Sixties Britain

Culture, Society and Politics

Mark Donnelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317866626
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Sixties Britain provides a more nuanced and engaging history of Britain. This book analyses the main social, political, cultural and economic changes Britain undertook as well as focusing on the 'silent majority' who were just as important as the rebellious students, the residents if Soho and the icons of popular culture. Sixties Britain engages the reader without losing sight of the fact that the 1960s were a vibrant, fascinating and controversial time in British History.

CHAPTER 1

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Post-war Britain, 1945–59

The return of peace

The price of victory in 1945 was high. In addition to almost 500,000 Britons who died in the conflict, the Second World War cost Britain about one-quarter of its national wealth. With overseas trade disrupted and Britain’s economic effort focused on war production, exports had fallen to one-third of their pre-war level. Some valuable overseas markets had been lost to the trading superpower of the United States and it was unlikely that they would be regained. The national debt had trebled by 1945, making Britain the world’s largest debtor nation. As peace resumed the country was living beyond its means by some £2 billion per annum. Much of Britain’s industrial plant and machinery was worn out after nearly six years at war. Throughout the country’s towns and cities millions of homes, schools and other buildings had been damaged or destroyed by the Luftwaffe. Repairing the damage to the national infrastructure would take time, as well as more money than the Exchequer had available. There were also problems abroad to consider. Victory had seen the return of Britain’s captured colonies, making it once more the head of the largest empire in history. This brought challenges and dangers alongside (for many people) enhanced national pride. Moreover, the global reach of the conflict had left Britain with a military presence in more than 40 countries by the time the guns stopped, including a shared occupation of Germany alongside the Soviet Union, the United States and France. As the US scholar William Fox had pointed out in 1944 Britain could rightly regard itself as a ‘superpower’, one of the ‘Big Three’ (with the US and USSR) who were soon to win the war (1944: 21). The problem here of course was that any meaningful claim to world power had to be supported by a degree of economic strength that Britain simply lacked. Towards the end of 1945, John Maynard Keynes joined a delegation which negotiated a huge loan from Washington so that Britain could escape from the looming catastrophe of a ‘financial Dunkirk’. It was not the last time that Britain was to go to the United States for help with paying the bills. In essence the post-war transatlantic ‘special relationship’ was a deal that gave Britain financial assistance from the US in return for its (usually) unequivocal support for American foreign policy. Britain may have fought from September 1939 to safeguard its independence, but the unintended consequence of the struggle was that it left the country ever more reliant on the United States from 1945 onwards.

Successive British governments would struggle to cope with the domestic and international legacies of the war effort for decades. For most British people, however, the problem of how the country would adjust in a changed post-war world was a far-off issue. After all, it was popularly assumed, the war had provided a striking vindication both of the British way of doing things and the character of its people. Britain (together with its imperial partners) was the only power to endure six full years of war, including a year in 1940–1 when it had stood virtually alone in Europe against the dictators. No doubt those same qualities that saw it through the test of conflict would come to the fore in peacetime. The glow of victory was expected to burn long after the victory parades, and few doubted that the country would retain its ranking among the top nations. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that in the years that followed many would look back on wartime with a mixture of nostalgia, pride and affection. It was understandable too that a ‘pleasure culture’ of war should take hold in Britain like nowhere else, with the war constantly re-enacted through films, television programmes, books, memorabilia, children’s comics and replica toys. The British, it appeared, had shown the best of themselves between 1939 and 1945 and they were determined to keep the memories of the wartime experience alive. Within a decade or so, however, a younger generation would begin to chafe against their parents’ tales of the ‘Spitfire summer’ or watching the Blitz from the rooftops. For those who grew up in the shadow of the atomic raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and who lived with the very real threat of Cold War tension escalating into nuclear annihilation, the concept of war took on a very different meaning. The sixties generational clash, in part at least, was to be played out in the space between memories of the ‘good war’ and anticipation of an impending nuclear apocalypse.

