Britain had been changed completely by the war, but it took some while for the depth and range of the alteration to become apparent. The first and greatest of these changes was the economic one. Britain had gone from being one of the richest nations, not only in the world, but in history, to being a country which was bankrupt. It had great industrial, and fiscal, resources, and with the upturn in the world economy of the 1950s, Britain would gradually recover some of its economic, though never its political, strength. But in the immediate post-war years the stagnation of the economy, greatly exacerbated by the experiment of state socialism and nationalisation, disguised from the British some of the more lasting changes in national life.
Nearly all these changes appeared as benefits, but as each one was eagerly embraced, Britain left behind a little of that esprit de corps which had bound society together so remarkably during the war years. By banishing the ways in which they thought about themselves, the British became less of a group, more a collection of individuals. Not for nothing did the old God of the Hebrews tell His people: ‘Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you’ (Deuteronomy 6:14). In the 1950s the British hungrily, greedily, went after other gods, who supplied them with food, and sexual imagery and music which they voraciously devoured.
Before exploring this phenomenon, however, we should note a feature which contributed hugely to the slow return of wellbeing which coursed through frozen British veins after the hardships of war and socialist austerity.
Wars have always expedited technological advance. Archimedes invented the catapult for the Greek army–it was first used with devastating effect at the Battle of Syracuse in 265 bc. Chinese alchemists of the Han dynasty pioneered gunpowder because their military leaders were desperate to assert superiority over their enemies. During the Second World War, the numbers of those involved in the conflict, and the intensity of the fighting, meant that the technological advances were proportionately superior. Consider the development of antibiotics. It was when trying to find a way of combating the devastating post-war influenza pandemic of 1919 that Alexander Fleming had first made his discovery of penicillin. The mould which had grown accidentally during one of his laboratory experiments turned out to be lethal to streptococci, gonococci, meningococci and pneumococci. But having made the discovery, in 1928, Fleming never developed it. The penicillin notatum vanished very quickly in laboratory conditions and he had not the wherewithal to develop it as a packaged pharmaceutical. It was only during the war, in Oxford, that the Australian Howard Florey and German émigré chemist Ernst Chain, together with Norman Huntley, read Fleming’s paper and began to develop the idea of penicillin, testing it on laboratory mice infected with streptococci. When the idea was taken to America, it became possible, after 1944, for penicillin to be produced on a scale to deal with the many infected troops in field hospitals. It was the wonder drug which, as well as curing syphilis and gonorrhoea in a matter of weeks, was to go on to cure millions of patients who would previously have died–of meningitis, pneumonia and other curable diseases.
The existence of antibiotics, and the growth of the pharmaceutical industry, was a vital factor in the increased wellbeing of the post-war world. Another example of the beneficial effects of war on the advance of technology came out of the Manhattan Project, whose prime aim had been to develop nuclear weaponry, for use against–in the event–Japanese civilians. Unforeseen consequences of the research on the Manhattan Project, however, included radiation therapy for the treatment of cancer, as well as the nanotechnology which would, by the close of the twentieth century, transform the world–not only with laser surgery but with digital cameras, and advances in computer science which seemed like magic.1
Some of this technological revolution took years to develop, but others–of which antibiotics were the most conspicuous–began to change life from the 1950s onwards. Changes which can be seen with hindsight to be wholly beneficial do not always feel pleasant to the conservatively minded.
While Iris Murdoch wrote her bestsellers about emotional chaotics, and Francis Bacon painted his tormented canvases of deliberately skewed popes and unclothed females, these artworks gave out messages of violence and unrest. These were confusing times. ‘Winter kept us warm.’ Demobbed soldiers found it hard to adjust to civvie street. Likewise, many British people felt beleaguered, even wondering whether the victories of 1945 had been anything but illusory.
‘Remember Magna Carta. Did she die in vain?’ The words might have been the motto of these unhappy or bewildered Britons, who saw something of themselves in the man who uttered them–Tony Hancock (1924–68).
