‘A whole attachment’: that was the ideal. Raphael Samuel would write illuminatingly after Williams’s death of how ‘the socialism which he advocated was not a utopian blueprint, but rather the recovery of a lost wholeness . . . a matter of age-old solidarities reasserting themselves, in conditions of difficulty, and complexity’.
Where lay that wholeness in the third quarter of the twentieth century? In an ambitious, more explicitly personal concluding chapter, Williams seemed to pin his hopes on ‘working-class culture’, a culture which he (like Hoggart) contrasted with the inexorably rising, commercialised mass culture, but which he (unlike the pessimistic Hoggart) saw as having an intrinsic, deep-rooted strength that would carry the day. This culture, he insisted,
is not proletarian art, or council houses, or a particular use of language; it is, rather, the basic collective idea, and the institutions, manners, habits of thought and intentions which proceed from this . . . [it] is primarily social (in that it has created institutions) rather than individual (in particular intellectual or imaginative work). When it is considered in context, it can be seen as a very remarkable creative achievement.
Citing Edmund Burke’s fear of the ‘swinish multitude’ trampling down learning, Williams ended this passage by comparing the historical record of collective working-class culture favourably to that of individualistic bourgeois culture: ‘This, indeed, is the curious incident of the swine in the night. As the light came, and we could look around, it appeared that the trampling, which we had all heard, did not after all come from them.’
Culture and Society was reviewed widely if not always favourably. John Jones in the New Statesman noted ‘a generosity of temperament which gives moral stature to his work’, but Denys Harding, an out-and-out Leavisite, charged Williams in the Spectator with failing to ‘squarely face the fact that vast numbers of people want, and pay for, rather low-quality work, and only a small public wants work of the quality discriminatingly appraised in this book’, while the TLS called his approach ‘at times suffocatingly abstract’. A typically shrewd, balanced verdict came in Encounter from the rising literary critic Frank Kermode. While admiring the book’s intelligence, candour and seriousness, he was sceptical about the exaltation of working-class culture – ‘I do not feel that it retains the value that Mr Williams allows it. Specially, I think the harm being done by television advertising is catastrophic.’ In due course two of the strongest critiques came from a pair of historians much more deeply embedded in the Marxist tradition than Williams himself was at this stage. ‘The prime requisite for any study of cultural history is a firm framework of historical fact – economic, social, political . . . The one great deficiency of the book is the lack of just this,’ declared Victor Kiernan the following summer in the New Reasoner. Then later, in its successor journal, E. P. Thompson wrote disparagingly (if fairly) of the book’s ‘procession of disembodied voices’ whose ‘meanings’ had been ‘wrested out of their whole social context’; he particularly mourned the apparent absence of ‘struggle’, especially class struggle, in Williams’s cultural tradition. For most readers, though, in the book’s early life, any reservations were far outweighed by a sense of excitement. Williams’s first biographer, Fred Inglis, put it best: ‘It was a life-changer for youngish readers in 1960 or so (including me). Its large, never-quite-grasped purpose was to find and recharge the lost veins of English romantic socialism, to make them glow again in the body politic.’16
Within a week or two of Culture and Society’s publication, an essay by Williams appeared in Conviction, a collection edited by Norman MacKenzie. Entitled ‘Culture is Ordinary’, the piece argued forcibly that, for ‘the Socialist intellectual’, there were ‘no masses to save, to capture, or to direct, but rather this crowded people in the course of an extraordinarily rapid and confusing expansion of their lives’. A year after the Angry Young Men had made their Declaration, this was generally a more sober gathering, with the contributors – again, all under 40 – generally on the left of the Labour Party but for the most part at some distance from the New Left. They included the Labour politician Peter Shore, the journalists Paul Johnson and Mervyn Jones, the historian Hugh Thomas and Richard Hoggart, the last with a piece characteristically called ‘Speaking to each other’, a plea for what he called ‘a decent classlessness’. Two essays that attracted particular attention were on welfare issues: Brian Abel-Smith sought to demonstrate that the middle class was benefiting disproportionately from the welfare state, and Peter Townsend, shaping up for what would become almost a lifetime’s work, attacked the myth that poverty had been abolished. But arguably the most striking essay was the last, and the only one by a female contributor: ‘A house of theory’ by Iris Murdoch. Starting with a comprehensive demolition job on the inadequacies of current and recent British philosophy, she then demanded not only a more rigorous, systematic theory of socialism but a return to the ideals of William Morris – without which, in the alienating conditions of modern industrial life, the ‘proletariat’ would remain ‘a deracinate, disinherited and excluded mass of people’.
