CHAPTER TWO: That was the decade that was

‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.’

Bob Dylan

 

‘A week is a long time in politics.’

Prime Minister Harold Wilson

 

In the sweltering heat of a July day in 1961, John Profumo, secretary of state for war, watched a leggy girl rise naked from the swimming pool at Viscount Astor’s opulent Buckinghamshire estate, Cliveden – and so began the lurid sexual scandal which finished his political career, indirectly put her in gaol, and provoked another of its miscellaneous cast of characters to commit suicide.

The naked apparition was Christine Keeler, an easy-living 19-year-old showgirl. Within days she and Profumo had become lovers, a liaison which sent the undercover agents of MI5 into overdrive. This was about to become a political scandal, too.

‘There is a ghastly unreality about it all . . . To own it, to live here, would be like living on the stage of the Scala theatre in Milan.’

Cliveden described by diplomat Harold Nicolson

 

The problem was that Keeler had also been sharing her favours with Yevgeny Ivanov, a senior naval attaché (or intelligence officer) at the Soviet Embassy. At the height of Cold War paranoia, who knew what dangerous pillow talk might be passed to the Russians?

MI5 also had its beady eyes on Stephen Ward, a Harley Street osteopath and portrait painter with glittering connections. In India he had treated Gandhi for headaches and a stiff neck, while his many illustrious English clients included Sir Winston Churchill, no less. Viscount Astor, another of them, allowed Ward the use of a cottage in his dramatically landscaped grounds at Cliveden; Keeler had been staying with him there when Profumo saw her by the pool. Ivanov was one of Ward’s friends.

The Ward/Cliveden set enjoyed wild sex parties, many of them arranged by the notorious Mariella Novotny (because so many senior politicians attended them, she referred to herself as the government’s chief whip), but it was the espionage angle which finally brought the Profumo story into the open in 1963. The Labour MP George Wigg drew Parliament’s attention to media rumours, adding that ‘The Press has got as near as it can – it has shown itself willing to wound but afraid to strike.’

In those still timorous times Fleet Street had indeed fretted about how much it could reveal. Nudges and winks were permitted, but they would surely have meant little to the man and woman in the street.

On the very day that Wigg raised the issue in the House of Commons, Private Eye had made oblique references to ‘a West Indian immigrant of no fixed abode’; to the proffered, and refused, resignation of ‘Mr James Montesi, a well-known Cabinet Minister’; and to parties arranged by a ‘Dr Spook’ which involved ‘Mr Vladimir Bolokhov, the well- known Soviet spy attached to the Russian Embassy, and a well-known Cabinet Minister’.

Wigg was more specific. The rumour, he said, ‘relates to Miss Christine Keeler and Miss Davies and a shooting by a West Indian’, and he called for a select committee to be set up so that ‘the honour of the minister concerned might be freed from innuendoes’.

It’s time to catch up with a few more of the dramatis personae:

• Mandy Rice-Davies. A friend of Keeler’s, a model and part of the same fun-loving set.

• Aloysius ‘Lucky’ Gordon. A Jamaican jazz pianist and singer, and one of Keeler’s former lovers. She alleged that in the aftermath of their affair he attacked her and held her hostage for two days.

• Johnny Edgecombe. An Antiguan hustler, and another of Keeler’s lovers. He attacked Gordon with a knife at the Flamingo Club in Wardour Street, London, in October 1962, and the following December fired shots outside Stephen Ward’s flat where Keeler and Rice-Davies were staying. This incident brought in the police and had the effect of opening the whole can of worms.

• Slum landlord Peter Rachman and fraudulent businessman Emil Savundra. Neither was connected with the Profumo case, but both were named by Rice-Davies as former lovers when she gave evidence in court.

Profumo, whose offer to resign had indeed been rejected by prime minister Harold Macmillan, came to the Commons and made a statement saying that there had been ‘no impropriety whatsoever’ in his relationship with Christine Keeler, and that he would take legal action if the newspapers suggested otherwise. He then went off to the races in the company of his wife (the actress Valerie Hobson) and that keen habituée of the track, the Queen Mother.

