It was a violent decade, which saw the murder of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States; the fatal stabbing of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in South Africa; and the grotesque murder of Sharon Tate with four friends in Beverly Hills, followed by the murder of Leno Lo Bianca in the same district. Charles Manson, a charismatic hippy, was found guilty of the crimes. It was the decade of the Vietnam War, in which the South Vietnamese lost 150,000 lives (400,000 wounded), the North Vietnamese 100,000 (300,000 wounded) and the United States military 45,941 (300,635 wounded). The reactions in Europe and America to the war were not all of a pacifist character. There was street fighting and rioting in London, Paris, Washington and Chicago. In Northern Ireland, the Troubles escalated and in Czechoslovakia (20 August 1968) Soviet tanks threatened a repeat of Hungary, 1956, when they entered Prague and brought to an end the benign reforms of Dubc'ek. So for all the summer of love and the love-ins and the everlasting songs, it was a blood-spattered, confused time. Peter Weiss’s 1964 play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade was the archetype of the Theatre of Cruelty. The convulsions would seem to many apocalyptic, as if some rough beast were to be born, as in Yeats’s horrific prophecy; perhaps as if Dostoyevsky too was right to have foreseen a time when, God having been discarded, anything would be deemed permissible.
In Britain, the practice of hanging criminals was discontinued. Revulsion against the ghoulish ritual had been growing ever since the Second World War, particularly in the prison service itself, where the doctor, the chaplain in full canonicals, and prison officers, together with the governor assembled to watch the hangman demonstrate his skills. Albert Pierrepoint (1905–92) was the most prolific exponent of the art. He had taken part in his first hanging when he assisted his uncle Tom hang Patrick McDermott at Mountjoy Prison in Dublin on 29 December 1932. He believed himself to be the swiftest in the business, executing James Inglis on 8 May 1951 at Strangeways Prison in Manchester in a mere seven seconds. In all, he executed an estimated 433 men and 17 women in the course of his career, including 200 war criminals at Hameln Prison in the British-controlled sector of Germany after the Second World War, the celebrated pro-Nazis John Amery, who was hanged at Wandsworth in December 1945, and William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, the Irish-American Nazi broadcaster who, in spite of not being a British subject, was hanged for treason at Wandsworth on 4 January 1946. Pierrepont also hanged Derek Bentley (28 January 1953 at Wandsworth). Bentley, who had the mental age of eleven after a head injury sustained during the war, shot a policeman. He was out with Christopher Craig, who shouted out the words ‘Let him have it!’ before Bentley pulled the trigger. On 30 July 1998, the Appeal Court finally ruled (after forty-five years of campaigning by his father, sister Iris and, since Iris’s death the previous year, by her daughter, Maria Bentley Dingwall) that his conviction was unsafe.
Pierrepont also hanged Timothy John Evans for murdering his wife at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill–a crime for which he was posthumously pardoned, when John Reginald Christie (hanged Pentonville Prison, 15 July 1953) was condemned for murdering seven women at that address. He also hanged the pathetic Ruth Ellis on 13 July 1955 at Holloway Prison; a mother of two who shot her lover in a crime passionnel, hers was a case which shocked the public and did much to alter the mood about capital punishment.
When Harold Wilson’s first government came in, the death penalty was suspended; the Private Members’ Bill to do so (sponsored by Sydney Silverman MP) received Royal Assent on 9 November 1965, suspending the death penalty for a period of five years and in effect abolishing it. The last two executions in Britain were carried out simultaneously in Walton and Strangeways prisons (the former in Liverpool) when Peter Anthony Alen and Gwynne Owen Evans (real name John Robson Walby) were hanged for the murder of a laundry man by the name of John West.
Even while these liberal laws were being passed in London, to the immense relief of Christians who questioned the legitimacy, and humanists who deplored the indecency, of hanging, murders were taking place.
Ian Brady worked at Burlington Warehouses, a big catalogue company in the middle of Manchester. Myra Hindley got a job there as a typist, and soon fell under Brady’s hypnotic sexual allure. Quite early on in their relationship, he persuaded her to buy a tape recorder, then (1961) a newfangled device only recently on the market.
Hindley was not herself unintelligent (she’d turned down a place at a teacher training college because she wanted to start earning her living as a secretary) and Brady gave himself intellectual airs, reading Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, alongside Harold Robbins’s The Carpetbaggers, with its message that rape and incest were exciting.1 He liked playing a tape of Hitler’s speeches. His copy of The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade is now preserved in the National Archives at Kew, because Hindley and Brady were the most notorious British murderers of the twentieth century.
He began with simple beating. She had discovered, once she became his lover, that he was a sadist and he easily initiated her into the ideas and appetites which that involved. They liked stalking unknown men in pubs and, when they found them in a darkened spot, giving them ‘punishment’ beatings. In bed, they fantasised about the perfect murder.2 They got hold of a friend’s van and enjoyed driving round contemplating their first murder. The killings were meticulously planned, with Brady carefully counting all the buttons on his clothes and listing all the items of clothing which would have to be burned when the deed was done. Their first victim was Pauline Reade, whom Myra Hindley had known since childhood, and whom they picked up as she was walking along the street in broad daylight. Brady raped her and killed her with a knife, and then Hindley drove them to the moors to bury the body. ‘If you’d shown any signs of backing out you’d have ended up in the same hole as her,’ he said. ‘I know,’ was her reply.3 That was 12 July 1963.
Ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey was probably the next victim. Once again, the murder was carefully planned in advance. They would find a victim and get ‘it’ to help carry some boxes to the back of the van. They found Lesley Ann at a fairground, as they staggered about with boxes of food and drink. Lesley Ann’s cry–‘Please, Dad, no!’–was carefully recorded on the newfangled tape recorder. Myra turned up Radio Luxembourg to drown the noise while Brady raped the child. Brady photographed his victim, and the next day they drove to the moors to bury the body.
By the time they were brought to trial at Chester Assizes for what had come to be known as the ‘Moors Murders’, on 27 April 1966, the police knew of just three killings–Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans, aged seventeen, and Pauline Reade. Brady was also convicted of the murder of twelve-year-old John Kilbride. After the murderers had been imprisoned for life, it became clear that there were other victims.