With his Homburg hat, melancholic folds of flesh about his jowls and his doggy eyes, Hancock was a comic who reflected an image of Britain, more especially of England, to itself. Hancock, with his series of humiliations and whinges, was an only half-exaggerated version of what many Englishmen now felt about themselves and about their country. Hancock had come down in the world. In the very act of being born, he had managed to run to seed. His parents, Jack and Lily, had run a hotel in Bournemouth. Jack died when Hancock was eleven. A spell at the Berkshire public school Bradfield College, also alma mater to the author of Watership Down, Richard Adams, added a glimpse of another world which fed Hancock’s archetypically English class chippiness. The war intervened when he was seventeen. His career in the RAF led him to Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) tours, and to acts in the Ralph Reader Gang Shows.
His first peace-time job was at the Windmill Theatre in Soho, whose boast was ‘we never closed’. Comedy turns punctuated the naked displays. This work led to contacts with radio producers and sketches on such standbys as Workers’ Playtime and Variety Bandbox. What marked Hancock out was his petulance. His ‘character’ began to emerge in the series Educating Archie, as the tutor to a ventriloquial doll, operated by Peter Brough, called Archie Andrews. ‘Flippin’ Kids’ was his catchphrase. It was in the autumn of 1954 that Hancock’s Half Hour was given its first radio broadcast, scripted by that inspired pair Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. The show transferred to television in 1956 and was soon being watched by 23 percent of the adult population.2
Galton and Simpson may be said to have invented the low-lit dramas of English ennui which John Osborne and Harold Pinter, a few years later, were to make highbrow. Pinter trod comparable territory to that explored first in Hancock’s Half Hour and in the later incomparable Galton and Simpson series about the aspirations of a young rag and bone merchant living with his manipulative old father, Steptoe and Son. Galton and Simpson made Anthony Aloysius Hancock (the actor’s real names were Anthony John) live at 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam. ‘Hancock’, his biographer tells us, ‘was secretly in awe of Galton and Simpson’s acute sense of what was risible about his pretensions’ (his winemanship, for example), his hunger for education (encyclopaedias and potted histories of the world formed the basis of his reading) and his not always simulated grandeur of manner.
In the tragi-comic half-hour plays, Hancock was always on his offended dignity, unlike his coarse housemate Sid James, who in real life was cuckolding Hancock. Sid bore an incongruous resemblance to Benjamin Britten, whose operas, the greatest works of music of our times–Billy Budd, 1951, Gloriana, 1953, The Turn of the Screw, 1954–were contemporaneous with Hancock’s Half Hour.
Whether he was being a radio ham or a blood donor, or simply musing in 23 Railway Cuttings on the sadness of what might have been, Hancock was programmed, like his country, to failure and self-pity. One of his most touching failures–and it is only just a failure–was the feature film he made–The Punch and Judy Man (1962). In the film, his wife’s desire to better herself, and the scorn they meet at the hands of the snooty middle-class elders of a seaside town, turns to farce. It is a self-parodying lament for a Britain which was doomed. Now, when we look at Hancock’s eternally middle-aged face, even at photographs taken in the early 1950s when he was still young in years, we can see the self-destructive rage which in the summer of 1968 would lead to the overdose of barbiturates washed down with vodka in a Sydney flat. We can feel no surprise that so many of Hancock’s contemporaries wanted not merely to change but to obliterate the sad old place which provided the backdrop for such hemmed-in existences.
‘Go not after other gods’ was not advice which many Britons could be expected to heed when allured by the temptations of Elizabeth David’s gastronomic rhapsodies, or the sexual allure of Brigitte Bardot or Marilyn Monroe.
When Elizabeth David (1913–92) began to write her cookery articles for Harper’s Bazaar, they must have read to many readers like fantasy. (When Ivy Compton-Burnett, a comfortably well-heeled maiden lady sharing her life with the upper-middle-class furniture historian Margaret Jourdain, was given a bottle of champagne at this period, she asked plaintively, ‘D’you heat it?’3) Elizabeth David wrote of aubergines at a time when such a vegetable was not to be seen outside the more exotic street markets of Soho and the Food Hall of Selfridges where, when in London, she went shopping. She wrote of olive oil when most Britons still bought this commodity in tiny bottles from the chemist. It was for massaging babies and loosening ear wax, not for preparing salad.
Yet for all her sophistication, Elizabeth David was a woman of her time. She recommended the use of Knorr stock cubes, and she never saw the point of coffee: having developed a taste for Nescafé during the war, she ‘never wished for anything better’.4 But she was a revolutionary. She did more good for the British table and the British palate than anyone of the twentieth century. But, rather like her contemporary Lawrence Durrell, whose Alexandria novels enjoyed such a vogue in the fifties before being everlastingly forgotten, they looked always to abroad for their pleasure. Britain, as it discovered some time in the 1980s, partly thanks to the Prince of Wales, had a rich gastronomic tradition which had only been interrupted by the war. A Stilton cheese, or a good Cheddar, rivals any cheese in France. English strawberries or English peaches are as succulent and delicious as anything eaten in Greece to the sound of cicadas. But Elizabeth David showed no consciousness of the fact.
A Book of Mediterranean Food (published in 1950) had been much more than a collection of recipes. It was a manifesto, which on its opening page quoted Michel Boulestin’s challenging view that ‘It is not really an exaggeration to say that peace and happiness begin, geographically, where garlic is used in cooking.’ In a Britain where food was still rationed (tea until 1952), and which in many quarters had all but forgotten how to cook, she evoked the smell and taste of another world–‘the oil, the saffron, the garlic, the pungent local wines; the aromatic perfume of rosemary, wild marjoram and basil…the brilliance of the market stalls piled high with pimentos, aubergines, tomatoes, olives, melons, figs…the great heaps of shiny fish, silver, vermilion, or tiger-striped, and those long needle fish whose bones mysteriously turn green when they are cooked’.
Her Italian Food was chosen by Evelyn Waugh as a favourite book of the year in the Sunday Times of 1954.5 It was one of those books, together with her French Country Cooking and French Provincial Cooking, which were not merely collections of recipes, but sustained essays upon the delights of food, and evocations of the beautiful, colourful places where the recipes were born. Many copies of these books remained beside the beds of those, such as Evelyn Waugh, who admired their prose and the scents and tastes it evoked. Far more copies, however, were to be found in kitchens. Little by little, their pages would be stained with spatterings of tomato, oil and stock. Even by 1955, she could address the problem of availability in a reissue of A Book of Mediterranean Food in Penguin: ‘So startlingly different is the food situation now as compared with only two years ago that I think there is scarcely a single ingredient, however exotic, mentioned in this book which cannot be obtained somewhere in this country’6… Philip Larkin, uncrowned laureate of provincial England, once remarked7 that he knew the end of England had come when croissants reached Beverley in Yorkshire, though his friend Barbara Pym, whose sad, pinched little novels for and about church spinsters of both sexes he championed and enjoyed, liked to read Elizabeth David in bed. (Her books evoked the duller pleasures of preparing macaroni cheese and baked beans on toast.)
Elizabeth David herself came across in her books more as a voice, and a strongly held point of view, than a character–though we now know, from her biographers, the strengths and vulnerabilities of her personality. She never exploited the emergent medium of television to show off her skills, either as food historian or kitchen performer. Fanny Cradock showed no such diffidence. She took understandable pride in the fact that in 1956, before an audience of 6,500 Daily Telegraph readers in the Royal Albert Hall, the Queen Mother said that she thought the post-war improvement in the standard of British cuisine was the responsibility of Fanny Cradock and her husband, Johnny.8
Cradock, who was guyed on the wireless comedy shows Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne as Fanny Haddock, was one of those characteristic figures of our age who defied parody and whose own self-projection was far more ridiculous than anything satirists could devise. Her surgically lifted face gave her an expression of everlastingly indignant, frozen amazement, and she had been prepared to undergo plastic surgery on her nose when technicians told her it was ‘too big’ and was ‘casting shadows over the food’. Although she expressed the aim (for which the Queen Mother was to applaud her) ‘to make good cookery easy and fun for the post-war generation of housewives, who had grown up during the years of food shortages’, there was never much sense–as there was in the televised cookery lessons of the bearded Philip Harben, for example–that viewers were expected actually to try the elaborate recipes, and table settings, upon which Mrs Cradock insisted. The pleasures of her programme, like those of Nigella Lawson in a later era, were voyeuristic rather than gastronomic. Fanny dressed for dinner before cooking it, and hovering at her side was Johnny Cradock, her third husband, a put-upon Old Harrovian who poured, and sometimes commented upon, the wine. Rather as in the case of Gilbert Harding, another television ‘personality’ of the same era, part of Cradock’s appeal was her irascibility. ‘I have always been extremely rude, and I have always got exactly what I wanted.’
