by A. N. Wilson
Pessimists tend to look back on the sixties as the time when Everything Came Unstuck. Honest to God destroyed the faith, and Lady Chatterley the morals, of the British. Libertarian libertine Woy Jenkins unleashed sexual depravity and pornography on an unwilling world. That is one picture. The optimists, who tend to be a little older, are sometimes those who remember the 1960s. They think that they spent the time with flowers in their hair, protesting against the Vietnam War, smoking pot and playing Beatles LPs. Perhaps they did so.
How can such things be measured? My suspicion is that British human beings had no more orgasms in the 1960s than they did in the 1860s or even than in the 1260s; that a brilliantly constructed farce by Alan Ayckbourn such as Relatively Speaking (first performed as Meet My Father in 1965) lasted just as well as some of the more obviously ‘sixties’ plays by Joe Orton. A few hundred, perhaps a few thousand, people changed, or thought they had changed, in the 1960s. But surely many more went on as they had always done.
If the 1960s was a time when Britain learned to fall in love with its future, it was also, this decade in which Churchill died, a time of nostalgia. When Harold Wilson launched an embarrassing campaign called ‘I’m Backing Britain’ to disguise from himself and his voters the effects of European membership, the BBC responded with a short six-part series. It began with a retired bank manager in a fictitious south coast town organising an ‘I’m Backing Britain’ luncheon, in 1968, and recollecting the days of 1940 when Backing Britain had meant being prepared to take up arms.
Dad’s Army (such was the show’s name) was a sitcom based upon the Home Guard. It ran for a total of eighty episodes until 1977. The scripts–not a dud among them–were by Jimmy Perry and David Croft, and they made superb use of some great character actors–above all Arthur Lowe as the bank manager and captain of the platoon–Captain Mainwaring–John Le Mesurier as his chief clerk and sergeant, John Laurie the undertaker, Arnold Ridley with a weak bladder, and Clive Dunn as Lance Corporal Jones, a very popular member of the cast but the only one who threatened to spoil things by overacting. There were some sublime moments, perhaps the best being those when the farcical and the heroic touched. In the episode called ‘The Deadly Attachment’, the captured captain of a German U-boat turns the tables on Mainwaring’s platoon and holds Lance Corporal Jones hostage. He puts a grenade in the waistband of the old man’s trousers.
CAPTAIN: Seven seconds will give me plenty of time to get clear, but I think it is not enough time for the old man to unbutton his tunic.
FRAZER: A terrible way to die.
MAINWARING: You unspeakable swine. Now listen to me. I’m the Commanding Officer here, it’s only right that I should have the bomb in my waistband.
JONES: I will not allow you to have the bomb in your trousers, sir. Don’t you worry about me, they can put twenty bombs in my trousers. They won’t make me crack.
MAINWARING: How can you hope to beat us? You see the sort of men we breed in this country?
CAPTAIN: Yes, rather stupid ones.28
Dad’s Army was so successful partly because it was a pastiche of the self-mockery of actual Second World War comedy, such as ITMA. (Some old-age pensioners ‘remembered’ the theme song, ‘Who Do You Think You’re Kidding, Mr Hitler’, from their wartime days, though it had been commissioned specially for the series.) In fact there was something double-edged about Dad’s Army and its success. In the episode just quoted, the languid Sergeant Wilson fails to prime the Mills bombs because he thinks they will be ‘awfully dangerous’. He thereby saves Jones’s life when the dastardly German plants the grenade on him. In 1968, however, many people were beginning to feel that Britain had come to feel like a pathetic old man with a bomb in his pants, a comedy hero with no future.
Others, more optimistic, felt that the change in the air was to be welcomed. The year 1968 was spoken of in after times by the baby boomers as if it had been one of those great dates in history, such as 1789, or 1848, in which a great revolution had occurred, not merely in the politics of nations, but in the human spirit. But to younger generations than theirs, it could not be seen as the real revolution of our times. Their salute of political heroes–Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara and other leftists–seemed less like the dawn of a new age than the last shout of an old one. As they demonstrated, and pinned on their badges, and waved their little scarlet copies of The Thoughts of Chairman Mao, these supposed champions of a new liberty were unwittingly delaying the true revolution, which was the overthrow of the communist tyranny in Russia and Eastern Europe by the dissidents. When they thought that they were cheering on a bright future, they seemed to their children’s generation to have been locked in a sinister historical past, which the things they most despised, free market capitalism and organised religion, would within little more than a decade eventually be destroyed. Chairman Mao killed infinitely more people than Hitler had done, and the system which had been strengthened by Stalin, enslaving the peoples of Eastern Europe, would be overthrown by the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Bulgarians, the East Germans and the Russians who had known at first hand, and for decades, what it was like to live in a society governed by the incompetent tyrants of the Soviet Union.