The reprieve was brief. Ward gave the home secretary evidence that Profumo and Keeler had been lovers, and the disgraced MP resigned – not, of course, for the affair itself, but because he had lied to Parliament.

 

A rash of trials

Three trials followed. In the first, Lucky Gordon was jailed for attacking Christine Keeler, while in the third, six months later, Keeler was sent down for nine months for perjury after admitting that she had lied about the assault all along. (Gordon was freed as a result.)

Between these two cases the public had to watch the unedifying spectacle of Stephen Ward’s prosecution for living off immoral earnings – specifically for procuring girls under the age of 21 to have sexual intercourse, for procuring abortions, and for keeping a brothel. This felt like an act of revenge by the wounded Establishment, an impression strengthened by the choice of Mervyn Griffith-Jones of Lady Chatterley trial fame as prosecutor.

Ward, acquitted of procuring but found guilty of pimping for Keeler and Rice-Davies, never heard the verdict. He had taken an overdose of sleeping tablets and died in hospital a few days later. At his funeral there was a wreath of a hundred white carnations sent by leading figures in the arts world: critic Kenneth Tynan, novelist and critic Penelope Gilliat, singer and actress Annie Ross, portrait painter Dominic Elwes, and the playwrights John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Joe Orton. Their card read:

To Stephen Ward

Victim of Hypocrisy

 

‘He would, wouldn’t he?’

Mandy Rice-Davies (or Randy Mice-Davies, as satirists liked to call her) showed no squeamishness when talking about her sex life during the Stephen Ward trial, and happily provided a list of her many lovers.

One of her remarks, simple as it was, has survived as a catch-phrase to be used in any appropriate situation.

When it was pointed out that Lord Astor had denied any involvement with her, her swift reply was devastating: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ (laughter in court).

 

And what happened to the other members of the cast?

• John Profumo, his wife standing by him, retired to a life of charity work, and in 1975 was awarded the CBE for his involvement with the disadvantaged in the East End of London.

• Christine Keeler wrote and co-authored several books about her life and the Profumo affair. She later worked in telephone sales, for a dry-cleaning business and as a school dinner lady.

• Mandy Rice-Davies sang, acted and wrote books, including an autobiography, married an Israeli and set up a chain of ‘Mandy’ clubs in Israel. Her life, she once said, had followed ‘one slow descent into respectability’.

 

The old order changeth

The shifts in a culture’s tectonic plates are felt in trivial matters as much as in grand political developments…

• During the early Sixties it was commonplace for cinemas to play the national anthem at the end of each performance – although audiences were showing an increasing reluctance to stand up for it and some vacated their seats early to avoid it.

• The passing of a hearse was still an occasion for the public to stop in their tracks, remove their hats if they were wearing them, and lower their heads in respect – but the press of traffic soon made the crawling pace of funeral cars impractical.

• National Service narrowly survived into the new decade, with the last man ‘called up’ on the last day of 1960. Mind you, this only encouraged older folk to repeat the tedious mantra that a couple of years in the army wouldn’t do today’s youngsters any harm!

• It took the threat of a strike by the players for the Football League to abolish the maximum wage in 1961. During the previous year the average national wage had been £15 a week, with the players getting a top whack of £20. Johnny Haynes of Fulham and England now became the first £100-a-week player.

• In September 1962 the last Gentlemen v. Players cricket match was played, at Scarborough. ‘Gentlemen’, usually from middle-class backgrounds, were amateurs, and ‘players’ were professionals. From this time the concept of amateurism – ‘a ludicrous system’, said the plain-speaking Yorkshire bowler Fred Trueman – was abolished.

• On 3 May 1966 The Times at last began printing news on its front page (it had made an exception only to report Winston Churchill’s funeral the previous year). The page had previously been given over to advertisements, a dullness which was now considered out of synch with… the times.