The Cradocks, their accents and their clothes, were really a species of vaudeville as much as they were apostles of good food. Like their admirer Queen Elizabeth, they appeared to belong to the pre-war world of deference and camp fantasy which the Second World War and the Attlee government had effectively made obsolete. Like those who read Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited–and even more, those who watched it televised in 1981–the great majority of fans did not aspire to belong to the grandeur enacted.
Those who did still exist at the top of the social hierarchy could no doubt sniff, through all Fanny Cradock’s grand phrases, the mothbally odours of the shabby genteel. The arcane rituals of the Season–presentation of debutantes at Buckingham Palace, Queen Charlotte’s Ball, and all its attendant cocktail parties and dinners–continued throughout the post-war years until, in 1958, the Royal Family themselves decided that enough was enough. One thousand four hundred and forty-one debutantes were presented at Buckingham Palace in that last year, but a much smaller number remained in London to ‘do’ the Season. One of them, Fiona MacCarthy, who wrote a witty account of the whole matter–Last Curtsey–made the telling point that the controlled mating rituals no longer corresponded to any form of reality. This was not how women of the period wished to find husbands. Many had already lost their virginity, and most wanted to do something more interesting with their lives than had been permitted to their mothers. Even if The Female Eunuch had yet to be written, ‘there was a vociferous debate over the next few years on what it meant to be a woman’.9
Not only did the mothers of the debutantes seem to their daughters to be caught in a pointless trap of self-imposed limitations (‘The generations of our mothers accepted they were wives and mothers and that was that’10), but they were also imprisoned–as their daughters for the most part did not entirely wish to be–by class.
For men, class differences were sometimes ironed out and sometimes exacerbated by National Service. Two years’ military service was compulsory from 1947 (the National Service Bill) until 1962.11 It was the last period in British history when male members of quite different classes were forced to be together. Evelyn Waugh’s son Auberon remembered his period of training at Caterham as a time of ‘simple physical torture–being made to run, with bursting lungs, round a track, carrying a Bren gun over my head as a form of punishment; after being injected with TAB (anti-typhus vaccine); being drilled in double time for half an hour in pyjamas to the latrine (or shithouse); being screamed at by a drill sergeant in front of the whole battalion for having dirty flesh on parade (a shaving cut) and doubled off the parade ground…The only useful lesson I learnt at Caterham concerned the resentment and hatred of large sections of the working class for such as myself.’12
There is no reason to doubt his testimony, though not everyone felt inspired by the hatred to devote a lifetime to class warfare. Nicholas Harman, an Etonian, later a journalist on The Economist, remembered being told at Caterham, by a Scouser in the barrack room, that he had been talking in his sleep. ‘I said, “Really sorry, don’t think so,” and he said, “Well, it was either you or McGuinness, you both talk funny.” Later, in Korea, Harman’s platoon sergeant in the Royal Fusiliers, who during the Second World War had been a temporary captain in an Indian regiment, said he liked the British army because you could tell an officer even in the dark by the way he spoke.’13
Whether National Service inspired the young men to look forward to a bright future in which all classes could work together, or whether it fostered class resentment, perhaps depended upon the temperaments of those concerned. As a social phenomenon, it neatly mopped up a class of people whom Marx, in Capital, termed the lumpenproletariat–rendered in the charming translation of Eden and Cedar Paul ‘the tatterdemalion or slum proletariat’. Marx divided the class into three–the able-bodied, the orphans and the pauper children, and the ‘demoralized, the degenerate, the unemployable’.14 In Leninist versions of the Marxist state, these people would find themselves in labour camps, or if possible exterminated. In Britain, throughout the nineteenth century, they had been cruelly dragooned into semi-slavery, either as factory hands or as domestic servants or foot soldiers. If they positively refused to work, they were consigned to the workhouse, and their life expectancy was extremely short, not more than forty years old in many cases.
