CHAPTER ONE: When sexual intercourse began

‘The Sixties, of course, was the worst time to try and bring up a child. They were exposed to all these crazy things going on.’

US First Lady Nancy Reagan

 

It happened, Philip Larkin’s poem claims with tongue-in-cheek precision, ‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban [November 1960] / And the Beatles’ first LP [March 1963]’.

Well, if the act itself had a rather longer history than that, it’s certainly reasonable to argue that the obscenity trial of Penguin Books for publishing D. H. Lawrence’s plain-speaking novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover marked a significant step forwards (or backwards, depending upon your point of view) in the freedom to portray sexual matters frankly in a book of literary merit.

As a fitting curtain-raiser for the Sixties, the trial proved to be a wonderfully comic clash between the voices of old authority and the younger, ‘permissive’ generation eager to topple it. It followed the Obscene Publications Act of the previous year, piloted through Parliament by the young backbench MP (and later Labour home secretary) Roy Jenkins in an attempt to draw a line between illegal pornography and serious art and literature.

 

Twelve good men and true

Even as recently as the 1960s, juries weren’t representative of the population as a whole: you could serve on one only if you were a property owner or tenant, and this disqualified a large swathe of women and young people.

Perhaps this was why Mervyn Griffith-Jones thought it sensible to talk to the jury about wives and servants – although after the Second World War very few people could imagine employing anyone to help in the home.

Under the Criminal Justice Act of 1972 qualifications for jury service were widened, becoming based on the right to vote.

 

Not in front of the servants

The prosecution’s task was to prove that Lawrence’s book, its explicit sex scenes accompanied by four-letter-word dialogue, was a filthy piece of work. Mervyn Griffith-Jones, the senior Treasury counsel representing the Crown, got off to a widely ridiculed start by suggesting questions which members of the jury should ask themselves.

‘Would you’, he asked, ‘approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book?. . . Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’

Griffith-Jones had been one of the British prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials, but he was horribly ill suited to this case. The Eton-educated barrister’s son clearly found it hard to envisage a world without servants or submissive women – and he now had to overcome the stream of 35 eminent writers, critics and even bishops who stepped forward to praise the novel’s qualities.

Few of them can have considered the book to be one of Lawrence’s best, but there was a principle at stake, and distinguished writers E. M. Forster and Rebecca West, sociologist Richard Hoggart and future Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis were among those who trooped into the witness box to defend its literary quality and its moral purpose.

The prize exhibit has to be the Bishop of Woolwich’s written deposition to the court that ‘Lawrence did not share the Christian valuation of sex, but he was always straining to portray it as something sacred, in a real sense as an act of Holy Communion.’

Although Penguin’s founder, Allen Lane, had designed his paperbacks to be ‘the same price as a packet of cigarettes’, the response to the not-guilty verdict caught him by surprise. The initial run sold out overnight, and the novel clocked up sales of three million within just three months.

 

Not so lucky

Although the Chatterley trial had struck a blow for serious works of art, the law continued to deal severely with publications which lacked that protection. Indeed, another novel with a history of legal suppression (John Cleland’s bawdy Fanny Hill of 1749) landed a London bookseller in the dock in 1964 – the publisher paid his costs. The defence argued that the book was a joyful celebration of normal, non-perverted sex, but the prosecution concentrated on a flagellation scene, and that was enough to swing the case. This victory, however, was illusory. The temper of the times had changed, and in 1970 an unexpurgated version would appear with no recriminations whatsoever.

Life was made especially difficult for the rash of little magazines which, in the boisterous spirit of the times, set out to expose, shock and antagonise authority. The stern blue eyes of Detective Inspector Frederick Luff, head of Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publications Squad and notorious for his ‘celebrity raids’, were fixed upon every issue.

 

Liberal laws of the Sixties

• Betting and Gaming Act 1960

It paved the way for betting shops and for slot machines in pubs. It also legalised gambling for small sums for games of skill. As the Daily Telegraph reported at the time, ‘Weekly bridge clubs, meeting in the local hotel, will no longer have to settle up in the bus shelter.’

 

• Race Relations Act 1965

This was the first legislation in the UK to address the ‘colour bar’, making it illegal to discriminate on the grounds ‘of colour, race or ethnic or national origins’ in public places. It prompted the creation of the Race Relations Board the following year. The legislation was refined in a new act three years later, which made it illegal to refuse housing, employment or public services to people because of their ethnic background.

