Elizabethans

How Modern Britain Was Forged

Andrew Marr

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780008298425
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte der Neuzeit

Who made modern Britain the country it is today? What does it mean to be the new Elizabethans?

Back in 1953 when the Queen ascended her throne, Britain was a very different nation. People wore more hats and uniforms, went regularly to church and were deeply class conscious. The Windrush generation had arrived just five years earlier, and many African-Caribbean and Indian people new to the UK were being denied housing, work, and entry to pubs, clubs and places of worship. There was division over immigration, food rationing and debate about what a late twentieth century Britain should look like. How did we get from there to here?

Bestselling author and broadcaster Andrew Marr offers up an answer: change came from the people. Telling Britain’s modern history through a diverse cast of individuals from all walks of life, Marr shows how women started owning their sexuality; how black activists changed the way we talked about race; how attitudes changed towards everything from social inequality to immigration, music, sexuality and freedom of expression. Celebrating activists and artists, sports heroes and business leaders, this book moves from Sylvia Plath to Elvis Costello, Frank Critchlow to Bob Geldof, Winston Churchill to Marcus Rashford, Zaha Hadid to James Dyson, Dusty Springfield to David Attenborough.

Through these sung and unsung titans of the modern Elizabethan era, this is a history that gets to the heart of how 1950s Britain evolved into the diverse, contradictory and divided country it is today.

Part One

ELIZABETHANS AT HOME

1

MOUNTAINS TO CLIMB

Tuesday 2 June 1953: Coronation Day, and with London en fête for the twenty-five-year-old Queen, there was only one story in town. Obvious – but untrue. The Times newspaper had a scoop of its own, though this was long before it would do anything so vulgar as to put it on the advertisement-crammed front page. A British team of climbers had conquered Everest and it alone had the story. Never mind that in this context ‘British’ meant a Tibetan and a New Zealander; like the Coronation, this was a moment of imperial pride. It was also a great moment for The Times. But why had that newspaper beaten all its rivals, not just in Britain but around the world? The answer tells us a lot about how we misremember the real character of this second Elizabethan age – the radical variousness, the unexpectedness, of the Queen’s subjects.

This story starts on the previous Friday, 29 May 1953. Two men, hacking through the snow, made it to the top of the world’s highest mountain. One was a tall Kiwi beekeeper with a huge, goofy smile. Edmund Hillary, despite strong pacifist instincts, had served during the war with the flying boats of the Royal New Zealand Air Force. He would go on to reach both the North and South Poles. Tenzing Norgay, who had been born in either Tibet or Nepal and who had lived a life of profound physical poverty as a mountain bearer, was a devout Buddhist who had survived several unsuccessful attempts on Mount Everest during the 1930s; he had originally been picked out by previous British expedition leaders partly for his brilliant and enthusing smile.

Reaching the summit of Mount Everest was, in the early 1950s, an extraordinary achievement. Modern technology and accumulated experience have made it much more common now. Then, it required tremendous physical endurance, mental determination and a great deal of raw courage – as well as a lot of luck. The ‘race’ to the top was a subject of fierce national competition. After a previous failed attempt, the British knew that a French team was next in line to try the following year and, if they failed, a Swiss team the year after that. So all Britain was keeping one eye on this particular attempt. Would they be aware of this crowning mountaineering achievement by the time the new monarch was crowned? Just behind the competition to reach the summit of Everest, there was a second race going on: who would get the news out first?

That was the responsibility of a relatively junior member of the team, waiting at base camp, nearly 18,000 feet up. James Morris was the correspondent of The Times of London and he was all too aware of the danger of being scooped. Had he sent the news openly, the information would certainly have been stolen and probably sold to his rivals by wireless operators working between Tibet and Britain. If he had sent it in an obvious code they would have been suspicious and might well have refused to pass it down the line to London. So Morris had agreed with his editors a fake message which contained hidden meanings. ‘Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement’ meant that the British team had reached the summit and that Edmund Hillary was the victorious climber. Morris wrote out his message and gave it to a runner – this is thought to be the last time a major news event relied on a physical runner – who in turn passed it down to the Silk Road village of Namche Bazaar, from where it went by wireless to the British Embassy in Kathmandu. Although James Morris didn’t know whether the message would make it through or if it had been properly understood in London, The Times had its story in time for a Coronation special.

Morris was on, if not cloud nine, then somewhere adjacent. As he wrote later:

I think for sheer exuberance the best day of my life was my last on Everest … how brilliant I felt as, with a couple of Sherpa porters, I bounded down the glacial moraine towards the green below! I was brilliant with the success of my friends on the mountain, I was brilliant with my knowledge of the event, brilliant with muscular tautness, brilliant with conceit, brilliant with awareness of the subterfuge, amounting very nearly to dishonesty, by which I hoped to have deceived my competitors and scooped the world … I felt as though I had been crowned myself.

But as the slightly odd comment about ‘muscular tautness’ might imply, this former cavalry officer with the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, and increasingly successful Welsh writer, had other things on his mind. He was thinking a lot about his strong male body. It was on Everest that he felt for the first time ‘its full power, as one might realise for the first time the potential of a run-in car’. This wasn’t, however, a reason for uncomplicated celebration. Ever since Morris was three or four years old, when he remembered sitting underneath his mother’s piano while she was playing Sibelius, he had felt he had been born into the wrong body. He should have been a girl.