 

TW3

‘What the hell is going on in this country?’ the Daily Mirror asked in the wake of Profumo’s resignation, adding that ‘All power corrupts and the Tories have been in power for nearly twelve years.’ The Times, countering the view that the sexual shenanigans were an irrelevance, carried the headline ‘IT IS A MORAL ISSUE’, while the bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, wrote that the events had left behind them ‘an unpleasant smell – the smell of corruption in high places, of evil practices, and of a repudiation of the simple decencies and the basic values’.

In this climate, it’s no wonder that BBC television’s live satire show That Was The Week That Was – shortened to TWTWTW and even more economically to TW3 – was welcomed as a veritable cleansing of the Augean stables. Launched in November 1962, it ran for only two seasons, but its irreverent attack on hypocrisy and cant, its fearless locking of horns with royalty, religions and corrupt businessmen, made it an unmissable Saturday-night event for millions.

There had never been anything like TW3. If Private Eye had broken the ground for the programme with its wickedly deflating humour, TW3 brandished sharper weaponry altogether, and it inevitably angered those it wounded – not only politicians but, for example, the Boy Scout Association, which objected to the questioning of Lord Baden-Powell’s sexuality.

Mary Whitehouse, unsurprisingly, regarded it as ‘the epitome of what was wrong with the BBC – anti-authority, anti-religious, anti-patriotism, pro-dirt, and poorly produced . . . and apparently impervious to discipline from within or disapproval from without’.

Poorly produced? The studio paraphernalia – mics, cameras, cables and so on – were all on view, and the performers would often read from scripts, giving TW3 a brash, ‘genuine’ atmosphere. Again, this was new and exciting.

The programme was presented by the former Methodist lay preacher David Frost, who would eventually become something of an Establishment figure himself. Its list of script writers was impressive, including among others Peter Cook, journalist Keith Waterhouse, Kenneth Tynan, playwright Dennis Potter, John Cleese and even the future poet laureate John Betjeman. The cast included Willie Rushton, Frankie Howerd, Eleanor Bron, John Wells, the cartoonist Timothy Birdsall and the commentator Bernard Levin.

Each programme began with a topical number sung by Millicent Martin, while Lance Percival would improvise a calypso to topical suggestions from the audience. Timings weren’t vital, because the show was open-ended. (When the BBC did try to fix a closing time by scheduling repeats of The Third Man after it, Frost read synopses of what was to follow by way of a spoiler; the Corporation caved in.)

The idea of a prime minister being lampooned on national television was almost shocking, but Harold Macmillan came in for regular mockery – and, it has to be said, manfully took it on the chin. The Profumo affair was a low point (Frost appeared, apparently naked, on a chair, sending up the celebrated pose adopted by Christine Keeler in a publicity photograph), but the programme was also merciless in highlighting his delusions of grandeur over the ‘special relationship’ with the Americans.

‘Hello, Jack,’ he begins a telephone call to John F. Kennedy at the White House. ‘This is Harold… Harold Macmillan… Macmillan… M-A-C-M…’

 

No holds barred

Unthinking respect for authority was on its knees. Nothing illustrates this more vividly than Private Eye’s treatment of a parliamentary speech in which Macmillan derided Labour for dithering and recited (in his upper-class drawl) the old music-hall number ‘She Didn’t Say Yes, She Didn’t Say No.’ Willie Rushton impersonated the old buffer to a musical backing on a record which sold throughout the country in huge numbers.

TW3 was last broadcast in December 1963, ostensibly because there was to be an election the following year and the BBC wished to ensure impartiality. The cynics noted that it also happened to be a year in which Parliament was due to debate the renewal of the Corporation’s charter. Sir Hugh Carleton Green, its director general, later commented: ‘It was in my capacity as a subversive anarchist that I yielded to the enormous pressure from my fellow subversives and put TW3 on the air; and it was as a pillar of the Establishment that I yielded to the Fascist hyena-like howls to take it off again.’

 

The Night of the Long Knives

Harold Macmillan responded dramatically to the government’s lack of popularity in July 1962 by sacking a third of his cabinet, including the chancellor of the exchequer – a bloodletting which immediately became known as the Night of the Long Knives after the murderous Nazi purge of 1934.

Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe turned instead to the Bible, devastatingly inverting a line from St John’s Gospel: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he should lay down his friends for his life.’

