Never Had It So Good

4,146 words

Dominic Sandbrook
Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to The Beatles
Little, Brown Book Group, 2005

Harold MacMillan was Britain’s Prime Minister (PM) between 1957 and 1963, winning a Conservative Party leadership election after Sir Anthony Eden was forced to resign over the Suez Canal debacle, and thus becoming PM. Despite Britain’s humiliation by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, this was a time of relative prosperity and stability in Britain. Post-war food rationing had ended in 1954, and despite the huge cost of World War II, Britain had come out of the war with a strong economy compared with those of war-ravaged Europe. Also in 1954, hire-purchase controls were relaxed, meaning an eight per cent boom in high-street spending over the next year on such consumer durables as refrigerators and televisions, bought on the “never-never.” Speaking of this relative prosperity, MacMillan is often contextually misquoted as having said to the British people: “You never had it so good.” In fact, and in full, he said: “Let’s be quite frank, for some of our people, you never had it so good.” The economic good news was conditional and qualified, as well it might have been.

Dominic Sandbrook’s book, Never Had It So Good takes as its historical time-frame just seven years, from 1956 to 1963, or Suez to The Beatles, as the author sub-titles his book. It is the first volume of two, and is followed by White Heat, which covers the period from 1964 to 1969. There were so many aspects of British society developing so quickly at this time. From new economic theories to new pop music, from the fall of empire to the rise of television, from the sudden availability of money to a young generation emerging from the staid, austere 1950s to the abolition of the death penalty, the author’s short time-frames are fully justified.

Mr. Sandbrook locates “the most common interpretation of the sixties [as] a cultural renaissance that emphasized tolerance, freedom and, above all, love.” From our vantage point, that looks strewn with red flags. Look where tolerance has got the UK today, look at who has freedom and what they do with it, and then put on All You Need is Love if you must. The poisoned apples of the 1960s looked so delicious at the time.

Mr. Sandbrook makes a well-calculated false start to his account, prefacing his opening chapter on Suez with a short introduction locating another starting point for the “long Sixties” model the author uses: the Lady Chatterley trial. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was D. H. Lawrence’s famously raunchy novel of love between the classes, in which the groundskeeper at a rich estate shows the lady of the house round the gardens, as it were. The High Court’s decision in 1960 that the book was not obscene is often seen as the starting-pistol for the permissive “Swinging Sixties.” Veteran British journalist Peter Hitchens wrote in the 1990s that, while Lady Chatterley’s Lover may not have caused the cultural corrosion of the 1960s, its trial is an accurate marker for the beginning of it. Hitchens laments his vanished country since that landmark decision:

We lost our nerve and our pride. We thought there was something wrong with our country, and so we scanned the world for novelties to import and adopt.

If nothing else, the Lady Chatterley trial proved beyond all doubt that the English class system was alive and well in 1960. “Is this a book,” the prosecuting counsel asked the jury, “that you would allow your servants to read?” At the time of the trial, 600 butlers were still in full-time employment in England.

Paired with the Chatterley trial, Mr. Sandbrook locates another event which did not so much start the Sixties as end the British Empire: the Suez Crisis. In 1945, Britain had been largely responsible for resisting invasion from half the world. Now, its troops couldn’t even protect a canal from the Egyptian army. How the mighty had fallen. As Harry Hopkins phrased it after Suez, Britain was now “merely one more offshore island.”

It wasn’t the first time Suez had meant trouble for Eden. He was Foreign Secretary in 1951 when Egypt threatened to occupy the canal. Prime Minister Winston Churchill yelled (rather tellingly) at Eden to “Tell them if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them!” As PM in 1956, Eden spoke Persian and Arabic, and was a famed diplomatist. His meetings with Nasser went well superficially, and the Americans were not keen on any British invasion should Nasser occupy specified zones. When the British did go in, the incursion “dumbfounded” Eisenhower, and the Americans even vetoed a British presence in the peace-keeping force sent into Egypt after the crisis. Eden had to explain that the invasion was “not part of a harking back to the old colonial concepts,” but instead intended to fight Communism, an absurd falsehood even by today’s Parliamentary standards. Colonial aims might have been preferable, as the affair quickly became shambolic and forced Eden out of office to make way for a PM in some ways a breath of fresh air for Britain, and in others the holder of dangerous ideas on how to run her. Eden did himself no favors when, at the height of the crisis, claiming exhaustion and illness, he accepted an offer from Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels (who we will meet again later), to vacation at Fleming’s Jamaican home, Goldeneye.

