps, with a large ‘C’ badge. Steele himself, reported the News Chronicle, initially struggled:
His first number, ‘Rock With The Caveman’, ended in dull silence from an icy audience. The young Rock and Roll King started on ‘Hound Dog’. Still the audience did not respond.
Then, from the Royal Box high up on the right, somebody was heard clapping in rhythm. It was the Queen Mother.
Once she turned to her daughter as if to say: ‘Come on, dear,’ but the Queen refrained. After a little, the Duke of Edinburgh started, rather half-heartedly, and off-beat.
Within weeks ‘The Pied Piper from Bermondsey’ was the subject of an Encounter profile by Colin MacInnes, who saw in Steele (‘every nice young girl’s boy, every kid’s favourite elder brother, every mother’s cherished adolescent son’) the harbinger of a possible English challenge to the dominance of American songs and performers. Coming from whichever side of the herring pond, all this youth culture largely passed Gladys Langford by. In poor health in her late 60s, living alone in a room in Highbury Barn, she kept her diary going despite severe bouts of depression. ‘Waiting to cross Highbury New Park,’ she recorded on the last Thursday of November, ‘I was amazed by the chivalry of the lorry-driver’s mate, a handsome Teddy boy who leapt from the cabin and led me across the road like a courtly knight errant.’29
Other diarists this month focused on the unfolding Space Age. ‘The 2nd Russian Satellite launched with a dog on board,’ noted Gladys Hague, living with her sister in Keighley, on 3 November. ‘Protests voiced from all over the world.’ Or, as Macmillan wryly put it two days later, ‘The English people, with characteristic frivolity, are much more exercised about the “little dawg” than about the terrifying nature of these new developments in “rocketry.”’ The dog, popularly known as Laika, ‘obsessed the public imagination’, wrote Mollie Panter-Downes. And when she was officially pronounced dead, recorded Frances Partridge on the 15th, ‘the Daily Mirror came out with a wide border of black, and a great deal about soft noses and velvety eyes up there in the stratosphere’.
As for the satellite itself, degrees of excitement took several forms. ‘It is far more momentous than the invention of the wheel, the discovery of the sail, the circumnavigation of the globe, or the wonders of the industrial revolution,’ Anthony Wedgwood Benn reckoned in his diary on the 5th; at a Church Assembly meeting in London on the 12th, one speaker declared the Church should send a Sputnik into outer space with a bishop inside it, given that ‘the present generation, founded on technology and science, is more interested in the “bleep, bleep” of the satellite than the “bleep, bleep” of the preacher’; and for almost a fortnight satellite-like shapes could again be spotted on the front page of the FT.
The canine aspect apart, perhaps the most striking thing about the episode was, a year after the USA had brutally pulled the plug on Eden’s war against Nasser, the extent of the pleasure taken in America’s technological humiliation – or what Panter-Downes tactfully described to her New Yorker readers as ‘the slight chuckle with which a man might note the discomfiture of the rich neighbor across the way whose Cadillac has suddenly refused to start’. A few weeks later, the failure of an American rocket provoked some almost gleeful headlines from Fleet Street (‘US calls it Kaputnik’, ‘Ike’s Phutnik’, ‘Oh, What a Flopnik!’), while by the following spring schoolchildren were chanting the rhyme
Catch a falling sputnik,
Put it in a matchbox,
Send it to the USA
They’ll be glad to get it,
Very
glad to get it,
Send it to the USA
to the tune of Perry Como’s ‘Catch a Falling Star’.30
On Monday the 11th, Armistice Day, John Sandoe opened his high-class bookshop in Chelsea, despite his grandmother’s shock about the absence of shutters to cover the windows on Sundays. Next day, Sir Robert Fraser, director general of the Independent Television Authority (ITA), gave a press conference robustly criticising the BBC and defending commercial television, while Woman’s Hour had at least one irritated listener. ‘That wretched “know all” Ruth Drew took part in telling us “how”,’ noted Judy Haines. ‘Another was telling us “how” in regard to fish, and another “how” in regard to washing, but Ruth loves housework. She takes a duster in each hand so that she doesn’t waste time with the odd hand! Of course, I only hate her because she’s not good for my conscience.’ That same day, the Post Office’s announcement of plans to introduce postal codes was neatly balanced by the Advisory County Cricket Committee’s decision at Lord’s to shelve yet again a proposed knockout competition. Arguably, though, the overall mood was for change, for two days later Buckingham Palace let it be known that after 1958 debutantes would no longer be presented at court, a decision effectively ending ‘the Season’ and perhaps reflecting Princess Margaret’s reputed disgust that ‘every tart in London can get in’.31
‘The conventional characters of “good BBC” and “bad ITA” belong to the land of myth and fable,’ Fraser had asserted at his press conference, responding to disparaging remarks by the head of BBC television. ‘We are often told we have audiences of morons: we think we have an audience of men and women . . . What some regard as the herd, we respect as the human family.’ Fraser was certainly talking from a continuing position of strength, having the day before given the key facts to Wedgwood Benn. ‘In 4.5 million homes with choice, 75 per cent prefer ITA, 25 per cent preferring BBC if you include children,’ the Labour MP duly noted. ‘Excluding children the figures are 70/30.’ Later in the week he lunched with the BBC’s Mary Adams: ‘She said they were absolutely defeated and in a complete dither.’
