Unforeseen by its creators, and presumably not affecting Dame Ivy, the Rent Act would through reducing security of tenure also give birth to ‘Rachmanism’: in essence, the systematic, often brutal use of intimidating methods by landlords – usually slum landlords – to induce or coerce sitting tenants to leave, so that with vacant possession they could either sell the property at a handsome profit or pack it with new tenants (often West Indian immigrants) paying inflated rents. Perec (Peter) Rachman himself was an immigrant from Poland in his late thirties who by this time had already built up a slum empire of some 70 or 80 houses, mainly in Paddington and North Kensington, by unsavoury means; the new legislation played into the hands of this ‘short, chubby-faced, plump and balding’ man, who, adds a biographer, ‘dressed in silk shirts, cashmere suits and crocodile shoes’, as well as always wearing ‘dark glasses and a gold bracelet which was locked to his wrist and inscribed with serial numbers of his Swiss bank accounts and safe-combinations’.21
Tenants rather than owner-occupiers gathered at White Hart Lane on Saturday the 11th to see Tottenham, with Bill Nicholson as new manager, run out 10–4 winners against Everton (Albert Dunlop in goal). It was not a final score that BBC television’s new rolling sports programme, making its debut that afternoon, could immediately bring. Grandstand, introduced by Peter Dimmock (who had wanted to call it ‘Out and About’), started at two o’clock and featured golf, horse racing and show jumping, but at 4.45 had to give way to The Lone Ranger followed by Jennings at School before, at 5.40, Today’s Sport, introduced by Kenneth Wolstenholme, at last gave the football results, read by Len Martin. Elsewhere this Saturday, Philip Larkin in Hull bought a new tie – ‘black, with gold horizontal stripes: nearly Teddy Boy but not quite, at least I hope not quite’, as he informed Monica Jones – and in London Paul Robeson gave a half-hour recital, singing spirituals, during Evensong at St Paul’s, with a crowded congregation of 4,000, including many non-whites, watching a significant, reconciling moment some six weeks after Notting Hill.22
Culturally, though, the defining event of the weekend was the reviews in the two upmarket Sundays of Alan Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. ‘The rowdy gang of singers who sat at the scattered tables saw Arthur walk unsteadily to the head of the stairs, and though they must all have known that he was dead drunk, and seen the danger he would soon be in, no one attempted to talk to him and lead him back to his seat,’ began this story by a working-class Nottingham man of a working-class Nottingham anti-hero, the cynical, hedonistic, newly affluent young Arthur Seaton. ‘With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the topmost stair to the bottom.’ It struck an immediate chord, with Richard Mayne in the Sunday Times praising its ‘authenticity, bolshie anarchism’ and John Wain in the Observer welcoming the realistic characterisation of Seaton, ‘not . . . a displaced intellectual but a genuine working man, who doesn’t hanker for a dimly glimpsed world of books and ideas, but differs from his mates only by being more rebellious’. A few days later, Peter Green in the Telegraph was even more complimentary, calling it ‘that rarest of all finds: a genuine, no-punches pulled, unromanticised working-class novel’. An alternative type of literary exotica was available this month, though, in the form of Lawrence Durrell’s Mountolive, the third of his Alexandria Quartet, now starting to be provisionally judged as an entity. ‘Not much more than an Arabian Nights Entertainment,’ was the sceptical view of fellow novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, who deemed it ‘an entrancing, odorous maze without a centre’.23
‘Looked in at Television, such a lot of it is drivel,’ Florence Turtle noted on Thursday 16 October. ‘Hughie Green’s double your money is quite a good programme, but what a lot of illiterate people they get on it.’ In retrospect, though, the main TV event that day had already happened, at five o’clock on the BBC. ‘Toys, model railways, games, stories, cartoons’ was the subtitle given in the listings for Blue Peter, ‘a new weekly programme for Younger Viewers, with Christopher Trace and Leila Williams’. He was a handsome 25-year-old actor, she was Miss Great Britain 1957 (and also an active Young Conservative). The under-11 target audience soon gave their verdict:
Almost without exception they found this programme very enjoyable to watch. For the small boys, of course, Christopher Trace’s demonstration of toy trains and model railways was an especial attraction . . . The demonstration of mind reading passed almost without comment, but a number of young viewers (boys and girls alike) seem to have found the cartoon – ‘Sparky and the Talking Train’ – very appealing.
