Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Did the pendulum swing back again? Did the public tire of taffeta and lace? Was there a groundswell of revulsion at the excesses of the Sloane Rangers, the entitlement of the Oxbridge elite and the rise of the cricket jumper as a fashion accessory?

  The answer, at least in the short term, was no. Fashion took new turns, but looking ‘very, very rich’ never lost its lustre. In the summer of 1982, the Guardian suggested that feminists should embrace the trend for ‘glitter, glamour and outrage’. In the autumn of 1983, The Times announced that the new image for men was the ‘honourable schoolboy, upper class chic spiced with cheek’. And that same autumn, Harpers & Queen’s Ann Barr discovered a new group to rival the Sloane Rangers. These were the ‘Nooves’, middle-class people who had made their money as accountants, in ‘videos and home computers’ or by renovating old buildings. They bought houses with paddocks for their new ponies; they went to the Brompton Road and South Molton Street, and came home with the right sort of carrier bags, which they used for their sandwiches. Some commentators might have worried that they were too greedy, too ambitious, too indifferent to their fellow Britons. But Barr had spotted another, darker failing. ‘If they take over,’ she said grimly, ‘the difficulty with them is that they haven’t a feeling for country sports.’35

  At around the same time that Ann Barr was contemplating the rise of the Nooves, the Sunday Times asked Ian Jack to write about how young people found love in the capital. His research took him to a dinner party in west London, thrown by four girls – ‘Fiona and Nicki, Claire and Annabel’ – who had been to the same boarding school and now worked as secretaries at auction houses, or for advertising firms, or in the City. To all intents and purposes, they were four little Lady Dianas. Young men arrived, ‘Jamie and Hugh, Simon and Mark’, wearing ‘corduroys and roll-neck sweaters’. The men were all very much of a type: they put on comic voices, talked in quotation marks, spoke of getting ‘wazzocked’ after work and discussed how much easier it was to have an overdraft when you banked in the country.

  At one point Jack asked one of the girls if ‘she ever encountered members of the working class’. ‘Not really,’ she said, ‘but I did sociology to A-level so I’ve got a fair idea about how they live.’ She was not joking.36

  26

  The British Are Coming!

  England won against odds that were at one stage quoted at 500 to one. Perhaps, reflecting on that apparent impossibility, Mrs Thatcher may sleep a little easier.

  Daily Telegraph, 21 July 1981

  If you want to change nappies, change nappies. It’s a free world. That’s why my father fought in the Second World War.

  Ian Botham on BBC2’s Open to Question, 20 October 1986

  The year was 1977, and in his rented house in Malibu, the film producer David Puttnam was feeling sorry for himself. Having moved across the Atlantic for tax reasons, he had never really settled in Hollywood and had come down with a nasty bout of flu. To cheer himself up, he reached to the bookshelf and pulled down one of the owner’s books, a history of the Olympic Games.

  When Puttnam reached the 1924 Games in Paris, and in particular the story of the Scottish athlete Eric Liddell, he realized he was looking at a brilliant premise for a film. When he returned to London, he commissioned a script from the television dramatist Colin Welland. Getting the money, however, was a problem. Everybody agreed that Welland’s script was excellent, but Britain’s film industry was in ruins, with annual production down to a pitiful sixty-one films in 1979, thirty-one films in 1980 and just twenty-four in 1981.fn1 To put it bluntly, nobody wanted to make British films. But at last Puttnam managed to scrape a £4 million budget together. Half came from Twentieth Century Fox; the other half, bizarrely, came from the Egyptian playboy Dodi Fayed, who fancied himself as a film producer. Later, Fayed had to be banned from the set after Puttnam accused him of offering cocaine to the actors. He was, Puttnam said, ‘one of the laziest human beings I’ve ever come across’.1

  In April 1980 the cameras rolled on Puttnam’s Olympic project. After various rewrites, Welland had decided to concentrate on two British runners, Eric Liddell, an evangelical Presbyterian missionary, and Harold Abrahams, the ultra-competitive son of a Jewish immigrant. His aim was to show them not as flag-waving national icons, but as men ‘fired by their own purpose, inspired by their own dreams and seeking only to test themselves, on their own behalf, against the fastest, the strongest, the highest on earth’. But when Chariots of Fire reached the screens a year later, it was its nostalgic patriotism that impressed the critics. The Times’s David Robinson thought it was ‘proudly and uncompromisingly British’, while the Financial Times’s Nigel Andrews hailed the ‘mythic nostalgia’ of its ‘patriotism and idealism’. The Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker even thought it ‘the kind of film that I’d almost given up hope of ever seeing in Britain again’, reawakening ‘sentiments that had so long lain publicly unexpressed one had begun to wonder if they ever existed: love of country, fear of God, loyalty to the team, unselfish excellence in the pursuit of honour, becoming modesty in the moment of victory’.