 

• Murder (Death Penalty Abolition) Act 1965

This was introduced to Parliament as a private member’s bill, with a so-called sunset clause stating that it would be repealed in five years unless renewed by Parliament. The Act became permanent in 1969.

 

• Abortion Act 1967

The new law legalised abortions by registered practitioners in England, Scotland and Wales (but not Northern Ireland), and regulated their provision through the National Health Service. No longer would women have to risk death at the hands of untrained back-street abortionists. Introduced by David Steel as a private member’s bill, the new act made abortion legal up to 28 weeks’ gestation. The law was amended in 1990, reducing the time to 24 weeks except when the woman’s life was in danger, she was under grave risk of physical or mental injury, or there was evidence of extreme foetal abnormality.

 

• Sexual Offences Act 1967

This law decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men, both of whom had reached the age of 21. It applied only to England and Wales, and didn’t cover the Merchant Navy or the armed forces.

 

• Theatres Act 1968

Critic Kenneth Tynan and playwright John Osborne were key figures in the framing of this legislation, which removed censorship by the Lord Chamberlain’s office – a state of affairs that had existed since 1737.

 

• Divorce Reform Act 1969

The Act restated the three existing grounds for divorce defined as ‘faults’ (adultery, cruelty and desertion) and added two ‘no- fault separation grounds’ based on a couple having lived apart for a specified number of years.

 

Private Eye

That great survivor amongst the satirical magazines, Private Eye, first saw the light of day in October 1961. It developed from a school magazine, and those who dismissed it evidently felt that it had never escaped that pedigree. Equally, one imagines, its earliest luminaries, Christopher Booker, Willie Rushton and Richard Ingrams, would have been happy to acknowledge its mixture of waywardness and sheer silliness, mixed as it was with a steadily increasing satirical bite.

The Eye has been taken to court on countless occasions and has narrowly avoided bankruptcy. It was, perhaps, a badge of honour that the high street newsagents W. H. Smith refused to stock the magazine throughout the Sixties and beyond. (The firm was inevitably tagged ‘W. H. Smut’ by the magazine, because of the top-shelf publications it did sell.) A badge of dishonour, in retrospect, was its decidedly unprogressive insistence on referring to the gay movement as ‘poove power’.

The Eye’s strength, then as now, was that it attracted first-class journalists on mainstream papers who were eager to write stories which, true as they might be, couldn’t get past the blue pencils of their own sub-editors.

 

Dirty work

It didn’t become clear until years later that the Obscene Publications Squad was itself mired in corruption throughout the time that it was hounding publishers during the Sixties.

In 1976 the squad was completely reformed after a series of trials revealed that it had been running a massive bribery racket since its inception in 1960. As much as £1,000 a month had been handed over by traders in hardcore pornography in return for leniency by the police.

Justice Mars-Jones found that much of the pornography seized by the squad had been shamelessly ‘sold back into the trade’.

 

IT

While Private Eye was awash with former public schoolboys, the International Times (changed to IT after The Times threatened a lawsuit) was resolutely underground.

It was launched in October 1966 at a Roundhouse event in London which featured ‘steel bands, strips, trips, happenings, movies’. Daevid Allen, guitarist of the acid band Soft Machine, which played there alongside Pink Floyd, claimed that it was ‘one of the two most revolutionary events in the history of English alternative music and thinking,’ and marked ‘the first recognition of a rapidly spreading socio-cultural revolution that had its parallel in the States’. (That’s how they spoke then.)

Its content (sex, drugs, rock and roll) had a genuine international reach. Of course this content antagonised Det. Insp. Luff, and IT was often ‘visited’ – prompting a reprisal raid on New Scotland Yard by another underground magazine, Black Dwarf, which not only got inside, but revealed details of the Met’s security arrangements.

 

Oz

Richard Neville founded this magazine in Australia in 1963. It took a strong line against police corruption, and the following year Neville and two of his colleagues were jailed for six months with hard labour for obscenity. The convictions were overturned on appeal, chiefly because the judge was found to have misdirected the jury.

In 1967 Neville launched Oz in London. The edition which saw him and his co-editors Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis charged with ‘conspiracy to corrupt public morals’ falls just outside our period. The ‘Schoolkids’ Oz’ of May 1970 was designed by young volunteers, and the chief prosecutor said that it dealt with ‘homosexuality, lesbianism, sadism, perverted sexual practices and drug taking’. Once again a prison sentence was handed down, and once again an appeal succeeded because of misdirection by the judge, but not before prison officers had shaved the three men’s long hair – that classic Sixties symbol of freedom and non-conformity. This act of vengeance provoked a public outcry.

