INTRODUCTION: Out of the darkness
It seems impossible to be neutral about the Sixties. The quotations above draw the battle lines: either it was a time of fruitful liberation, promising a flowering of love, equality, creativity and untrammelled self-expression, or it was a wretchedly irresponsible period, its legacy a breakdown of respect and decency, its damaging moral and social consequences still in evidence half a century later.
Although we’ll surely agree that both positions are extreme, it’s only fair to the reader to come clean at the outset: this book is largely a celebration of those gloriously giddy years. The excuse, should one be needed, is my age. I was born in late 1942, and so had just turned 17 when the Sixties arrived. How could a teenager emerging from postwar British drabness fail to be stimulated by the heady promise – political, cultural, economic – of what was clearly a radiant new dawn?
The weary Fifties
The story has to begin in the Fifties, both in order to make sense of the sheer exuberance of what was to follow and to acknowledge that the seeds of the coming revolution had already begun to sprout.
Our parents’ generation (pathetically conformist, as we thought) had been battered first by the Depression and then by the Second World War. Ordinary people who had survived that conflict, whether fighting abroad or coping with enemy bombardment at home, had shown the spirit to choose a postwar government dedicated to a more egalitarian way of life – the National Health Service and all that. But those early fires had already dimmed by the beginning of the following decade when the old war leader Winston Churchill was voted back into 10 Downing Street.
Most families had little spare cash, meat rationing wasn’t lifted in the UK until 1954, and those who had a decent job saw no reason to rock the boat by agitating for more pay. Enough was enough.
Many things were in short supply during the early 1950s:
• Fridges: Only about 15 per cent of homes had one.
• Telephones: Even fewer – and many shared a line with a neighbour.
• Washing machines: Most women (that’s the way it was!) had to do it by hand.
• Televisions: Ownership was growing, but there was only one channel.
• Central heating: Not since the Romans left.
As for the physical landscape, that matched the general mood. In London and other cities hammered by the Luftwaffe there were large, undeveloped bombsites sprouting weeds.
After all, the country was still paying off its war debt to the Americans (and would continue to do so until as late as 2006).
More than a million unimaginatively designed council houses were thrown up to combat postwar homelessness, many of them in a rash of ‘new towns’ throughout the country. There were also some 150,000 ‘prefabs’ – I was brought up in one myself – designed to last for ten years, but often surviving for much longer.
You never had it so good!
By the mid-1950s an economic recovery was on the way, and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously told a gathering of his Conservative supporters in July 1957 that ‘Most of our people have never had it so good.’
He told his audience: ‘Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime – nor indeed in the history of this country.’
He was right, but Britain wasn’t yet a consumer society, and many felt that his boast was in pretty poor taste.
The American dream
This general dreariness was to give way, as the decade lengthened, to an economic boom – and anyone anxious to predict what this would mean for British society in the years ahead only had to look across the Atlantic to the already prosperous USA.
During the war gum-chewing GIs had been described as ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here’. The Americans were back home now, but the exportable elements of their brash and confident culture cast a spell on many an aspirational inhabitant of this monochrome, tired little island, and especially on the young.
American films were much more lavish than anything made in the UK, and stars such as Marlon Brando and James Dean made the rebellious misfit an attractive role model in a society deadened by Cold War conformity.
Fings weren’t wot they used t’be!
At the very end of the 1950s Lionel Bart wrote the music and Cockney lyrics for Frank Norman’s West End success Fings Ain’t Wot They Used t’Be, directed by Joan Littlewood. The words of the title number list several contemporary social changes – and point the way forward to the Sixties…
They changed our local Palais
Into a bowling alley.
The British had always had their skittles, but the bowling alley was a craze straight from America.
There used to be trams,
Not very quick,
Gotcha from place to place,
But now there’s just jams
’Alf a mile fick.
Car ownership had begun to spread, using roads ill prepared for the volume of traffic. The new towns had been designed with narrow streets, allowing just enough room for two cars to pass, since nobody had envisaged working-class families ever being able to afford their own transport.
They stuck parking meters
Outside our door to greet us.
Bart was up to the minute, because the very first of them had been installed (in Mayfair, London) on 10 July 1958.
Once our beer was frothy,
But now it’s frothy coffee.
Tea had always been the national drink, but coffee bars were springing up the length and breadth of the land.
It used to be fun,
Dad an’ old Mum
Paddling down Southend.
The English seaside holiday wasn’t yet a last resort, but money in the pocket now allowed travel to hitherto unknown parts, and ‘Paris is where we spend our outin’s.’
Grandma tries to shock us all,
Doing knees-up rock and roll.
The ‘big bands’ were still in business, playing for a clientèle which enjoyed dancing the waltz and quickstep, but the raucous new music had already thoroughly seduced the young.
They’re buying guitars, plinketty plonk,
Backing theirselves wiv free [3] chords only.
A skiffle group had a washboard and a tea-chest bass and a rock group had its drums, but the guitar was the ubiquitous instrument of the new music, however badly played.
Rock and roll
Where on earth, our parents asked, was the melody in the music we tuned in to on Radio Luxembourg every evening? There were melodies, of course, but what older folk recoiled from was its combination of aggressive rhythms and sexual explicitness.
Although there was still a place for crooners such as Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams and Perry Como, for the likes of Gracie Fields and the Beverley Sisters, and even for comedy numbers such as ‘Seven Little Girls Sitting in the Back Seat, Kissing and a-Hugging with Fred’, it was the rockers who were the coming force.