 

Three men in a boat

Three prime ministers with contrasting personalities piloted the good ship Britannia through the choppy waters of the Sixties.

Harold Macmillan (Conservative, in office 1957–1963) played the part of a witty, unflappable Edwardian gentleman. This role did not equip him well to cope with the Profumo scandal, which he was generally thought to have mishandled. In his early years as PM he was ‘Supermac’, after a cartoon by Vicky in the Evening Standard – an image not intended to flatter, but which suited him when the economy was buoyant and the country more at ease with itself. He faltered during the early Sixties, and took the opportunity of a minor health scare to step down and return to the family publishing business. His personal tragedy was the long-standing liaison of his wife Dorothy with a fellow Tory, Lord (Bob) Boothby.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home (Conservative, 1963–1964). The Peerage Act of 1963 enabled hereditary peers to relinquish their titles in order to sit in the House of Commons. It came about chiefly at the instigation of Labour’s Anthony Wedgwood Benn – who was briefly the third Viscount Stansgate – but it also allowed the sudden elevation to Downing Street of the former Earl of Home (pronounced ‘Hume’).

A Scot like Macmillan, and the only prime minister to have played first-class cricket, Sir Alec was a laconic, cadaverous figure easy to parody in an age of declining deference – although his riposte to Harold Wilson’s repeated references to his being the 14th Earl of Home was to murmur: ‘I suppose Mr Wilson, when you come to think of it, is the 14th Mr Wilson.’

Home was chosen to replace Macmillan above more fancied candidates (particularly ‘Rab’ Butler), and showed his resilience by running Labour a close second in the 1964 election despite the fallout from the Profumo affair. Totally lacking in pomposity, he once artlessly confessed his weakness in economic matters by admitting, no doubt tongue in cheek, that ‘I do my sums with matchsticks’.

Harold Wilson (Labour, 1964–1970 and 1974–1976). The squat, blunt Yorkshireman needed no matchsticks. After taking a first-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, he had become one of the youngest Oxford dons of the century, at just 21, and when appointed president of the Board of Trade ten years later he was the youngest cabinet minister of the 20th century.

In appearance dour and unimaginative, he nevertheless developed an ability to deliver punchy one-liners: ‘No comment – in glorious Technicolor’ was one reaction to the Profumo scandal. He approached the 1964 election as the champion of technological progress. ‘The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution’, he had declared at the Labour Party’s annual conference, ‘will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated measures on either side of industry.’

 

Kidnap!

In April 1964 two University of Aberdeen students attempted to kidnap the Prime Minister. Meeting them in public – and thinking it was a joke – he gave them a pound for charity. When they knocked on the door of the house where he was staying, however, Sir Alec realised they were serious.

Packing as if to leave with them, he poured them some beer and eventually persuaded them to abandon their plot. The clincher, it seems, was his forecast of the dire consequences should they take him away: ‘If you do, the Conservatives will win the election by two or three hundred seats.’

 

Cloak and dagger

What hung over everything in these turbulent times was the dreadful image of a mushroom-shaped cloud. Whether anyone would dare to use them, nobody knew, but the Cold War adversaries bristled with nuclear weapons, and their leaders boasted of their readiness to press the button – if, they were always careful to say, the other side used them first.

In such an atmosphere the ‘national security’ panic regarding Christine Keeler, Profumo and Ivanov is at least understandable. Spies were thought to be everywhere…

• George Blake, a double agent working for the Soviet Union, betrayed some 400 MI6 agents to the Soviets. Arrested in 1961, he was given a prison sentence of 42 years, but he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs five years later and fled to the USSR.

• John Vassall, a homosexual, was working in the UK’s Moscow embassy when he was plied with drink and photographed in compromising positions with several men. Blackmailed by the Soviets, he returned to Britain and handed over thousands of classified documents before being arrested in 1962 and sentenced to 18 years in gaol. He served ten of them.

• Kim Philby. After Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess had fled to Russia in the Fifties to avoid arrest, there were strong suspicions that Philby was ‘the Third Man’, but official bungling saved him. By 1963, however, it was clear that the net was closing around him, and he defected at night aboard a Soviet freighter.