In terms of national politics, what most people wanted in 1945 was rewards from the state for their wartime efforts. Politicians could hardly complain if this public mood put them under pressure to deliver high returns. Throughout the conflict they had continually inflated expectations about what could be achieved once victory was secured. The Labour Party, in particular, captured the public imagination about the possibilities of a ‘New Jerusalem’, making ambitious promises from the earliest stages of the war about jobs, houses, a national health service and first-class public services for all citizens. The energy and strategic positioning of this campaign carried them to a landslide victory in the 1945 election against a Conservative Party led by Winston Churchill, the ‘man who had won the war’. With a Commons majority of 146, Clement Attlee’s post-war government was able to carry through its legislative programme, deservedly gaining a reputation as perhaps the greatest reforming administration in British political history. The National Insurance Act (1946), the National Health Service Act (1946) and the National Assistance Act (1948) were the building blocks of the modern welfare state. Full employment remained a priority, and the Bank of England, fuel, power and inland transport industries were nationalised. But while the government was able to control its programme, its management of the economy – particularly the vulnerable position of Britain’s balance of payments – was a different matter. In a pattern that was to haunt governments throughout the fifties and sixties, in the immediate aftermath of the war Britain spent collectively more on imported goods than it earned in foreign exchange through exports. The resulting imbalance caused a major currency crisis in 1947, a year that ended in the resignation of the Chancellor, Hugh Dalton. In 1949 the government (in which a youthful Harold Wilson served in Cabinet) was forced to devalue sterling. As the currency functioned among other things as a symbol of the nation’s international economic status, devaluation marked a humiliating retreat by the Labour government. In real terms for British consumers it meant higher prices, smaller rations (certain goods were even more scarce than they had been in wartime) and public spending cuts, all of which added up to lower living standards. Far from enjoying the fruits of wartime victory Britain was now living through the so-called ‘age of austerity’. Dalton’s replacement as Chancellor, the ascetic Stafford Cripps, called for yet more resources to be diverted from home consumption to the export drive. Casting the drive for national economic recovery in ethical and moral terms, Cripps urged the population towards new levels of material self-denial. Whether it was for cars, clothes or pianos, British consumers faced lengthening waiting lists as the government put limits on what manufacturers could sell on the home market while the rest of their stock was sold overseas. The damaging political consequences for Labour soon followed. Partly because of a ‘housewives revolt’ among women who were weary of struggling to make domestic ends meet, Labour lost support from key groups of female and middle-class voters before they had even served a full term in office. This drift of support away from the government from 1947 onwards meant that in the 1950 election Labour’s commanding majority was reduced to a mere five seats. The following year Attlee called another election in search of a more decisive mandate. Perhaps if he had waited for one more year the government’s popularity would have benefited from economic recovery. But in 1951 the swing of popular opinion against Labour in key constituencies continued and they were pushed out of office, despite having won the highest aggregate vote of all the parties. Few within Labour’s ranks would have predicted that the party was about to embark on a thirteen-year period in opposition, ending only when Harold Wilson led them back into government with another knife-edge majority in 1964.

Before it fell from power the post-war Labour government made one telling contribution to the gaiety of the nation. In May 1951, exactly a century after the Victorian Great Exhibition showcased Britain’s world power status, the Festival of Britain opened on London’s South Bank. It was a civic celebration that drew a line under the hardships of the previous ten years and pumped up national pride as the country faced what was predicted to be the long-drawn-out threat of the Cold War. For Herbert Morrison, who was responsible to the Cabinet for organising this event, the Festival was about ‘the people giving themselves a pat on the back’ (Lewis 1978: 11). It was also a foreign tourist attraction, pulling in visitors at a time when tourism remained one of the country’s most important dollar earners. Despite the fact that, as Michael Frayn argued, ‘Festival Britain was the Britain of the radical middle class – the dogooders; the readers of the News Chronicle, the Guardian, and the Observer;the signers of petitions; the backbone of the BBC’ (1986: 307–8), the event was a popular triumph. Over eight million people came to the South Bank to see the Festival, and in towns and cities across the country millions more attended the mini-celebrations – carnivals, sports events, historical pageants, firework displays, bonfires – that were organised to complement activities in the capital. The event was designed to offer something to everyone. For those who wanted their national pride affirmed the Festival sang a stirring hymn to Britain’s manufacturing prowess and industrial heritage, with coal and shipbuilding venerated alongside a spectrum of inventions that stretched from the vital to the eccentric. For those who wanted to see and hear the ‘best’ of British high culture, King George VI’s opening of the Royal Festival Hall was a high point in the celebrations (even though the opening night offered a concert of purely English music). For everyone else there were the Festival Pleasure Gardens at Battersea Park. Here fun-seekers braved lengthy queues to enjoy fairground rides like the ‘Big Dipper’ and the ‘Dragon Ride’, except on Sundays when the country’s moral guardians ensured that the Gardens remained closed (Hylton 1998: 15, 18). For cynics who saw the £11 million spent on the Festival as a waste of public money at a time when the government had more serious problems to tackle (not least the Korean War), there was a perverse satisfaction to be gained from the event’s organisational shortcomings. When the Festival opened it put such pressure on the capital’s power supply that other parts of London were plunged into darkness. The Pleasure Gardens, meanwhile, opened behind schedule and over budget because of strikes, go-slows and work-to-rules by construction workers who demanded to be paid a special ‘exhibition money’ rate for their labour. The Conservative opposition, who were at best unenthusiastic about the Festival, saw these problems as further examples of socialist mismanagement and misjudgement. As far as they were concerned it was not the government’s job to tell free citizens in a free society how to enjoy themselves. When they returned to power shortly after the Festival closed in September 1951 they left most of its infrastructure to fall into disrepair: thus it was that a site of 27 acres lay unused and derelict in the heart of London, waiting to be transformed a decade later into an ugly commercial office block and car park (Frayn 1986: 326).