The 1945 election had changed their position, and when National Service came to an end there would be removed the last disguise used by governments to hide the existence of these people from the rest. The only humane course of action was to pursue the optimistic course that those labelled ‘demoralized degenerate and unemployable’ by Karl Marx might, in a liberal democracy, be educated to a level where they would soon move on happy and equal terms with the rest. By 2008, after more than half a century of beneficent state education, 30,000 British school children per annum were leaving school with no qualifications at all.15 In the fifty previous years, the rest of society would have been performing the optimistic and charitable task of sending these people to school, trying to persuade them to eat wholesome food, and extending their lives, in spite of their habits of smoking and drinking, to the point where they would require, along life’s path, expensive prisons, hospitals and eventually old folks’ care homes specially built for them. No public figure in our times ever quite learnt how to solve this problem, for those whose forebears, in harsher times, had led lives which were nasty, brutish and short. Almost no one in public life, in fact, was impolite enough to see it as a problem at all, though as the ranks of the lumpenproletariat in all senses swelled–becoming both more numerous and more obese–it was not a phenomenon which it was easy to ignore. The kindly minded lawmakers and formers of opinion of the period, not all of them socialists, hoped for some way of improving the lot of everyone in society, and would echo the aspiration of Miss Luke, the schoolmistress in an I. Compton-Burnett novel, who says, ‘I have spent my life amongst educated and intelligent people…I pay the rightful homage of the highly civilized…to those whose lives are spent at the base of civilisation.’16 There had never been a time in history when everyone else–from the working classes to the classes at the top of the economic scale–had been compelled through decency to live as if the ‘unemployable’ were just like everyone else. The experiment, or illusion (depending upon viewpoint), would colour the years which followed.
Certainly, after National Service was phased out, and the economic revival made evident the gaps between talents and opportunities, the artificially close social cohesion, which had been an unwonted feature of British life since the beginning of the Second World War, began to come apart.
An early warning signal came with the change in the musical scene. Rock’n’ roll was the expressive African American slang for sexual intercourse. The phrase soon became synonymous with music of a kind never heard before on this planet; music which, when amplified electrically, could be used to numb the senses, to subdue the critical faculties, even to torture non-Western enemies. In the 2002–7 invasion of Iraq, prisoners were tortured by constant exposure to loud rock music, a form of mental blasting which was the recreational physical-cum-mental background noise for a majority of Western young people. In the West, rock’n’ roll, and its various variations and descendants–rock, heavy metal, etc–became the music of the age. Bill Haley and His Comets exemplified the northern band rock’n’ roll which was initially the music’s most popular form in England–though Memphis country rock, as popularised by Elvis Presley, would soon overtake it.17 Having started as an innovation among black working-class American youth, rock music was destined to become the common lingua franca of our times, the noise coming from loudspeakers in every country on the planet. No other form of music has ever had this degree of universality. In every country where rock music became the norm, it drove out indigenous musical forms. It took a mere generation in Ireland, for example, for the extinction of songs which had been learnt over hundreds of years. Once the pied piper’s rock muzak had been installed in an Irish bar, just as in a bar in Melbourne or Singapore or Buenos Aires or Swindon, the young would follow it, leaving behind the native tradition, the old stories and songs which had been inside the heads of their forefathers. Although fans of rock music do know the lyrics of their favourite numbers, they can never in their own, unamplified persons ever hope to reproduce the sound exactly. In all previous generations of the human race, music was collective and it was an activity. If you went to the pub or the music hall, you sang. You joined in. Rock music was the first purely passive musical form. It was something which happened to you. You gyrated and shook to it, as to the shamanic summons of a witch-doctor, but you could not exactly sing along to it. You were not part of the music, as you might when singing ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’ around the pub piano. You were the music’s victim. And this was designedly so, since the 1950s was the first decade in which children and adolescents–now for the first time in history given the name of teenagers–had any money.
Previously, boys and girls of sixteen dressed as their parents dressed, and danced to the same music. Now, for anyone who chose to make money out of them, they could be offered special young persons’ clothes, young persons’ music.