 

The Cuban Missile Crisis

The world has never been closer to the horror of nuclear war than during a period of two nail-biting weeks in the autumn of 1962.

On 14 October a US Air Force U-2 spy plane captured photographic evidence that a Soviet missile base was under construction in Cuba. The Americans demanded that the site should be dismantled and all the weapons removed, but they decided on a military quarantine of the island rather than an immediate armed assault.

Soviet president Nikita Krushchev responded with a bullish letter to President Kennedy, stating that the quarantine was ‘an act of aggression propelling humankind into the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war’. They were eyeball to eyeball.

There were many who sympathised with the Cubans, who had resisted an armed invasion by the United States a year before at the Bay of Pigs, and for whom the Soviet Union was a friend in need. But few could witness the day-by-day nuclear stand-off with anything but mounting dread.

At last, on 28 October a secret deal was brokered by the United Nations secretary-general, U Thant. The Soviets would remove their weapons, and the Americans would never attempt to invade Cuba again.

 

The road from Aldermaston

The early Sixties were the heyday of the Aldermaston marches, held every Easter after the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1958. Here was a cause that divided the nation without ever achieving any decisive result. The campaigners, who spent days on the road marching down to London from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire, regarded Britain’s possession of nuclear weapons as immoral. Their opponents regarded these bearded, sandalled hippies as out of touch with reality.

Tens of thousands trekked the 52-mile (83 km) route each year, the younger members of the host playing and singing their way along. John Brunner’s ‘The H-Bomb’s Thunder’ became the unofficial CND anthem, while other favourites included ‘Brother Won’t You Join the Line?’, ‘Doomsday Blues’ and ‘The Bomb Has Got to Go’.

The protests weren’t confined to the Aldermaston event. In September 1961 the 89-year-old philosopher and life-long protester Bertrand Russell was jailed for a breach of the peace (that is, sitting down in Trafalgar Square and refusing to budge), and a few days later, at another ban-the-bomb demonstration, those arrested included the CND chairman Canon John Collins, the playwright John Osborne, the jazz musician George Melly and the actress Vanessa Redgrave.

 

The Berlin Wall

In the aftermath of the Second World War Winston Churchill made his famous speech describing a metaphorical ‘iron curtain’ dividing East from West. From 1961 the city of Berlin would be physically divided – at first by a stout fence and then, from 1965, by an impassable concrete wall with guard towers.

For East Germany this was the ‘Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart’, while for West Berlin’s mayor (and later West German chancellor) Willy Brandt, it was the ‘Wall of Shame’.

One of the grimmest legacies of the Cold War Sixties, it was finally demolished in 1989.

 

Winds of change

When he first said it, in Ghana in January 1960, nobody seemed to be listening – perhaps because the former Gold Coast already had its independence. But when Harold Macmillan repeated the phrase before South Africa’s parliament in Cape Town three weeks later everyone sat up and took notice.

‘The wind of change is blowing through this continent,’ he told the MPs, ‘and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.’

This bold declaration of intent regarding the freedom of Britain’s African possessions was anathema to the right wing of his own Conservative party at home, and the Monday Club pressure group was formed to fight it. The Times had obviously got the message loud and clear, however, for that April the paper quietly abandoned its section heading ‘Imperial and Foreign News’, replacing it with ‘Overseas News’.

Another part of Macmillan’s speech was unpopular with his local audience. ‘As a fellow member of the Commonwealth,’ he went on, ‘it is our earnest desire to give South Africa our support and encouragement, but I hope you won’t mind my saying frankly that there are some aspects of your policies which make it impossible for us to do this without being false to our own deep convictions about the political destinies of free men to which in our own territories we are trying to give effect.’

The following year, after a whites-only referendum, South Africa declared itself a republic and left the Commonwealth. Its racist apartheid policy would make it an international pariah until the 1990s.