It was stirring if de haut en bas stuff, but in the event Murdoch’s subsequent, mainly understated political journey would be to the right, as ultimately was the trajectory of the collection’s already sceptical reviewer in Socialist Commentary. ‘I detect in this book a condescension to the goodness of ordinary people, as opposed to the radicals whom they philosophically admire, or the careless submerged, whom they envy but dare not emulate,’ wrote John Vaizey. ‘I detect a reluctance to live their own ideals.’ And he asked:
What is the socialist vision today? I strongly suspect – much as I detest it – that it has more to do with the kind of hunger for achievement that we see in the New China than with any Scandinavian arcadia. Either that, or the socialist vision is now a private vision; a turning-away from public causes; a decision to live one’s own life concerned with one’s relationship with other human beings and with oneself, in which socialism is the political equivalent of turning down the neighbour’s noisy wireless because it interferes with our children’s sleep.
Vaizey in 1958 was a young, leftish economist specialising in education, but in the end he would be the intellectual par excellence who, in Noel Annan’s words about this ‘mercurial, erratic, ingenious’ man, ‘declared that he [i.e. Vaizey] and his generation had got it wrong and they should shake out a reef and sail on a new tack’.17
Sadly, neither Declaration nor Conviction took a line on the rapidly changing built environment, but towards the end of September the Architects’ Journal’s ‘Astragal’ (probably J. M. Richards) described his recent visit to the almost completed, already part-occupied showpiece of public housing. ‘If you drive across Richmond Park towards the towering slabs and point blocks of the LCC’s Roehampton estate,’ he began, ‘you will feel that this is what the approach to a city ought to be like – open country leading to rolling parkland punctuated by buildings.’ Admittedly there were faults – ‘the access balconies are sordid bleak places, and there isn’t any relief from the spartan matières brutes once you get inside the maisonettes’ – but overall these were ‘faults that are easy to forget when you look at the scheme as a whole and compare it with any other local authority work in this country’. Around this time, one Sunday afternoon, Florence Turtle also had a look:
We toured Richmond Park & the Roehampton LCC Estate – this latter a terrible eyesore from Richmond Park, it resembles seven or eight tall piles of matchboxes surmounted by a drum, and at some angles it looks like a giant industrial plant. Letters in the ‘Telegraph’ praising it & others the contrary. I suggest the ‘pros’ don’t have to live in sight of it. The occupants of the flats complain about travel, shopping, & entertainment facilities, during the bus strike they were cut off. They have some justification, many of them rehoused from the East End. To us who appreciate the amenities of the district it is ‘The Murder of a Neighbourhood’, it used to be one of the loveliest districts in London.
There had indeed been a vigorous correspondence in the Daily Telegraph, and a few days later the last word went to W. R. Atherton, who had moved in February into one of the estate’s new high-rise flats. ‘I found myself at home,’ he said, despite not being a natural modernist. ‘I hate rock ’n’ roll, toneless music, abstract painting, and all sculpture after Jacob Epstein. I am a Cockney in exile. And yet I am content.’