  On the face of it, Chariots of Fire does seem an immensely nostalgic film. The opening scene, a memorial service for Harold Abrahams in 1978, sets the tone. ‘Now there are just two of us,’ says an aged Nigel Havers, ‘young Aubrey Montague and myself, who can close our eyes and remember those few young men, with hope in our hearts and wings on our heels.’ As his words die away, the troubles of the present fade into nothingness, and we are back in the 1920s. The Trinity Great Court Run, the Cambridge Gilbert and Sullivan Society, even the ‘heather on the hills’ of Liddell’s beloved Scotland, seem perfectly calculated to stir a misty-eyed longing for a lost golden age. The bicycles clatter through Cambridge; the national anthem rings out over the conquered stadium; the crowds cheer their returning heroes. In many ways the atmosphere recalls George Orwell’s words about the world of boys’ weekly papers in the 1940s: ‘The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound … Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever.’2

  In fact, the men behind Chariots of Fire never thought of it as a conservative film. Puttnam was a keen Labour supporter. So was the director, Hugh Hudson, who had been educated at Eton but ‘hated all the prejudice’ of his class. As for Colin Welland, he had worked with Ken Loach and written several instalments of the BBC’s immensely earnest Play for Today, and was very firmly a man of the left. As the historian James Chapman has shown, Welland’s original treatment envisaged the film as a struggle between the ‘privileged few’ and the ‘postwar generation’, who were ‘determined to win through in their own right for what they, and they alone, believe is worthy’. The filmmakers even saw a parallel between Liddell, defying the authorities’ demands that he run on the Sabbath, and the athletes who were defying Mrs Thatcher’s call to boycott the Moscow Olympics. The film, wrote Welland, would tell the story of two men who, ‘riding their “Chariots of Fire” … fight against and eventually sweep aside those newly emerging Goliaths, nationalism and political expedience, those same monsters which today have resurfaced in the probable demise of the whole magnificent ideal’.3

  It is all the more ironic, then, that Chariots of Fire is often seen as a Thatcherite film. With her deeply romantic sense of history and intense belief in Britain’s unique destiny, Mrs Thatcher would have relished the loving shots of chapels and courts, not to mention all the Gilbert-and-Sullivan-singing and Union Jack-waving. And it is easy to imagine her pride at seeing Abrahams and Liddell secure their medals, not just because they were British, but because both made satisfying Thatcherite heroes. As a strict Presbyterian who spent most of his later life as a missionary in China, Liddell was driven by similar convictions to the austere Methodism that had shaped the young Margaret Roberts. As for Abrahams, Mrs Thatcher always had a soft spot for Jews. As Hugo Young puts it, she particularly prized their ‘belief in self-help’, their enthusiasm for ‘ambition and self-a
dvancement’ and their ‘moral code for upward mobility’, qualities that the film’s Harold Abrahams has in abundance. For as Hudson told the critic Alexander Walker, Chariots of Fire ‘wasn’t about winning, but striving’.4

  The most illuminating scene of Chariots of Fire, which most firmly places it at the turn of the 1980s, comes halfway through. The patrician Masters of Trinity and Caius, played by John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson, have summoned the brooding Abrahams, played by Ben Cross, to dinner. All three are in black tie, savouring their port in a wood-panelled college room. The Master of Trinity launches into a paean to sport’s role in the ‘education of an Englishman’, explaining that it fosters an ‘unassailable spirit of loyalty, comradeship and mutual responsibility’. Then he changes tack. In his ‘enthusiasm for success’, Abrahams has ‘lost sight of some of these ideals’. In particular, the Master has heard rumours that he is employing a coach: not merely an Italian but, worse, a professional. ‘The way of the amateur is the only one to provide satisfactory results … You’ve adopted a professional attitude. For the past year, you’ve concentrated wholly on developing your own technique in the headlong pursuit, may I suggest, of individual glory.’