MacMillan was seen to have cleared up to everyone’s satisfaction after Suez. When he was drawn by cartoonists as “SuperMac,” wearing his underwear outside his trousers and flying to the aid of a Great Britain supposedly getting greater, it was affectionate ribbing rather than aggressive satire. Even after his Chancellor resigned (apparently over his objection to MacMillan’s Keynesian economic policies), the new one gave the most generous budget in generations. The economy grew, production rose, and by 1959 “the high streets were awash with cars, televisions, washing machines and all the glittering panoply of consumerism.”

The economic boom was actually more of a revival:

But, for all its razzmatazz, the consumer boom of the late 1950s was not an unprecedented economic revolution. Rather, it was a trend that had been interrupted by the Second World War. If anything, for middle-class Britons it was the austerity of the war years that had been anomalous, not the affluence of the following decade.

Affluence would last until the 1970s, with its “Winter of Discontent,” power-cuts, Bolshevist trade unions, and the “shattering blow of the OPEC oil shock.” Despite the false “Yuppie” boom of the 1980s, not that many people felt affluent, and Britain’s economy at present looks on the verge of a core meltdown.

MacMillan called a General Election in 1959 and the Conservatives walked it, actually increasing their majority in the House. Whether it was true or not, people believed MacMillan when he said that (at least some of them) had never had it so good.

Electoral turnout was far higher than it is today, and Labour were so mortified at the scale of their defeat at the polls that they mooted a change of name to reverse their unpopularity. They almost called themselves “Reform,” which would have left Nigel Farage hunting for a new name today. But Labour had already done enough damage:

The politicians of the fifties and sixties lived in a world that had been irrevocably altered by the Labour government elected in 1945. By the time Clement Atlee [Labour PM] left office in 1951, the foundations of what historians call the post-war settlement were in place.

This “post-war settlement” was Britain’s version of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the welfare state was born, with all its commitments to full employment, a public/private sector economy, and the recognition of trade unions. It may have looked as though a socialist utopia was coming but, if it was, it was not going to be cheap. Macmillan wrote a book called The Middle Way, and its subject sounds like a precursor to Tony Blair’s ruinous “Third Way”: “[The book was] on the need for centralised planning and economic nationalism, and even calling for a new party combining ‘all that is best of left and right’.”

Although not a member of The Fabian Society himself, Macmillan certainly held some Fabian ideas, decidedly curious for a Conservative Prime Minister. The author claims that Maynard Keynes was not actually a socialist, just in favor of a degree of command-and-control economics. As always, this is a question of degree. When it comes to controlling the money supply and influencing supply and demand, how much is too much? And who would end up paying if mistakes were made? The working-class, that’s who, to whom the Conservatives of the 1950s were actually far closer to than Labour are now, when both main parties bray about “civic nationalism,” which means kissing any posterior as long as it is brown or black.

As for Labour at the start of the 1960s, an important distinction existed between them and their European counterparts in that they were not “primarily an instrument for the realization of socialist ideology,” but rather a creation of the trade unions. Union members in their millions were not required to pledge allegiance to some Communist Internationale, but rather to their fellows in their own particular industries, harking back to the British tradition of guilds. The unions’ power was growing and, although they would have to wait until the 1970s for the peak of their power – and their epic battle with Margaret Thatcher – their power was still formidable in the 1960s. Mr. Sandbrook describes Labour as a motley collection of interests, a mixed bag of “Fabians, planners, corporatists, Christian socialists, trade unionists, social democrats,” although the Tories referred to them simply as “the Socialists.”

Macmillan had actually come close to joining the Labour Party in the 1930s, an indication that the parties had much in common. They still do, of course, but that is because they are now a “uniparty” with two wings pretending to oppose one another. In the 1980s, Conservative strategist Michael Fraser described the post-war Labour and Conservative parties as “two trains, starting off from parallel platforms… and running for some time on broadly parallel lines but always heading for very different destinations.” The Liberal Party in the 1950s were regarded as “little more than a historical eccentricity,” but became serious contenders in many seats with the characteristic and determined leadership of Jo Grimond, a younger man at a time when British politics was still the province of men at least middle-aged and at most quite elderly.

But the post-war 1950s had set up the 1960s on stable foundations: “For many contemporary observers, what characterized the fifties was not political disagreement but an underlying mood of consensus and contentment.”

On the whole, the UK as the 1960s dawned was more or less as American philosopher George Santayana saw it (roughly agreeing with George Orwell a couple of decades before him), describing Britain as “the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humours.” The political landscape is the backdrop of Mr. Sandbrook’s book, but the chapters devoted to various aspects of British culture and society are the decoration. They are rich in both observation and the evocation of another, vanished country, one in which they certainly did things differently than today.

The chapter on immigration to Britain is titled The Newcomers, and is written in an understandably liberal tone. One doesn’t expect to pick up a book by a British historian and find a white nationalist screed. Try that in the business of academia and you won’t work again, and there are not many David Starkeys around. I was surprised to see the phrase “white flight” used as far back as 1958, as we are used to it now, and we all know the drill. If white people move into a predominantly black area, it’s gentrification, and therefore racist. If they move out of an area becoming predominantly black, it’s white flight, and therefore racist. Gallup poll results from September, 1958, however, show a point that few on the political left are prepared to concede, then or now:

Only one in ten people would move house if ‘coloured people’ came to live next door. On the other hand, when asked if they would move if ‘coloured people came to live in your district in great numbers’, 28 per cent said they would definitely move, another 28 per cent said they might do so, and 44 per cent said they would not. ‘White flight’ was not simply a matter of prejudice, since many householders believed that the threat posed by immigrants to local property prices left them with no choice but to move to a different area.” [Italics added]

This is such an important point, although the author does add that “it is hard to deny that racial prejudice played its part.” Well, yes. It is hard to deny. But the prejudice is against the effects of the black presence, not because black people smell funny or eat goat. Liberals will never understand that the need for whites not to live around blacks in 1960 was primarily from financial interests, not some thuggish racism. (Now, of course, it’s different, it’s more a matter of self-protection for whites). Race had not yet become the toxic hot topic we know today, but all the elements were in place:

Many migrants were also beginning to think of buying their own houses, and some set themselves up as landlords for their fellow newcomers. But even here, conditions were cramped, dirty and unsanitary, and overcharging was rife.

This is a trend that has only worsened today, as Indian and Pakistani consortia buy up whole sections of major British cities as though the country were a Monopoly board.

On the subject of housing, a relatively young Minister of the time had much to do with its reform, and an interest in slum removal his critics never mention. It will not be until the second half of the decade that Enoch Powell would make headlines (and be fired by Edward Heath) for his (in)famous speech, but he was a political big-hitter long before that. Here, the author is a good deal more respectful to Powell than most of his academic associates before or since, who reflexively label as a racist the politician who famously gave the mis-named “Rivers of blood” speech in Birmingham in 1968. The author notes Powell’s “exceptional intellectual intensity and the burning passion of his political convictions.” For readers interested in Powell, I reviewed Simon Heffer’s superb biography here. Powell’s sheer intelligence intimidated his political colleagues. Here was a man who took notes in the House of Commons in Ancient Greek, as well as translating Herodotus and many other classical authors.

The chapter entitled Rock and Roll Babies charts the huge impact British pop music had on the world, and betrays the author’s love for The Beatles. The music business promoter who said in 1962 that “Groups are out: four-piece groups with guitars particularly are finished” was presumably himself out of a job as the decade progressed, because the “British invasion” began with the Fab Four and ended with Altamont. The four-piece band has only really died this century, apart from the old guard wheeling themselves out for one more tour. For lovers of rock apocrypha, the chapter is a delight. When The Beatles began to have chart hits, and were working on new material, although John Lennon’s father liked the sound of a new number called She Loves You, he suggested they not sing it in “that American style everyone is using,” but instead sing, “She loves you, yes, yes, yes,” to predictable mirth from Lennon and McCartney.

Rock and roll was initially feared by the music establishment. The music paper Melody Maker (long gone now, but a once-respected magazine I sub-edited for a few times in the 1990s) was a “jazz and swing” publication at the end of the 1950s, and made its editorial views clear:

Viewed as a social phenomenon, the current craze for Rock and Roll material is one of the most terrifying things to have happened to popular music… The Rock and Roll technique, instrumentally and vocally, is the antithesis of all that jazz has been striving for over the years – in other words, good taste and musical integrity.

As aficionados of the black music of the time, one wonders what Melody Maker’s staff writers would have made of rap. Much the same as the rest of, I imagine, that the letter “C” at the start of the word is silent.

But, although The Beatles and other bands were causing a sensation, and pop music was making all the headlines, Mr. Sandbrook puts things in perspective:

People rarely remember that the soundtracks of The Sound of Music and South Pacific comfortably outsold any of The Beatles albums of the decade; or that more people attended church than went to football matches.

Great Britain was still a staid, conservative set of countries, and most of its peoples inhabited a world of small concerns rather than the bright lights of pop fame:

On an average morning… in 1963, up to a million people might rush out to buy the latest number-one record. But, at the same time, a staggering nineteen million looked forward to another day pottering about in the garden.

“Hobbies and diversions thrived,” and the country seemed to be moving forward in its typical, rather bumbling way. No wonder so many British conservatives (the genuine ones, not those who have hijacked the party of that name today) look back to the late 50s and early 60s with wistful nostalgia. This was the last of Little England, and the European disaster was still a long way off, largely because Europe was seen as a “bombed out, defeated rabble.” Although Edward Heath would sign the UK into the Common Market in 1973, the enthusiasm of most Britons for European union did not match that of the French or Germans. And this animus against Europe was not new:

When Chelsea, the English league champions, were invited to participate in the inaugural European Cup in 1955, they were barred from doing so by the domestic football authorities.”¡

Now, the European Champions League is boosted by the likes of the BBC in a way that England’s famous FA Cup no longer is.

The chapter on the literature of the period focuses on two great friends, the novelist Kingsley Amis and the poet Philip Larkin, with a brief detour by way of a young maverick, Colin Wilson. (The book features nothing on the philosophy of the day, which is a pity). Both Amis and Larkin reacted against the prevailing modernism in literature, and disliked the faddish, existentialist philosophy Wilson espoused:

“[Their] brand of conservative pragmatism caught the mood of the period much better than Wilson’s pseudo-Continental abstractions.”

After the Lady Chatterley trial, Britain had a good, conservative-tending decade when it came to literature, but British fiction was “so wide-ranging and diverse no single trend completely dominated.” This was the time of the “Angry Young Men,” and the satire boom centered around Oxford intellectuals such as Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller. Kenneth Tynan’s ground-breaking play, Look Back in Anger, began a process whereby drama was partially wrested from the hands of the upper-middle class, and showed the same scenes of working-class life novelists would portray in such novels as Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. These novels very much hold up today, and had strong social messages which seem entirely absent in our days of sensitivity readers and racial quotas for novels. But it was not Angry Young Men or existentialist poseurs who were the publishing sensation of the 1960s.

Ian Fleming was the decade’s most famous British author, with President Kennedy (rather oddly) numbering From Russia with Love among his favorite books. Fleming had chosen for 007 “the dullest name he could find,” and wrote as a hobbyist before his worldwide fame, which would lead to one of the world’s most famous film franchises. Bond’s principal interests were “gastronomy, cards and sex,” and Fleming was quite clear on his target audience, saying of his books that they were “written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes or beds.”

Sport was as important as ever. Motorcycle speedway (which my father used to take me to when I was young in the 1970s) was the second most popular sport in the land after football. Perhaps the fascination with speed explains why there were no speed limits on country roads in Britain at the time. The British read more newspapers and periodicals than anyone bar the Swedes, four in five homes had a garden, one in five households had a dog, one in four a bird, and one in three a cat. If it all seems rather idyllic, that’s because in comparison with today’s social menagerie, it was. And, of course, the monarchy was still respectable and much loved. How different to the moral zoo the House of Windsor has become.

Queen Elizabeth II, given the eventual length of her 70-year reign, was still relatively new to the throne, and much had been hoped for in the “new Elizabethan age.” The Observer, in its Coronation supplement in 1952, had claimed that Britain “is today a more united and stabler society than it has been since the Industrial Revolution,” and the stability of the monarchy was an important pillar. Not everyone loved their Queen, however. Lord Altrincham, a peer of the realm and critical of Her Majesty, made enemies in unexpected places after he described his monarch as “a priggish school-girl, captain of the hockey team.” One of the letters of complaint he received was from a group of young men, probably Teddy Boys, a violent youth cult of the time:

Altrincham, if we ever see you in the street, we’ll do you in. We ain’t no law-abiding boys and we don’t hold with this police stuff but you go too flamin’ far when you critisise [sic] our Queen who does more good than you if you lived to be 500. She’s a grand lady and you bloody well know it.

Yours,
Eight (loyal to the Queen).

An early version of a social media storm, perhaps.

Television became a genuine cultural influencer during the decade, and its escapist drama was actually enjoyable rather than the sheer propaganda it is now. Dr. Who became so popular so quickly that “four in every five letters to the BBC’s Points of View programme were about the Daleks.” When you look at both the BBC and Dr. Who today, it is little wonder some of us would like a TARDIS to whisk us way back when. The BBC is a good example of the sea-change in Britain over 60 years. In the early 1960s, Mr. Sandbrook writes, “people trusted the BBC. It strove to be the mirror of the nation, and the nation accepted it.” Compare this with today, where the most powerful man in the world is being forced to sue the corporation for an outrageous falsehood concerning selective editing of a speech.

Mr. Sandbrook’s book is really about England. There is little mention of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, but when most people say “Britain,” they generally mean England anyway. By serendipity, as I was polishing off this piece, I saw a Breitbart headline: Britons believe country was happier and safer 50 years ago. My part of it certainly was in 1975, in the suburbs of London. It didn’t feel happy or safe the last time I was there five years ago. And I suspect Mr. Sandbrook’s second volume (which I look forward to reading) may begin to show, with the rise of the Labour Party and the unions, where the socio-economic seeds were sown that grew into our current briar-patch.

At the very end of Never Had It So Good is an excerpt from a speech by Labour Leader Harold Wilson, later to become Prime Minister. Mr. Sandbrook’s title for volume 2, White Heat, is taken from another of Wilson’s speeches, glorifying – almost worshipping – the “white heat of technology.” This speech also seems to hail the rise of the technocracy I wrote about here last week: “In the Cabinet room and in the boardroom alike, those charged with the control of our affairs must be ready to think and to speak in the language of our scientific age.”

With this fetishization of technology as his inspiration, Wilson compares the new era to the old in glowing terms. In what follows, however, a genuine conservative would suspect that the out-dated era Wilson consigns to history would have been less likely to lead Britain to its current plight. Mr. Sandbrook summarizes Wilson as follows:

The people of Britain, [Wilson] declared, were ‘living in the jet-age’, but they were still being ‘governed by an Edwardian establishment mentality’. It was time to change all that, to banish ‘the chill frost of Tory leadership’.

But frost preserves, whereas heat, particularly white heat, tends to destroy.