Britain’s year of revolution amounted to little more than a marijuana-induced party for spoilt students, the first generation not obliged to do military service or to earn their living as soon as they left school. Britain itself had, during the 1960s, become liberalised in its sexual behaviour, but this was more because of increased prosperity, and by the dissemination of cheap contraception by the medical profession and the pharmaceutical giants. But though it now had several hundred thousand immigrants from the Commonwealth, living largely in the poorer quarters of British cities, the country was fundamentally the same place in 1968 as it had been in 1958. It was still a monarchy. The institutions of Parliament, the judiciary and the Inns of Court, remained the same. The armed forces, though reduced, were still in place. Britain remained an independent archipelago. Industry remained hamstrung by the cold war between trades unions and management. If Great Britain’s unity was under threat it was not from student demonstrations but from the centuries-old problem of Ireland. If its constitutional position, and its sovereignty, were to undergo a radical alteration, this would come not from the activities of the left, but from those new men of the Conservative Party who saw the political future of Britain not as a world empire, nor as an island fortress but as a johnny-come-lately in the European experiment.
Yet the 1960s as a whole, viewed retrospectively, polarised the British. The pessimists saw the decade as the period when everything began to unstick, when Britain undid itself, when the sniggering of the satirists and the misguided reforms of liberalism loosened the fabric of morals and social cohesion. The optimists saw the same changes and viewed them as the beginning of liberation. For the optimists, however childish the behaviour of students or iconoclastic playwrights, it was a period when Britain grew up. They no longer looked to the Lord Chamberlain to decide what they could see on the stage, nor to the Home Secretary and the police and the judiciary to tell consenting adults how to comport themselves in their intimate sexual lives. To the optimists, Roy Jenkins was the Home Secretary who allowed the mature British public to read what they wished, without the philistine interference of the Director of Public Prosecutions. To the pessimists, Jenkins was responsible for every corner-shop newsagent being filled with unsightly pornographic magazines. Optimists rejoiced that unhappily married people and homosexuals (sometimes the same) were no longer stigmatised. For the pessimists, stigma was a good thing, holding together the fragile but useful institution of family life. For the optimists, muddle was better than hypocrisy.
Whichever side of the argument you were guided by temperament to support, it became a commonplace as the years went by to regard the 1960s as the decade when everything in Britain changed. Philip Larkin’s lines were regularly trotted out–‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP’–by r
eaders who failed to see their irony: namely that for a provincial university librarian the revolutions in social and sexual mores with which the decade was associated had not really happened. For optimists, the quasi-revolutionary riots of the students of Paris in 1968, and the imitation demos which led to long-haired students occupying university campuses in Britain, there was a feeling of freshness in the air. In an echo of the Communist Manifesto, Paul Johnson, the editor of the leftist weekly the New Statesman, hailed les événements in Paris as a New Dawn: ‘For what is happening there is of great importance not only to France but to the world. To be there is a political education in itself, to watch the birth-pangs (perhaps, soon, the murder or even suicide) of a new approach to the organization of human societies.’29
That was how it seemed to an intelligent left-wing commentator in the summer of’68. ‘Here in Britain’, he said, ‘we have a stagnant economy, in which university students are told we must develop horror weapons in the cause of the export trade, and workers are stampeded by ignorance and demagogy into howling abuse at an even more exploited section of the population, the blacks. No wonder young people look for a fourth choice: and in Paris, it seems to me, they are beginning to find one.’30
It did not seem like that, however, to the majority of the English electorate. Perhaps dismayed by the stagnant economy, perhaps because they agreed with J. Enoch Powell’s views of Pakistani and Indian immigrants, perhaps because they wanted to signal their instinctive feelings about inflammatory left-wingery such as was purveyed by the New Statesman, they voted Harold Wilson out, and the Conservatives returned to power on Waterloo Day, 1970.
