by A. N. Wilson
His passionate wish to belong to the royal circle was a common characteristic of semi-royalties, who are often more concerned with ‘position’ and the importance of ‘blood’ than the heads of their families.Mountbatten’s morganatic and uncertain ancestry made him desperately desire to be a trusted part of an inner circle which, when he was a young man, had reigned on the thrones of Europe east of the Rhine. Defending his birthright he collected, and then ignored and hid away, papers in his own archives, and created myths flattering to his vanity by romantically rewriting his family history.To his critics his obsession was and is ridiculous, but it should be balanced against his fearlessness and the greatest of all qualities in a leader, the ability to inspire those under his command.11
When Mountbatten’s nephew Philip married the future Queen Elizabeth II it was the fulfilment of all Mountbatten’s desire to control the destinies of the British Royal Family. As a boy cadet, he had witnessed the humiliation of his father, Prince Louis, who had so longed to become the First Sea Lord but was dismissed in the understandable wave of anti-German feeling which swept the country upon the outbreak of the First World War. The family name of Battenberg was changed to Mountbatten, just as the House of Saxe-Coburg became the House of Windsor. (‘Now,’ the Kaiser had joked, ‘I suppose we shall have the Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg.’) Mountbatten was so anxious to attend, and interfere in, the wedding of Philip and Elizabeth that, even though he was the last Viceroy of India, he rushed home for the event. It was for this trivial reason alone that he was so anxious to speed up Indian independence arrangements, leaving Greater India with the Partition of West and East Pakistan (the latter subsequently Bangladesh), with much avoidable slaughter and perhaps a million lives lost.
Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark had seriously entertained the idea that his bride would take his surname. Apart from the fact that it was without precedent in British royal history, the surname itself was ludicrous–Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. The Home Secretary of the time, Chuter Ede, suggested that he should take his mother’s surname and be married as Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten. Pushed by ‘Uncle Dickie’, he had done his best to persuade the Royal Family that the future Queen should have the surname Mountbatten. This was roundly rejected, much to Philip’s rage. He is supposed to have exclaimed, ‘I’m nothing but an amoeba!’–by which he presumably meant that his only function in the constitutional scheme of things was as a stud to provide the monarch with heirs. In 1960, the Queen had declared, ‘I and my children shall continue to be styled and known as the House and family of Windsor.’ Yet by the time of Princess Anne’s wedding in 1973, Mountbatten wrote to the Prince of Wales, ‘her marriage certificate will be the first opportunity to settle the Mountbatten-Windsor name for good’. It was outrageous of Mountbatten to have asked the Prince of Wales to contravene a decision made by the Queen in Council, but the trick seems to have worked. After the wedding, in which Anne did indeed sign her name in the register as Mountbatten-Windsor, the Queen said that in future she wished her descendants to be known by the new name, having long wished, according to her press secretary, ‘to associate her husband’s name with their descendants’. Most people who gave much thought to such things, an admittedly diminishing band, recognised it as a mistake.12
Mountbatten, born 25 June 1900, was the age of the century. In August 1979, he and his family took a holiday off the coast of Ireland. Their twenty-nine-foot fishing boat Shadow V was left for long spells unattended in the little harbour of Mullaghmore while the party was ashore. On the 27th, Mountbatten went aboard with Lord and Lady Brabourne, Mountbatten’s son-in-law and daughter, and their fourteen-year-old twin sons Nicholas and Timothy, together with Lord Bra-bourne’s eighty-three-year-old mother Doreen. An Irish boy from the neighbourhood, Paul Maxwell, was also of the party. The bomb, which had been planted on the boat, went off just as they cleared the harbour. Paul Maxwell and Nicholas Knatchbull were killed, Doreen Brabourne was fatally injured, Timothy and his parents were badly injured. Mountbatten was killed outright.13
The IRA issued the half-witted declaration that it had carried out an ‘execution’, as a way of ‘bringing emotionally home to the English ruling-class and its working-class slaves…that their government’s war on us is going to cost them as well’. The murders merely exacerbated the intensely anti-Irish feeling in England which the IRA outrages always provoked. Princess Margaret, on a visit to Chicago two months after Uncle Dickie’s death, got into trouble, when someone expressed sorrow at Mountbatten’s murder, by replying that the Irish were pigs, a remark which some thought provoked the immediate departure of the Mayor of Chicago, Jane Byrne, from the party. Hasty denials were issued next morning, but no one was convinced. As for Dickie, Mountbatten’s slavish biographer surely exaggerated when he wrote that ‘the world mourned’. Mountbatten had not been loved, and except by Noël Coward fans he was not even much respected. Private Eye had discovered an easy target with its repeated suggestion that Mountbatten was not merely homosexual, but also a Soviet agent. Even if it was not quite true, he certainly did as much damage as many an enemy spy could have done. By gross mismanagement in India he was in effect, if not in intention, a mass murderer. By interfering, and giving disastrous advice to the Royal Family, he contributed to the very low esteem in which they had come to be held by the end of his life. They had their ups and downs in popularity after the Mullaghmore bomb exploded, but, on the whole, their fortunes have steadily improved.