There remained the problem of Southern Rhodesia which, likewise, would not be resolved for many years (it finally became Zimbabwe in 1980). The British government refused to grant the country independence without majority rule, and the response of Ian Smith’s white-dominated government was to make a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) in November 1965. UDI was condemned by the international community, and – at Britain’s request – the United Nations authorised economic sanctions. The following year Harold Wilson made one last effort to reach a deal with Smith, the two men having secret meetings aboard the cruiser HMS Tiger off Gibraltar, but the gulf between them proved to be too great.

 

Decolonisation in Africa…

By the end of the 1960s, all Britain’s African colonies except Southern Rhodesia (the future Zimbabwe) and the South African mandate of South West Africa (Namibia) had achieved independence.

Somalia 1960

Nigeria 1960

Sierra Leone 1961

Tanzania 1961

Uganda 1962

Kenya 1963

Malawi 1964

Zambia 1964

Gambia 1965

Botswana 1966

Lesotho 1966

Mauritius 1968

Swaziland 1968

 

…and elsewhere

Cyprus 1960

Jamaica 1962

Trinidad 1962

Malta 1964

Gozo 1964

British Honduras 1964 (Belize from 1973)

Barbados 1966

Guyana 1966

‘Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role.’

Dean Acheson, former US Secretary of State, in 1962

 

Mourning the president

The assassination of US president John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963 was more than a shock to the British people: it felt almost like a personal bereavement.

In those troubled and changing times, his youthful charisma seemed to speak to the idealism of a generation grown weary with the platitudes of politicians mired in the past.

People queued in their thousands to record their loss in books of remembrance, and the usually iconoclastic TW3 ditched its satire and created a tribute programme instead.

 

Vietnam

The US conflict in Vietnam, like the Iraq war decades later, sharply divided public opinion in the West, and there were mass protests on both sides of the Atlantic.

Harold Wilson repeatedly refused requests to involve British troops in the war – causing a strained relationship with US president Lyndon B. Johnson.

In March 1968 some 10,000 protestors gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square before marching to the American embassy in Grosvenor Square. The actress Vanessa Redgrave was allowed to enter the embassy to deliver a letter of protest, but more than 200 people were arrested after violent clashes with mounted police.

The following October 25,000 anti-war demonstrators marched on the embassy once again, but a force of a thousand police officers restrained them.

In November the American journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story of the My Lai atrocity, in which more than 500 innocent South Vietnamese civilians were massacred in their village by a US platoon.

 

Closer to home

The racial tolerance Britain preached abroad was soon to be put to the test at home. It had been enshrined in the 1965 Race Relations Act, one of a series of liberal laws introduced by Wilson’s Labour government, and a refinement was set to come onto the statute books in 1968.

The early Sixties had seen a steady influx from Commonwealth countries. Although the shameful ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ letting boards were a thing of the past, immigrant families were still often pushed to the back of the queue for housing and jobs. This discrimination would now be outlawed.

At this very moment, however, the home secretary, James Callaghan, introduced legislation to Parliament precisely designed to keep large numbers of African Asians out of the country. These were the victims of aggressive pro-black policies being pursued in Kenya and Uganda, two countries which had recently achieved their independence.

With a thousand Asians a month arriving in Britain, Callaghan devised his Commonwealth Immigrants Bill which, overnight, made their UK passports invalid. A limited number of ‘special vouchers’ would be issued instead.

He dismissed (in a memo) the argument that emigration from the country usefully offset the numbers arriving: ‘This view overlooks the important point that emigration is largely by white persons from nearly every corner of the United Kingdom, while immigration and settlement are largely by coloured persons into a relatively small number of concentrated areas. The exchange thus aggravates rather than alleviates the problem.’

 

The foaming Tiber

The bill had many critics, including notable Conservative figures such as Iain Macleod, Ian Gilmour and Michael Heseltine, and it must have been a great relief to Callaghan when someone else came along to take the flak. This was the shadow foreign secretary Enoch Powell, who made a notorious speech in Birmingham on 20 April 1968.