Just as Elizabeth David tempted English palates with Mediterranean food, and English ears accustomed themselves to American music, so British sex symbols were required not to be attractive in themselves, so much as to be ‘the British answer to Marilyn Monroe’–sometimes to Brigitte Bardot.
Diana Mary Fluck was born in the railway town of Swindon in 1931. As a teenager she had dated Desmond Morris, also from Swindon and later famous as the author of The Naked Ape, a zoologist and anthropologist. Her name was so obviously in danger of mispronunciation that she changed it to Diana Dors. After she became famous, she agreed to open a church fete in her native town. The vicar of Swindon, in his desperation to avoid just such a mispronunciation, was guided by a malign misfortune to avoid the wrong obscenity. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great pleasure that I introduce to you our star guest. We all love her, especially as she is our local girl. I therefore feel it right to introduce her by her real name: Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the very lovely Miss Diana Clunt.’18
Her many films, and her occasional ventures into print, did not suggest coyness about sex. Films included Good Time Girl (1948), Lady Godiva Rides Again (1951), Yield to the Night (1956), The Love Specialist (1956) and many others, teetering off beyond the borders of suggestiveness with Adventures of a Taxi Driver and Keep It Up Downstairs.
What was striking about her was not her name, but the notion that in this era of history a rising English sex bomb had to model herself on foreigners. ‘Things were complicated’, she wrote in For Adults Only, ‘as we all seemed to have double initials, such as B.B., in her [Brigitte Bardot’s] case, D.D. in mine, M.M. as in Marilyn Monroe herself.’19 It was Dors’s misfortune to lack the smallest scintilla of Bardot’s or Monroe’s sex appeal. In spite of having dyed her hair blonde, and in spite of preparedness to show off enormous breasts, she had a coarse, puddingy face and no acting ability. ‘Since I left school at thirteen I have been working for a certain standard of living’ also seemed a spectacularly unsexy and joyless approach to stardom. ‘Once I’d got it, I saw no reason to give it all up. Luxury is comfortable, it’s good for you, it’s luxurious.’20
Just as Swindon-born sex symbols now had to take their cue from Hollywood, so religious revival itself, were it ever to occur in the godless, post-war atmosphere of Britain, came from across the Atlantic. When Billy Graham came over to Britain in 1954, he addressed the largest religious congregation yet seen in the British Isles: 120,000 people, crowded into the Wembley Arena. For the previous three months, Billy Graham had conducted what amounted to a missionary campaign to convert England to a completely un-English form of religion. Although it was always his policy to advise converts to seek out the church of their own background, whether Methodist, Church of England or Roman Catholic, rather than enlisting them as recruits in his own Baptist Church, Billy’s 1954 mission had an aim which went beyond the desire for the personal conversion of the sinner. He wanted England to become part of a universal religious resistance to the threats of world communism. He wanted England to become more like the middle- and working-class America which were the most fructiferous areas of Graham’s vineyard. ‘There will always be an England. But will it always be the England we have known?’ he asked. ‘The England of history has been an England whose life, both national and individual, was ever centred upon the things of God.’21
While there were some reasons for supporting this suggestion–the fact that the world had only the previous year witnessed an ancient coronation ceremony in which the young Queen was anointed with the oil of chrism by the former headmaster of Repton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher; the fact that bishops sat ex officio as members of the Upper House of Parliament; the fact that so many English schools were of a specifically religious foundation–it would be hard, since the 1689 Whig Revolution, to match Billy’s words to the England of John Locke, of the four Georges, of Dickens, John Stuart Mill and Disraeli, of Marie Lloyd and Tony Hancock. Naturally, some inhabitants of these islands, once evangelised by the Celtic saints and later by Benedictine monks, had centred themselves upon ‘the things of God’. But while individuals–including some of the individuals named above–were so centred, there remained a bedrock of British indifferentism, not merely in religion, but also in music: had not a German visitor deemed it Das Land ohne Musik? It was not a place where you wore your heart on your sleeve.