‘Setting the people free’: Conservative government, 1951–57

Churchill’s Conservatives returned to government in October 1951 on a promise to restore consumer prosperity and ‘set the people free’ from socialist bureaucracy and controls. But the free-market consumer paradise that they projected in their election literature took the best part of a decade to arrive. In the meantime, early 1950s Britain remained, in the words of Andrew Graham-Dixon, the place of the ‘tightened belt, the ration book and Spam’ (1996: 226). It was a country where food rationing (of meat, butter and bacon) remained part of everyday life until 1954 and where queues and restrictions were the norm. Backyard privies were common, while across much of urban Britain, cleared bombsites awaiting redevelopment were children’s playgrounds for years. Even Cabinet ministers reluctantly obeyed Churchill’s instruction to take a pay cut in 1951 because of the ailing condition of the economy. Compared with the inter-war years of periodic and widespread (if regionally-specific) depression and the sacrifices of wartime, the hangover of austerity into the fifties was an inconvenience rather than real hardship. Many adults could endure the dullness of early-fifties Britain because it was accompanied by unprecedented domestic security. This was in some respects a comforting time, a period when social relations were underpinned by a new consensus between people and state, the twin pillars of which were full employment and a properly-funded welfare system. True, the shiny materialism of fifties America depicted in advertisements and Hollywood films suggested that the British were lagging behind their richer wartime ally. But at least there were jobs, stable prices and pensions.

Despite opposing most of the Attlee government’s reforms when they were out of power, Churchill’s Conservatives never intended to overhaul the ‘post-war settlement’ once they were back in government. Welfare capitalism was the shared governing assumption of the time. Hence denationalisation was kept to a minimum: only road haulage and iron and steel were returned to private ownership (both in 1953). The emollient Walter Monckton (nicknamed ‘the oilcan’) at the Ministry of Labour maintained cordial relations with the trade unions, consulting them on strategic questions of economic management and quietly dropping plans made in opposition to reform trade union law. Rab Butler as Chancellor ensured that there were real-terms spending increases on the welfare state and made full employment a priority consideration in macro-economic policy, even though the effect of both was to stoke up inflationary pressures. Harold Macmillan, meanwhile, poured energy and resources into his ‘Grand Design for Housing’, aided by Churchill, who judged that ‘housing and red meat’ were the two domestic issues closest to voters’ hearts (Weiler 2000; Seldon 1987: 71). Macmillan’s success in building houses at a faster rate than his Labour predecessors, eventually hitting his target of 300,000 a year in December 1953, was a major boost to his national profile – even though he obviously sacrificed build quality for speed of construction. The sole female Cabinet minister (and no favourite of Churchill), Florence Horsburgh, focused her efforts at the Ministry of Education on the non-partisan tasks of building more schools and recruiting more teachers. Unfortunately for her, Churchill preferred building houses. By the time she was replaced by David Eccles there was little evidence that a specific Conservative philosophy on education had guided her policy decisions. Churchill’s domestic policies, in other words, were a triumph of pragmatism. Social and political controversies were largely avoided, but the down side of this cautious approach was that the 1951–5 government was subsequently criticised for ducking out of ‘necessary’ but difficult measures. Depending on the perspective of the critic these ‘lost opportunities’ would include immigration controls, trade union legislation, a more targeted approach to welfare, and the failure to create what was later referred to as a ‘property-owning democracy’ (Seldon 1987: 85–7).