As always, public feelings about the Royal Family, Establishment, the hierarchical structure of society and the inheritance of the past, were mixed. The Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 had occurred during a blazing hot summer. Street parties were held all over Britain, with bunting suspended from trees and lamp-posts, and children sitting at trestle tables eating egg sandwiches and drinking lemonade, much as they might have done in the year of the Coronation. These parties were quite spontaneous. No one was compelled to arrange them. Yet there was an air of defiance about them, as though the times were out of joint, and this expression of loyalty to the Queen was, paradoxically, itself an act of protest, against the state of Britain which the politicians had created.
A more strident form of protest against the existing order of things was punk. In the 100 Club, a small basement in Oxford Street, on Tuesday nights from 1976 onwards, the Sex Pistols performed their furious routines.14 ‘Anarchy in the UK’ was one of their most famous numbers, screamed out by the author of the lyrics, Johnny Rotten, the stage name of John Lydon, an etiolated red-haired urchin who yelled at his squirming audience that he was the anti-Christ and he wanted to destroy everything. The audience bounced up and down, pogoing, and, in so far as thought was possible in minds blown with narcotics, they responded eagerly to Rotten’s message, just as they thrilled to the sight of his friend Sid Vicious smearing himself with blood, or Siouxsie Sioux, a punk goddess with naked breasts protruding from her bondage outfits, and swastikas adorning her arms. For the Jubilee, Johnny Rotten wrote a version of ‘God Save the Queen’ which reached Number Two in the charts. The sleeve of the single disc was a Warholesque representation of Her Majesty with her eyes blocked by a collage reading God Save the Queen and her mouth pasted over with the words Sex Pistols. The lyrics equated the twenty-five years of her reign with a ‘fascist regime’. Real fascism was now something which had retreated so far into the historical shadows that the word ‘fascist’ was used to denote more or less any form of hierarchy, any rule of law, any attempt to hold on to the concept of personal property, anything, in short, of which the speaker disapproved. The BBC awarded Rotten’s ‘God Save the Queen’ the high accolade of banning it from any of its radio or TV stations.
The Sex Pistols’ was a cry of horror, not from the absolute depths but from the stultifyingly boring fringes. The natural haunts of their fans were the soul-destroying purlieus and suburbs of London.
Siouxsie Sioux (of Siouxsie and the Banshees) was really a girl called Susan Janet Ballion (bo
rn 1957) from Bromley. John Lydon’s background was ‘lace curtains Irish’. His family lived in a council flat in Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park. Like Germaine Greer, Madonna, and many others in our times, Johnny found that a dysfunctional Catholic childhood had been the first brilliant career move.