But for Billy, England had suffered something tragic in the war years of 1940–45. This was not the loss of its Imperial world power or the ruination of its exchequer, both of which had been the specific war aims of US President Roosevelt and US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jnr, but something more nebulous. According to Graham, ‘Through fear-haunted days and never-ending nights, the German bombs turned England’s homes and churches into fire-blackened heaps of rubble. And when the war ended, a sense of frustration and disillusionment gripped England, and what Hitler’s bomb could not do, Socialism with its accompanying evils shortly accomplished.’
There were voices raised against this interpretation of recent events. ‘Apologize, Billy–or Stay Away,’ called out the Daily Herald, when it reported these words of the evangelist on Saturday 20 February.22 But Graham did not apologise. The fact that some members of the socialist Cabinet, such as Stafford Cripps and Frank Longford, had been Christians, whereas the present Prime Minister, old Sir Winston Churchill, was an unreconstituted Victorian unbeliever, was not allowed to get in the way of a piece of good rhetoric. Addressing an audience at Central Hall in Westminster shortly after his arrival, Billy announced: ‘President Eisenhower was right when he said we must have a spiritual awakening if the Western World is to survive. And Sir Winston Churchill has said he wonders whether our problems have not got beyond our control–I am going to preach a gospel not of despair but of hope–hope for the individual, for society and for the world.’23
It was a time when any English boy or girl who wanted to be a cowboy emulated the somewhat anodyne Roy Rogers. The privileged child would even possess a fringed Roy Rogers hat, waistcoat and sheriff’s badge, and a Roy Rogers CA-gun in a Roy Rogers holster. ‘Roy Rogers is coming to London for the crusade,’ said Dr Graham, ‘at his own expense. He has a tremendous influence on boys and girls, and I think his Christian testimony is a wonderful opportunity of [sic] getting them interested in church and Sunday school.’
Did the Evangelical Alliance chaired by Major General D. J. Wilson-Haffendon (‘Haffy’) get quite what it had bargained for when it invited Dr Graham to England? Haffy was a Victorian throwback, as were most of those who still counted for anything in England, men such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Geoffrey Fisher, the Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, or the Poet Laureate, John Masefield. Haffy had been a staff officer for thirty years in the Indian Army. He guaranteed that Billy Graham would, in the course of his visits, be given such dinners at the House of Commons, the Café Royal and Claridge’s as might have graced the pages of a novel by Trollope. The Earls of Cottenham and Cavan, the Viscounts Bridgeman and Newport, the Bishops of Worcester and Barking were in attendance. Somehow, however, the particular brand of Christianity Dr Graham brought to England was not of a native kind. As the assemblies filled the seats at Harringay Arena, and eventually as the throngs grew at Wembley, Billy would introduce his fellow Americans who sat with him on the podium. Former US Air Force Senator Stuart Symington (Democrat) and Senator Styles Bridges (Republican). There, too, was the gigantic Don Morrow, a leading figure in American football now destined for the Presbyterian ministry.24
Perhaps only those who heard Billy Graham speak could imagine the effect. He was one of those orators of whom Bill Clinton in small, Adolf Hitler in large, degree were two, capable of swaying the emotions of crowds by something which seems close to hypnotism. During the latter part of the Harringay mission one of the organisers remarked that if Billy Graham ended his sermon by reading out the multiplication tables and then gave the invitation, the people would still come.25 This was an allusion to the moment in every Billy Graham rally when, after the sermon, and the playing of ‘mood music’, the crowds are invited to swoon forward and give themselves to Christ, as the choir raised their voices…
Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine
This is my story, this is my song,
Praising my Saviour, all the day long!
