Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  For those inclined to take comfort from such a verdict, there was a rude awakening to come. In 1977 Moody himself was given a twelve-year jail sentence for bribery and corruption in his capacity as head of the Obscene Publications Squad, a position he had held even while carrying out his inquiry. In the intervening period, much had been done by Sir Robert Mark, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 1972 to 1977, to clean up the force, but even he was perhaps a little too inclined to understand the bent copper, using the argument implied in The Burden of Proof; there is, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘a widespread general acceptance that in London, at least, the system of justice is weighted so heavily in favour of the criminal and the defence lawyer that it can only be made to work by bending the laws. In fairness to the CID that view is not confined to them.’

  Faith in the police was not destroyed by the scandals of the early and mid-1970s. They added to the background noise, to the sense that something was not quite right in Britain, but the force still tended to get the benefit of the doubt. In 1975 The Sweeney erupted onto TV screens, depicting members of Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad as boozing, womanizing brawlers, and taking televised violence to new levels for both police and villains, though there were limits; the briefing paper for writers on the series advised, with an implied regret, that ‘Four-letter words are not permissible, nor can we indulge in “souped up” horror, e.g. represent, in slow motion, a security guard having his head blown off by a shotgun.’ Even here, however, the tone was entirely supportive, and a 1975 episode that centred on allegations against a senior Squad officer made explicit reference to the Times-prompted investigation, whilst emphasizing that what we were watching was yet another case of a decent copper being stitched up by villains.

  For the public, acceptance of police corruption was still perhaps a step too far (a 1977 opinion poll showed that only 15 per cent thought the police weren’t honest), for there remained a need to believe that someone somewhere was holding the line, defending society against what was seen as a rising tide of violence. Because, as the ’70s dawned, the media were awash with tales of our descent into brutality. The term ‘mugging’ was imported from New York to describe the crime of street robbery, and although the practice was not exactly unknown in Britain, muggers sounded both more contemporary and more dangerous than footpads and highwaymen; the word could also, some noted, be subtly nuanced towards black criminality more than anything in the previously existing vocabulary had been. There was also the increasing focus on football hooligans at the same time and, allied to this, the emergence of the skinheads.

  Descended from the mod culture of the early 1960s, but stripped of that movement’s art school pretensions, skinheads were an uncomfortable sight for the general population. Working-class youths with hair shaved to within a quarter-inch of its life, clad in boots, braces and rolled-up jeans, they came to represent the nihilistic antithesis to the idealism of the late ’60s. ‘What are we for? Nothing really,’ commented one. ‘We’re just a group of blokes. We’re not for anything.’ They made early appearances at the 1968 Grosvenor Square demonstration against the Vietnam War (chanting in support of Enoch Powell) and at the Rolling Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park the following year, but it was the ’70s that saw them transformed from a style-conscious London scene into a national movement; by 1972 it was being argued that they ‘constitute by far the biggest single group among this country’s teenagers’. And their image was one of mindless violence, aimed at rival gangs, especially in football grounds, and at ethnic minorities.

  ‘We’re being exploited, the working class,’ explained one skinhead from London’s East End. ‘It’s hard for us to fight for our job and our house, but with them here as well, trying to get our houses, it’s another opposition.’ In case his meaning wasn’t entirely clear, he added, ‘I’ll tell you another thing, when you stand next to these people that have just come over here, they fucking stink.’ The same rage was evident in the words of a Birmingham skin: ‘Have you ever been in their restaurants? Have you seen the way they grovel round you, the way they’re always trying to please you? I hate them, that’s all.’

  In so far as this racial hatred had a political expression, it was manifested in support of the one politician who spoke out against immigration. ‘You don’t see no blacks in China,’ argued one, with contorted but rigorous logic. ‘That’s what we need – a Chinese Enoch Powell.’ For those who lived in Powell’s heartlands, the original was quite sufficient. SKINHEAD BODYGUARD FOR ENOCH read a 1970 Daily Mirror front-page headline, claiming that forty skins had surrounded Powell at an election rally in Smethwick, and quoting sixteen-year-old Neil Sandford as saying: ‘We heard that long-haired people and students were coming to cause trouble. No one causes trouble to our mate Enoch. And if there is any trouble we will soon sort it out.’

