British Student Activism in the Long Sixties

Caroline Hoefferle

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415893817
• eBook ISBN: 9781136241642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Based on empirical evidence derived from university and national archives across the country and interviews with participants, British Student Activism in the Long Sixties reconstructs the world of university students in the 1960s and 1970s. Student accounts are placed within the context of a wide variety of primary and secondary sources from across Britain and the world, making this project the first book-length history of the British student movement to employ literary and theoretical frameworks which differentiate it from most other histories of student activism to date.

Globalization, especially of mass communications, made British students aware of global problems such as the threat of nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, racism, sexism and injustice. British students applied these global ideas to their own unique circumstances, using their intellectual traditions and political theories which resulted in unique outcomes. British student activists effectively gained support from students, staff, and workers for their struggle for student's rights to unionize, freely assemble and speak, and participate in university decision-making. Their campaigns effectively raised public awareness of these issues and contributed to significant national decisions in many considerable areas.

1 Beginnings

Student Activism in the Fifties and Early Sixties

It was Sunday, the 4^th of November 1956, and for the first time since the General Strike of 1926, Britain was witnessing a massive protest in Trafalgar Square, in the heart of London. Under overcast skies, white banners flew everywhere with big black letters spelling out “Law not War!” Thirtythousand clean-shaven young men (and very few women), most of whom were dressed in conservative drab overcoats and neckties, completely filled the famous square at the center of the nation’s capital city. They listened intently to a succession of speakers denounce the British and French invasion of the Suez Canal in Egypt, cheering and occasionally chanting, “Eden must go!” The star speaker was Labour’s left-wing foreign affairs spokesman Aneurin Bevan. With his shock of white hair, this charismatic senior statesman made an impassioned speech, scattering a host of pigeons into flight and rousing the crowd to great cheers. He railed against the Conservative government of Anthony Eden: “They have besmirched the name of Britain. They have made us ashamed of the things of which formerly we were proud. They have offended against every principle of decency and there is only way in which they can even begin to restore their tarnished reputation and that is to get out! Get out! Get out!”¹ The speech made a lasting impression on those in the crowd and was reported widely in the national newspapers the next day. But the real importance of the day lay not in the speeches or even the chants and banners. The real importance of this particular rally in Trafalgar square was the fact that in the midst of supposed political apathy and consensus, 30,000 young Britons had turned out to register their dissent, and by doing so, began the reinvigoration of the nation’s political Left and the era of the Long Sixties.

The protest had been brewing ever since Egyptian President Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal in July of 1956 and the Conservative British government led by Prime Minister Eden had threatened retaliation. When the leader of the Labour Party Hugh Gaitskell initially supported Eden taking “precautionary steps,” two small leftist organizations called Victory for Socialism and the Movement for Colonial Freedom formed the Suez Emergency Committee to mobilize public opinion against armed intervention by British forces. In the first week of September, the Trades

Union Congress passed a resolution opposing any use of force in the Suez without the backing of the United Nations. On 29 October, however, the British and the French secretly encouraged Israel to invade Egypt, and then sent in troops to occupy the area on the pretext of keeping the peace between Israel and Egypt. This spurred the Suez Emergency Committee to book Trafalgar Square for the November demonstration to use public pressure to stop the invasion before it began. At this point, the Labour Party threw its weight behind the protest, calling the Suez invasion a breach of international law and using its influence to ensure a large turnout for the demonstration.²

The high turnout of students at the protest especially surprised everyone, including the participants, organizers, police, and government. One young socialist organizer Stan Newens, who would eventually become a Labour MP, later recalled:

At the height of the proceedings, a great chant went up in the northwestern corner of the square as a massive column of student demonstrators began to come in and went on endlessly. “One, two, three, four! We won’t fight in Eden’s war”, they chanted. The whole square and its environs were engulfed in a vast array of protesters who were jammed in tight. The sense of mass solidarity in a just cause held us spellbound and instilled in us all a common will to carry our protest forward. At the end of the protest speeches, part of the crowd made for Whitehall, perhaps hoping to besiege Downing Street, and bitter clashes with the police followed in which 27 people were arrested. It was clear that the rally had awakened many thousands from their apathy... ³

Partly because of this large outpouring of dissent, Newens and many others on the British Left saw this rally as “a seminal event in British Labour history” and a turning point in the post-war era.