  At that, Abrahams bridles, but the Master of Caius chips in: ‘Your aim is to win at all costs, is it not?’ ‘At all costs, no,’ says Harold. ‘But I do aim to win within the rules. Perhaps you would rather I play the gentleman and lost?’ ‘To playing the tradesman, yes,’ snaps the Master of Caius. ‘My dear boy,’ says the Master of Trinity with smooth condescension, ‘your approach has been, if I may say so, a little too plebeian. You are the elite, and are therefore expected to behave as such.’ That is too much for Abrahams. ‘You know, gentlemen, you yearn for victory just as I do,’ he says coldly, pushing back his chair to leave, ‘but achieved with the apparent effortlessness of gods. Yours are the archaic values of the prep-school playground. You deceive no one but yourselves. I believe in the pursuit of excellence. And I’ll carry the future with me.’

  As the door closes behind him, the Master of Trinity murmurs complacently: ‘There goes your Semite, Hugh.’ But it is not Abrahams’s Jewishness that they object to. It is his professionalism, his individualism, his modernity. They might have been Lord Carrington and Sir Ian Gilmour, shaking their heads at the folly of another impatient outsider.5

  Of all Chariots of Fire’s virtues, the most important was its timing. Conceived in the late 1970s, it reached the screens at precisely the moment when audiences were tired of feeling depressed and thirsting for patriotic reassurance. Released in the spring of 1981, it proved that rare thing, a genuine word-of-mouth hit, with takings growing as the weeks went by. What was really striking, though, was how well it was doing in the United States, where most reviewers loved it. At the time, Alexander Walker thought it had tapped into two fashionable American enthusiasms: jogging and God. But a more obvious explanation is that it fulfilled middle-class Americans’ expectations of a British picture, all country houses, Cambridge colleges and cut-glass accents. It was ‘something more even than a thinking man’s Rocky’, said Time magazine, calling it ‘a wonderful historical restoration’ of a ‘more gracious and perhaps more innocent time’.6

  Even so, Puttnam, Hudson and Welland could scarcely have anticipated the bounties that flowed their way on 29 March 1982, when they arrived at the Los Angeles Music Center for the Academy Awards. The runaway favourite was Warren Beatty’s Russian Revolution drama Reds. The big winner, though, was Chariots of Fire, which picked up awards for its screenplay, costume design and music, as well as the coveted title of Best Picture. It was thirteen years since the last entirely British-made winner, Oliver!, so Welland could be forgiven for getting carried away. ‘The British are coming!’ he exclaimed.fn2 And when he flew home it was to front-page headlines that easily dwarfed the column inches devoted to Britain’s previous Oscar winners. After all the dire economic news – and the coldest winter since the 1940s – it was a relief to have something to cheer.7

  In the wake of the Oscars, the distributors gave Chariots of Fire another whirl in the cinemas. But by now events in the South Atlantic had taken a hand. Four days after Welland’s call to arms, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Suddenly there was a new charge to the moment when the Master of Caius pays tribute to the fallen of the First World War, ‘the flower of a generation’, who ‘died for England and all that England stands for’. And as the Task Force fought its way towards Port Stanley, dozens of people wrote to Puttnam to thank him for such an ‘inspiring’ film. ‘I left the theatre feeling completely uplifted,’ wrote one old acquaintance, ‘proud of having been to Cambridge, of being British and of knowing you.’