  By this stage, assaults on British Asians had already become common, initially in Brick Lane in London where a wave of attacks had claimed their first fatality in April 1970, and the expression ‘Paki-bashing’ was gaining currency in the media. The following month, Pakistan’s High Commissioner to the UK met the home secretary, James Callaghan, to protest at the violence and to point out the damage the skinheads were doing to relations between the two countries. Meanwhile, in Wolverhampton, the convener of a meeting of concerned groups threatened that: ‘It would also be possible to arrange retaliation against English people in India and Pakistan. This could be a reaction.’ In fact, there had already been reports in the London-based publication Mashriq of assaults on British people in Pakistan.

  A related phenomenon of the time, though one less likely to cause international tension, was the victimization of gay men under the banner of ‘queer-bashing’. In 1970 a gang of twelve youths, aged between fifteen and eighteen, were sentenced for an attack on Michael de Gruchy, a twenty-nine-year-old solicitor’s clerk, that left him dead on Wimbledon Common. Four were convicted of murder, amongst them eighteen-year-old butcher’s assistant Geoffrey Hammond, whose father – in an early example of what would one day be called blame culture – knew who was responsible, and it wasn’t him or his boy: ‘The first part of a policeman’s job is crime prevention. They know queer-bashing on the common has been going on for years and failed in their duty for not stopping it. All the parents have been let down.’ The class division between killer and victim was typical of such violence; in 1978 two youths, a bricklayer and a hod carrier, were jailed for life for the queer-bashing murder of Peter Benyon, a thirty-two-year-old librarian.

  The skinhead cult had started as an obsessively working-class fashion statement, but by 1970 it had mutated into something far nastier: ‘Every other schoolboy in England was reading scabby little exploitation paperback novels called Skinhead and Skinhead Escapes, following the tawdry exploits of Joe Hawkins, tooled-up, blood-spattered thug in a Harrington,’ recalled former skin and future style writer Robert Elms; ‘the whole thing was well on the way to parody’.

  The paperbacks in question were written by James Moffat, the most successful, if not the most talented, pulp author of his time. Churning out a bewildering number of books, under a variety of pseudonyms and at great speed (he claimed that his record was writing a novel in 36 hours), Moffat struck gold in 1970 with Skinhead, published by the New English Library under the name Richard Allen. The story concerns Joe Hawkins, the leader of a small skinhead gang in the East End, and follows him through a week of violence and sex, taking in the full range of standard settings – football match, Brighton, youth club, pubs – visits to all of which provoke outbreaks of fighting with opposing gangs, public transport employees, hippies, Asians, and the police. In an attempt to provide him with some context, we first meet his father, a distant relation of Alf Garnett, a dock worker who doesn’t quite have the courage of his convictions: ‘He was completely disillusioned with this Labour government – but he wouldn’t abstain nor vote Tory. He would vote Labour as he always had; as his dad and his granddad had.’ But this background
soon fades in favour of a denunciation of Joe’s discredited culture: ‘His was a senseless world of violence for the sake of violence; his ideal devised by those wishing the end of civilized behaviour patterns; his the star-struck era of pop and pot and the belief that might is right even if might has to play games and call itself right.’ In this world Hawkins and his gang are seen as little more than animals, depicted in a way that prefigured the rats of James Herbert: ‘They swarmed over him, knocking him to the ground, kicking and gouging and slashing with all the ferocity of their ugly minds.’ And if there is a character articulating the authorial voice, it’s the doctor who stitches up one of the victims. ‘I’d like to see what a dictator could do in this country,’ he despairs. ‘Slums wiped out, harsh measures to curb the grab-all boys, savage sentences for injury to persons, hanging for child rapists and cop-killers, the birch for young offenders like these skinheads.’

