Reporting this month, under the BBC’s auspices and chaired by Antony Jay (the future co-writer of Yes Minister), was TICTAC, acronym for Television’s Influence on Children: Teenage Advisory Committee. ‘Teenagers,’ it found, ‘are bored by politics.’
This is rather a bald statement, but it does seem to be true of an astonishingly large proportion of them. ‘It’s all talk’, ‘it’s boring’, ‘I don’t know what they’re talking about’. Again and again all of us came across these comments and others like them. Western Germany, steel nationalisation, the constitutional future of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the Singapore elections – nearly all of them seem incapable of the slightest interest in, let alone enthusiasm for, any of these topics. The reason seems to be that they cannot see how ‘politics’ impinge on them, or what they have to do with their lives . . .
We found a widespread disenchantment with politicians. ‘It’s sort of corrupt’. ‘They’re too dogmatic’. ‘It’s all fixed’. ‘They’re just keeping to the party line’. At the back of it seemed to be the feeling that their views were conditioned by their party allegiance; they didn’t honestly believe what they said, or at least you couldn’t be sure they did; and that discussion between, say, Labour and Conservative was pointless since neither was open to persuasion by the other.
Other findings were that teenagers were more interested than adults in ‘the large issues of ethics and morality’ such as ‘the colour bar, crime, punishment, marital fidelity, social justice, religion, the H-Bomb’; that they were highly observant of television techniques, criticising ‘bad cueing, unconvincing studio exteriors, fake props and set dressing, bad camerawork, etc’; that they were often ‘outraged’ by insincerity in a speaker or programme; and that particular dislikes included the quiz games watched by their parents (seeing ‘if some bloke was going to go on and win £3 2s’), period drama (‘I can’t bear all those “’pon my soul’s” and overacting’) and slow-paced BBC programmes (‘Victor Sylvester and all that’). Altogether, concluded TICTAC, ‘the more we talked to teenagers about television, the clearer it became that for them it was solely a source of entertainment. They never volunteered this fact, because it had clearly never occurred to them that it might be anything else. Its function in the home was that of Court Jester: to pass the time, to keep boredom at bay, to hold the attention, to interest, to amuse, but always to entertain.’ Or, put another way, ‘neither they nor their parents looked to the television set to serve as private tutor, chaplain, woodwork instructor, occupational therapist or Youth Leader’.1
Nor were Cousins or Gaitskell in the entertainment business. ‘I have never believed that the most important thing in our times was to elect a Labour Government,’ declared the T&G’s leader in early July at his union’s conference on the Isle of Man, shortly before it voted unilateralist. ‘The most important thing is to elect a Labour Government determined to carry out a socialist policy.’ The press gave him a predictable lashing – ‘COUSINS LOSES THE ELECTION’ (Daily Sketch); ‘COUSINS GOES WRONG’ (Daily Mirror); ‘IS COUSINS A DANGER TO BRITAIN?’ (Sunday Express) – and shortly afterwards a poll conducted for Labour found almost half the electorate agreeing with the proposition that the party was ‘severely split by disagreement’, an impression presumably confirmed when Gaitskell on the 11th, speaking at Workington, repudiated unilateralism and insisted that ‘the problems of international relations’ would not be ‘solved by slogans, however loudly declaimed, or by effervescent emotion, however genuine’, but by ‘very hard, very clear, very calm and very honest thinking’. By now, everyone was expecting an autumn election, and Labour’s anxieties were compounded by industrial troubles, especially in the motor industry, while the printers’ strike dragged on until early August.