‘As I look ahead,’ he intoned, ‘I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’ (Powell was a classicist, and ‘the Roman’ was the ancient poet Virgil.) He also quoted one of his Wolverhampton constituents, who had told him that ‘In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’

It was described by The Times as ‘an evil speech’. Tory leader Edward Heath promptly fired Powell from the shadow cabinet.

 

Two American deaths

In his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (as it came to be called) Enoch Powell mentioned ‘that tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic’. He was referring to the race riots which had spread to more than a hundred US cities after the assassination of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King in Memphis on 4 April.

The American people were soon to be shocked by yet another killing. Senator Robert Kennedy, himself a staunch supporter of minority rights, was shot dead in Los Angeles on 2 June.

 

Many supported Powell, though. A thousand London dockers went on strike to protest about his sacking, marching on Parliament with placards which read DON’T KNOCK ENOCH and BACK BRITAIN, NOT BLACK BRITAIN. They lobbied the Labour MPs Peter Shore and Ian Mikardo, who was kicked. When Lady Gaitskell, widow of the former Labour leader, shouted that they would have their remedy at the next election, some replied: ‘We won’t forget.’ They probably didn’t.

 

I’m Backing Britain

A strange campaign with this slogan was launched in 1968 when five secretaries from Surbiton offered to work an extra half an hour each day without pay to boost productivity.

Within a week their cause had taken off nationally, Harold Wilson had given it his support and the campaign’s Union Flag logo could be seen in every high street. The newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell suggested adding a ‘Buy British’ element, although the campaign’s T-shirts were made in Portugal.

In a very British way it all fizzled out within a few months, having had no effect whatsoever.

 

That was 1968 that was

The recent flowers-in-your hair Summer of Love must have seemed long forgotten among the worldwide political upheavals which occurred in this single remarkable year.

In China Mao Tse-Tung had a firm grip on his Cultural Revolution, but elsewhere in the Communist bloc there were student protests in Yugoslavia and Poland, while Soviet troops poured into Czechoslovakia during the ‘Prague Spring’ to overthrow Alexander Dubček’s popular reformist government.

Elsewhere there were sit-ins, marches and demonstrations – often led by students, often violently put down – about civil rights, the Vietnam war and a host of local issues, from Japan to Europe, from the US and Canada to Jamaica, Mexico and Brazil.

In France agitation for university reform (there were a few tame occupations of UK universities, too) escalated into a violent outpouring of dissatisfaction with the old regime, and to a crippling national strike.

The French, of course, philosophised about the phenomenon, but if their ‘revolution’ came to nothing it was surely because those at the barricades knew more about what they were against than what they were for.

 

The Troubles

The so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland are usually reckoned to date from October 1968, when activists defied a government ban on their civil rights march in Belfast and were attacked by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, leading to three days of rioting.

Violence escalated throughout the last year of the decade. That April the Roman Catholic Bernadette Devlin became the youngest woman ever elected to the British Parliament (the record still stands as of 2012). A few days later the Ministry of Defence sent army reinforcements into the province for the first time since the Second World War.

In August, with eight people shot dead, more than a hundred treated for gunshot wounds and Protestants setting fire to hundreds of homes in Catholic areas of Belfast, the British army was deployed on the streets. The soldiers would stay there for 38 years.

 

Grey heat

Although his government reduced the voting age from 21 to 18 and passed several laws reflecting the relaxed moral code of the time, Harold Wilson’s image is less that of a free spirit riding the Sixties breeze than a cautious manipulator forever watching his back.

Modernisation was the theme of his 1964 election campaign, but the ‘white heat‘ of his planned technological revolution turned out to be rather grey. There was to be no place for restrictive practices in industry, yet ministers seemed to spend a great many valuable hours in proverbial (and actual) smoke-filled rooms, finessing deals with uppity union leaders over sandwiches and mugs of thick brown tea.

Adroit at playing left against right in his own party, Wilson managed the considerable feat of converting Labour to the idea of joining the Common Market – only for French president General de Gaulle to veto Britain’s application, just as he had a few years earlier when Harold Macmillan first tried to get through the door.

And yet Wilson’s government did get quite a lot done. For good or ill, Britain was a very different place at the end of the Sixties from what it had been at the beginning.