The Catholic Church provided him with the props of Gothick horror, both against which to react, and with which to clothe his iconoclasm. It also inspired his most celebrated lyrics–the ‘God Save the Queen’ parody being almost word for word the same as the IRA’s explanation of why they had blown Mountbatten sky high. Johnny Rotten, who had something of the artist about him, stood detached from the bizarre punk creation of which he was by far the most stylish representative. Punk was in any event always surrounded by irony and Rotten was a stylishly ironic exponent of it. Sid Vicious (other names John Beverley/John Simon Ritchie) was, by contrast, less an ironic exponent than an appalling object lesson of the movement’s negativism. The child of a junkie, he appeared at the front of the band in a drug haze, mutilating himself and mouthing idiocies or making, sometimes feigned, puking sounds, sometimes trying to remember Lydon’s lyrics. At the age of twenty-one he took up with a fellow heroin addict named Nancy Spungeon. The autumn of 1978 found them in New York, where, following in the footsteps of Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan, they checked into the Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street. On 12 October, Nancy was found dead in the hotel room, lying under the bathroom sink with stab wounds in her stomach and a hunting knife at her side. When the police arrived, Sid admitted responsibility. After a spell in a psychiatric hospital he was sent to prison on Riker’s Island. On 1 February 1979, he was released on bail, and found his mother, Anne Beverley, awaiting him. She gave him some heroin. Sid went to a friend’s apartment in Greenwich Village and shot up. ‘Jesus, son, that must have been a good hit,’ said the mother when she saw her son lit up with the smack. He injected himself once more that night and died of an overdose. Anne was in the room next door. ‘I’m glad he died,’ said Sid Vicious’s mother. ‘Nothing can hurt him any more.’15
The commercial success of the Sex Pistols was a paradoxical fact given their desire to attack and defame the ‘fascist’ world of privilege and, presumably, of commerce. But the music industry knew that there was big money in the sheer offensiveness, not only of words, such as Rotten’s ‘God Save the Queen’, but of the noise itself made by the great bands of the era. Synthesisers were invented in the late 1960s by Bob Moog, while he was studying engineering and physics at Cornell University, and thereafter the noisier the band, and the greater the scream of mindless rage they represented, the happier were the fans. On tour in 1972, the Rolling Stones fed their sound through massive banks of speakers hoisted high above the stage, guaranteeing deafening noise. Even this noise was as nothing to the volume produced by Led Zeppelin, described by Germaine Greer as the Wagner of rock music. They continued their mind- and ear-blasting career until 1980 when their drummer, John Bonham, drank himself to death. Huge sums had been generated by these assailants of the eardrums.
Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, likewise, saw that there was money in punk chic. Their boutique at 430 King’s Road selling rubber clothes, studs and bondage clothes fitted with buckles and straps, PVC which could be opened to reveal the genitalia, soon expanded into a multi-million-pound business. Épater la bourgeoisie, the old decadent rallying cry of the 1890s, now became immensely lucrative, creating not so much a bourgeoisie but an aristocracy of rock stars, clothes designers, film-makers and architects. Indeed, those attacking the system in Callaghan’s Britain stood a much greater chance of making a good old-fashioned fortune than those trying to shore up conventional businesses while battling with the wage demands of trades unions. Youth was not merely in rebellion–against what it was never quite sure–it also had money to burn.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which was first broadcast on BBC television in October 1969, and which continued until 1974, was a late flowering of surrealism, a televised version of the humour made popular by Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers in The Goon Show. It was a series of larky comedy sketches, in which, for example, a football match might be played between teams of the great German versus the Greek philosophers, or two young men in drag, impersonating charwomen, would go to Paris to meet Jean-Paul Sartre. The prodigious popularity of the series, and its long afterlife as a cult on American television, probably derived from its skilful flattery of the audience into thinking that they, too, enjoyed such juxtapositions of student essay subjects with the despised life of provincial middle- or lower-middle-class England which had been left behind when the actors themselves had gone to university. It was an undergraduate rag warmed up for general consumption. Some of the sketches, such as a man taking back a parrot to a pet shop because it was dead and had been dead when sold, became so much part of the common culture that pub bores could recite the whole of it to one another as a substitute for wit of their own. If compared with the sketches of The Two Ronnies, which were being aired during the same decade, most of the Monty Python sketches cannot be seen as funny at all. Compare the dead parrot sketch with, for example, the episode of The Two Ronnies in the hardware shop, where the customer, a taciturn Ronnie Barker, asks for ‘fork handles’ and is given ‘four candles’.16 The verbal ingenuity and the deadpan acting make this a small comic masterpiece. The best thing about the Monty Python show was the ingenuity of the graphics by the American Terry Gilliam. Had the sketches not been interrupted by Gilliam’s visual jokes, nor accompanied by John Philip Sousa’s march ‘Liberty Bell’, they would not have been so hilarious. Gilliam made the sketches into surreal circus, in which cut and pasted Victorian strongmen can lift the actors up like ants, or the foot from Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid descends upon the set to squash them. Heads blow off, and flowers burst from the gaping neck. Naked girls chase cardinals on tricycles, both crushed in turn by the descending foot, or by a nursery scrapbook cherub.