‘I am sure your sensitive adolescent souls will burn with righteous indignation when you read that some poor motor car builders simply had to go out on strike because they were earning only £30 a week,’ Dr J. E. Dunlop, rector of Bell Baxter High School at Cupar, Fife sarcastically surmised on 3 July at senior prize-giving. ‘Try to rise above this horrible example set by your elders,’ he urged the school-leavers, ‘and you will gain what they have missed, the greatest prize in the world – a tranquil soul.’ Within a fortnight, in a different dispute, a major, almost month-long strike had started at Morris Motors (part of the British Motor Corporation) in Cowley, following the instant dismissal of chief shop steward Frank Horsman – ‘because’, according to management, ‘of a continuous and deliberate policy of obstruction, insubordination and insolence over a period of many years, culminating in the incident of July 14, when he instructed certain men to stop work’. Mrs W. Lawrence, a farmworker’s wife and mother of three, was unimpressed. ‘What must other countries think of England?’ she asked in a letter to the Oxford Mail, shortly before Cousins managed to settle an increasingly invidious dispute by arranging for Horsman to be transferred to Pressed Steel. ‘Is it Great Britain when it seems the unions try their best to stop workers’ efforts by these constant strikes?’ A few weeks later, in early September, Gallup found that those viewing trade unions as on the whole ‘a good thing’ had declined from 67 per cent in 1955 to 60 per cent now; given the overwhelming press hostility, arguably the surprise was that the figure was as high as that.
Not only the press was hostile. The Boulting brothers (John and Roy) had been making low-to-medium-strength anti-Establishment comedies for several years, and now, with I’m All Right, Jack, they hit the jackpot. Set in a munitions factory, and in theory attacking equally both sides of industry (with Terry-Thomas playing the useless, pompous manager, Major Hargreaves), in reality the film had as its principal target hypocritical, self-serving trade unionism, as embodied by the shop steward Fred Kite (played – indeed created – by Peter Sellers with cruel brilliance, including short-back-and-sides haircut, Hitler moustache, ill-fitting suit, waddling walk). ‘All them corn fields and ballet in the evening,’ is how he imagined his beloved Soviet Russia. As for concepts of economic efficiency: ‘We do not and cannot accept the principle that incompetence justifies dismissal. That is victimisation!’ Crucially, most reviewers from the left portion of the political spectrum found little to object to. The Manchester Guardian on 15 August reckoned it ‘not so far from the reality as told in the daily news of strikes’, while the day before, Dick Richards in the Mirror gave ‘full marks’ to the ‘witty, irrepressible’ Boultings for their ‘latest thumb-to-the-nose mickey-taking piece of gaggery’, in which they ‘shrewdly, and with very little malice, poke fun at every phase of industrial life’. ‘Maybe,’ conceded Richards at the end, ‘it’s not an accurate picture of 1959 factory life, but it’s splendid comedy.’ Splendid enough for the Queen, who watched it while on holiday at Balmoral – apparently in the company of Macmillan. ‘If that doesn’t win you the election,’ said someone to the PM, ‘nothing will.’2
Macmillan himself had spent the last Thursday of July at his Sussex home, Birch Grove. ‘Butler, Heathcoat Amory, Hailsham, Macleod, & a lot of TV experts to luncheon,’ he noted. ‘We then did about 50 minutes discussion (to be cut to 15 minutes) wh. it is hoped wd do to open the election campaign . . . We did it in the Smoking Room & the whole house was in confusion, with 40–50 electricians, technicians & what-not who made havoc of the place.’ The following week he toured three new towns (Basildon, Stevenage and Harlow, with a ‘good’ or ‘very good’ reception everywhere), while on the 7th came a feel-good announcement from the Palace. ‘The Queen is to have another baby in January or February,’ recorded Harold Nicolson. ‘What a sentimental hold the monarchy has over the middle classes! All the solicitors, actors and publishers at the Garrick were beaming as if they had acquired some personal benefit.’
Nothing, though, improved the national mood more this summer than the heady cocktail of sun and affluence. ‘For week after week, the skies have been deeply blue and cloudless every day, followed by warm, starry nights in which people have sat out in pavement cafés and on their own
doorsteps and in every slip of a back garden to enjoy the rare, un-English balminess,’ wrote Mollie Panter-Downes.
Though the old idea of London in August is of empty streets becalmed in a dead season, the city has never appeared more lively and booming, with the hotels, restaurants, and theatres all packed; the chauffeurs waiting beside their Rolls-Royces and Jaguars at West End curbs; the television masts seeming to sprout thicker each day over the suburban housing-estate roofs; and crowds from the provinces, dressed in their holiday best and with money to burn obviously smouldering in their pockets, happily lounging along Shaftesbury Avenue and Regent Street.