  Even the Prime Minister found it a source of encouragement. Over the weekend of 24 and 25 April, with British troops preparing to retake South Georgia, Mrs Thatcher arranged a special screening at Chequers. Had the landings unfolded differently, the film might have seemed a blackly ironic rebuke to its audience’s surging patriotism. But things could hardly have worked out better for David Puttnam’s accountants. By the end of 1982 Chariots of Fire had sold more tickets than any other film that year, with the sole exception of Dudley Moore’s comedy Arthur. Perhaps people just liked watching John Gielgud.8

  There was another obvious reason why Chariots of Fire appealed to so many cinemagoers in the early 1980s. Although the Corinthian ethos was in deep decline, athletics was enjoying a tremendous boom. Colour television had brought new blood, new attention and new money; and, after years in the doldrums, Britain’s athletes were finally recapturing the vanished lustre of Liddell and Abrahams. By any reasonable standard, their recent record had been abject. At Munich in 1972 Britain’s athletes had won just four Olympic gold medals, while at Montreal in 1976 they won just a single bronze. At this point, a story about all-conquering British runners would have seemed cruelly implausible.9

  Four years later, however, the story was very different. ‘SMASHING FOR BRITAIN’, screamed the front page of the Express on 2 July 1980:

  Gloom-Beaters Ovett and Coe Stun the World

  Super athletes Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett put the life and fire back into gloomy Britain last night.

  The Olympic rivals smashed a world record apiece in the space of an hour.

  Between them, the pair now hold FIVE world records – all in the name of Britain, which is a great tonic for a country suffering the economic blues.

  Coe and Ovett put on their world-beating show in faraway Oslo. But their sensational win double was just the thing to lift the temperature at home on one of the coldest, wettest July days ever …

  In a month’s time they will run each other into the ground in Moscow. But last night they were both winners. And so was Britain.

  Here was a rivalry worthy of Puttnam’s heroes. The Financial Times’s athletics writer Pat Butcher, who later wrote a book on the Coe–Ovett relationship, called them ‘the Toff and the Tough’: ‘Coe, slight, elegant, intense, fear of failure investing his every move. Ovett, the barrel-chested bruiser, strolling around the track like the very incarnation of Kipling’s dictum to accept victory and defeat with equal panache. Hollywood could not have conceived it better.’ Puttnam might have had something to say about that.10

  As in Chariots of Fire, what made the struggle between Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe so compelling was that it was not just a question of sport. It was one of style, culture and social class. They were born less than a year apart: Ovett in Brighton in October 1955, Coe in London in September 1956. In the press they were portrayed as polar opposites: Ovett the self-made striver, Coe the embodiment of effortless privilege. Yet both images were very misleading. Despite his gritty reputation, Ovett was a preternaturally gifted prodigy, so good that when he was just 14, an experienced coach told his parents that he was likely to run at the Olympics. Coe was much slower to develop. As late as 1979, when he graduated from Loughborough University, he was still planning a career in the City. But then, that summer, he broke not one but t
hree world records. It was obvious the financial world would have to cope without him.

  There is no denying, though, that there was a class dimension to the Ovett–Coe rivalry. Ovett’s background had been far from comfortable. His father was a roof tiler, his mother was just 16 when he was born, and he was effectively brought up by his grandparents. From the moment he broke through, he had a reputation for being a man of steely will and stubborn opinions, the ‘bad guy’ of British athletics. It is perhaps a stretch to compare him with Smith, the extravagantly talented rebel in Alan Sillitoe’s story ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ (1959), since Ovett did actually finish, and indeed win, his races. Yet in his crabby, outspoken independence, Ovett recalled the lean and hungry heroes of the late 1950s. If he had been born fifteen years earlier, Fleet Street might have hailed him as a people’s champion. But at the turn of the 1980s, working-class heroes were out of fashion. Instead, wrote The Times’s Simon Barnes, he was the ‘pressmen’s monster’, a ‘truly dangerous young man … the horrid bully who might beat lovely Sebastian’.11

  What of the lovely Sebastian? The press made him sound like Brideshead Revisited’s Sebastian Flyte, but in reality Coe’s father was a production engineer in a Sheffield steel firm, while his mother was a half-Indian former actress. If his background was middle-class, it was hardly patrician. He spent his teens in South Yorkshire, not exactly the height of metropolitan glamour, and went to his local secondary modern. His father Peter, an exceptionally intense man with sensationally right-wing opinions, made sure Sebastian was well mannered and well spoken, which meant people thought he was better off than he was. But his athletic success was only partly a question of natural talent. It was also the result of his father’s gruelling training programme, which had him pounding up the hills of Sheffield in driving snow. ‘He ran Seb’s life like a project,’ a friend said. According to Butcher, Peter Coe even took an evening class in statistics, ‘so that he could better map out the future’.