Compared with the millions who tuned in to Hancock’s Half Hour, the thousands who gave themselves to Christ at Billy’s rallies were small in number. But The Economist, on 22 May 1954, commented, ‘The appeal is to emotion which, as every dictator knows, will snowball its way through a crowd. Yet Mr Graham does not produce mass hysteria, although he is certainly dramatic, as he lunges about the stage taking by turns the roles in the Fall of Adam and Eve…Anglican parsons will shudder at the thought they should emulate his technique even if they could. But though they rightly preserve the intellectual tradition that has always been theirs, they can hardly ignore the fact that it is Mr Graham who seems to be on the wavelength.’26
Was it possible that The Economist had alerted its readers to the social and historical significance of these rallies in London sports arenas? Great Britain was not on the verge of a religious revival. In fact, from the 1950s onwards, allegiance to any of the major Christian denominations, with occasional blips in the graph, would be in steady decline. There was, however, a distinct change in the air. The ‘intellectual tradition’ of which the ‘Anglican parsons’ formed a part was something which went back to the seventeenth century, when modern England truly began. To the period after the civil wars, and after the restoration of Charles II in 1660, belonged a crucial few decades in which were forged the political, economic, educational and religious fabric of the nation. The Church by law established, with the monarch as its Supreme Governor, chose to be Episcopal; and in the 1950s, the bishops, in their lawn sleeves, continued to sit in the House of Lords; the liturgy, framed in 1662, continued to be the only lawful form of service in established churches, and it was that to which the huge majority of parishes, schools and colleges adhered. The Bank of England, founded in the late seventeenth century, and the City of London, with all its companies, and guilds, and the Stock Exchange, remained independently British, and was the source of the nation’s wealth. That system of capital and credit allied to an essentially Whig-aristocrat form of government was the basis of the British success story, both in its European wars against first the Bourbons and later Napoleon, and in its colonial and Imperialist expansion across the globe. To this late seventeenth-century period, too, belonged the foundation of the Royal Society, the beginnings of modern science, the astounding advances in physics and chemistry made by the likes of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.
The ancient Greeks had, among the great range and succession of their divinities, worshipped two gods who represented fundamentally opposed principles of life. Many cultural historians saw in this tension, between the worship of the god Apollo, and the worship of Dionysus, a key to why Greece had excelled, both as the ancestor of modern political stability, the cauldron of notions of stable statecraft, and also the origin of the great European literature and the birth of tragedy. Apollo, whose epithet Phoebus means radiant, is always represented as a young athlete. His cult was associated with military and athletic training, with discipline, and with ideas of responsible citizenship. He was also the god of music, an art form which depends upon rules. When Marsyas the shepherd thought he could make art by ‘letting it all hang out’, he was forced to sacrifice himself to Apollo; he was flayed, his skin removed, a painful reminder to worshippers of the god that beauty and art, like political systems and military skill, come from discipline, order, degree. Apollo was the god who guided the hand of John Locke and the English Enlightenment, and who kept the British electorate voting for the ‘boring’ political parties, while the rest of Europe lurched from the extremes of fascism and communism. Apollo, too, guided the British idea of humour, which was based on irony, on doggedness, on courage in the face of overwhelming hostility, such as was demonstrated by Hitler in the 1939–45 war.
The god seen as representing an opposing principle to the orderliness of Apollo was the god of wine, Dionysus, known to the Romans as Bacchus. He was bisexual and bispecial, which is why he came to be seen as a type of Christ, the God-Man. Bacchus/Dionysus was both male and female, human/divine and animal. His followers worked themselves into frenzies. Rules, boundaries and systems, for Dionysus and his followers, existed in order to be transcended or destroyed. Human beings under the influence of drink, drugs or mass hysteria have become the servants of Dionysus. The Greeks channelled the worship of Dionysus to certain periods of the year (one of them, obviously, being the wine harvest) and to certain rituals, which included those of emotional chaos which came to be known as tragedy and comedy. Theatre was the creation of Dionysus.
Dionysus was a god who came and went. He was not always present. His cult in ancient Athens was evidence of the human need to explore, and expose, the sources of our fears, lusts, rages; to dramatise, and thereby come to terms with, the sexual and familial histories which we all carry about with us. But when the festival was over, the worshippers of Dionysus would go back to the altars of Apollo, to reason, to order, to grammar, to the punishment of wrongdoing and the discipline of mind, body and society.
England in the 1950s did not realise it, but it was in the process of closing down the temples of Apollo, and handing over its worship to Dionysus.
Behind all this, there existed a concept of self- and political control which was fundamental to the British Enlightenment. To Billy Graham, the great philosopher Bishop Butler might have said, as he said to John Wesley, ‘Sir, the pretending to gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing.’27