Children over 11 mainly dismissed the programme as ‘babyish’, though a few girls ‘reacted favourably to the doll collection item’ as presented by Williams, who also talked about their trousseaux.
Three days later a daredevil, good-time motor racer from Farnham, 29-year-old Mike Hawthorn, became world champion, courtesy of an act of the utmost sportsmanship by Stirling Moss, who, following a controversial incident at the Portuguese Grand Prix earlier in the season, had given testimony that allowed his rival to keep second place. Hawthorn on becoming champion immediately retired, but for Tommy Steele the next career move was a change of direction, with his manager announcing next day, ‘He wants to get away from rock ’n’ roll,’ in the context of Steele signing a film contract to play a British seaman who gets involved in a Spanish bullfight. By this time, Monday the 20th, the president of the German Federal Republic, Dr Theodor Heuss, had begun a state visit. ‘The sight of Germany’s black, red, and gold flying alongside the Union Jack on government buildings has given many Londoners a mighty queer feeling,’ commented Mollie Panter-Downes, adding that along the Mall ‘most of the crowds watched silently when he drove past them in the open royal carriage’. No doubt some had been reading the Mirror’s ‘Cassandra’, who that day categorically called Germany ‘the cause of the greatest bloodshed and misery the world has ever known’ and insisted that ‘Papa’ Heuss, for all his ‘good manners’, would be unable to ‘wash away the nature of the nation that he represents’. Two days later the unforgiving columnist reprised, arguing that ‘the ageing professor has successfully been sold to an amiable but significantly silent British public, as a benign and scholarly man’, though in reality ‘a skilful apologist for the German people’; he signed off with a reference to ‘the stench of the gas ovens still in the air’.24
That same day, Wednesday the 22nd – three weeks after being ‘tremendously heartened’ by how on his tour of the West Midlands ‘everyone seemed very cheerful & very friendly’, and four days after noting that ‘the Socialists are working up a “slump” scare’, with unemployment having tipped over the then politically invidious half a million mark – Macmillan recorded a cardinal moment in the pre-election cycle:
I had a good talk today with the Chancellor of the Exr on the 64,000 dollar question – is it a boom? is it a slump? is it slack water? If the last, will the tide go in or out? The people have now a pathological fear of even a little unemployment. Yet 1% means over-employment and a financial crisis. 3% means almost a political crisis . . .
It is a great pleasure to talk with Heathcoat Amory, after having dealt with Thorneycroft. The former is very intelligent, flexible, & courteous. The latter was fundamentally stupid, rigid, & ‘cassant’. We agreed on the things we might do to ‘reflate’ the economy.