She did not need to spell out the political import: ‘This is also the summer when the country’s prosperity – coming so suddenly after the long, bleak series of governmental exhortations to cut down on spending that many citizens are inclined to pinch themselves rather sharply – can be felt on the skin along with the sunshine.’3
The prospective Labour candidate for Grimsby was far from the metropolis. ‘So now this most gifted political problem-child, this all-but-statesman already at 40, so outstandingly able, astringent, brave, integral, quick, gay – such fun to have about – is on the high road up,’ a delighted, ever-admiring Hugh Dalton had written to Gaitskell in February after the local party had chosen the undeniably gifted, undeniably arrogant Anthony Crosland, out of the Commons since 1955. ‘Great success, given a flick of luck, is easily within his powers.’ His constituency was of course synonymous with fishing, and during August the author of The Future of Socialism spent a fortnight on the Grimsby trawler Samarian’s trip to the Faro and Westerly fishing grounds. As he docked, wearing his wartime red paratrooper beret and an old sweater, Crosland informed the Grimsby Evening Telegraph that the fishermen were ‘the most hard-working and cheerful people I have met in a long time’.
Gaitskell would have approved the sentiments. He had confided to Richard Crossman (a fellow Wykehamist) earlier in the month, apropos Crosland’s friend and rival, Roy Jenkins,
He is very much in the social swim these days and I am sometimes anxious about him and young Tony . . . We, as middle-class Socialists, have got to have a profound humility. Though it’s a funny way of putting it, we’ve got to know that we lead them because they can’t do it without us, with our abilities, and yet we must feel humble to working people. Now that’s all right for us in the upper middle class, but Tony and Roy are not upper, and I sometimes feel they don’t have a proper humility to ordinary working people.
It may have been around this time that Nye Bevan added his perspective. If Gaitskell won the election, someone speculated to him, there would probably be a good job for Jenkins, albeit he was said to be a little lazy. ‘Lazy? Lazy?’ reputedly exclaimed Bevan. ‘How can a boy from Abersychan who acquired an accent like that be lazy?’
August bank holiday was still on the first Monday of the month, and that day questions of class were high on the agenda in a recorded conversation between Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, above all the increasingly vexed question of whether the new affluence was de-proletarianising the working class. Williams was inclined to be sceptical – claiming that, through for instance the universal use of the welfare state, it was as much a case of the middle class becoming working class as the other way round, and he stressed the continuing relevance of ‘the high working-class tradition’, defined as ‘the sense of community, of equality, of genuine mutual respect’. Hoggart did not deny that tradition, but – with a nod to Family and Kinship – argued that whereas ‘living together in a large industrial district’ produced a sense of solidarity, ‘if you spend some time on a new housing estate you are aware of a kind of break, of new pressures and tensions’. And he went on:
I’m not surprised that working-class people take hold of the new goods, washing-machines, television and the rest (this is where the statement that they have become middle class is a statement of a simple truth). This is in line with working-class tradition and isn’t necessarily regrettable or reprehensible – what one does question is the type of persuasion which accompanies these sales, since its assumptions are shallower than many of those people already have.
A lot of the old attitudes remain, but what one wants to know is how quickly these new forces – steady prosperity, greater movement, wives going out to work – will change attitudes, especially among younger people. I’ve talked to a lot of working-class adolescents recently and been struck not only by the fact that they didn’t see their industrial and political situation in the way their fathers did at their age (one expected that), but by the difficulty in getting any coherent picture of their situation out of them. Everything seemed open, and they seemed almost autonomous.
But by the time they’ve married and settled in with commitments a great many forces encourage the picture of a decent, amiable but rather selfish, workable society – the New Elizabethan Age.
Towards the end, the conversation turned to politics. ‘The emphasis the Conservatives put is quite strong and attractive,’ conceded Williams.