The Pythons themselves, a little like the Beyond the Fringe team of an earlier generation, came from the older universities. Terry Jones and Michael Palin were Oxford, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and John Cleese were Cambridge.
They captured the mood of their generation by their expressed hatred of religion. Earlier generations had been prepared to leave alone the shattered shell of the Christian religion, but the Python team lived in an era when the Church was on the run, and Christianity itself seemed to many people to be fraudulent, even dangerous. Geza Vermes, a former Hungarian Roman Catholic priest then teaching at the University of Oxford and an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, published in 1973 a book called Jesus the Jew. It was an attempt to place Jesus in his historical setting. Few people have ever known more about first-century Palestine, its languages and religions than Professor Vermes, and his book had a great impact, seeming to many biblical scholars to destroy the plausibility of Christian beliefs that Jesus could ever have made the claims for himself which were made by later theology–above all that He was a divine being. Had Vermes, however, managed to create a more plausible Jesus than the figure of the Four Gospels? Many thought that he had, among them, presumably, the Pythons, whose Life of Brian, a spoof version of the life of Jesus, was designed as an assault upon the Christian religion. In a cowardly way, they covered themselves by asserting, in the first five minutes of the film, that Brian Cohen was a contemporary of Jesus, but in all the scenes which follow it is clear that Jesus himself was the object of their abuse. We have the Sermon on the Mount in which Brian’s words, Blessed are the Peacemakers, is misheard as Blessed are the Cheesemakers, and it ends with a parody of the Crucifixion. Many theologians, religious teachers and priests at this period had come to accept the Vermes–Python version of Christian origins. ‘Men said that Christ slept, and his saints’–the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s despondent observation on the chaos of King Stephen’s reign, would have made a fitting epitaph for the 1970s.
It was while the
Pythons were filming an episode of Monty Python in Torquay that they came upon the ill-tempered hotelier, Donald Sinclair, who inspired one of the most enduring characters of the decade, Basil Fawlty. ‘Could you call me a taxi, please?’ Cleese asked him. ‘A taxi?’ ‘Yes.’ Sinclair emitted a deep sigh. Then through gritted teeth the grudging reply came, ‘I suppose so.’
Cleese wrote the scripts of Fawlty Towers with his American wife Connie Booth. Their model was the Feydeau farce, but they outsoared their master. Each thirty-minute episode was a tightly wrought harmony of plotting, the different strands of the story coming together in an invariably hilarious catastrophe. Cleese played the irascible Basil, and Prunella Scales was his wife, Sybil, with an irredeemably common bouffant hairdo, and twangy south-eastern accent. Connie Booth, poised and beautiful, was Polly, the maid-of-all-work, and one of the many inspired things about the series was that (Booth, one suspects, being the real mind behind the comedies) never for one instance was any comic mileage made out of the fact that Polly is a meltingly beautiful blonde. No guest ever makes a pass at her and the termagant wife Sybil never suspects Basil of straying with Polly, though Basil once suspects Polly of indecent relations with someone who turns out to be an old family friend. They are all far too busy trying to train the idiotic Spanish waiter, Manuel, or coping with the disasters, nearly all of Basil’s making, which befall their unfortunate guests. They stopped when the going was good, only making a dozen episodes, and it could be said that television knew no finer hour.
In one of the most electrifying episodes, an aggressive American stays at Fawlty Towers and is the first who is brave enough to confront Basil with the fact that the place is a dump. It leads to a minor rebellion in the ranks, with other guests, when challenged, admitting that the service, food and general standards of the hotel are lousy. You feel at this moment that it is a miracle that the hotel, like the marriage of its proprietors, has managed to survive. Luckily, by the next episode Basil is back in the semi-control, which is the most he ever exercises over life. With his regimental ties, sense of England going to the dogs, despair at the success of the trades unions, suspicion of the foreigner, but inability to be a good manager, Basil Fawlty was the archetypal Englishman of Callaghan’s Britain. The wounded dignity, the feeling that the country was under threat, the despondent sense that nothing can be done to get them out of the mess into which Fate has dug them–these matched the mood of an electorate who watched powerless as the politicians caved in to union pay demands, and the economy lurched from one crisis to the next. (Basil is obsessed by strikes, especially by the car workers, and is wistfully envious, as he reads the newspapers, of the power and influence of Henry Kissinger.)