 

Beyond the Fringe

The four young men who wrote and performed the stage revue Beyond the Fringe (first seen in 1960) were the forerunners of later satirists without having a sharp political edge themselves.

Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore were former Oxbridge students with an offbeat sense of humour and a delight in pricking the pomposity of the older generation.

They could certainly offend. Some took their piece ‘The Aftermyth of War’ as an attack on brave soldiers, though it was intended as a send-up of empty patriotic attitudes.

Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who had the temerity to attend one of their performances, was offended by Cook’s parody of his faux upper-class mannerisms. Cook, knowing that he was in the audience, simply twisted the knife a little further.

Their iconoclasm inspired the work of two later groups of entertainers: the wounding satire of That Was The Week That Was (1962–1963) and the zaniness of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–1974).

 

Too near the knuckle

One of the features in the offending issue of Oz was a highly sexualised treatment of the children’s cartoon character Rupert Bear. Sex had always been a hang-up with the British, and during the Sixties those who were particularly uneasy about it found it just about everywhere they looked.

Even the Tory government seemed to be colluding with the permissive society, for goodness’ sake! Enoch Powell would later be known for his illiberal views on immigration, but in December 1961, as Minister of Health, it was he who sanctioned the prescription of contraceptive pills at a subsidised price on the National Health Service. True, this was for married women only, but everyone knew what would happen next. Those pills were out of the bottle.

‘The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact.’

Feminist writer Julie Burchill

 

Enter Mary Whitehouse

The forces of reaction to this increasingly orthodox laxity were galvanised by a doughty woman who refused to be cowed by the ridicule she inevitably attracted. Mary Whitehouse was no prude, but an earnest Christian of conservative bent who taught art and sex education and was shocked by the standards of her young charges. She aimed her weapons at the BBC in particular, founding the Clean Up TV pressure group in 1964 and a year later replacing it with the more aggressive National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association. She accused the Corporation’s director general, Sir Hugh Greene, of being ‘more than anyone else’ responsible for the country’s moral decline, his organisation spreading ‘the propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt . . . promiscuity, infidelity and drinking’.

Greene, who spoke darkly of censorship and refused to bow to her demands, privately commissioned a portrait of her from the expressionist artist James Lawrence Isherwood; it shows her with five breasts. Mrs Whitehouse continued to campaign for many years. During the Sixties she seemed to be fighting a losing battle, but we can now see that she landed a number of effective blows along the way.

 

The ineffable Tynan

The brilliant and flamboyant critic Kenneth Tynan took exhibitionism to the extreme during a live TV debate in November 1965. Discussing sexual explicitness on stage, he said he doubted that many people would find the F-word totally out of bounds – using the word itself for the very first time on television.

The uproar was unsurprising, although Mary Whitehouse excelled herself by writing to the Queen about it. She suggested to Her Majesty that he should have ‘his bottom spanked’, presumably unaware that flagellation happened to be one of Tynan’s vices.

 

Drugs busts

If sex was top of the shock list for soap-box moralists, drugs ran it a pretty close second. Cannabis had been the Beat Poets’ choice of mood changer and perception enhancer, and in Sixties Britain its use had become commonplace in the so-called counterculture.

Here are a few of its pet names:

• Marijuana

• Mary Jane

• Pot

• Hash

• Weed

• Dope

‘If you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there.’

Variously attributed

 

Broken butterflies

Needless to say, the police often came visiting, the most notorious episode being a raid on the Sussex home of the Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards one night in 1967. Hauled before the courts, Richards was sentenced to a year in jail for allowing cannabis to be smoked in his house, while lead singer Mick Jagger was sent down for three months for possessing four amphetamine tablets, or ‘pep pills’.

For good measure, detectives raided the home of another band member, Brian Jones, while the trial was under way, and he was imprisoned for drugs possession too.

The severity of these sentences appalled even that organ of respectability The Times. Its editor, William Rees-Mogg, slightly misquoting the 18th-century poet Alexander Pope, asked: ‘Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?’ and suggested that the musicians had been treated much more severely than had they been ordinary members of the public.

All three Stones would have their prison sentences quashed, but not before 64 public figures had put their signatures to an advertisement in The Times which stated that ‘The law against marijuana is immoral in principle and unworkable in practice.’