That the competitive society is a good thing, that the acquisitive society is a good thing, that all the style of modern living is satisfying and a real aim in life. They seem to believe these things a lot more strongly than the Labour Party believes in anything. Labour seems the conservative party, in feeling, and it’s bound to remain so unless it really analyses this society, not to come to terms with it, but to offer some deep and real alternative, of a new kind.4
As Williams and Hoggart were speaking, the Hague sisters – Frances and Gladys, unmarried, living together in Keighley – were on the third day of their week’s holiday at Bridlington. ‘We began with a dash for the bus, as the taxi we ordered never came, so we only just caught our train,’ recorded 62-year-old Gladys about the Saturday, when public transport was its usual crowded self at the start of a bank holiday weekend.
What a crush in Leeds as all were rushing to the far end of the station for the East-coast trains. Porters need some patience as some travellers need so much reassuring about their train. We were lucky to get in a comfortable coach and sat back to enjoy the scenery . . . Bridlington station with its wooden foot bridges could do with a more modern look but at any rate we had arrived. After a good welcome and tea at our lodge we spent our first evening enjoying the air and watching the players on the putting and bowling greens. After working hard it is nice to watch others playing hard.
Sunday featured a walk on the South Sands, the afternoon on the beach, a salmon salad tea, and church in the evening (‘about 300 in the congregation, very good singing’), while on bank holiday Monday itself the clerk of the weather again obliged:
The sun was hot all morning so deck chairs were in great demand . . . Fathers on holiday seem to have more fun than the mothers who are left in chairs to keep an eye on the family’s possessions, perhaps they would rather watch the cricket and football than take part. Races and other games organised by representatives of a children’s comic paper attracted many of the younger children and there were plenty of prizes for lucky winners. Donkeys weren’t in the mood for trotting and needed some coaxing.
That evening in Glasgow, Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall, by now on its post-London tour, opened for a week at the King’s Theatre. The main actors from the original production had all left, so instead the Glasgow Herald’s reviewer singled out Michael Caine (26, working-class, this his first major role) as ‘the remorselessly jocular cockney’, Private Bamforth, with his performance ‘taking (with no small success) the easy way on all occasions to raise a laugh’. The not wholly pleased Christopher Small continued: ‘He does it, it must be owned, with considerable charm; nevertheless, the effect, which brings a complaisant audience almost to the point of finding funny the enforced slaughter of a prisoner, is a little odd.’
Next Saturday the Hagues set off home. ‘Such large crowds at the station that it was 3 hours before we left,’ noted Gladys. ‘The earlier trains came in full of Butli
ns campers from Filey. The Boys Brigade came on the platform in very orderly style being accompanied by the band playing. Had a very restful and enjoyable holiday. All gone well.’ The 18-year-old Joe Brown had been performing at Butlin’s in Filey earlier in the season, but the group he was in were so wretched, and he was so fed up with being made as a gimmick to have his head shaved à la Yul Brynner, that by the start of the month he had dropped out. Meanwhile at Butlin’s in Pwllheli, the 23-year-old Glenda Jackson did stick it out as a Blue Coat – ‘having’, she remembered rather sourly, ‘to tell all the happy holidaymakers who wanted to be in York House that they were in Windsor House’ – and took the opportunity to dye her hair peroxide-blonde, wear mauve and generally try to become Jeanne Moreau, in the hope of kick-starting her stagnant acting career. The ubiquitous soundtrack this August was Cliff Richard’s number 1 hit ‘Livin’ Doll’ – a single that, observes Pete Frame, ‘conferred unimaginable respectability on Cliff, smoothing out all the bumps in his reputation’ – and the film was South Pacific, on record-breaking runs all across the country. For her family, recalled Trina Beckett half a century later, it was as usual Southbourne in Dorset, even though in an old Austin Seven it was two days’ drive from their Wolverhampton home. The drill was familiar – an unbendingly strict landlady (‘No dinner for late arrivals’), no choice about what you had to eat, four families of four competing for the bathroom – and ‘each day started with the 8.30 non-negotiable breakfast of cornflakes followed by bacon, fried egg and baked beans’. Whereupon, with no one allowed in the house after 9.30 a.m.,
Modernity Britain Page 39