Stuart Hall was another young protester at the Trafalgar Square rally, but he was there for very different reasons. A postgraduate student at Oxford University, Hall and his left-wing friends, Alan Hall, Raphael Samuel, Peter Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams, had been discussing imperialism, racism, capitalism, and the possibilities of a new form of socialism for years. Inspired by their radical professor G. D. H. Cole, they had revived the Socialist Club at Oxford and were busily gathering together other likeminded students to plot out a new way forward for socialism. Born in Jamaica in 1932 to successful middle-class parents of mixed racial heritage, Hall was especially conscious of the evils of imperialism and racism. With a Rhodes scholarship to help him, Hall had arrived at Merton College in 1951. When the British invaded the Suez, he and his friends saw it as a reassertion of imperialism and they vowed to fight this action any way they could. The Trafalgar protest seemed to be the most important way of demonstrating their opposition to imperialism, and so they too found themselves in the crowd of thousands there in the center of London on that gloomy Sunday afternoon.⁴

The anger and excitement felt by Smith and Hall was echoed in the faces and attitudes of thousands of others there that day. For many, it was their first political demonstration and it was inspiring. Workers and students together were challenging the authorities for the first time that any of them could remember. Participation in the protest gave the protesters hope in other ways. When thousands surged towards Whitehall and Downing Street, anything seemed possible. United together, the masses of people might be able to exert real political power. Similar to countless activists in countries around the world in the twentieth century, this generation awakened to the realization of the power of demonstrations as a “visible fraternity,” a “gathering of bodies into a single moving material form... intended to say ‘we’ are here and ‘they’ (the powerful, the others, those who do not enter into the composition of the ‘we’) should be afraid and take our existence into consideration.”⁵

In 1956 their protest appeared to succeed. By the time the slow-moving Anglo-French invasion force arrived in the Suez, the fighting there had already stopped, and the British and French were forced to agree to a cease-fire without fully occupying the Suez. The United States, which was eager to gain the support of the Middle East in its Cold War, was quick to condemn its allies in this case and threatened the collapse of the pound if Britain did not pull out. Over the next few months, United Nations peacekeeping forces replaced French and British forces to the embarrassment of the two governments.⁶ Although this withdrawal was due to international opposition much more so than to the Trafalgar protest, the demonstration had united the Left in a renewed political initiative and introduced students and young people as a major mobilizing force for the first time since the Second World War. The year 1956 would be a turning point in the history of British Left, and the beginning of a new student movement centered on upholding the high ideals of fair play and democracy espoused in British discourse for generations.

STUDENT “APATHY” IN THE POST-WAR PERIOD

The entrance of a large contingent of university students in the Trafalgar square demonstration of 1956 was a surprise because many social commentators in the fifties were convinced that most students were apolitical. Despite the long history of student activism and protest in British history, and a number of important national and international crises and transformations in the late 1940s and early 1950s, these years were relatively quiet years for the nation’s universities. Students seemed to be most concerned with working hard at their studies and starting their professional careers. The leading student organizations, including the National Union of Students, National Association of Labour Student Organizations, and the Federation of Conservative Students, had no mass following among students and engaged in no significant direct actions in the early fifties. Local student clubs and student unions were preoccupied with social events and fund-raising, with little interest in issues outside of the universities. Indeed, students such as David Goldberg from Glasgow University complained of student inaction and apathy as late as 1955, calling them a “Generation Gone Wrong.”⁷ All seemed quiet on the university front in the forties and fifties, but a number of important changes in British society, politics, and the economy were taking place which would pave the way for the beginning of the student movement in 1956.

Popular memory recalls the post-war forties and fifties as docile years of consensus and conservatism in contrast to the years of social upheaval and liberalism in the sixties. In recent years, however, historians have uncovered considerable evidence demonstrating that many of the rapid changes associated with the sixties actually began as early as the forties.⁸ One of the most important changes that would affect all generations since the forties was the creation of a modern social welfare state. The Labour government of Clement Attlee oversaw the passage of the National Insurance, National Health Service, and National Assistance Acts, the nationalization of the Bank of England, the railways, coal, and steel, and the implementation of the 1944 Education Act, hoping that these policies would eradicate longterm economic inequalities.

The 1944 Education Act, which was proposed by Conservative Minister of Education R. A. Butler, was especially important in shaping the experience and expectations of post-war students. Designed to guarantee equal access to a state-funded education for all children through the age of fifteen, its creators hoped that it might allow more working-class children to enter higher education by basing educational advance on merit and achievement, and thus help to eliminate the class inequalities which plagued the nation. At the age of eleven, children would take a Common Entrance Examination determining the type of secondary school the pupil would attend. Those scoring in the upper 25^th percentile could choose to attend a grammar school, which would prepare them to go on to university. Those in the lower 75^th percentile would attend a secondary modern school, which emphasized “practical” courses for children who would end their education at fifteen and enter the labor market. After age fifteen, pupils could study for entrance examinations for universities, attend further education courses, or end their formal schooling. With several years of study in two or three subject fields, grammar school children could take Advanced Level Examinations which would be used to determine their eligibility for entrance into universities. Although the Labour government began implementing this act in the 1940s, successive Conservative governments extended educational benefits even further in the 1950s in their efforts to modernize the economy. In 1953, for example, Local Education Authorities were required to provide student grants for higher education, the amount of which depended upon their parents’ expected contribution. To ensure that the universities could accommodate all qualified students, Conservatives upgraded a number of colleges to university status and planned seven new universities in 1958. At least in theory, therefore, both Conservatives and Labour leaders agreed on access to higher education as a right for all qualified British children.⁹

