by A. N. Wilson
Those who did still exist at the top of the social hierarchy could no doubt sniff, through all Fanny Cradock’s grand phrases, the mothbally odours of the shabby genteel. The arcane rituals of the Season–presentation of debutantes at Buckingham Palace, Queen Charlotte’s Ball, and all its attendant cocktail parties and dinners–continued throughout the post-war years until, in 1958, the Royal Family themselves decided that enough was enough. One thousand four hundred and forty-one debutantes were presented at Buckingham Palace in that last year, but a much smaller number remained in London to ‘do’ the Season. One of them, Fiona MacCarthy, who wrote a witty account of the whole matter–Last Curtsey–made the telling point that the controlled mating rituals no longer corresponded to any form of reality. This was not how women of the period wished to find husbands. Many had already lost their virginity, and most wanted to do something more interesting with their lives than had been permitted to their mothers. Even if The Female Eunuch had yet to be written, ‘there was a vociferous debate over the next few years on what it meant to be a woman’.9
Not only did the mothers of the debutantes seem to their daughters to be caught in a pointless trap of self-imposed limitations (‘The generations of our mothers accepted they were wives and mothers and that was that’10), but they were also imprisoned–as their daughters for the most part did not entirely wish to be–by class.
For men, class differences were sometimes ironed out and sometimes exacerbated by National Service. Two years’ military service was compulsory from 1947 (the National Service Bill) until 1962.11 It was the last period in British history when male members of quite different classes were forced to be together. Evelyn Waugh’s son Auberon remembered his period of training at Caterham as a time of ‘simple physical torture–being made to run, with bursting lungs, round a track, carrying a Bren gun over my head as a form of punishment; after being injected with TAB (anti-typhus vaccine); being drilled in double time for half an hour in pyjamas to the latrine (or shithouse); being screamed at by a drill sergeant in front of the whole battalion for having dirty flesh on parade (a shaving cut) and doubled off the parade ground…The only useful lesson I learnt at Caterham concerned the resentment and hatred of large sections of the working class for such as myself.’12
There is no reason to doubt his testimony, though not everyone felt inspired by the hatred to devote a lifetime to class warfare. Nicholas Harman, an Etonian, later a journalist on The Economist, remembered being told at Caterham, by a Scouser in the barrack room, that he had been talking in his sleep. ‘I said, “Really sorry, don’t think so,” and he said, “Well, it was either you or McGuinness, you both talk funny.” Later, in Korea, Harman’s platoon sergeant in the Royal Fusiliers, who during the Second World War had been a temporary captain in an Indian regiment, said he liked the British army because you could tell an officer even in the dark by the way he spoke.’13
Whether National Service inspired the young men to look forward to a bright future in which all classes could work together, or whether it fostered class resentment, perhaps depended upon the temperaments of those concerned. As a social phenomenon, it neatly mopped up a class of people whom Marx, in Capital, termed the lumpenproletariat–rendered in the charming translation of Eden and Cedar Paul ‘the tatterdemalion or slum proletariat’. Marx divided the class into three–the able-bodied, the orphans and the pauper children, and the ‘demoralized, the degenerate, the unemployable’.14 In Leninist versions of the Marxist state, these people would find themselves in labour camps, or if possible exterminated. In Britain, throughout the nineteenth century, they had been cruelly dragooned into semi-slavery, either as factory hands or as domestic servants or foot soldiers. If they positively refused to work, they were consigned to the workhouse, and their life expectancy was extremely short, not more than forty years old in many cases.
The 1945 election had changed their position, and when National Service came to an end there would be removed the last disguise used by governments to hide the existence of these people from the rest. The only humane course of action was to pursue the optimistic course that those labelled ‘demoralized degenerate and unemployable’ by Karl Marx might, in a liberal democracy, be educated to a level where they would soon move on happy and equal terms with the rest. By 2008, after more than half a century of beneficent state education, 30,000 British school children per annum were leaving school with no qualifications at all.15 In the fifty previous years, the rest of society would have been performing the optimistic and charitable task of sending these people to school, trying to persuade them to eat wholesome food, and extending their lives, in spite of their habits of smoking and drinking, to the point where they would require, along life’s path, expensive prisons, hospitals and eventually old folks’ care homes specially built for them. No public figure in our times ever quite learnt how to solve this problem, for those whose forebears, in harsher times, had led lives which were nasty, brutish and short. Almost no one in public life, in fact, was impolite enough to see it as a problem at all, though as the ranks of the lumpenproletariat in all senses swelled–becoming both more numerous and more obese–it was not a phenomenon which it was easy to ignore. The kindly minded lawmakers and formers of opinion of the period, not all of them socialists, hoped for some way of improving the lot of everyone in society, and would echo the aspiration of Miss Luke, the schoolmistress in an I. Compton-Burnett novel, who says, ‘I have spent my life amongst educated and intelligent people…I pay the rightful homage of the highly civilized…to those whose lives are spent at the base of civilisation.’16 There had never been a time in history when everyone else–from the working classes to the classes at the top of the economic scale–had been compelled through decency to live as if the ‘unemployable’ were just like everyone else. The experiment, or illusion (depending upon viewpoint), would colour the years which followed.
Certainly, after National Service was phased out, and the economic revival made evident the gaps between talents and opportunities, the artificially close social cohesion, which had been an unwonted feature of British life since the beginning of the Second World War, began to come apart.
An early warning signal came with the change in the musical scene. Rock’n’ roll was the expressive African American slang for sexual intercourse. The phrase soon became synonymous with music of a kind never heard before on this planet; music which, when amplified electrically, could be used to numb the senses, to subdue the critical faculties, even to torture non-Western enemies. In the 2002–7 invasion of Iraq, prisoners were tortured by constant exposure to loud rock music, a form of mental blasting which was the recreational physical-cum-mental background noise for a majority of Western young people. In the West, rock’n’ roll, and its various variations and descendants–rock, heavy metal, etc–became the music of the age. Bill Haley and His Comets exemplified the northern band rock’n’ roll which was initially the music’s most popular form in England–though Memphis country rock, as popularised by Elvis Presley, would soon overtake it.17 Having started as an innovation among black working-class American youth, rock music was destined to become the common lingua franca of our times, the noise coming from loudspeakers in every country on the planet. No other form of music has ever had this degree of universality. In every country where rock music became the norm, it drove out indigenous musical forms. It took a mere generation in Ireland, for example, for the extinction of songs which had been learnt over hundreds of years. Once the pied piper’s rock muzak had been installed in an Irish bar, just as in a bar in Melbourne or Singapore or Buenos Aires or Swindon, the young would follow it, leaving behind the native tradition, the old stories and songs which had been inside the heads of their forefathers. Although fans of rock music do know the lyrics of their favourite numbers, they can never in their own, unamplified persons ever hope to reproduce the sound exactly. In all previous generations of the human race, music was collective and it was an activity. If you went to the pub or the music hall, you
sang. You joined in. Rock music was the first purely passive musical form. It was something which happened to you. You gyrated and shook to it, as to the shamanic summons of a witch-doctor, but you could not exactly sing along to it. You were not part of the music, as you might when singing ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’ around the pub piano. You were the music’s victim. And this was designedly so, since the 1950s was the first decade in which children and adolescents–now for the first time in history given the name of teenagers–had any money.
Previously, boys and girls of sixteen dressed as their parents dressed, and danced to the same music. Now, for anyone who chose to make money out of them, they could be offered special young persons’ clothes, young persons’ music.
Just as Elizabeth David tempted English palates with Mediterranean food, and English ears accustomed themselves to American music, so British sex symbols were required not to be attractive in themselves, so much as to be ‘the British answer to Marilyn Monroe’–sometimes to Brigitte Bardot.
Diana Mary Fluck was born in the railway town of Swindon in 1931. As a teenager she had dated Desmond Morris, also from Swindon and later famous as the author of The Naked Ape, a zoologist and anthropologist. Her name was so obviously in danger of mispronunciation that she changed it to Diana Dors. After she became famous, she agreed to open a church fete in her native town. The vicar of Swindon, in his desperation to avoid just such a mispronunciation, was guided by a malign misfortune to avoid the wrong obscenity. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great pleasure that I introduce to you our star guest. We all love her, especially as she is our local girl. I therefore feel it right to introduce her by her real name: Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the very lovely Miss Diana Clunt.’18
Her many films, and her occasional ventures into print, did not suggest coyness about sex. Films included Good Time Girl (1948), Lady Godiva Rides Again (1951), Yield to the Night (1956), The Love Specialist (1956) and many others, teetering off beyond the borders of suggestiveness with Adventures of a Taxi Driver and Keep It Up Downstairs.
What was striking about her was not her name, but the notion that in this era of history a rising English sex bomb had to model herself on foreigners. ‘Things were complicated’, she wrote in For Adults Only, ‘as we all seemed to have double initials, such as B.B., in her [Brigitte Bardot’s] case, D.D. in mine, M.M. as in Marilyn Monroe herself.’19 It was Dors’s misfortune to lack the smallest scintilla of Bardot’s or Monroe’s sex appeal. In spite of having dyed her hair blonde, and in spite of preparedness to show off enormous breasts, she had a coarse, puddingy face and no acting ability. ‘Since I left school at thirteen I have been working for a certain standard of living’ also seemed a spectacularly unsexy and joyless approach to stardom. ‘Once I’d got it, I saw no reason to give it all up. Luxury is comfortable, it’s good for you, it’s luxurious.’20
Just as Swindon-born sex symbols now had to take their cue from Hollywood, so religious revival itself, were it ever to occur in the godless, post-war atmosphere of Britain, came from across the Atlantic. When Billy Graham came over to Britain in 1954, he addressed the largest religious congregation yet seen in the British Isles: 120,000 people, crowded into the Wembley Arena. For the previous three months, Billy Graham had conducted what amounted to a missionary campaign to convert England to a completely un-English form of religion. Although it was always his policy to advise converts to seek out the church of their own background, whether Methodist, Church of England or Roman Catholic, rather than enlisting them as recruits in his own Baptist Church, Billy’s 1954 mission had an aim which went beyond the desire for the personal conversion of the sinner. He wanted England to become part of a universal religious resistance to the threats of world communism. He wanted England to become more like the middle- and working-class America which were the most fructiferous areas of Graham’s vineyard. ‘There will always be an England. But will it always be the England we have known?’ he asked. ‘The England of history has been an England whose life, both national and individual, was ever centred upon the things of God.’21
While there were some reasons for supporting this suggestion–the fact that the world had only the previous year witnessed an ancient coronation ceremony in which the young Queen was anointed with the oil of chrism by the former headmaster of Repton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher; the fact that bishops sat ex officio as members of the Upper House of Parliament; the fact that so many English schools were of a specifically religious foundation–it would be hard, since the 1689 Whig Revolution, to match Billy’s words to the England of John Locke, of the four Georges, of Dickens, John Stuart Mill and Disraeli, of Marie Lloyd and Tony Hancock. Naturally, some inhabitants of these islands, once evangelised by the Celtic saints and later by Benedictine monks, had centred themselves upon ‘the things of God’. But while individuals–including some of the individuals named above–were so centred, there remained a bedrock of British indifferentism, not merely in religion, but also in music: had not a German visitor deemed it Das Land ohne Musik? It was not a place where you wore your heart on your sleeve.
But for Billy, England had suffered something tragic in the war years of 1940–45. This was not the loss of its Imperial world power or the ruination of its exchequer, both of which had been the specific war aims of US President Roosevelt and US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jnr, but something more nebulous. According to Graham, ‘Through fear-haunted days and never-ending nights, the German bombs turned England’s homes and churches into fire-blackened heaps of rubble. And when the war ended, a sense of frustration and disillusionment gripped England, and what Hitler’s bomb could not do, Socialism with its accompanying evils shortly accomplished.’
There were voices raised against this interpretation of recent events. ‘Apologize, Billy–or Stay Away,’ called out the Daily Herald, when it reported these words of the evangelist on Saturday 20 February.22 But Graham did not apologise. The fact that some members of the socialist Cabinet, such as Stafford Cripps and Frank Longford, had been Christians, whereas the present Prime Minister, old Sir Winston Churchill, was an unreconstituted Victorian unbeliever, was not allowed to get in the way of a piece of good rhetoric. Addressing an audience at Central Hall in Westminster shortly after his arrival, Billy announced: ‘President Eisenhower was right when he said we must have a spiritual awakening if the Western World is to survive. And Sir Winston Churchill has said he wonders whether our problems have not got beyond our control–I am going to preach a gospel not of despair but of hope–hope for the individual, for society and for the world.’23
It was a time when any English boy or girl who wanted to be a cowboy emulated the somewhat anodyne Roy Rogers. The privileged child would even possess a fringed Roy Rogers hat, waistcoat and sheriff’s badge, and a Roy Rogers CA-gun in a Roy Rogers holster. ‘Roy Rogers is coming to London for the crusade,’ said Dr Graham, ‘at his own expense. He has a tremendous influence on boys and girls, and I think his Christian testimony is a wonderful opportunity of [sic] getting them interested in church and Sunday school.’
Did the Evangelical Alliance chaired by Major General D. J. Wilson-Haffendon (‘Haffy’) get quite what it had bargained for when it invited Dr Graham to England? Haffy was a Victorian throwback, as were most of those who still counted for anything in England, men such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Geoffrey Fisher, the Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, or the Poet Laureate, John Masefield. Haffy had been a staff officer for thirty years in the Indian Army. He guaranteed that Billy Graham would, in the course of his visits, be given such dinners at the House of Commons, the Café Royal and Claridge’s as might have graced the pages of a novel by Trollope. The Earls of Cottenham and Cavan, the Viscounts Bridgeman and Newport, the Bishops of Worcester and Barking were in attendance. Somehow, however, the particular brand of Christianity Dr Graham brought to England was not of a native kind. As the assemblies filled the seats at Harringay Arena, and eventually as the throngs grew
at Wembley, Billy would introduce his fellow Americans who sat with him on the podium. Former US Air Force Senator Stuart Symington (Democrat) and Senator Styles Bridges (Republican). There, too, was the gigantic Don Morrow, a leading figure in American football now destined for the Presbyterian ministry.24
Perhaps only those who heard Billy Graham speak could imagine the effect. He was one of those orators of whom Bill Clinton in small, Adolf Hitler in large, degree were two, capable of swaying the emotions of crowds by something which seems close to hypnotism. During the latter part of the Harringay mission one of the organisers remarked that if Billy Graham ended his sermon by reading out the multiplication tables and then gave the invitation, the people would still come.25 This was an allusion to the moment in every Billy Graham rally when, after the sermon, and the playing of ‘mood music’, the crowds are invited to swoon forward and give themselves to Christ, as the choir raised their voices…
Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine
This is my story, this is my song,
Praising my Saviour, all the day long!
Compared with the millions who tuned in to Hancock’s Half Hour, the thousands who gave themselves to Christ at Billy’s rallies were small in number. But The Economist, on 22 May 1954, commented, ‘The appeal is to emotion which, as every dictator knows, will snowball its way through a crowd. Yet Mr Graham does not produce mass hysteria, although he is certainly dramatic, as he lunges about the stage taking by turns the roles in the Fall of Adam and Eve…Anglican parsons will shudder at the thought they should emulate his technique even if they could. But though they rightly preserve the intellectual tradition that has always been theirs, they can hardly ignore the fact that it is Mr Graham who seems to be on the wavelength.’26