Still, the original television channel had its undoubted glories, not least the scriptwriters Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. ‘There’s a bite to Hancock’s Half Hour,’ observed the critic John Metcalf soon afterwards, ‘a willingness to accept the worst in all of us, to make social and human observations that belong to the satirist rather than the clown.’ So too Tonight, soon to move to a 6.45 start and increasingly addictive to members of the Viewers’ Panel:
The whole programme is good from beginning to end. It also has the essence of surprise – you don’t know what to expect next (which is the very thing that makes it hold you, I believe).
I would sooner miss my evening meal than miss this harmonious three (Cliff Michelmore, Derek Hart and Geoffrey Johnson Smith).
There had also been a sharpening-up in a key area. ‘The BBC, inspired by ITV News, has improved the manner of its news presentation,’ reckoned the Spectator’s John Cowburn in his end-of-year TV review, ‘so that it is no longer the voice of the Establishment talking to the poor gammas.’ Even so, for the medium as a whole, paternalism remained the order of the day: not only did the Postmaster General, Ernest Marples, refuse in December to allow an extension of viewing hours (‘It is not only quantity but general quality and balance which has to be borne in mind’) but many among the progressive intelligentsia disdained to acquire a set, so that, as Doris Lessing recalled, ‘One could more or less work out someone’s political bias by the attitude he took towards television.’ Of course, there were variations. At the end of January, Michael Young was informing the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer that his co-author Peter Willmott had become ‘a real television addict’: ‘He says that he has not been to a cinema since December 16th when he acquired his new set.’32
Young passed on this titbit in the context of Gorer having been engaged since the autumn on a detailed investigation of television-watching habits. Adults were surveyed in November, leading to some suggestive statistics: 59 per cent of the upper middle class never had the set switched on while they were eating, compared to an overall average of 46 per cent; 22 per cent, mainly from the working class, always had the set on during meals; and, in answer to the question ‘How important is television in your daily conversation?’, 52 per cent overall replied, ‘not at all important’ (66 per cent in the case of the upper middle class). One of Gorer’s ‘greatest surprises’ from the study was ‘the apparent almost complete absence of emotional involvement of the viewers with “TV personalities”’, while in general he reckoned that ‘although TV will help somewhat to identify people who appear on the screen fairly frequently its influence as a form of political education and enlightenment is practically non-existent’.
Two months later it was the turn of children to give their views:
I would rather go out really; go down to the coffee bar or stay with a friend, we have the records on. Yes, records are more important. (Jean Milner, 14, girls’ grammar, Stoke-on-Trent)
Everyone sits down and watches it; you don’t talk as much as you used to. If anyone came in, you used to talk – now you watch the television. (Elaine Bate, 14, girls’ grammar, Stoke-on-Trent)
I don’t think some programmes it is a timewaster but with others it is. Such as these cowboy Westerns – I can’t see what use you get from them but I watch them just the same. (Peter Sockett, 14, secondary modern, Sheffield)
I ask if we can have it on and if my brother wants the BBC, there is always a row going on. (Janet Slack, 10, primary, Sheffield)
I think I have learned a lot from it – Panorama and Tonight, these specially I like. Some of the comedy programmes haven’t taught me much. (D. J. Bettany, 15, boys’ grammar, Newcastle-under-Lyme)
Westerns – you get sick of them. (David Wise, 14, secondary modern, Crawley)
Gorer’s conclusion was that television had only two major effects on young people: it made them stay at home more, and it made them go to bed later. The Manchester Guardian’s television critic, in a swingeing attack just before Christmas on ITV’s fare for children, was much less inclined to ignore the moral dimension. ‘There is a certain amount of crime and violence in these programmes,’ he complained, ‘but almost as disturbing is the tawdry and trashy character of the incessant films and series.’ And he instanced The Buccaneers – ‘a sort of pseudo-Stevenson tale, in which, as in all ITV serials, neither character nor dialogue matter one jot; action, crude, abrupt, and almost mechanical, is all that matters’. Even Robin Hood, ‘which I had thought passable when commercial television began, now seems to have deteriorated into the same perfunctory, empty bustle as all the rest of the film serials’. In fact, the only saving grace was Rin-Tin-Tin, ‘the most humane of these affairs, perhaps because this handsome dog can neither talk nor shoot’.