Naturally the case excited interest, much of it extremely prurient. The tape recorder had enabled the jury, and those in the public gallery, to hear Brady and Hindley torturing their victim. Pamela Hansford Johnson, novelist wife of C. P. Snow, attended the trials and wrote a book4 claiming that Brady and Hindley were the product of what had come to be known as the ‘permissive’ societ.4 But what society had ever permitted crimes such as theirs? Another writer, Emlyn Williams, the Welsh playwright, wrote an account of the murders, Beyond Belief, which must have left readers with the queasy sensation that he had enjoyed the shock and horror which he professed so to abominate.
Most of Brady and Hindley’s crimes were committed before the abolition of the death penalty. If anyone deserved to hang, was it not they? The debate between advocates and opponents of a death penalty continued in Britain until membership of the European Union (which bans capital punishment in its member states) made it a non-issue. After abolition in Britain, the rates of murder increased steadily. In 1957, there were fewer than sixty offences committed which, under the term of the current legislation, would have merited death. By 1968, this number had crept up to a little less than one hundred. By 2004, there were over nine hundred murders a year.
In the case of Hindley and Brady, however, the arguments were less about deterrence than about the need for ‘closure’. They began their career of torture and murder before hanging was abolished, so they knew what they risked: it probably increased the thrill. As it was, they were sentenced to life imprisonment, Brady to a psychiatric prison–Broadmoor–and Hindley to a series of women’s gaols. Hanging them would not have brought back their victims. For some people, who certainly include their victims’ families, however, the ritual of violence, and the fact that the story was given an ending, would have provided, if not consolation, a degree of satisfaction.
A man for whom such sentiments were abhorrent was the 7th Earl of Longford (1905–2001), who visited both Brady and Hindley in prison. After Hindley became a Roman Catholic and professed her penitence, Longford–himself a Roman convert–campaigned tirelessly for her release, thereby guaranteeing that she spent her life behind bars. The more he campaigned, the more the tabloid newspapers revealed stories of her attempted prison escapes, and her affairs with lesbian wardresses, while reminding the public of the enormity of her crimes.
Longford was a puzzling, lovable figure. Had he lived in the nineteenth century, he might well, like another 7th Earl, that of Shaftesbury, have enjoyed a reputation as the philanthropist and human benefactor that he undoubtedly was. It was not fair to claim, as did his detractors, that he was interested only in celebrity criminals, and in seeing his name in the newspapers (though his lust for publicity was part of his complex nature). He spent all his available spare time, deep into his old age, waiting on cold railway platforms to change trains, and scurrying across England, to visit any prisoner who asked to see him. Many of them were abusive to him. He never complained, believing quite simply that he was obeying the Gospel injunction that inasmuch as we have visited those who were sick or in prison, we have done so to Chris.5 He had been a don at Christ Church, Oxford–he taught politics, his colleague Roy Harrod economics, to, among others, the future Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson. Longford began as a Young Tory, but, having attended a rowdy Mosleyite rally at Oxford Town Hall, he was accidentally hit on the head by a chair and, when he came round, he was left wing. He had secretly become a Roman Catholic, under the influence of Father Martin d’Arcy SJ, without telling his clever, beautiful wife, Elizabeth, the biographer and historian. She saw him as Pierre in War and Peace. Others saw him, with his bald head often adorned by a patch of grubby Elastoplast, as at best a Holy Fool, at worst a deluded self-publicist. Whether or not it was true, there was an apocryphal story which appeared to sum up his paradoxical character: that of him going into a bookshop to protest that they had not displayed his book with sufficient prominence in the window. The book was a disquisition entitled Humility. Against this must be set the countless individuals to whom Longford provided their only hope of human contact when the criminal justice system seemed to have deserted them. In 1998 he caused a storm of protest among homosexual activists when, debating in the Upper House about lowering the age of consent for homosexuals, he said, ‘if someone seduced my daughter it would be damaging and horrifying but not fatal. She would recover, marry and have lots of children… On the other hand, if some elderly, or not so elderly, schoolmaster seduced one of my sons and taught him to be a homosexual, he would ruin him for life. That is the fundamental distinction.’
Beside this extremely unfashionable point of view, which certainly damned him in the eyes of those in 1998 who knew best, must be set the actual experiences of those who knew him. At Longford’s ninetieth birthday party at the House of Lords, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu said, with tears in his eyes, to a friend–‘When I came out of prison, no one would speak to me. I came to this place, and I was cut–until Frank came up and spoke to me.’6 He had been regular in his prison visits to Montagu when, after a celebrated court case, his fellow peer had been sent to prison in 1953. The title of Montagu’s autobiography, Wheels Within Wheels, alluded to his passion for veteran cars and the great collection of them at Beaulieu, his seat in Hampshire. It also, of course, alluded to the emotional and sexual complications of his reputation. He claimed in the book that he had been entirely innocent of the charges brought against him: ‘I had no qualms or hesitation about protesting my innocence. On the other hand I believe it was entirely wrong that such charges should have been levelled against anyone at all.’7 After his release from prison, Montagu went on to become a much-respected public figure, and as first chairman of English Heritage from 1983 onwards he did much to preserve the country’s historic architecture and environment. Indeed, it was the brutality of his sentence which helped, very slowly, to change the law in Britain.
During the August Bank Holiday of 1953, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, a young man aged twenty-seven, engaged to be married to Anne Gage, went swimming with his friend the film director Kenneth Hume. Some Boy Scouts had been camping in the grounds of Palace House on the Beaulieu River in Hampshire, which, together with his estate and his father’s title, Montagu had inherited when aged three in 1929.8
The two asked the young boys to join them for a swim. In the course of the day, Montagu’s camera was ‘stolen’ and there were subsequent suggestions that the camera was used for the purpose of blackmail. Montagu and Hume were charged by the local police with sexual assault upon the Boy Scouts. After the hearing at Lymington Magistrates Court on 7 November 1953, the case was heard a month later at Winchester Assizes. Montagu was acquitted of assault and not enough evidence had been produced to substantiate a second much more minor charge. The second charge, and Hume’s case, would be heard by the judge at the following Assizes in March.
