When we talk about the Beatles, we talk about ourselves.
At the end of August 1966 the Saturday Evening Post published ‘The Monarchs of the Beatle Empire’, a piece by the British journalist James Morris.1 In it, Morris saluted the Beatles for liberating Britain from class. To twenty-first-century ears its tone may hint of Lady Bracknell, but its sentiments remain radical. First, he described the arrival of these ‘four young roosters from the north’ into ‘a country so long hag-ridden by class’. When Morris had been to Liverpool, somebody had complained that ‘They’re all grammar-school boys really,’ but for Morris this was by the way: ‘the point is that they have managed to make the whole subject of personal origins, so long an obsession of the English, irrelevant to themselves’. In the past, the regional character in England was always exploited for comic purposes, but the Beatles had just carried on regardless: ‘They have simply ignored the old English social divisions and effortlessly stormed the barricades of custom.’
Morris confessed that he was not their biggest fan: ‘I still, to be honest, don’t awfully like the look of them – which is to say, I don’t like their faces, just as I don’t happen to like caraway seeds or Rubens.’ But he was attracted to the Beatles for their ‘absolute aloofness to old prejudices and preconceptions, their brand of festive iconoclasm’. Their glory lay in their detachment from Britain’s imperial grandeur. They are New Men, ‘the British emancipated at last from the White Man’s burden’. Morris proclaimed ‘an inescapable sense of holiday in England today – a springy, frothy sense of release’.
He then touched on what many people thought of as their androgyny, the product of long hair, pretty faces and skinny frames. They had thrown aside all the old tenets of manliness: ‘Children are said to love them because they don’t know whether they are boys or girls.’ They were, he said, ‘minstrels of … emancipation’ who had ‘expressed something that most of us in England have instinctively felt – that the old values really did need a cheerful dust-down. Why should we be manly? Why should life be quite so real, quite so earnest? Why should we stiffen our upper lips? Who says so? Why?’
Though he never mentioned it in the piece, two years before, James Morris had embarked on a prolonged course of pills derived from the urine of pregnant mares. In his autobiography, Conundrum, written many years later, he chronicled his transformation ‘gradually from a person who looked like a healthy male of orthodox sexual tendencies, approaching middle age, into something perilously close to a hermaphrodite, apparently neither of one sex nor the other, and more or less ageless’. This initial treatment led him to full sex reassignment surgery in 1972, at which point James became Jan.
1 Educated at Evelyn Waugh’s old school, Lancing College, and Christ Church, Oxford.