‘This party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.’

Harold Wilson on Labour

 

In Place of Strife

The party’s closeness to the trades unions, which had a role in choosing its leaders, was increasingly regarded as a weakness by Labour leaders. In 1969 the secretary of state for employment, Barbara Castle, introduced a white paper, ‘In Place of Strife’, which suggested – among much else – that unions should call ballots before striking and that an industrial board should be set up to enforce settlements in industrial disputes.

Alas for Mrs Castle, there were deep divisions within the Labour cabinet itself, and the proposals were dropped.

 

The Open University

The jury is still out on Labour’s drive to turn grammar schools into comprehensives, but few would disagree that one of the party’s greatest legacies (driven through by the arts minister, Jennie Lee) was the Open University.

The new university would accept students without any previous qualifications, and they would study at home rather than on campus. The Tory MP Iain Macleod thought the idea ‘blithering nonsense’, but the playwright Willy Russell later acknowledged the value of this ‘higher education for all’ institution: his 1980 comedy Educating Rita is set in the office of an Open University lecturer, and Rita and her tutor both find their lives transformed by the OU experience.

As for conventional universities, Labour continued the expansion begun by the Conservatives, a total of 23 being founded during the decade.

 

The new universities

1961: University of Sussex

1962: Keele University

1963: University of East Anglia; University of York; Newcastle University

1964: University of Strathclyde; Lancaster University

1965: University of Kent; University of Essex; University of Warwick

1966: Loughborough University; Aston University; Brunel University; University of Surrey; University of Bath; University of Bradford; City University, London; Heriot-Watt University

1967: University of Salford; University of Dundee; University of Stirling; Royal College of Art

1969: Cranfield University

 

The Beeching axe

A less happy episode was the modernisation (or ‘reshaping’) of the country’s railway system carried out by Dr Richard Beeching – commonly known as the ‘Beeching axe’.

His view was that the losses experienced by British Railways since the 1950s would grow even more severe without drastic action, and that meant closing lines all over the country. Within ten years of his report more than 4,000 miles (6,400 km) of railway and all of 3,000 stations had disappeared – 25 per cent of all route miles and 50 per cent of stations.

Beeching’s name, widely reviled today, lives on in a number of places where the railway once ran, including his own home town of East Grinstead in Sussex. The A22 relief road through the town descends into a deep cutting which was originally made for the railway line. The locals, not surprisingly, wanted to name this section of road Beeching Cut, but the authorities thought this was rather too pointed, and today you drive along Beeching Way instead.

 

Blots on the landscape

It wasn’t only the moral and cultural landscape that changed during the Sixties. To live in a large town was to witness the physical landscape being transformed by the intrusion of large, concrete, squared-off office blocks – a sign of growing prosperity, no doubt, but also of developers being allowed to get away (or so it seemed to the dazed onlooker) with practically anything they liked. Perhaps the architects were paying tribute to such giants of their profession as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier – but the resulting ‘Brutalist’ style is largely unloved today.

Along came a group of stained-glass students from the Royal College of Art who called themselves Anti-Ugly Action. When the first stone was laid for Barclays Bank’s new headquarters in London, they placed a black coffin on the pavement outside, bearing the epitaph ‘Here lyeth British architecture.’ Cards were issued to members of the public so that they could recommend buildings for ‘the Anti-Ugly seal of disapproval’. Regular protests followed.

It was all good fun, of course, but the sudden rash of unlovely buildings was something of a mystery. Why was there so much ugliness up in the sky while, down at street level in the boutiques, accessory shops and even in the car factories, the country was awash with dazzling, original design?

 

Cathy Come Home

While property developers were throwing up new headquarters for businesses, many families had trouble finding a decent place to live. The problem of homelessness was highlighted in the BBC play Cathy Come Home, which shocked the nation.

Written by Jeremy Sandford, it told the story of a woman who, after her husband loses his job because of injury, has her children taken away by social services.

Twelve million viewers tuned in, and a new awareness of the housing crisis gave a shot in the arm to the newly formed charity, Shelter.