Five days later, on the 27th, the government announced the end of the remaining restrictions on hire purchase and the renting of goods: no longer would it be compulsory to make a minimum deposit of one-third or to pay in advance for the first four months’ rental. ‘We can give this extra bit of freedom because the credit squeeze and the other stern measures we took a year ago have worked,’ declared the president of the Board of Trade, Sir David Eccles, though the Manchester Guardian observed cautiously that ‘no Chancellor can lose sight of the balance of payments’ and that the government was bound to be criticised for having ‘favoured consumption before investme
nt’. The public, however, was willing to take the risk: a Gallup poll soon afterwards revealed 58 per cent approval for this green light and only 26 per cent disapproval.25
Tuesday the 28th saw the state opening of Parliament being televised for the first time, with two commentators in direct competition. As ‘Her Majesty returns to the Robing Room and thence to Buckingham Palace,’ solemnly intoned the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby near the end, ‘she leaves behind in all of us, a memory of a state occasion at its most magnificent.’ Over on ITV, Robin Day was altogether crisper and more informal: ‘The crown will go back to the Tower of London. All the scarlet and ermine robes will go back to wherever they came from. And Parliament will go back to work.’ In the afternoon, Gladys Langford again ‘went ’bussing’: ‘Finsbury Park – Golders Green – Victoria – Green Park – Highbury Barn. But my world is gone. Cliff-like flats, girl children in colourful pants, old women raddled & “permed”.’ That evening Anthony Heap dutifully attended the Royal Court for the first night of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Endgame (‘these dreary sleep-inducers’), and Dr Bronowski’s guests on ITV’s New Horizon programme, discussing the good and bad effects of science, were Aldous and Julian Huxley. ‘Move It’ was meanwhile moving up the charts – number 3 by the end of the week, tucked behind Connie Francis’s ‘Stupid Cupid’ and Elvis’s ‘King Creole’ – while on Saturday 1 November Grandstand-watchers noted a changing of the guards, with Dimmock now co-presenting with an unknown face, 32-year-old David Coleman. Then from the 8th it was Coleman on his own.
The new man was, in Frank Keating’s apt words, ‘smart, street-wise and regional’, having previously been the first non-international athlete to win the Manchester Mile and played for Stockport County reserves as well as working on the Stockport Express and in the BBC newsroom in Birmingham. The time was ripe for a new, non-public-school approach to covering sport. ‘Out,’ as Jim White puts it, ‘went the clipped, detached, patronising dinner-jacket style inherited from radio presentation, and in came a much more engaged manner.’ It was an elevation that undoubtedly owed much to Grandstand’s producer, the fiercely driven 31-year-old Bryan Cowgill, who had been to grammar school in Clitheroe and was at this stage convinced that his lack of a university education would block his progress at the BBC.26 Coleman and Cowgill: part of a fresh breed – call them meritocrats – whose hour was seemingly at hand.
9
Parity of Esteem
Just as Coleman was preparing to take the hot seat (and a peasant’s son was being elected Pope John XXIII), the first reviews started to appear of Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy – the book for which he would be remembered even more than Family and Kinship. Contrary to subsequent assumptions, Young did not in fact coin the term meritocracy: two years earlier, writing in Socialist Commentary (a magazine to which Young contributed), the sociologist Alan Fox had put the word in quotation marks and defined it as ‘the society in which the gifted, the smart, the energetic, the ambitious and the ruthless are carefully sifted out and helped towards their destined positions of dominance, where they proceed not only to enjoy the fulfilment of exercising their natural endowments but also to receive a fat bonus thrown in for good measure’. But it was certainly Young who popularised it.
The book itself – in which ‘Intelligence and effort together make up merit (I + E = M)’ – is set in 2034 and comprises two parts. The first traces the rise, well under way by 1958, of a meritocratic elite chosen largely through intelligence-testing and educational selection; the second relates the disturbing consequences, as those deemed unmeritorious become an increasingly alienated underclass, with the threat looming by the 2030s of a ‘Populist’ revolution. Although the first part reveals Young as far from unsympathetic to the meritocratic case, ultimately the book is a dystopian warning against a rampant, self-serving, IQ-driven, intolerant meritocracy. ‘Were we to evaluate people, not only according to their intelligence and their education, their occupation, and their power, but according to their kindliness and their courage, their imagination and sensitivity, their sympathy and generosity, there could be no classes,’ asserts the ‘Chelsea Manifesto’, issued by a local group of the Technicians Party (as the Labour Party has been rebranded) in 2009. ‘Who would be able to say that the scientist was superior to the porter with admirable qualities as a father, the civil servant with unusual skill at gaining prizes superior to the lorry driver with unusual skill at growing roses?’1
The notices were respectful rather than wholly enthusiastic. The Financial Times waited ‘in vain for the sound of a human voice or a glimpse of earthy people’; the TLS reckoned the final revolt ‘too sketchily contrived to be convincing’; and in the Spectator the literary critic Boris Ford regretted that Young’s satire ‘operates at a comparatively simple debating level’, with ‘little command of the undertones of irony, let alone of the verbal compression, that one associates with Swift’. On the substance of the satire, Young was attacked from both directions. ‘He seems to think that if we now chose comprehensive schools, with a common curriculum for all children, the cleavage in society would never take place,’ observed The Times. ‘But in a country whose economic survival depends on discovering and promoting the best brains, even such schools would still be selective instruments. There is no getting away from the rise of the meritocracy in a scientific world.’ By contrast, reviewing in the Manchester Guardian, Raymond Williams was unconvinced by the reach of the new meritocracy: ‘I see no evidence, in contemporary England, of power being more closely connected with merit, in any definition. The administrators, professional men and technicians are increasingly being selected on educational merit, but the power is still largely elsewhere, “and no damned merit about it”.’