  Despite this wholly negative portrayal of its subjects, and much to the publisher’s surprise, the book was a huge success, selling a reported million copies (given how rapidly it was passed around classrooms, it must have been read by millions more), and spawning a series of sequels that started with Suedehead and included Skinhead Girls, Boot Boys, Smoothies and Terrace Terrors. In a preface to Suedehead, Allen spelt out his own position, that skinheads were a product of ‘our permissive society which has, rightly or wrongly, encouraged the growth of off-beat cults within a framework peopled by law-abiding, decent, sometimes dull citizens’. Claiming the pulp privilege of having his cake and selling it, he blamed ‘mercenary-minded rag-trade merchants, a soft-pedalling attitude by politicians who look for teenage votes to save their seats, and an overwhelming pandering by the news media’, and he warned that ‘Britain cannot survive long in a climate of anarchy.’

  Youth violence was far from a new development, of course, but skins were of a different order from those that had recently gone before, primarily in being so self-contained in their negativity; for all its aggression, skinhead was a curiously passive phenomenon with no obvious interest in interacting with, let alone changing, society. And, in a first for a post-war youth cult, it didn’t even produce its own music, preferring to dance to the early versions of reggae that were coming out of Jamaica. The result was that, with the exception of a few imported records making the singles charts, this was a cult that had virtually no impact on a wider culture, save in the sense of instilling despair in those ‘sometimes dull citizens’ who Allen claimed to have close to his heart.

  This majority – or at least those within it who paid attention – worried about the soil wherein this nihilism had grown, and perhaps the most commonly identified cause was the breakdown of discipline in schools, a development popularly linked to a decline in the physical chastisement of pupils. A 1968 survey showed that 40 per cent of primary school heads had unilaterally banned the use of the cane, and the Inner London Education Authority built on this trend towards liberalism, decreeing that, from 1973, corporal punishment would be outlawed in its primary schools (towards the end of the decade, Labour’s education secretary, Shirley Williams, announced that the government was planning to abolish it in all primary schools, as well as special schools for the handicapped). That meant that it still remained in most secondary schools, though here problems arose as a result of the Sex Discrimination Act, passed in 1975. To comply with the new legislation, Heaton Park School in Newcastle upon Tyne, amongst others, announced that henceforth the strap, formerly used only on misbehaving boys, would now be applied also to girls; in response, some 200 girls walked out of their classrooms, and proceeded to vandalize property to such an extent that the police had to be called in to prevent a riot. Labour MP Renée Short protested that ‘The aim of the Act was to bring the disadvantaged sex up to the standards of the advantaged, so we should be seeing that boys are no longer caned,’ but she was then in a minority, even in Parliament. An attempt to ban all corporal punishment was voted down in the Commons, where Tory MP Patrick Cormack explained that his opposition to abolition was based on the fact that ‘juvenile vandalism was costing the country £8.5m a year’. It didn’t exactly speak well of the existing system, though a survey of teachers by the Times Educational Supplement in 1977 showed a clear majority still in favour of retaining corporal punishment, and the fear of even greater disorder was genuinely held.

  Symptoms of this supposed fall in standards included reports of a game known as Potter, which achieved a degree of popularity with Putney school children in 1970. Named after the caretaker of Fenn Street Secondary Modern School in the sitcom Please Sir!, as played by Deryck Guyler, the practice involved ‘harassing school and library caretakers, putting sticks through their bicycle spokes, and using accents similar to those of the television character’. Also causing concern was a new generation of toys that could be used in playground violence, starting with clackers (two solid plastic balls on either end of a piece of string; the string was held in the middle and the balls bounced together, as a kind of yo-yo for thugs). A succession of injured children, some of them hurt intentionally, prompted many schools to outlaw clackers, while the Home Office launched an investigation in 1971 into whether they should be banned outright. The following year, however, the craze ended as abruptly as crazes generally do, leaving the manufacturers, James of England, with 400,000 clackers in their warehouses and 170 workers redundant. Trivial though these stories might have sometimes appeared, the wider picture to which they contributed had serious implications; in 1975 it was reported that numbers of male applicants for teacher training courses had fallen by a third in just two years, with classroom discipline being the most frequently cited reason.