Paul McCartney paid for the ad, but although the Beatles and their manager Brian Epstein signed up to it, the list was broadly based and predominantly non-hippie, including such substantial names as the writer Graham Greene, the broadcaster David Dimbleby, the psychiatrists David Stafford-Clark and Anthony Storr, the publisher Tom Maschler and the DNA scientist Dr Francis Crick

 

‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’

Though the battle to legalise pot was lost, the campaign probably contributed to a more tolerant attitude towards its use in the years ahead. It’s doubtful, though, that many of its respectable champions would have similarly rallied round that other ‘signature’ drug of the Sixties, LSD.

In a 2004 interview, Paul McCartney admitted that a number of the Beatles’ songs made ‘subtle hints’ about drugs. ‘A song like “Got to Get You Into My Life”, that’s directly about pot,’ he said, ‘although everyone missed it at the time. “Day Tripper”, that’s one about acid. “Lucy in the Sky”, that’s pretty obvious.’

 

‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’

This was the mantra of Dr Timothy Leary, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University who began experimenting with LSD in 1960 after previously enjoying the experience of eating hallucinogenic mushrooms during a trip to Mexico.

The drug wasn’t yet illegal, but, to the consternation of the university, Leary involved students in his researches, and in an interview with Playboy magazine he claimed that it was a potent aphrodisiac. He lost his job. In 1964, with another fired professor, Richard Alpert, he published The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

From this time Leary’s interest in LSD became more recreational than scientific. A judge gave him 30 years in jail for possessing half a cannabis reefer (the Supreme Court unsurprisingly overturned the sentence), while President Nixon described him as ‘the most dangerous man in America’.

‘We saw ourselves’, Leary said later, ‘as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the Dark Ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.’

 

Marijuana increased the heart rate, lowered the blood pressure and (being less strong than the stuff sold on the streets today) reduced many of its users to slumbrous philosophising. LSD was a different animal altogether, promising its takers a colourful roller-coaster of images and emotions.

British psychiatrist Humphry Fortescue Osmond (1917–2004) coined the word psychedelic to cover LSD and other hallucinogens he experimented with. He was a friend of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), whose Doors of Perception chronicled his own experience of taking mescalin. Huxley sent Osmond a celebratory couplet:

To make this mundane world sublime,

Take half a gram of phanerothyme.

 

Osmond responded in similar vein:

To fathom Hell or soar angelic

Just take a pinch of psychedelic.

 

Huxley felt these powerful drugs should be entrusted to intellectuals only, but now psychedelic colours were everywhere – even in the vibrant patterns followed by dogged knitters of comfy home-made sweaters.

 

Sixties mystics

Sublimity, Hell and angels bring us to another Sixties phenomenon: the period’s earnest quest for some kind of spiritual fulfilment beyond the rigid confines of what many saw as old-style, outworn Western religion. (John Lennon told a reporter in 1966 that the Beatles were now more popular than Jesus – a remark that failed to cause a stir in the UK but led to public burnings of the group’s records in the United States and elsewhere.)

Aldous Huxley thought that acid’s gifts ranged from pure aesthetic pleasure to ‘sacramental vision’, and in South California (just the place for this kind of thing) he sat at the feet of Swami Prabhavananda of the Vedanta Society.

The Beatles’ yearnings were sublimated by another Indian mystic, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who developed the technique known as transcendental meditation and (to some mirth outside his own circle) would later advocate that his disciples should practise levitation in the pursuit of world peace.

 

Some secular gurus

• Marshall McLuhan

His phrase ‘The medium is the message’ was one of the buzzwords of the Sixties – and gave rise to the punning title of his best-selling 1967 book, The Medium Is the Massage. McLuhan, a Canadian critic and communication theorist, taught that the technology we use (the medium) becomes part of our thinking processes. He coined the expression ‘the global village’ and predicted the World Wide Web decades before it was invented.

 

• R. D. Laing

The Scottish psychiatrist specialised in mental illnesses, and (though he disliked the label) was regarded as a major figure in the anti-psychiatry movement. He rejected the notion that psychosis was essentially a biological phenomenon, and sought to place a patient’s difficulties within his or her social, intellectual and cultural background. Schizophrenia, he argued, was a theory rather than a fact. Madness was often an expression of social distress, and should be valued as a cathartic and transformative experience.

 

• Herbert Marcuse

A German Jewish philosopher and political theorist who became a US citizen in 1940, Marcuse was the darling of the Sixties student movement because of his willingness to speak at their protests. He was a lifelong Marxist who (although he hated the term) became known as ‘the father of the New Left’. His 1969 Essay on Liberation inspired fellow radicals, although Counterrevolution and Revolt, which followed it, warned that Sixties ideals were under threat from the right.

 

• Jacques Lacan

The French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist influenced a raft of Sixties intellectuals, in particular the post-structuralist philosophers who were rather more honoured than read – outside the universities at least. He had an impact on critical, literary, film and feminist theory, as well as clinical psychoanalysis. Lacan was an unashamed Freudian, his work featuring the unconscious, the ego and the castration complex. Regarded as belonging to the far left, he expressed his sympathy with Sixties student protests in France.

 

Psychedelic Review

This magazine, founded in 1963, was a scholarly rather than an underground publication, but some of its early essay titles reflect the spirit of the times:

• Can this drug enlarge man’s mind?

• Herman Hesse: poet of the interior journey

• The god in the flowerpot

• Shouted from the housetops: A peyote awakening

• Hallucinations as the world of spirits.

 

The Maharishi was opposed to drugs, but many a seeker after truth and self-knowledge swore by them. In the United States (indeed, in California again), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey staged parties which he called ‘acid tests’, involving wild music, fluorescent paint, strobe lighting and other psychedelic effects heightened by the ingestion of LSD. Not everyone survived unscathed.

In 1964 Kesey and his Merry Pranksters painted a school bus in DayGlo colours and travelled east to New York, dispensing LSD along the way. (It wouldn’t be banned in America until October 1966.) At the wheel was Neal Cassady, the model for Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty in On the Road and described by novelist Robert Stone as ‘the world’s greatest driver, who could roll a joint while backing a 1937 Packard onto the lip of the Grand Canyon’.

The trek’s legendary status was bolstered by the publication of journalist Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test four years later.

 

The hippie trail

In the 18th century every young aristocrat was expected to take the Grand Tour, savouring cultured Europe and bringing back trophies to grace his ancient family pile. During the Sixties it was the turn of young dropouts, both male and female, who (a cheap BIT Guide for travellers in their rucksacks) hitch-hiked or jumped on cheap buses to visit India, Pakistan, Nepal and other parts of southern Asia. They brought back memories.

Most of the young adventurers passed through Istanbul, with some then taking a northern route to India via Tehran, Kabul and Lahore, while Pakistan-bound travellers crossed Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Iran. Kathmandu was a favourite destination; one of its thoroughfares is still popularly known as Freak Street in doubtful tribute to the many thousands of footloose Westerners who once passed along it.

Books about the experience include Magic Bus by Rory Maclean, Wrong Way Home by Peter Moore, and Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar, which tells of his four-month trip across Asia by train, the first part of it following the hippie trail.

 

The Summer of Love

If you had to boil the general yearning down to a single word you couldn‘t do better than fix on ‘love’ – a flimsy concept at the best of times, but one that seemed to suffice for the hundred thousand people who flocked to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the ‘Summer of Love’ in 1967, and for the millions in the rest of America and across the world who sang that universal hymn to ‘flower power’ along with Scott McKenzie:

If you’re going to San Francisco,

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

If you’re going to San Francisco,

You’re gonna meet some gentle people there.

 

Down the coast in Monterey that summer massive crowds flocked to the world’s first heavily promoted rock festival, featuring Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding and groups such as The Grateful Dead, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane and The Byrds.

 

Honest to God

Even the Church of England was forced to take a look at its own beliefs after a book by the Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson – defender of the ‘holy communion’ sex scenes in Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover – became an overnight sensation.

Honest to God was written in 1963 and clocked up sales of 300,000 copies in three months. Robinson denied abandoning his Christianity (as his critics claimed), but argued for a new theology to suit the modern age. Rather than being ‘out there’, he wrote, God should – in the words of existentialist theologian Paul Tillich – be regarded as ‘the ground of our being’.

His idea that God’s revelation to humanity could be experienced within the wider culture rather than in the narrow confines of the Church was hardly likely to endear him to the authorities, and the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote a pamphlet denouncing the book. In later years both men took the view that it had been a storm in a teacup, but at least the Anglican church had had its Sixties moment.

 

Mods and Rockers

Not all the young were conscious rebels. Many of them, however much they picked up the general vibes, simply wanted to have a good time – and so the Mod movement was born in the UK.