As a result of these educational reforms, the number of students attending universities nearly doubled between 1946 and 1962, increasing from 69,000 to 119,000.¹⁰ Overall funding of the universities and education in general also increased dramatically in the post-war period, rising from 6.8 per cent of public expenditure in 1951 to 12.5 per cent in 1975, as the nation increasingly perceived higher education as the key to solving Britain’s social problems and to helping the nation to compete in the global economy.¹¹ Despite this emphasis on modernization and reform, Britain’s higher education system was slow to change in many ways. Housing, facilities, and staffing often failed to keep pace with the expanding student population, and a myriad of university regulations limited student freedoms and reinforced traditional power hierarchies between staff and students. The reality of university life fell far short of the high expectations raised by the rhetoric of modernization and reform of the period.

The high cost of social welfare programs and recovery from the damages of the Second World War also contributed to a flagging national economy throughout the late forties and shaped national politics in the fifties. The stagnant economy, together with continued rationing, led to the loss of electoral support for Labour and the victory of Winston Churchill’s Conservative Party in the 1951 general election. Because of the narrowness of this victory, the successive Conservative governments of the fifties made only minor and gradual adjustments to Labour’s domestic economic policies.¹² As the nation recovered from its economic difficulties, the Conservative party became increasingly popular among voters and dominated politics throughout the fifties and early sixties. Despite occasional fluctuations, by 1957 the nation had entered into a period of affluence which would last until the late sixties. In a speech that year, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously declared, “Let’s be frank about it; most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country... and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime— nor indeed ever in the history of this country. What is beginning to worry some of us is, ‘is it too good to be true?’”¹³ This dual perspective on the period, delight in affluence but anxiety about the future, would shape British culture throughout the sixties.

Uncertainty over the economy and new consumerism was paralleled by anxiety about the social changes which accompanied this transformation. Historian Arthur Marwick convincingly shows that this economic growth and consumerism transformed the societies and cultures of all of Europe and North America in the late fifties and the sixties, contributing to a revolution in consumer spending, leisure, popular culture, and standards of living.¹⁴ The fastest growing group of consumers in the fifties were the baby-boomers. Like many other countries in Europe and North America, Britain had experienced a “baby boom” in the late forties which resulted in the number of young people under age twenty growing from three million in 1951 to over four million in 1966.¹⁵ This population bubble attracted considerable attention from the media and from corporations seeking to target this new generation of consumers. Marwick and many other social commentators then and now believe that this generation was raised in affluence with new “permissive” child-care techniques, giving children more personal freedom than previous authoritarian generations. ¹⁶ This generational thesis, which was first outlined by social commentators in the late fifties and early sixties, perceived a resulting generation gap between babyboomers, who were raised to view all people as equals, and their parents, who were raised to respect their elders and social hierarchy. The babyboom generation, which came of age in the sixties, has thus been associated with permissiveness and youth rebellion.

More recently, however, historians of the post-war period have found that so-called permissive trends and worries about youth rebellion date back to the 1940s, a generation before the baby-boomers. Historian Nick Thomas points to a number of studies which have demonstrated the existence of rising rates of juvenile delinquency in the 1940s, and a rising tide of public hysteria in reaction to it dating to the 1950s. Social commentators and the news media in the fifties worried about youth rebellion and blamed the lax discipline associated with the banning of flogging and birching in 1948.¹⁷ Thomas has also shown that a number of other social changes, such as the decline in church attendance and class deference, which have been blamed on the sixties, actually began in the forties. The sixties and the baby-boomers, therefore, are best seen as part of a continuum of long-term changes taking place within British society.¹⁸

More important for the creation of a student movement was the social construction of youth as a new social group. As youth emerged as a discrete social group with their own needs and money to spend, new commercial markets expanded dramatically to satisfy their needs and desires. Sales of rock ‘n’ roll singles especially benefitted from the emerging yo...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Routledge Studies in Modern British History
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowlegments
• Introduction
• 1 Beginnings: Student Activism in the Fifties and Early Sixties
• 2 “The Troubles” of Universities in the Mid-sixties
• 3 1968, That Magical Year
• 4 The Transformation of the Student Movement
• 5 The Seventies and the Rise of the Unions
• Epilogue and Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index