Radio’s principal innovation this autumn was the coming of Today on the Home Service, in effect as the sound equivalent of Tonight. It began as two 20-minute strands, either side of Lift Up Your Hearts and the eight o’clock news; its debut on 28 October featured Petula Clark, interviews with a pilot and plane passenger, record reviews, Robert Morley on a first night, Eamonn Andrews on boxing, and an item about an auction of Napoleon’s letters – a miscellany with not a hint of politics, let alone a bruising interview. It was not until the following summer that the raffish Jack de Manio, with his gin-and-tonic voice, became the main presenter, and another five years before Today more systematically focused on news and current affairs. The Archers remained the favourite radio programme, with some 18 million listeners. In late November a survey was conducted, and many fans ‘paid tribute to the authentic atmosphere of the Ambridge community’, as in the words of a police sergeant’s wife: ‘The characters – foolish, kind, wise and occasionally spiteful – make a very realistic programme.’ A salesman’s wife, however, found the female characters less plausible. ‘Why are all the women rather crudely drawn? They whine, they nag, they gru
mble, they are usually very silly and demanding; and when they are good, they are very, very dull.’33
The run-up to Christmas began for Judy Haines on the last day of November. ‘Had an enjoyable but exhausting time in Gamage’s,’ she recorded. ‘Girls got pencil cases from Father Christmas and enjoyed the Animal Show. I ordered four articles to be sent home.’ The following Wednesday afternoon, in dense fog near Lewisham, the 4.56 steam express from Cannon Street to Ramsgate crashed into a stationary electric train, bringing down a bridge carrying a loop line over the track path and altogether killing 90 people. ‘Bodies shrouded in blankets and coats lay in a long row beside the track,’ reported the Manchester Guardian. ‘Alongside were strewn handbags, gloves, shoes, and gaily wrapped Christmas parcels.’ That was a disaster, down to human error as well as the weather, but later in the month three scandals began to unfold. On the 7th, in Thurso, a police officer was provoked by a foul-mouthed 15-year-old grocer’s boy (‘you think you’re a smart fucker’) into hitting him, leading to complaints which the police dismissed before the local MP eventually forced a public inquiry, amidst considerable parliamentary disquiet about a cover-up. On the 9th, the former and future right-wing Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt exposed on Panorama the gerrymandering practices of the Communist-led Electrical Trades Union, most recently its cynical blackballing of Les Cannon, the union’s gifted Education Officer who had resigned from the CP over Hungary. And on the 19th, the Commons debated the recently exposed abuses at Rampton Mental Hospital near Retford, Nottinghamshire, where the mentally ill rubbed shoulders with violent criminals. Amidst all this, the critic Hilary Corke (in the Listener on the 12th) ferociously attacked Doris Lessing (a writer ‘of absolutely no importance’); the 14-year-old future critic, Lorna Stockton, went to her first, dismal school dance in Whitchurch, Shropshire and met Vic Sage (‘temples glistening with sweat and Brylcreem’); and on the 16th, in a live TV transmission of Hancock’s Half Hour, much of the scenery fell prematurely apart, leaving Hancock to play an entire scene holding up a table. But at least the audience was laughing – unlike for the most part at Barnacle Bill, the final Ealing comedy, released just before Christmas to a critical panning summed up by Isabel Quigly’s three words, ‘a big flop’. It was comic cuts, though, at a cold, wet Valley on Saturday the 21st, as ten-man Charlton Athletic came from 5-1 down to beat the visitors Huddersfield Town 7-6, leaving their manager, Bill Shankly, for once speechless until the train back reached Peterborough.34
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