So too in Bristol this autumn, where one sky-blue Saturday morning a local MP inspected Barton House, a new 14-storey block. ‘We went right to the roof and visited various flats,’ recorded Anthony Wedgwood Benn. ‘To see the bright airy rooms with the superb views and to contrast them with the poky slum dwellings of Barton Hill below was to get all the reward one wants from politics. For this grand conception of planning is what it is all about. The people were happy, despite the grumbles about detail.’ Up in Sheffield, it was a less grand outlook for Mrs Mary Slinn, who since 1899 had lived at 50 Woodside Lane, Pitsmoor, in a small but comfortable house due to be demolished as part of the Corporation’s Burngreave redevelopment scheme. ‘Nobody is going to shift me away to some estate outside the town,’ she told the Sheffield Telegraph a few days before her 90th birthday. ‘I am too old to put roots down somewhere else now . . . It doesn’t look much, but it is a friendly street. You couldn’t ask for nicer neighbours and that means a lot at my age.’ In Hertfordshire a whole town, Ware, was seemingly being demolished. ‘A holocaust of antiquity’, with ‘medieval timbers and kingpost roofs, Elizabethan wall-paintings, a Regency assembly room, all gathered round a handsome red-brick Georgian Inn, swept away’, was a local description in October of what had been taking place in recent years, with this letter-writer to an architectural magazine adding despairingly of how ‘the homeliness of brick and tile is replaced by carpets of concrete dotted with municipal bedding plants’.
In the City of London a wonderful Victorian building by now under threat was the Coal Exchange, recommended for demolition as part of a road-widening proposal. On 25 October The Times published a plea from Betjeman, repudiated a few days later by David Young of Sloane Avenue, Chelsea: ‘The Coal Exchange may be “a pioneer building in cast iron”, to quote Mr Betjeman, but it is in bad repair, cold, dirty, and no longer of any use to the coal industry. We must not be sentimental about buildings of this type.’ Would J. B. Priestley have agreed? The day after Betjeman’s letter, the BBC broadcast Lost City, showing the crusty Yorkshireman making a rare return trip to Bradford, his boyhood city, still strikingly Victorian in character and appearance despite the redevelopment recently under way. For the most part nostalgia ruled, but at the end, as the London train prepared to pull out, he offered his considered verdict on present-day Bradford and how it needed fully to embrace the second half of the twentieth century: ‘It’s not as good as it promised to be once. It’s not bad, but it’s not good enough for the real Bradfordians.’
T. Dan Smith had no doubts that the Newcastle of 1958 was not good enough for Geordies. ‘I talked a different language,’ he recalled about his failure (only 14 votes out of 60) to be elected leader of the city’s Labour Party after it had won power in the local elections in May. ‘My arguments were about inner cabinets in local government, efficiency as a complement to caring, and planning as the handmaiden of a civilised life. Their talk was of drains and majorities and rates. These were important things, but not priorities in a city which was being strangled by traffic, humiliated by lack of opportunity and murdered by mediocrity.’ Instead, he had to make do with the chairmanship of the Housing Committee, where he put new drive into the existing slum-clearance programme and, faced with nearly 10,000 families on the waiting list and no spare building land within the city boundaries, saw no alternative but to build high. Smith’s immediate focus was on Newcastle’s rundown West End, including the Scotswood Road area, and that autumn he wrote a long poem about his hopes and ambitions for it that began by emphasising the determination to clear the ‘horrid slums’. Smith was an intelligent, rounded man, whatever his flaws, and the poem’s most interesting passage conveys a certain ambiguity – even regret – about the process, often a brutal one, that was now starting to unfold:
Here and there a gable wall
Exposing papers to us all –
Flowered, plain, in stripe or check
Silent parchments watch men wreck
As building after building falls
Leaving exposed those few odd walls;
Wherein once sheltered windows clean,
Now only broken glass is seen.
Ultimately, though, he believed there was no alternative, and the final lines looked ahead to that glorious day almost four years thence, the centenary of the Blaydon Races:
Old Scotswood Road must live again
To carry further still its fame.
We’re soon to have a celebration –
Let Tynesiders rise in jubilation
A century has marched along
Since first we heard that Tyneside song.
On June the 9th in ’62
We will tell the world anew –
Together with the sculptors’ art,
A Festival to play its part.