Montagu had undoubtedly antagonised the police. When the Boy Scouts made their initial allegations, Montagu had flown to France to explain matters to his fiancée but there had subsequently been a hare-brained scheme for Montagu to avoid trial by going to live in America. He later came to believe that the police had ‘tampered’ with his passport to make it look as though he had visited England during the time he was actually in America, and failed to give himself up.
By the time of the next Winchester Assizes much more serious evidence had been brought against him and his gay cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers and another gay friend, the journalist Peter Wildeblood. It appears that, a year before Lord Montagu had invited the Boy Scouts for a swim, Pitt-Rivers and Wildeblood had used the beach hut at Beaulieu for encounters with two Royal Air Force orderlies by the names of John Reynolds and Edward McNally. The police persuaded Reynolds and McNally to ‘turn Queen’s evidence’ against Wildeblood, Pitt-Rivers and Lord Montagu, and they thereby had enough evidence with which to send the three to prison. The trial began on 15 March 1954 and by a strange irony The Times chose to report it in a column directly adjacent to an account of ‘an exhibition of manuscripts, letters, books, and miscellaneous items associated with Walt Whitman’, at the American Library in Grosvenor Square. While the American Ambassador Mr Winthrop Aldrich praised the lyrically homoerotic author of Leaves of Grass, Mr G. D. Roberts QC for the prosecution spoke of homosexuals as ‘perverts’ and ‘men of the lowest possible moral character’. This salacious tale began in March 1958 with McNally on leave from the RAF at Ely meeting Wildeblood in Piccadilly Circus Underground Station; they ‘smiled at one another and got into conversation’. McNally then came back to Wildeblood’s flat where ‘unnatural acts were committed mutually between them’. McNally returned for duty at the RAF, subsequently being posted to Blackpool, but he kept in touch with Wildeblood and held on to his highly prosecutable letters. In July he and a friend, John Reynolds, were introduced to Lord Montagu and invited to stay at the beach hut on the Beaulieu Estate. ‘McNally…said that when he mentioned his friend Reynolds Lord Montagu asked him if he (Reynolds) was “queer”. The witness replied that he was.’
The charges brought against Lord Montagu, Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood were that they ‘conspired together to incite John Reynolds and Edward McNally to commit acts of gross indecency with male persons’. Lord Montagu was further charged with having committed an offence with John Reynolds on 24 August 1952 and Wildeblood with having committed an offence on the same date with McNally.
Mr W. A. Fearnley-Whittingstall QC defending Lord Montagu said that were it not for recent events, ‘Lord Montagu today would have been a happily married man. That must be a devastating thought. He was a useful member of the House of Lords and a kindly landowner, he was faced with a bitter future.’
Part of the offensiveness, as far as the court was concerned, was that, as Edward Montagu’s sister later wrote, he had committed a terrible social impropriety by entertaining people of an inferior social class. Hence, in part, the fantasy that the three better-born men had needed to ‘incite’ the airmen to acts of indecency. There was undoubtedly a social, not to say political, dimension in the case; if it was not true to say that the police wanted to punish Edward Montagu in part for being a lord, there was probably an element of wishing to make an example of a well-known prosperous figure, pour encourager les autres. Lord Montagu himself always denied being homosexual at all. The case ended on 24 March with Wildeblood and Pitt-Rivers each being sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment and Montagu to twelve. The judge, Mr Justice Ormerod, described the offences as ‘serious’, but said he was offering the most lenient sentences allowed by the law. A call by Wildeblood’s lawyer, to the effect that he should be allowed a course of psychological medicine at the Middlesex Hospital, was rejected. Dr J. A. Hobson, a consultant physician, had given it as his view that ‘Wildeblood was not a typical type [sic] of homosexual [sic]. There was a better chance than in most cases of homosexuality [sic] of curing him by treatment.’ The plea, too, was rejected.
It had been a high-profile case, but by no means unique. Four hundred and eighty men were convicted in England and Wales during the three years ended March 1956 for homosexual offences committed with consenting adults in private. Most pleaded guilty, and most made written statements to the police admitting their offences. Inevitably, given the nature of the evidence and the difficulty of substantiating it, the police would have been unable to do their work without snooping, hiding in likely venues for gay ‘cruising’, such as parks or public lavatories; on occasion they posed as homosexuals and on occasion they indulged in such acts themselves before turning in their victim-partners.
But it was on 4 August 1954, while Lord Montagu was beginning to serve the fifth month of his prison sentence, that a committee was appointed by the government to submit a report on the law and practice relating to homosexual offences and prostitution. The chairman was a former public school headmaster (Uppingham, Shrewsbury) named John Wolfenden. He assembled a committee which included Canon Demant, the Anglo-Catholic moral theologian; Goronwy Rees, by then Principal of the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth; Lady Stopford, family doctor and magistrate; and others with legal and medical experience. Wolfenden had a double brief: to report on the law relating to prostitution and to look again at the question of homosexuality. ‘For the sake of the ladies’ on the committee, it was agreed that when referring to homosexuals they should say ‘Huntley’, and when talking of prostitutes they should say ‘Palmer’–as in Huntley and Palmer’s Biscuits.9 Their all but unanimous opinion (James Adair, former Procurator General for Glasgow, dissented), published in the Wolfenden Report of 3 September 1957,10 was that ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence’. Their report took ten years to be turned into law–the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. The Conservatives had dragged their feet over implementing Wolfenden and it was left to a courageous peer, ‘Boofy’ Arran, to introduce a bill calling for reform. The debate sparked some lively exchanges, with Lord Dilhorne (‘Bullying-Manner’) taunting the Archbishop of Canterbury about whether he favoured legalising the act of buggery, and the Chief Scout fearing the country would go the way of Greece and Rome,11 quite a good way to go if you imagined the Greece of Alcibiades or the Rome of Caesar, it might be thought. (The Archbishop was a liberal in favour of reform, but he did not admit to their Lordships’ House, as he once did to a private dinner when asked his view of homosexuality–‘Well.’ Long, long pause. ‘I tried it once.’ Long pause. ‘I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t try it again.’12) After the Lords debate, it was inevitable that the law would change. Germany decriminalised homosexuality in 1913, Russia in 1917. England, by doing so in 1967, was nonetheless in advance of some European countries, especially those where the Roman Catholic Church was dominant. (In Ireland, homosexuality was not decriminalised until 1993, a fact which perhaps lurks behind Captain Grimes’s mysterious comment, in Waugh’s Decline and Fall, that ‘you can’t get into the soup in Ireland, do what you like’.13) It was in 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders.14 The Church of England, in all its enlightened manifestations, had always known this, but in bringing the debate out into the open in the 1990s it smoked out some extraordinary bigotry within its own ranks and eventually caused the effective break-up of the worldwide Anglican Communion over the issue. So, it remained, throughout our times, a live issue, with many countries in the world, such as India and Uganda and Nigeria, retaining their ban on the activity.
Undoubtedly, the liberalisation of the laws governing sexual conduct brought to Britain a heady feeling of liberation. The old Tory world, which had been lampooned out of existence in 1964, was firmly knocked into its grave by the General Election of 1966, in which Harold Wilson won a second election victory. The ‘planned economy’ and the ‘white heat of the technological revolution’ would somehow pay the bills as public spending soared. The World Cup finals were held in England and England won. The football team, containing such figures as Bobby Charlton, Bobby Moore and Geoff Hurst, made everyone happy. Football is war without the blood. In a later, slightly more serious decade, the Argentine would be seen as a real enemy. In the World Cup of 1966 they were rivals, booted out in the quarter-finals. Alf Ramsey, the England manager, described the Argies as ‘animals’. That cheered everyone up, too. For, though everyone was supposed to be left wing, and sexually liberated, a little bit of xenophobia never failed to make the British smile. It took their minds off the grim realities of war in other parts of the globe. General William C. Westmoreland, US Commander in Vietnam, told his troops ‘to remove the people and destroy the villages’. While Bobby Charlton was restoring English amour propre, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, cheered on by young and not-so-young British lefties, was imprisoning the minds of millions, and leading to deaths and incarcerations which to this day are countless.
During the last summer of his life, playwright Joe Orton (1933–67) was walking from Islington to King’s Cross with his friend the actor and comedian Kenneth Williams (1926–87) and talking of sex. ‘“You must do whatever you like,” I said, “as long as you enjoy it and don’t hurt anyone else. That’s all that matters.”’ Williams quoted back Camus’s line, ‘All freedom is a threat to someone.’ He described a visit to an East End pub at which young men had clustered around him. ‘“Kaw! Ken, it’s legal now you know. And he started pulling his trousers down.”’ But Williams would have none of it. ‘“You should have seized your chance,” said Orton. “I know,” Kenneth said, “I just feel guilty about it all.” “Fucking Judaeo-Christian civilisation!” I said, in a furious voice, startling a passing pedestrian.’ Both men were destined to die unnaturally.15 Kenneth Williams took his own life in his bleak white flat near Great Portland Street Station in 1987. Orton was murdered by his lover, an unsuccessful actor named Kenneth Halliwell, two weeks after the conversation just quoted.
There was a studied frivolity, a need to see a passer-by startled as he denounced the Judaeo-Christian tradition. ‘Cleanse my heart’, he had prayed to a God in whom he did not believe, ‘give me the ability to rage correctly.’16
An early, and highly successful, attempt to spread mayhem among the respectable classes had resulted in the twenty-nine-year-old Orton–described as a ‘lens cleaner’ and his friend, later murderer, Halliwell, aged thirty-five–being found guilty at Old Street Magistrates Court for stealing seventy-two public library books and ‘wilfully’ damaging a number of books, including the removal of 1,653 art books. The pair were sent to prison for six months. In the first volume of Emlyn Williams’s plays the contents were amended to include dramas the Welshman never wrote, such as ‘Knickers Must Fall’, ‘Up the Front’, ‘Up the Back’ and ‘Fucked by Monty’. Dorothy L. Sayers’s mystery whodunnit would have surprised readers in the Islington Library by its blurb, beginning, ‘When little Betty Macdree says that she has been interfered with, her mother at first laughs. It is only something that the kiddy had picked up off television. But when sorting through the laundry, Mrs Macdree discovers a new pair of knickers are missing she thinks again.’17 Orton also delighted in spoof correspondences, often writing letters as ‘Mrs Edna Welthorpe’. Sometimes Edna was avant-garde, as when she wrote to the Heath Street Baptist Church, trying to persuade them to stage a play called The Pansy, ‘which pleads for greater tolerance on the subject of homosexuality’.18 Sometimes she is more puritanical, even writing to denounce the immoral plays of Joe Orton, or Horton as she mistakenly called him on occasion. (‘I myself was nauseated by this endless parade of mental and physical perversion.’)
Orton suggested that his library pranks were an act of revenge upon librarians, though members of that profession were not above book abuse. Strangely enough, in the same year that Orton and Halliwell were sent down, 1962, the librarian poet Philip Larkin and his girlfriend Monica Jones were having a holiday at Haydon Bridge, near Hexham, Northumberland, during which they enjoyed systematically defacing a copy of Iris Murdoch’s novel The Flight from the Enchanter–in the list of the author’s previous publications could now be found ‘UNDER THE NET her Garments’. Some originally innocent sentences were merely underlined–‘Today it seemed likely to be especially hard’. Others were altered so that, ‘Her lips were parted and he had never seen her eyes so wide open’ became ‘Her lips were parted and he had never seen her cunt so wide open.’19
The defaced library books were Orton’s first plays. The successes on the stage–Entertaining Mr Sloane, which was first presented in London at the New Arts Theatre on 6 May 1964, and Loot–at the Cochrane Theatre on 29 September 1966–were an extension of the same anarchic wit, the same sense of the intolerability of conventions. By the standards of a later age they would seem overwhelmingly misogynistic. The discovery of a woman’s dead body in Loot and her husband’s outraged feelings that she is in the nude nudge us towards the idea that all conventions of morality are absurd. As Hal, the son of the woman, stuffs stolen money into her coffin he remarks, ‘I shall accompany my father to Confession this evening in order to purge my soul of this afternoon’s events.’ ‘It is at times like this I regret not being a Catholic,’ says his friend. Hal retorts, ‘Afterwards, I’ll take you to a remarkable brothel I’ve found. Really remarkable. Run by three Pakistanis aged between ten and fifteen. They do it for sweets. Part of their religion. Meet me at seven. Stock up with Mars Bars.’
Though technical and comedic triumphs, nothing much lingered in the air after Orton’s plays were staged. John Osborne, by contrast, was a writer no less refreshingly angry than Orton but his plays are much more closely observed, more morally intelligent. One of the finest of them, Luther–Albert Finney took the title role at the first performance in 1961–dramatises the sense felt by practically all that generation, if they possessed any sensitivity to the state of things, that the status quo was intolerable. Osborne’s Luther could be seen in retrospect as a man of the 1960s. His ‘Here I stand; God help me; I can do no more, Amen’ at the Diet of Worms, 1521, spoke to a generation that, as individuals, felt no personal commitment to the political programmes on offer. Osborne might have been considered an iconoclast with his first play, Look Back in Anger. Some of his contemporaries deemed to be Angry Young Men–Kingsley Amis, John Braine–managed to step seamlessly into the personae of Right-Wing Bastards in what seemed like no time at all. Braine, a librarian from Bingley, wrote a bestseller called Room at the Top which was obsessed by the injustice of the class system. Braine never stopped being class conscious but a single visit to the United States was enough to make him abandon left-wingery. Explaining his change of heart to Donald Soper, a Methodist preacher who identified the teachings of Christ with those of the Labour Party, Braine said that America had come as a revelation. Here was a country where it did not matter if your father was rich or poor. You had a chance to get on, regardless of class. ‘And’, added Soper, ‘provided you aren’t black.’ Braine fixed his frog-like eyes, seen through thick spectacles, on to Soper’s conceited, eager face. ‘Of course I’m not black’, he rasped in his strong Yorkshire accent.
Kingsley Amis’s transition from member of the Communist Party to Garrick Club bore perhaps happened more gradually than Braine’s conversion, but it was no less absolute. The Angry Young Men called themselves Fascist Beasts when they met for their lunches at Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street and the jokey application is better than ‘Right Wing’, still less ‘Conservative’. Kingsley Amis remained class-chippy and godless, as did his great friend Larkin, who had never been tempted by any form of leftism. Osborne has much in common with them but was a toweringly more original and interesting writer. Just as Luther, in bold, colloquial language, rescued the Germans from formal religion (giving them back personal religion), so Osborne, greatest of the Angry Young Men, went on being angry as systems overpowered individuals. Where Luther had fought the Roman Church, Osborne punctured the pretensions of politics.
True nonconformity was a quality which Osborne saw as quintessentially English. In the 1960s there were many con artists purveying their Bohemian or anti-Establishment credentials who were in fact fiercely ambitious and cleverly opportunistic. They were the New Establishment in Waiting. Of such were the Beatles, never more New Establishment than when they pompously sent back the MBE which Harold Wilson, in a pathetic attempt to woo the younger voter, had recommended to the Sovereign should be theirs. Of such was John Mortimer, who combined the roles of fashionable QC with that of being a second-rate writer, and who would suck up to the New Establishment by his supposed daring in defending the obscene magazine Oz in 1971.
One of the most astute remarks ever made by Harold Macmillan was a reply to Anthony Wedgwood Benn in the House of Commons in 1960. Macmillan, then Prime Minister, had been persuaded by Hugh Trevor-Roper (later Lord Dacre) to stand for election as Chancellor of his old university, Oxford, against the former Ambassador to Washington, Sir Oliver Franks. After much intrigue and plotting of the sort which was Trevor-Roper’s lifeblood, Macmillan won–by 1,976 votes to 1,697. (The electors are the MAs of the university.) A few days later, Wedgwood Benn congratulated Macmillan in the House, ‘on having proved by his own tremendous victory in a ballot held in Latin, open for all to see, that the Establishment has nothing to learn from the Electrical Trades Union’. And here was Macmillan’s brilliant reply–‘Except that on this occasion, I think, the Establishment was beaten.’20 Here, the ‘Establishment’ meant the Foreign Office Mandarin, the Liberal who appealed to the academic world. But Macmillan could see that the 1960s were going to be a time when the Old Establishment was replaced by a rival group of would-be Establishments. England would never be quite the same again.
John Osborne, likewise, could see that the true rebels during the 1960s were not those who grew their hair or made exhibitionistic boasts about their sexual lives, but those who saw the damage being done to the world by town planners, spivs, bad architects, businessmen and politicians who believed in Growth. These were the ones who were ruining England, and being actively encouraged by the political classes to do so. Anyone who objected to a Georgian high street being pulled to bits and replaced with brutalist multi-storey car parks, or who thought that Victorian terraced streets were preferable to asbestos-polluted high-rise blocks on the East German pattern, must bear the label of fuddy-duddy. Of such was the great John Betjeman. When Max Miller, the genius of English music hall, the master of double entendre, died in 1963 (his jokes were all about sex but he never said a ‘dirty word’ on stage), Osborne burst into a threnody: ‘There’ll never be another, as old John Betjeman says, an English genius as pure gold as Dickens or Shakespeare–or Betjeman come to that. What did Trollope say–muddle-headed Johnny? It’s deep honesty that distinguishes a gentleman. He’s got it. He knows how to revel in life and have no expectations–and fear death at all times.’21 Osborne’s most poignant play, The Entertainer, was about a failed music hall entertainer, whose financial and emotional life implodes into chaos at the time of Suez.
Miller’s ethnic origins were Romany. The long-suffering wife of this promiscuous man lived in Brighton but his fellow Anglican and devoted admirer Betjeman liked the fact that Miller was a stout high churchman who attended Saint Bartholomew’s Church, Brighton (the tallest as well as one of the highest churches in the land), on ‘the greater festivals’.22
Betjeman revelled in such jokes, knowing that they were celebrations of a vanishing England. The music halls, and the Church, were doomed, which was why he loved both. And he fought long and often lonely battles for such architectural wonders as James Bunning’s Coal Exchange (demolished 1962) or the Arts and Crafts Bedford Park (which Betjeman saved from demolition in 1963). From his first emergence on to the social scene in the late 1920s, Betjeman had entranced such people as the Mitfords and the Guinnesses and the fading Irish aristocracy. Now, what had been reserved for drawing rooms in country houses, or Maurice Bowra’s rooms at Wadham, could be enacted on the television and everyone in England fell in love with him. But only a few saw how deadly serious was his desire to save what was left of old England before the spivs pulled it down. There was a mindlessness about the 1960s, a sheer silliness, which could not see the consequences of policies such as architectural vandalism.
At Orton’s funeral they played a tape of his favourite song, the Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’: ‘I read the news today, oh boy/About a lucky man who made the grade’.23
Many of the Beatles songs were about self-betterment, or about the fantasy, in the case of the Beatles themselves, of outsoaring provincial and class restrictions in order to hit the Big Time (‘Paperback Writer’, for example). No history of the period could overlook Beatlemania, though any history could afford to overlook the Beatles. They beat all records for sales in Britain and America.24 For most of the decade, until in 1969 they announced that they were breaking up the group, they could be sure of mobs of screaming fans every time they checked into a hotel or airport or turned up at a gig. They also had their serious musical admirers. On 23 December 1963, the music critic of The Times praised their ‘fresh and euphonious’ guitars in the song ‘Till There was You’, their ‘submediant switches from C major into A flat major’ and the ‘octave ascent’ in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. The critic continued, ‘One gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat-submediant key-switches, so natural is the Aeolian cadence at the end of “Not a Second Time” (the chord progression which ends Mahler’s “Song of the Earth”).’ Yet though the band produced some melodies which pass the memorability test–‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘Help!’ once heard stay in the head–the secret of their success is that they are rock music’s easy listening. The Beatles posed as rebels against class conventions and the supposedly stuffy mores of their elders, but their appeal was always to nice boys and girls, who would play their cherished Beatles LPs to their children when they paired off and settled down, enjoying the patronising sentimentality of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’.
The four who composed the group came from Liverpool. John Lennon had attended Quarry Bank Grammar School, Paul McCartney was educated at Wilson Hall, Garston. Lennon, with a skiffle group called the Quarrymen, met McCartney at a church fete in 1957. McCartney brought along his friend George Harrison to join the Quarrymen. They went through a number of names–Johnny and the Moondogs, Long John and the Beatles, the Silver Beatles, before settling on the Beatles in 1960. They sometimes used a drummer called Tommy Moore, who was much older than they were. In the end, however, Moore left the band and returned to his work as a forklift truck driver in a bottling factory. Eventually they settled as a quartet when Richard Starkey joined them as drummer, with the name Ringo Starr. Their best career move was when they engaged Brian Epstein as their manager. He failed to sell them to Decca, but he did persuade George Martin, who headed the Parlophone label for EMI, to take them on for a year’s contract. The first recording session was booked on 6 June 1962 at EMI’s Abbey Road studios in St John’s Wood, London.25 This did not produce a single recording which the company wanted to use, but they eventually came up with ‘Love Me Do’, and their career was made. Three months later the song ‘Please, Please Me’, an anthem of the age, would take them to further heights. By 1964 they were so popular that crowds of four thousand waved them goodbye from Heathrow Airport on their first trip to America. The crowds waiting for them at the other end, in the newly renamed JFK Airport, exceeded any that had been seen there.26
It was in New York that they met Bob Dylan, who introduced them to smoking pot. Dylan was in every way a superior artist and performer. His songs, rasped out in that distinctive snarling voice and interrupted by jerky mouth organ recitatives, truly did herald something new in the world–‘The Times They Are a Changin’, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, and countless others. The sung lyrics of Dylan are very nearly in the league of some of the great songs of the world, such as those of Robert Burns. The Beatles are pappy by comparison.
This fact, obvious to everyone else, was certainly not clear to the Beatles themselves, who, the moment they were famous, became invested with a risible degree of self-importance. Lennon was the most pretentious and self-regarding in this respect; the more he took drugs and made an exhibition of himself, the more he seemed to believe himself to be some kind of poet-sage or philosopher. Lennon’s own self-importance, however, was as nothing to that of his second wife, Yoko Ono. Describing herself sometimes as a sculptress, sometimes as a film-maker, a naked Yoko invited journalists and cameramen into the honeymoon suite of the Hilton Hotel, Amsterdam, when the pair married. They lay in bed being photographed, and offering such useful pieces of advice to the world as ‘Stay in bed’ and ‘Grow your hair’. They went further, and suggested that the violence which existed between South and North Vietnam, between the Arabs and Israelis, or between America and the Soviet Union, would evaporate were the politicians involved only to remove their trousers.
The pair’s moral and political announcements, delivered urbi et orbi, were disconcerting. No crooners of a previous age would have considered it their place to make such statements. Dan Leno had not offered his thoughts to the world on the Schleswig-Holstein Question, or the Unification of Italy. Bing Crosby or Harry Belafonte would have been laughed off the stage if they had attempted to share with the audience their views on the legalisation of cannabis or the meaning of life. On 24 July 1967, the Beatles added their names to those of Graham Greene, R. D. Laing and others calling for the legalisation of pot. In August the same year they met the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India and became adepts of the wisdom of the East. Their need to impose their ‘ideas’ on the public were perpetuated by McCartney, who continued to be an advocate of animal rights and vegetarianism, long after Lennon had been assassinated (by Mark Chapman, 8 December 1980, in New York City), George Harrison had died of lung cancer (29 November 2001) and Ringo Starr had become a voiceover on animated versions of the Revd W. Awdry’s Thomas the Tank Engine stories. They bequeathed to the world the annoying legacy that entertainers, rather than being humble enough to entertain, should inflict their half-baked views of economics, meteorology and politics to those who had been gullible enough to buy their recordings.
In an interview with Maureen Cleave in the Evening Standard in 1966, Lennon modestly announced that Christianity was dying out and that the Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus now’.27 The remark was clearly not intended to be amusing. Many people in America and South Africa paid Lennon the compliment of melting down their Beatles records in protest.
The Rolling Stones from the south London suburbs were the more stylish answer to Liverpool’s most famous quartet. Not just because they were southerners: the Stones were in every way more English than the Beatles, that is to say more capable of irony. Jagger’s contortions on the stage, his overt sexuality, his exploitation of the bisexual signals which he gave out, both on and off stage, were all reversions to Lord Byron.
One legacy of the 1960s was that rock music, rather than being something which was reserved for parties, nightclubs and people who enjoyed that kind of thing, became the anthem and background music of every area of British life. There would never come a time when its music fell silent. People would hear it as the background music at airports and in shops, even in bookshops, where customers by definition want quiet; it would be played at children’s parties instead of ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’. It was not deemed inappropriate at funerals. Trendy vicars of course incorporated it into their maimed liturgies. It provided the backing for films and advertisements. It was the most invasive of aural transformations ever suffered by the human race. And with that liberal tyranny, which was characteristic of that most intolerant decade, anyone who objected to it was labelled a fuddy-duddy.
The most remarkable musical productions to emerge from Liverpool during the decade were the early symphonic works of John McCabe (born 1939), but you would not have thought so if all you had heard of was the Beatles. When McCabe was growing up, Liverpool was a truly cultured place, its Walker Art Gallery, its concert halls, schools, library and university justly esteemed. They all continued, of course, but as the city collapsed around them, and it was redubbed a City of Culture, the kind of culture meant was really ‘Popular Culture’. So, the ‘music of the 1960s’ for many people means the Beach Boys, Freddie and the Dreamers or Gerry and the Pacemakers.
The decade was in fact a memorable one musically. Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony (1962) was a horrifying, moving depiction of the Stalinist Terror, evoked by a haunting bass solo, orchestra and chorus. Poulenc’s Gloria, one of the most beautiful pieces in the whole repertoire of church choral music, was composed in 1959, and to the 1960s proper belong the operatic fantasy ‘Votre Faust’ and the Couleurs croises for orchestra (1967). In England, a great composer, Benjamin Britten, was producing such stupendous work as the Cello Symphony (1963), or the opera of Death in Venice (1973). A new star arose in the sky–John Tavener (born 1944) had the first performance of his extraordinary dramatic cantata The Whale in 1965. Michael Tippett not only continued to compose good work–the Second Piano Sonata (1962) and his opera The Knot Garden–but was a tireless promoter of musical performance. This was the great decade of Solti’s conducting Wagner’s Ring at Covent Garden. Malcolm Sargent was still conducting the annual Proms in the Albert Hall, with originality and brio.
In literature, the 1960s were a wonderful decade, too. Anthony Powell continued with his roman-fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time–penning the best three volumes in the sequence, those relating to the war: The Valley of Bones (1964), The Soldier’s Art (1966), The Military Philosophers (1968). V. S. Naipaul wrote his funniest and most tender novel, A House for Mr Biswas (1961); Geoffrey Hill (born 1932), perhaps the best poet of his generation, published King Log in 1968. John le Carré’s The Looking Glass War of 1965 was rather more than just a spy thriller. In 1967 two brilliant comic miniaturists, Paul Bailey (with At the Jerusalem) and Beryl Bainbridge (with A Weekend with Claude), established their reputations. In 1969, George MacDonald Fraser had the inspired idea to write a series of novels about the British Empire in its heyday, with the Rugby School bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays as its hero. Flashman was published in 1969. But none of this, exactly speaking, was what people meant, in after times, when they spoke of the 1960s. Someone once met the young C. S. Lewis, pacing along Addison’s Walk at Magdalen College, Oxford, his pipe ablaze. When asked the reason for his good humour Lewis replied that he had just discovered that the Renaissance had not happened. What he meant was that there had not been a great cultural break between the so-called Middle Ages and the age of Spenser and Shakespeare. Similarly, is it not possible to read the history of our times without thinking of the 1960s as the great watershed after which everything was different?
Pessimists tend to look back on the sixties as the time when Everything Came Unstuck. Honest to God destroyed the faith, and Lady Chatterley the morals, of the British. Libertarian libertine Woy Jenkins unleashed sexual depravity and pornography on an unwilling world. That is one picture. The optimists, who tend to be a little older, are sometimes those who remember the 1960s. They think that they spent the time with flowers in their hair, protesting against the Vietnam War, smoking pot and playing Beatles LPs. Perhaps they did so.
How can such things be measured? My suspicion is that British human beings had no more orgasms in the 1960s than they did in the 1860s or even than in the 1260s; that a brilliantly constructed farce by Alan Ayckbourn such as Relatively Speaking (first performed as Meet My Father in 1965) lasted just as well as some of the more obviously ‘sixties’ plays by Joe Orton. A few hundred, perhaps a few thousand, people changed, or thought they had changed, in the 1960s. But surely many more went on as they had always done.
If the 1960s was a time when Britain learned to fall in love with its future, it was also, this decade in which Churchill died, a time of nostalgia. When Harold Wilson launched an embarrassing campaign called ‘I’m Backing Britain’ to disguise from himself and his voters the effects of European membership, the BBC responded with a short six-part series. It began with a retired bank manager in a fictitious south coast town organising an ‘I’m Backing Britain’ luncheon, in 1968, and recollecting the days of 1940 when Backing Britain had meant being prepared to take up arms.
Dad’s Army (such was the show’s name) was a sitcom based upon the Home Guard. It ran for a total of eighty episodes until 1977. The scripts–not a dud among them–were by Jimmy Perry and David Croft, and they made superb use of some great character actors–above all Arthur Lowe as the bank manager and captain of the platoon–Captain Mainwaring–John Le Mesurier as his chief clerk and sergeant, John Laurie the undertaker, Arnold Ridley with a weak bladder, and Clive Dunn as Lance Corporal Jones, a very popular member of the cast but the only one who threatened to spoil things by overacting. There were some sublime moments, perhaps the best being those when the farcical and the heroic touched. In the episode called ‘The Deadly Attachment’, the captured captain of a German U-boat turns the tables on Mainwaring’s platoon and holds Lance Corporal Jones hostage. He puts a grenade in the waistband of the old man’s trousers.
CAPTAIN: Seven seconds will give me plenty of time to get clear, but I think it is not enough time for the old man to unbutton his tunic.