Part Four
The 1970s
14
HeathCo
Alan Bennett’s plays of this period captured the flavour of England being mysteriously lost. There is an atmosphere of inevitability about its dismantlement, and yet no one involved can completely understand why it has to be dismembered so fast, and so brutally. In Habeas Corpus, which opened at the Lyric Theatre on 10 May 1973 with Alec Guinness as the pathetic down-at-heel doctor who can’t stop fumbling with the female patients, many of the familiar Bennett figures and themes were aired. The chorus was the charwoman, Mrs Swabb, originally played by Patricia Hayes, whose rendition of comical working-class characters became famous on television, and which belonged to a tradition of humour going back to Dickens. These women themselves, who were to provide Bennett with much of his stock in trade over the next thirty years, were part of the obsolescence. Their very names–Elsie, Edna, Hilda, Ena, Minnie–were passing out of use. Habeas Corpus was a bedroom farce in which otherwise respectable men found themselves running about on stage with no trousers on. The characters are all imprisoned in unsatisfactory bodies, or bodies which make unwanted jokes out of their lives. Wicksteed’s sister Connie feels cheated by life because she is flat-chested, and much of the plot hinges on her ordering ‘falsies’. The randy old men and the sex-starved middle-aged are almost wistful in their repeated allusions to the Permissive Society. Mrs Swabb, the expert, says, ‘Me, I don’t bother with sex. I leave that to the experts.’ The play is a comedy, but it isn’t without its message. Lady Rumpus, the colonial widow whose return to the old country sparks off the farcical train of the play’s events, says, ‘From end to end I’ve searched the land looking for a place where England is still England.’
Wicksteed exclaims, ‘And now she’s hit on Hove.’1 John Osborne had entered comparable territory over the last decade or two of plays. Bennett’s TV dramas unearthed a host of emotionally undernourished lives, but at the back of the story there was always this sense which Lady Rumpus had given off. That England was vanishing. The play in which this notion was given its best airing in Bennett’s work was Forty Years On, whose first performance was given at the Apollo Theatre on 31 October 1968, with John Gielgud as the headmaster and Alan Bennett himself as a junior master called Tempest.
The occasion is the headmaster’s last term at Albion House, a public school on the South Downs, a place whose proud traditions have descended into absurdity, and whose very future existence is in question. ‘Albion’ is, in the last strains of the drama, let out. ‘A valuable site at the crossroads of the world. At present on offer to European clients. Outlying portions of the estate already disposed of to sitting tenants. Of some historical and period interest. Some alterations and improvements necessary.’2 If the allegory seems a bit heavy when read, it had a tremendous impact upon stage not only in its first West End run, but in its revivals. Bennett was one of those Englishmen intensely conservative in everything but politics. He was more than a little in love with Albion House, its arcane traditions, its unswervingly traditionalist, and on the edge of kinky, headmaster. The drama consists of a play within a play in which a more liberal master, Franklin, puts on a school play lampooning the traditional British readings of the First and Second World Wars, and of heroes such as Lawrence of Arabia. (‘Speaking fluent Sanskrit he and his Arab body servant, an unmade Bedouin of great beauty, had wreaked havoc among the Turkish levies.’3) Yet there was a deep nostalgia in the play. The audiences who piled in to laugh at Bennett’s jokes were as often conservative as they were revolutionaries. It captured the mood, as did the cartoon strip in Private Eye about England having been turned into a thrusting new company called HeathCo, of wistfulness about what was being thrown away.
‘I do not suppose,’ Lady Dorothy Macmillan remarked in the early 1960s, ‘anyone realizes the overwhelming regard and affection my husband has for Mr Heath.’ Many Tories shared Macmillan’s high regard for this very competent Chief Whip, which was why, in their new system of choosing a party leader–election by fellow MPs–he comfortably beat his two rivals, after the resignation of Alec Douglas-Home. The votes were 150 for Heath, 133 for Reginald Maulding and 15 for J. Enoch Powell.