We’ll make Tyneside thus loud proclaim
How just and right its shout of fame –
Tomorrow, then, we all will see
That Scotswood’s making history.18
In the early days of October, 18-year-old Ronnie Wycherley was auditioned in Birkenhead by the impresario Larry Parnes and would soon be known as Billy Fury; Saturday Skiffle Club on the Light Programme transmuted into Saturday Club (introduced by Brian Matthew in a non-BBC, cross-class voice); and the first single by Harry Webb (aka Cliff Richard) entered the Top Twenty. ‘So rock ’n’ roll is dead, is it?’ the jazz critic Steve Race had asked in Melody Maker in June. ‘My funeral oration consists of just two words: good riddance.’ An incensed young songwriter, Ian Samwell, had seen Cliff perform at the 2i’s coffee bar in Soho and then penned for him an authentic rock ’n’ roll number, ‘Move It’, inspired musically by Chuck Berry. Released in late August, the song was taken up by Jack Good, the strong-minded TV producer who had become disenchanted with the BBC’s antiseptic Six-Five Special, started Oh Boy! on late-night commercial television during the summer, and in September was able to get his fast-paced, cutting-edge show directly competing on Saturday evenings against Pete Murray et al. Good’s trump card was Cliff, and vice versa. ‘It was Jack who created the beginnings of Cliff Richard,’ recalled the singer half a century later. ‘He didn’t want an Elvis lookalike, so off came the sideburns, away went the guitar, and in came the sneer, the curled lip, and that sultry look up at the camera. I was 100% directed by him but, oh boy, did he know what he was doing.’ Not that, even on the pop scene, the pouting young Cliff was everyone’s cup of tea. ‘Violent hip-swinging and crude exhibitionism’, the New Musical Express would call his performing style, adding tartly that ‘Tommy Steele became Britain’s teenage idol without resorting to this form of indecent, short-sighted vulgarity.’19
The start of Saturday Club on 4 October coincided with the return of a national champion. Back in 1952 the De Havilland Comet had inaugurated the jet age, but three crashes in less than a year meant that all Comets had been grounded from 1954. Four years on, two wholly redesigned Comet IVs now flew the BOAC flag from London to New York – the world’s first transatlantic passenger jet service, beating (amidst considerable national satisfaction) Pan Am’s Boeing 707 by a little over three weeks. A momentous occasion in the wider transport sense, with 1958 the last year in which more passengers crossed the North Atlantic by sea than by air, it did not in the event signal a lasting British triumph. The process of getting Comet IV into service had been too slow to secure decisive first-mover advantage, the plane’s seating capacity was only half that of the 707 or the Douglas DC-8, and it was only a few years before BOAC was looking to Boeing for its long-haul needs. Symbolically, within days of the initial moment
of glory, BOAC found itself beset by an unofficial strike of 4,000 maintenance men – a strike overseen by a rising trade unionist, the supremely self-confident and articulate Clive Jenkins. ‘While the Comet IV is a delightful aircraft in which to fly,’ he observed soon afterwards in his analysis of the dispute, ‘it represents a marginal commercial operation. This is easy to see when it stands alongside the large Boeing 707 on the apron at London Airport.’ And as for ‘the Tories and their plans for hobbling the unions in civil aviation and further traffic-diversions to the under-cutting private operators’, he quoted a Spanish proverb: ‘Have patience and you will see your enemy’s funeral procession.’20
Two days after the Comet soared was ‘Decontrol Day’ – the coming into operation, after a 15-month standstill, of the government’s controversial Rent Act. Around six million dwellings were owned by private landlords, with some 40 per cent of London’s population living in the private rented sector. The purpose of the legislation was to give those landlords an adequate return after many years of rent control and generally to try to restore the forces of supply and demand to the housing market, which ultimately – ministers believed – would help to reduce the dire housing shortage. Many middle-class tenants, enjoying the genteel advantages of protected tenancies and rents, were appalled by the prospect. ‘Why should a wicked act be passed?’ Mrs Philips Guise in January 1958 asked the Housing Minister, Henry Brooke – an act that allowed ‘unscrupulous landlords’ to ‘put up rents more than double, causing misery and distress to thousands of people who have fought for their country & have always strived to live within their means’. The novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett was especially wrathful. ‘The Rent Act is looming over everything here, and it has fallen on me with thunderous force,’ she wrote from South Kensington to a friend abroad in September 1957. And again, some nine months later: ‘It would be of little good to move as the same thing is happening everywhere and there is nothing to be done but suffer it, though in my case not in silence.’ To a cousin indeed, she was positively apocalyptic, declaring that ‘these are hard days and we are the doomed class’.
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