Elvis Presley recorded ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ in 1955 and had a string of hits before the end of the decade. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino and Buddy Holly were already household names (among the young), while Jerry Lee Lewis added scandal to the mix when he arrived in Britain newly married to his 13-year-old cousin. He had to fly back after only three concerts, tail between his legs.
The BBC bravely (and briefly) moved with the times by creating The Six-Five Special, a Saturday-evening programme devoted to popular music. The moody rock-and-rollers, often picked out dramatically from pitch darkness by a spotlight, included home-grown talent such as Marty Wilde, Vince Eager and Billy Fury – given their singing names by the rock impresario Larry Parnes.
The music’s anarchic nature seemed to be exemplified by outbreaks of violence when The Blackboard Jungle, featuring Bill Hayley and the Comets’ ‘Rock Around the Clock’, was screened in British cinemas in 1956.
The Beat Generation
American writers had a strong impact here, too. J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye was the archetypal novel of adolescent defiance, angst and bloody-minded independence, but it was the group dismissively known as the ‘beatniks’ who perhaps made the greatest impression on pre-Sixties British youngsters of a literary and political bent.
A number of the Beat poets – among them Allen Ginsberg (author of ‘Howl’, 1955) and Gregory Corso – would later take part in a memorable event in Sixties London. Ginsberg listed what he thought the movement was about:
• Spiritual and sexual liberation.
• Liberation of the word from censorship.
• Decriminalisation of marijuana and other drugs.
• The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll as a high art form.
• The spread of ecological consciousness.
• Opposition to the military–industrial machine civilisation.
• Respect for land and indigenous peoples and creatures.
Notable among the Beat novelists were William S. Burroughs, whose scabrous Naked Lunch was published in 1959, and Jack Kerouac, whose On the Road (1957) inspired a generation of would-be footloose idealists with its account of road trips taken across the States by Sal Paradise and his charismatic, pot-smoking buddy Dean Moriarty.
‘I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.’
Bob Dylan
The British had no writer like Kerouac, but there was some faint equivalence between the Beats’ individualistic political stance and the anti-Establishment attitudes of the working-class heroes who appeared in novels by such as Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, David Storey and Stan Barstow. Something was stirring down below, and the times would soon be a-changin’.
Money talks
Barely a third of UK homes had television when the first commercial channel was introduced on 22 September 1955. (The very first ad was for Gibbs S.R. toothpaste.) The BBC responded by having a major character in its radio serial The Archers die in a fire that same evening, pulling a record audience of 20 million.
Within a few years ITV would have as large an audience as the BBC, but in those innocent times some parents refused to let their children tune in to it, as they felt that advertising was a distasteful business.
Angry young men
John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1956. Its working-class antihero, Jimmy Porter, spends much of the play railing against middle-class mediocrity.
Critics used to the more polite works of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan were generally dismissive of it, referring to Osborne and a group of other young English writers as ‘angry young men’.
The label fitted few of them – but this upsetting of the Establishment applecart can be seen as a forerunner of the furore that was to erupt over Sixties satire (see Chapter 2).
Teddy boys
In 1956 Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had a hit with their song ‘I’m not a juvenile delinquent.’ It was a vacuous number but a timely one, because there were growing fears on both sides of the Atlantic that the disrespectful young were getting out of hand.
British tastes tended to follow the American lead at some distance, but the so-called Teddy Boys represented the first flowering of a distinctive youth culture. They dressed in a style vaguely derived from dandies during the 1901–1910 reign of Edward VII. The worst of them – mercifully a minority – brandished coshes, knuckle-dusters and flick-knives and earned sensational media coverage for staging gang fights. It was the ‘Teds’ who broke up cinemas at showings of The Blackboard Jungle, and the sight of a group of them shouldering their way towards him would encourage any young lad in their path to step out of the way pretty smartly.
Their uniform consisted of long drape jackets with velvet collars, ‘Slim Jim’ or bootlace ties, fancy waistcoats, drainpipe trousers and crepe-soled suede shoes known as ‘brothel creepers’. They wore their hair long and greasy, often with a quiff at the front and the sides swept back (with a heavy steel comb) to form a ‘duck’s arse’, or DA, at the rear.
They often bought this expensive gear on the ‘never-never’ – that is, paid for it by instalments – but it was a sign of increasing affluence among the young that they could afford it at all.
Fidel leads the way
Fidel Castro’s overthrow of the Cuban dictator General Batista in January 1959 was a Fifties event which, with hindsight, feels like a Sixties one, even to the lack of consensus as to whether it was a blessing or a curse. It’s no wonder that Castro’s second-in-command, Che Guevara, became a Sixties icon.
The sight of Castro’s small band of victorious guerrillas riding atop their tanks into Havana after defeating a much larger government army in the mountains vibrated a romantic nerve for left-leaning idealists – of which there were a great many at the time.
Some Fifties icons
Music: Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Elvis Presley
Film: James Dean, Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot
Fashion: Christian Dior, Pierre Balmain
Literature: Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Iris Murdoch, John Osborne
Sport: Stanley Matthews, Len Hutton, Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson
Into a new age
Such was the background to the Swinging Sixties, a decade in which newly prosperous teenagers would emerge from their chrysalises like gaudy butterflies; in which taboos of race and gender would be tested to breaking point; in which artistic life would flourish in myriad unpredictable ways; in which satirists would find their voices and political leaders bow to demands for radical change.
While this book concentrates on events in Britain, it also acknowledges the remarkable worldwide nature of these phenomena. Can they be convincingly ‘explained’? Sociologists have done their best, but for those of us who were there at the time it really did feel as if, to echo the Thunderclap Newman number, there was ‘something in the air’.