Of the three candidates, Powell was obviously the most inclined towards monetarism. But of the two candidates who had stood any chance of winning, Heath was the more right wing. That is, he stood for limiting the power of the trades unions, controlling inflation by interest rate rises, and pursuing the goal of joining the European Economic Community. (Being pro-Europe was right wing in those days.) Heath’s voting record in the Commons was eloquent: on 13 December 1964 he abstained during the Abolition of Capital Punishment Bill. On 2 March 1965 he voted for Sir Cyril Osborne’s bill to halt Commonwealth immigration; on 26 May 1965 he voted against Leo Abse’s bill to implement the Wolfenden proposals, allowing consensual homosexual acts for men aged over twenty-one.4 Moreover, Heath, with his non-public school background, would surely appeal to the wider electorate? He came from Broadstairs in Kent, where his enterprising father had risen from being a carpenter to running his own small firm, W. G. Heath, Builder and Decorator.5 When still an undergraduate, at Balliol College, Oxford, he consulted the young Arnold Goodman, then working as a solicitor for Royalton Kisch, who had a seaside house near Broadstairs where he had employed W. G. Heath, about the possibility of suing the student paper the Isis for referring to his father as ‘a jobbing builder’. This prickliness was kept well concealed, however. (Goodman, of course, dissuaded him from suing.) At Oxford, where he had been a music scholar, he excelled; he was President of the Union, and he later had a good, if slightly uneventful war, rising to be a colonel in the Royal Artillery. Thereafter, he had a number of occupations, including news editor of the Church Times, and a half-hearted attempt to work in a merchant bank.
Undoubtedly, he won the 1970 election (having lost the election of 1966) because of the association of the Conservative Party with Enoch Powell. No doubt Heath was genuinely repelled by racialist sentiments, but this cunning ex-Chief Whip knew that, after he had sacked Powell from the Shadow Cabinet in 1968, there were still very many Tories in the country at large who agreed with the Wolverhampton Prophet’s views on immigration, and many backbench Tory MPs also. Private Eye’s cover for 16 April 1968 had a photograph of the unmarried Heath, a bubble coming from his mouth to say,
‘Enoch may be talking balls, ducky, but there’s no denying he’s a vote catcher.’
Heath had been an assiduous Chief Whip, and as the old order of Macmillan and Home gave place to a more socially inclusive Conservative Party, he seemed an adventurous, unstuffy choice of pugilist to pit against the cleverness of Harold Wilson. If one Prime Minister, from the eleven Prime Ministers in our times, had a claim to have made an historic step, it was Edward Heath. He is the one out of the eleven without whom the history of our times would have been very distinctly different. He could easily have lost the leadership contest, and the Conservative Party could have been led by the lazy, genial slightly Eurosceptic Reggie Maudling, who would never have had the energy or political courage to push through Britain’s entry to the EEC. Equally, Heath could have lost the election in 1970, in which case Harold Wilson, with his eye on the Eurosceptic left in his own party, would probably not have ventured entry either. As Hugo Young said in his magisterial history of Britain and Europe, from Churchill to Blair, This Blessed Plot, ‘The most qualified “European” in Tory politics assumed the leadership of Britain at the time when the question of entry to Europe was ready for its final resolution.’6 Yet, having negotiated British entry to Europe, Heath presided over a calamitous administration which was defeated humiliatingly, not by another party, but by the National Union of Mineworkers, whom he had challenged to a political contest not of its nor the nation’s choosing. In a short spell in office, he reversed all the economic ambitions with which he had set out when he entered Number 10. He was cursed with very bad luck–above all the descent of the Irish situation from one of periodic violence to near civil war. At the end of his time he watched the price of oil rise as the result of a Middle Eastern war. But the worst of his fortunes was to have been born with his character–stubborn, and weirdly disengaged. So, although he was an honourable man and–unlike his successors in the role–never ‘briefed’ against Cabinet colleagues whom he did not like, he was incapable of geniality, feigned or otherwise. After the humiliations of the first 1974 election, for example, when he summoned his Cabinet (or ex-Cabinet), he had no word of encouragement for them or thanks for their support. ‘In the Cabinet he would sit there glowering and saying practically nothing’, remembered one colleague.7 His ‘outlets’ were sailing and music, to both of which he devoted himself with a competitive fervour, though quite with whom the competition was being waged it was never clear. He was a world-class yachtsman, and it was typical of the man’s defiant attitude to his snobbish critics that he chose to call his yacht Morning Cloud–the second word of which he always impenitently pronounced Clyeowd. It cost £7,450, a tidy sum for an MP with no private income, and with it he won the Sydney–Hobart Race and the Admiral’s Cup. The second Morning Cloud was even bigger (it had a crew of eight) and even more expensive, competing honourably, though not winning, in the Fastnet Race. ‘It was an unprecedented feat for a serving Prime Minister to have captained his national team in an international sporting event, let alone won it,’ wrote his biographer John Campbell.8 Morning Cloud III, a yet bigger yacht, was capsized near the Isle of Wight by two freak waves. Two of the crewmen were lost. It was an example of the capricious misfortune which dogged Heath, in politics, as in life.