Perhaps pragmatism was to be expected from an administration led by Churchill, the wartime colossus and national figurehead whose best days were obviously in the past. Churchill suffered a stroke in June 1953 – just weeks after the Queen’s coronation was presented by commentators as the start of a new Elizabethan age – and by the last six months of his premiership he was wholly unfit for office. He was fortunate that a deferential press colluded in playing down the gravity of his ailing health, allowing him to remain in post until April 1955 when he finally resigned at the age of 80. His successor was Anthony Eden, the Tory heir-apparent since 1941, whose own serious medical problems had kept him out of action for much of 1953. Eden announced a general election almost immediately and led the Conservatives to an increased majority of 58 seats. ‘Conservative Freedom Works’ had been their campaign slogan. Millions of voters had no compelling reason to disagree. The commanding political position that Eden inherited as Prime Minister, however, was destroyed within a year by a misjudged foreign expedition. The defining moment of what turned out to be Eden’s brief premiership was the Suez crisis of 1956, when Britain and France (with Israeli assistance) invaded Egypt in an attempt to regain control of the Suez Canal from Colonel Nasser’s government. Eden, wounded by press coverage that dismissed him as an ineffectual successor to Churchill, had hoped to prove that he was a resolute defender of Britain’s imperial interests. But his attempt to humiliate Nasser rebounded disastrously. The United Nations condemned Anglo-French aggression, demanded a ceasefire and debated whether to use their own troops to restore peace. The United States, alarmed at the revival of ‘old’ European imperialism operating without American permission, threatened to use their vast foreign currency reserves to engineer a sterling crisis unless Britain withdrew. In the largest example of popular protest since the 1930s, thousands of anti-war demonstrators gathered in Trafalgar Square to signal their opposition to western aggression and to demand Eden’s resignation. Faced with opposition on all sides, not least from the Egyptians who blocked the Suez Canal, Eden was forced to evacuate British forces. It was a humiliating climbdown, and the sharpest indication up to that point of the limits of post-war British power. The other lesson that the British political class learned was that the approval of the United States was required for all major foreign policy decisions. The price of Eden’s failure to anticipate the risks of invading Egypt was soon apparent. His already fragile health was ruined by the strain of the Suez crisis and he resigned in January 1957.

‘Never had it so good?’: the late-fifties affluent society

A new Prime Minister whose party had been in government for almost six years could be expected to exaggerate a little about how the country had improved in recent times. But when Harold Macmillan declared that most people in the country had ‘never had it so good’ in July 1957, he identified what for many was a reality. The deep social divisions of the thirties, the strains of war and the dull ache of post-war shortages gave way to a more comfortable age in the mid-fifties. A booming economy, soaring stock market values, low unemployment, a wealth of accessible consumer choice and improved welfare services were the defining features of a new age of affluence. Rationing and austerity measures no longer applied. Average weekly earnings (including overtime payments) rose by 34 per cent between 1955 and 1960, a rate that comfortably out-paced the rise in the cost of living (Marwick 1990: 114). As a result most Britons were healthier, better-educated, better-housed and more prosperous than ever before (Porter 1993: 13). The country was at last enjoying the kind of boom conditions that characterised post-war America – indeed, the ‘never had it so good’ phrase was provided by a US trade union leader who had used it two years earlier. In a less frequently quoted part of Macmillan’s speech in July 1957 the Prime Minister had correctly warned that economic growth and a tight labour market were likely to produce inflation. Action would have to be taken, he counselled, to maintain price stability. Such caution, however, was lost amidst a long-suppressed release of pent-up consumer demand. Even Macmillan proved reluctant to heed his own warnings about inflationary pressures when, in January 1958, he preferred to accept the resignation of his Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, and two other Treasury Ministers, Nigel Birch and Enoch Powell, rather than agree to their proposals to cut £50 million from public spending. The Prime Minister dismissed the resignations as ‘little local difficulties’ and expansion was allowed to continue.

Across the country people spent their rising real incomes on cars, homes and domestic appliances. Refrigerators and washing machines began to appear in people’s kitchens and helped to transform everyday household routines. Television sets became commonplace, their popularity heightened by the arrival of commercial television in 1955. Fashion was no longer the preserve of the wealthy. The development of cheaper synthetic materials that could be mass-produced, dyed in different colours and turned into off-the-peg outfits made the latest designs more accessible – even though the joke at the time was that male outfitters such as Burton’s offered customers a choice of only three styles: small, medium and large. Personal spending surged as the range of consumer products widened dramatically in the late fifties. The easing of credit controls in 1958, and the £300 million worth of tax cuts that Chancellor Heathcoat Amory gave away in his pre-election budget of April 1959, further fuelled demand. The first indications that this economic prosperity would come to be equated with a new cultural liberation were evident in the colour magazines which told readers how to fill their increased leisure time and live the fashionable life. Self-fulfilment through consumption was the fantasy that drove post-war capitalism forwards. Poverty, it seemed, was a slain giant, a term that was due to be expunged from the political lexicon or at least updated for new times to mean the non-ownership of a television set. Such prosperity, it should be recognised, was not unique to Britain. Western economies boomed after the Korean War, so much so that affluence became a cultural weapon to wield against communist states in the Cold War – material proof, it seemed, of the benefits of capitalism. But many in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables and illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: reading the sixties
• 1 Post-war Britain, 1945–59
• 2 Consumerism, youth and sixties pop music
• 3 Anxieties, beliefs and intellectuals
• 4 Conservative crisis and Labour recovery, 1959–64
• 5 On screen
• 6 ‘Swinging London’ and the ‘long front of culture’
• 7 Labour’s first term and the politics of race
• 8 Permissiveness and counter-culture
• 9 Poverty and devaluation
• 10 1968, cultural crisis and women’s liberation
• 11 Powellism and nationalist politics
• 12 Labour crisis and Conservative recovery, 1968–70
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index