  If the skinheads were one violent manifestation of the splintering of 1960s youth culture, then another was the Angry Brigade. A London-based anarchist organization of limited but uncertain strength, the Angry Brigade engaged in a series of bomb attacks in 1970–72, a campaign that resulted in a five-month trial at the Old Bailey, with four defendants convicted and another four acquitted. The targets of their actions were for the most part related, at least tangentially, to the political mainstream of the times – two bombs exploded at the house of employment secretary Robert Carr on the day of a mass demonstration against the Industrial Relations Bill, another at a Territorial Army recruitment centre following the introduction of internment in Northern Ireland – but the agenda was not always so clear. There was, for example, the strange case of the attack on the Biba shop in Kensington on 1 May 1971.

  Biba had been present at the birth of swinging London – indeed the Daily Telegraph article by John Crosby that launched that phrase had named Biba’s founder, Barbara Hulanicki, as one of the ‘people who make London swing’ – and it had since grown to become a fully fledged department store, run almost entirely by women and celebrated by its mostly female customers as a place of glamorous liberation. In its final incarnation, from 1973 to 1975, it would create an escapist paradise, a version of retail theatre that owed more to Busby Berkeley than to the high street, and that offered glam heaven to its customers and habitués: ‘You can be Garbo! You can be Marilyn!’ enthused the store’s designer, Steve Thomas. ‘It took girls out from being second-class citizens, secretaries and shopgirls, to being stars.’ It also attracted the fashionable end of the middle-ageing ’60s generation; the caftan-wearing wife of The History Man, in Malcolm Bradbury’s satire of radical intellectuals, regularly disappears off to London for a ‘Biba weekend’, occasions for her to go shopping and meet up with her lover (she has, it need hardly be said, an open marriage).

  Biba had thus emerged from the same cultural explosion that produced both the Angry Brigade and its supporters in the underground press and beyond, even if their paths had subsequently diverged. The Guardian was later to claim that it was ‘some kind of macabre tribute’ that Biba should be targeted by the bombers ‘to protest the rising tide of capitalist female deco-decadence’, though those who worked at the store, particularly the security officer, Jo
hn Evans, who was injured in the blast, did not entirely appreciate the compliment. The May Day attack was allegedly ordered by feminist associates of the Brigade, angered by Biba’s decadent appeal, and the admission of guilt issued in the wake of the bombing contained the one great slogan produced by the organization in its entire existence: ‘If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy buying.’ There was a certain irony, therefore, in the fact that the terrorist campaign itself inspired a new line of clothing. Craig Stuart Fashions Ltd, a strictly non-political company which ‘had the dubious claim to fame of inventing loon pants’ (the heavily flared jeans that became the uniform of 1970s hippies), went on to create a trouser in tribute to the Angry Brigade. ‘Angry pants were introduced to follow up the phenomenal success of loons and were made in various shades of brushed denim,’ remembered company founder Craig Austin. ‘They sold quite well but never really took off in anything like the same incredible way as loons. Great name though.’

  The bombs of the Angry Brigade were, as it turned out, only the prelude to the wave of political violence that was to engulf mainland Britain. Much more serious was the struggle by the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, which had re-emerged in the late 1960s, and which became the source of terrorist attacks that lasted through to the end of the century. The scale of the problem was such that troops were sent into Ulster in 1969, with the intention that they might assist the police and step between the factions; or as folk singer Harvey Andrews put it in his 1972 song ‘Soldier’: