The Egg-heads and Duffel-coat Rebels
One group of society was equally opposed to the Tory magic circle and the industrial entrepreneur. Its supporters wore heavy blue or beige duffel coats – the coarse, toggle-fastened woollen coats designed in Victorian Britain but which became truly popular on the Atlantic and Arctic convoys of the Second World War – and roll-necked pullovers, baggy tweed jackets, stout shoes. The men would be vigorously bearded. Their look proclaimed the opposite of stylishness or American influence. Their chosen music, too, was very different from the skiffle bands and the rock and roll beginning to infiltrate teenagers’ lives. For most politically minded left-wingers folk music was the sound of the times, heard in smoke-filled and beery clubs across the nation.
Folk music became popular throughout the UK in the fifties, though it has been swamped in memory by the eruption of pop soon afterwards. It was particularly strong in Scotland where singing traditions among farm-workers and miners, and the vast popularity of Robert Burns, underpinned an audience for ‘the people’s music’. Edinburgh had been chosen at the end of the forties as the site of a new annual international festival of the arts (selected just ahead of Bath because it had rather less bomb damage) focusing on the traditional elite arts – opera, classical drama, ballet and fine arts. By 1950 there was growing irritation among the poets and singers at the centre of the Scottish literary revival at the way Scotland was being excluded and, by 1951, an alternative people’s festival was established. Trade unions, the Communist Party, left-wing councillors and others backed the project, which in turn kicked off the post-war folk scene in Scotland. There were lectures about the danger of American culture swamping British culture, concerts and get-togethers with Gaelic musicians, films, choirs and specially written plays – but, within three years, at the height of the Cold War, the Edinburgh people’s festival was closed down by the trade union movements on the grounds that it was a Communist plot. (It was Communist-tinged but it was hardly a plot.)
Outside Scotland the folk movement was strongest in the Northern and Midland regions of England and the West Country, though folk clubs spread everywhere and by 1957 there were supposed to be some 1,500 of them in Britain. There was something over-defensive about their self-proclaimed independence from American music, since the United States was undergoing its own folk revival at the same time, also strongly linked to left-wing politics and also defiantly ‘authentic’ in the face of the rising power of commercial music. Jimmie Miller, the best-known leader of the movement, had been born in Salford into a Scottish socialist family of militants and musicians and had had dozens of jobs in the 1930s before marrying the left-wing actress Joan Littlewood, and setting up experimental radical theatre projects with her. Later they split up and Miller wrote his best-known song ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ for an American folk musician, Peggy Seeger, when they fell in love. A committed Marxist, he changed his name to Ewan MacColl as he became central to the folk revival. Among his songs was ‘Dirty Old Town’, later made famous by the London-Irish band the Pogues. Other key figures were the former soldier and poet Hamish Henderson, who first began collecting traditional songs and stories from across the Western Highlands and Islands; and Norman Buchan, the Labour MP. There was great talent, great energy and great optimism. For a time it seemed that Britain might produce a music radically different from the raucous new noises of North America.
Folk continued to be much enjoyed by a minority. Stars like Billy Connolly cut their teeth on folk. But outside the Celtic nations, the revival was pretty much doomed from the beginning. Any movement so suffused with nostalgia and gentle humour, played on instruments with minimal amplification, is unlikely to cut the mustard in an age of urban consumerism, when the commercial drive is to record and sell short, fast songs for a young and fickle audience no longer interested in the struggles of their grandparents. Any movement so resolutely unfashionable, so tousled, hairy and serious, was unlikely to defeat styles and songs efficiently marketed for the new teenage market. The parallel enthusiasm for modern jazz, which excited the English middle-class youth at the same time, and which seemed so rebellious in a land still contemptuous of ‘negro’ culture, fizzled away for similar reasons. Live performance in small clubs and songs that went on for too long, and were simply too complicated for everyone to enjoy, surrendered to quick, easy music. In a battle between the ‘authentic’ and the cool, when the fight is pitched for young urban consumers, it is easy to see what will happen. In the end, for all its beauty and vigour, Britain’s folk music revival of the fifties was another exhibition of impotent local revolt against the coming age of America.
So was the political cause which so many of the folk and jazz enthusiasts cherished, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. One of its leading figures, the popular historian A.J. P. Taylor, later reflected that CND, like the Establishment politicians it opposed, simply overrated Britain’s position in the world: ‘We thought that Great Britain was still a great power whose example would affect the rest of the world. Ironically, we were the last imperialists.’ For a while, the campaign sent a jolt through politics and seemed to all those contemplating the swift extinction of life on the planet far more a moral act than politics as usual. It had begun with a campaign to end the radiation-spreading testing of nuclear weapons, which was causing great alarm. Popular writers, notably J.B. Priestley, and the elderly mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, wrote influential articles proclaiming the moral necessity of renouncing such world-destroying weaponry entirely. The New Statesman appealed to Khrushchev to disarm and to its surprise got a reply back from Moscow, albeit an unhelpful one. The Labour left were almost all committed ban-the-bombers as of course was the Moscow-funded Communist Party of Great Britain. These strands, along with Quakers, pacifists and certain journalists, eventually found themselves sitting together in the appropriately named Amen Court, home of Canon John Collins of St Paul’s Cathedral, where on 15 January 1958 the new organization was created. A month later, more than five thousand people turned up for the inaugural meeting at Westminster; some were arrested when they went on to protest at Downing Street.
Though CND would fail to persuade any major British party to renounce nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War and failed as well to halt, never mind reverse, the build-up of American nuclear weaponry on British soil, it did succeed in dividing the Labour Party and seizing the imagination of millions of people. For a ramshackle left-wing organization, it behaved in a thoroughly modern and media-savvy way. Its symbol, designed by a professional artist, Gerald Holtham, in 1958, and based on semaphore, became an international brand almost as recognizable as Coca-Cola: suddenly, all those duffel coats and black jumpers had some decoration. The Aldermaston marches, first from Trafalgar Square towards the base and later in the opposite direction, were never enormous but they did attract massive press coverage. Its more militant wing, the Committee of 100, using direct non-violent action, managed to get the 89-year-old Lord Russell arrested by police, a considerable act of public relations. Yet it was as Taylor described it, a movement of egg-heads for egg-heads. Another historian reflected that it was a classic ‘anti-political movement of the educated, the affluent and the disaffected, a movement rooted in the leafy suburbs of the middle classes, not the slums or council estates’. Its members tended to be liberal on other issues too, and to be contemptuous of the organized and stodgy routines of politics, Labour politics in particular. By the end of the fifties, radicals found Labour entirely unappetizing. Now, why was that?