FRAZER: A terrible way to die.
MAINWARING: You unspeakable swine. Now listen to me. I’m the Commanding Officer here, it’s only right that I should have the bomb in my waistband.
JONES: I will not allow you to have the bomb in your trousers, sir. Don’t you worry about me, they can put twenty bombs in my trousers. They won’t make me crack.
MAINWARING: How can you hope to beat us? You see the sort of men we breed in this country?
CAPTAIN: Yes, rather stupid ones.28
Dad’s Army was so successful partly because it was a pastiche of the self-mockery of actual Second World War comedy, such as ITMA. (Some old-age pensioners ‘remembered’ the theme song, ‘Who Do You Think You’re Kidding, Mr Hitler’, from their wartime days, though it had been commissioned specially for the series.) In fact there was something double-edged about Dad’s Army and its success. In the episode just quoted, the languid Sergeant Wilson fails to prime the Mills bombs because he thinks they will be ‘awfully dangerous’. He thereby saves Jones’s life when the dastardly German plants the grenade on him. In 1968, however, many people were beginning to feel that Britain had come to feel like a pathetic old man with a bomb in his pants, a comedy hero with no future.
Others, more optimistic, felt that the change in the air was to be welcomed. The year 1968 was spoken of in after times by the baby boomers as if it had been one of those great dates in history, such as 1789, or 1848, in which a great revolution had occurred, not merely in the politics of nations, but in the human spirit. But to younger generations than theirs, it could not be seen as the real revolution of our times. Their salute of political heroes–Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara and other leftists–seemed less like the dawn of a new age than the last shout of an old one. As they demonstrated, and pinned on their badges, and waved their little scarlet copies of The Thoughts of Chairman Mao, these supposed champions of a new liberty were unwittingly delaying the true revolution, which was the overthrow of the communist tyranny in Russia and Eastern Europe by the dissidents. When they thought that they were cheering on a bright future, they seemed to their children’s generation to have been locked in a sinister historical past, which the things they most despised, free market capitalism and organised religion, would within little more than a decade eventually be destroyed. Chairman Mao killed infinitely more people than Hitler had done, and the system which had been strengthened by Stalin, enslaving the peoples of Eastern Europe, would be overthrown by the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Bulgarians, the East Germans and the Russians who had known at first hand, and for decades, what it was like to live in a society governed by the incompetent tyrants of the Soviet Union.
Britain’s year of revolution amounted to little more than a marijuana-induced party for spoilt students, the first generation not obliged to do military service or to earn their living as soon as they left school. Britain itself had, during the 1960s, become liberalised in its sexual behaviour, but this was more because of increased prosperity, and by the dissemination of cheap contraception by the medical profession and the pharmaceutical giants. But though it now had several hundred thousand immigrants from the Commonwealth, living largely in the poorer quarters of British cities, the country was fundamentally the same place in 1968 as it had been in 1958. It was still a monarchy. The institutions of Parliament, the judiciary and the Inns of Court, remained the same. The armed forces, though reduced, were still in place. Britain remained an independent archipelago. Industry remained hamstrung by the cold war between trades unions and management. If Great Britain’s unity was under threat it was not from student demonstrations but from the centuries-old problem of Ireland. If its constitutional position, and its sovereignty, were to undergo a radical alteration, this would come not from the activities of the left, but from those new men of the Conservative Party who saw the political future of Britain not as a world empire, nor as an island fortress but as a johnny-come-lately in the European experiment.
Yet the 1960s as a whole, viewed retrospectively, polarised the British. The pessimists saw the decade as the period when everything began to unstick, when Britain undid itself, when the sniggering of the satirists and the misguided reforms of liberalism loosened the fabric of morals and social cohesion. The optimists saw the same changes and viewed them as the beginning of liberation. For the optimists, however childish the behaviour of students or iconoclastic playwrights, it was a period when Britain grew up. They no longer looked to the Lord Chamberlain to decide what they could see on the stage, nor to the Home Secretary and the police and the judiciary to tell consenting adults how to comport themselves in their intimate sexual lives. To the optimists, Roy Jenkins was the Home Secretary who allowed the mature British public to read what they wished, without the philistine interference of the Director of Public Prosecutions. To the pessimists, Jenkins was responsible for every corner-shop newsagent being filled with unsightly pornographic magazines. Optimists rejoiced that unhappily married people and homosexuals (sometimes the same) were no longer stigmatised. For the pessimists, stigma was a good thing, holding together the fragile but useful institution of family life. For the optimists, muddle was better than hypocrisy.
Whichever side of the argument you were guided by temperament to support, it became a commonplace as the years went by to regard the 1960s as the decade when everything in Britain changed. Philip Larkin’s lines were regularly trotted out–‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP’–by readers who failed to see their irony: namely that for a provincial university librarian the revolutions in social and sexual mores with which the decade was associated had not really happened. For optimists, the quasi-revolutionary riots of the students of Paris in 1968, and the imitation demos which led to long-haired students occupying university campuses in Britain, there was a feeling of freshness in the air. In an echo of the Communist Manifesto, Paul Johnson, the editor of the leftist weekly the New Statesman, hailed les événements in Paris as a New Dawn: ‘For what is happening there is of great importance not only to France but to the world. To be there is a political education in itself, to watch the birth-pangs (perhaps, soon, the murder or even suicide) of a new approach to the organization of human societies.’29
That was how it seemed to an intelligent left-wing commentator in the summer of’68. ‘Here in Britain’, he said, ‘we have a stagnant economy, in which university students are told we must develop horror weapons in the cause of the export trade, and workers are stampeded by ignorance and demagogy into howling abuse at an even more exploited section of the population, the blacks. No wonder young people look for a fourth choice: and in Paris, it seems to me, they are beginning to find one.’30
It did not seem like that, however, to the majority of the English electorate. Perhaps dismayed by the stagnant economy, perhaps because they agreed with J. Enoch Powell’s views of Pakistani and Indian immigrants, perhaps because they wanted to signal their instinctive feelings about inflammatory left-wingery such as was purveyed by the New Statesman, they voted Harold Wilson out, and the Conservatives returned to power on Waterloo Day, 1970.