Perhaps the most searching critique, looking ahead and similarly sceptical, came from Charles Curran in Encounter, arguing that Young was ‘guilty of a gross over-simplification’ in assuming that ‘the road to Meritocracy’ lay wide open without obstacles. Instead, he contended, ‘the British masses’, far from seeking a meritocracy, ‘want a society that protects and cares for the untalented many’, and he identified ‘three great barriers to the attainment of Meritocracy in Britain’, which collectively were ‘impregnable’: first, an increasingly elderly electorate, who had ‘outlived their competitive years’ and were now ‘social pacifists, against change and struggle’; second, the power of the family unit, involving parents ‘caring fiercely, irrationally, instinctively, combatively’ for their offspring, so that the family was ‘the historic fortress of favouritism, the nest of nepotism, the protective shell that guards the dull, the timid, the slow, the non-competitive weakling’; and third, the deep roots in British history of status being ‘fixed by inheritance and tradition, rather than achieved as a prize in competitive struggle’. In short, Young had constructed a meritocratic straw man. And, he added, ‘the lower classes need not start advertising for a Spartacus just yet’.2
But undoubtedly, even if their numbers and potency were exaggerated, the meritocrats – advancing largely by dint of their own endeavours, as opposed to socio-economic background and connection – were on the march in the course of the 1950s, and Young’s analysis was tapping into a real trend.
‘Lucky Jim Dixon is the first hapless hero to climb from the crib of the Welfare State,’ Philip Oakes wrote in the Evening Standard in September 1957, almost four years after Kingsley Amis had given birth to a literary-cum-social phenomenon. ‘His bones are reinforced by Government dried milk. His view of the world is through National Health spectacles. And he looks back – not in anger – but with surprise, that he has been allowed to barge through the privileged ranks of bores and phonies, towards some kind of success.’ In short, ‘he is the man most likely to move into the room at the top’. The last four words had a particular resonance, just six months after the publication of John Braine’s instantly best-selling novel Room at the Top, the story of the aspirational, socially climbing, lower-middle-class (like Brai
ne himself) Joe Lampton, newly arrived in a prosperous northern provincial town. ‘A callous, ambitious, sexy L-cky J-m,’ declared John Davenport in his Observer review. ‘He is a ruthless rather than an angry young man.’ Over the summer, Richard Crossman read this ‘nauseating new vulgarized Lucky Jim book’ and pondered its success. ‘It is lower middle-class, anti-working-class, describing the working classes as dirty, smelly people, eating fish and chips and favouring the upper class as people who have tiled bathrooms and beautiful voices.’ Only a Wykehamist, of course, could fail to appreciate the allure of tiled bathrooms, and over the next few years Joe Lampton increasingly replaced Jim Dixon as the symbol of new, meritocratic social forces dynamically and hungrily on the move.
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