The Mods were young people who suddenly had enough money to go out and enjoy themselves in a way their parents could never have imagined. We’ll catch up with their fashions later: suffice it to say here that they were sharply suited and liked to scoot around on low-powered Lambretta and Vespa two-wheelers dangling mirrors and mascots.

And drugs? They had a particular fancy for ‘purple hearts’, an amphetamine–barbiturate combination. These were tossed back not to send the mind on a trip to some technicolour nirvana, but to keep the body going through long hours on the dance floor. These Mods were above all eager party-goers.

Thanks to a series of clashes during holiday weekends in the mid-Sixties they are now for ever remembered as part of a riotous double act with the Rockers, leather-jacketed, greasy-haired roughs on noisy motorbikes who were everything the fastidious Mods were not.

Their choice of music was different, too. The Rockers – Teddy Boys on wheels – liked Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. The Mods were into R&B, soul, Jamaican ska and British bands such as The Who, The Kinks and The Small Faces.

The trouble kicked off at Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, on the 1964 Easter bank holiday weekend. The weather was wet and miserable, the place had practically closed down and the thousand visiting Mods had nothing to do. They took their boredom out on the pier (stallholders swiftly shut up shop), damaged beach huts along the front and threw deck chairs through shop windows. A small gaggle of Rockers was chased along the streets.

The 60 policemen on duty that day made 97 arrests (two dozen youngsters were charged with minor offences), but they brought in reinforcements the following day, suspecting that there was worse to come. Nothing much happened, in fact, but the media had already seized on the potential drama, and the Daily Mirror ran a headline that Monday morning which nodded towards a Fifties biker film starring the surly Marlon Brando:

‘WILD ONES’ INVADE SEASIDE

 

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess described his 1962 novel as ‘a sort of allegory of Christian free will’. Set in a near-future England, it tells the story of a band of teenage thugs who indulge in nightly orgies of violence.

The final, redemptive chapter was cut from the American edition of the book, and the subsequent film by Stanley Kubrick followed this version and seemed to glorify its characters’ worst excesses.

Burgess said he regretted ever writing the book: ‘In a film little can be implied,’ he said. ‘Everything has to be shown.’

 

Sawdust Caesars

The subsequent chain of events now seems inevitable. Over the following months Mods and Rockers flocked to south-coast resorts such as Margate, Brighton and Bournemouth, engaged in fisticuffs (and sometimes worse) and were widely condemned in the media and in Parliament as the nation seemed overcome by a surfeit of what the sociologist Stanley Cohen called ‘moral panic’.

A magistrate in Margate had his moment of fame after one fracas, being widely quoted for describing the town’s unwanted visitors as ‘these long-haired, mentally unstable, petty little hoodlums, these sawdust Caesars who can only find courage like rats, in hunting in packs’.

The home secretary, Henry Brooke, not only rushed a Malicious Damages Bill through Parliament, but put 69 officers from Scotland Yard’s flying squad on red alert at RAF Northolt, ready to cope with any emergency. Sure enough there was trouble at Hastings the very next Sunday afternoon, and the eager cops were flown in to deal with what the press couldn’t resist calling ‘the Battle of Hastings’.

As always on such occasions the immediate sentences were out of proportion to the offences themselves, including prison terms and heavy fines, but they sent out a strong signal. Perhaps because of this, or perhaps because the novelty had worn off, the Mods and Rockers soon abandoned their seaside lawlessness to seek their pleasures elsewhere.

At the height of the trouble Frank Taylor MP had asked the government ‘to give urgent and serious consideration to the need for young hooligans to be given such financial and physical punishment as will provide an effective deterrent,’ while the Earl of Arran tabled a motion in the House of Lords calling for the raising of the minimum driving licence age from 16 to 19 in order to keep all those young two-wheelers off the roads.

But had the older generation not recently blotted its own copybook? Had an MP and a member of the House of Lords not been involved in the biggest sex-and-politics scandal of the decade? The young had hardly been set a good example…

 

Quadrophenia

The most notorious Mods and Rockers confrontation was at Brighton during the 1964 May bank holiday, when two people were stabbed during a series of running fights along the seafront.

The Who’s rock opera Quadrophenia tells the story of a London Mod, Jimmy Cooper, who has taken part in the Brighton fracas but who is dispirited to discover when he returns to the town a little later that the Mod phenomenon is already on the wane.

Quadrophenia was later turned into a film, loosely based on the original.