After years of private unhappiness, and despite a successful marriage and five children, Morris would make the transition from man to woman, first with drugs and then through perilous surgery in Morocco. James Morris, successful journalist, travel writer and historian, became Jan Morris, ditto. Although by that time, 1972, Britain had around 150 transsexual people, Morris was the most prominent and more of a pioneer in attitudes to gender than he had ever been on the slope of the mountain.

Today ‘trans’ rights and gender fluidity are the most fashionable and recent aspects of Britain’s fractious twenty-first-century culture wars. But this is not so new, and to think it is new is to misremember. Morris was not, by any means, the first Briton to change gender, as science made powerful yearnings physically possible. So far as we know, the first Briton to undergo male-to-female gender-reassignment surgery was a racing-car driver and former RAF Spitfire and Hawker Typhoon pilot. Robert Cowell’s war had included some very close escapes before being finally shot down and imprisoned by the German Army in a camp so grim that the prisoners were reduced to eating cats before being liberated by the Soviet Union’s Red Army.

Returning to motor racing after the war, Cowell became increasingly depressed and began to take oestrogen, realizing that his identity was fundamentally female. A young transgender doctor, Michael Dillon, who had made the transition from female to male himself, then performed an illegal castration operation on Cowell. Sir Harold Gillies, a famous plastic surgeon, and cousin of Sir Archibald McIndoe, whose ‘Guinea Pig Club’ was composed of burned and reconstructed RAF aircrew, finally carried out a full surgical operation, giving the war hero a vagina.

It is a curious fact that transsexual surgery, regarded today as being at the cutting-edge of gender liberation, owes so much to the horrors of the Battle of Britain and Second World War fighting generally. Gillies, like McIndoe, had made his name rebuilding the faces of damaged servicemen. In his case, they were mainly veterans of the First World War trenches. By the early 1950s the British certainly knew a great deal about what was then called ‘sex change’, not least because in 1954 Roberta Cowell sold her story to the hugely popular magazine Picture Post, which put her on the front cover, pouting and sultry as Marilyn Monroe.

Making the transition from one gender to another produces a ripple of effects, of course, spreading far beyond the individual concerned – to partners present, past and future, to friends, employees and colleagues, and ultimately to institutions circumscribed by their own rules. Roberta Cowell walked out on her wife (who had been an engineering student and had fallen in love with him before the transition), and in later life she never acknowledged her two daughters. Jan Morris maintained her membership of grand London clubs, whose doormen barely blinked, and won over almost all her friends and employers. These are normal human stories, to the extent that every experience is different in detail. It has been a social change made possible by technology – modern drugs and surgery. But it has been surrounded by ignorance and prurience on the one side and a certain amount of aggressive self-righteousness on the other.

What would the crowds awaiting the Queen in the centre of London have made of it all? Historians sometimes tell us that the Britain of the 1950s was repressed and ignorant compared to today. The shrewdest novelists tell different stories; but at any rate there is nothing so irritating as looking back at previous generations in a spirit of moralizing self-righteousness – what the historian E. P. Thompson called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. People observing that Coronation in 1953 could not have known how science was about to reshape gender possibilities, any more than we know what is coming next for us.

Jan Morris later made the point that, in her case at least, transition was driven not by sexual urge but by something more profound. In her memoir Conundrum she said that she had realized that sex was not a division but a continuum,

that almost nobody was altogether of one sex or another, and that the infinite subtlety of the shading from one extreme to the other was one of the most beautiful of nature’s phenomena. Sex was the biological pointer, but the gauge upon which it flickered was that very different device, gender. If sex was a matter of glands or valves, gender was psychological, cultural or in my own view spiritual.

Nuanced, reflective and fundamentally optimistic, Morris was able to survive darkly suicidal moments before confronting what she felt was the unavoidable decision of changing to become a woman. She was able to maintain a spectacularly successful and glamorous career, to stay in an emotionally intense and satisfying relationship with the woman she had originally married as a man, and to keep in touch with supportive and understanding children from that relationship. It is impossible to read her story and think that ‘transgender’ is a trivial or somehow flimsy issue, though it is hardly a majority issue in terms of numbers.

Morris described meeting fellow transgender people all of whom had just been operated on in the Casablanca clinic where she made the change. It reads like the gripping conclusion of a wartime adventure:

we were like prisoners, released momentarily from our cells for interrogation, meeting at last, colleagues known to us only by code or legend. We looked at each other at once as strangers and as allies, in curiosity and in innocence. And we had this in common too: that we were all gloriously happy. Just for those few days of our lives, if never before, if never again, we felt that we had achieved fulfilment, and were ourselves. Mutilated and crippled as we were, stumbling down the corridors trailing our bandages and clutching our nightclothes, we radiated happiness. Our faces might be tight with pain, or grotesque with splurged make-up, but they were shining with hope. To you we might have seemed like freaks or mad people … But for a week or two anyway we felt pure and true …

In the 2010s transgender rights became much argued about, from Parliament to the internet. Transition carries substantial legal and educational consequences. Nobody knows how many transgender people there are in Britain since no official statistics have been compiled. GIRES, an organization which tries to help transgender people, estimates the number as between 300,000 and 500,000. Whether this is an underestimate or an overestimate, their cause has been taken up by increasing numbers of young British people, often to the derision of their elders. The number of children being referred to the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service in London is said to be rising to around fifty a week. How has something once so rare become so popular? Is it because the culture is changing? Is it because drugs and surgery are so much easier to obtain?

By 2017 there were the beginnings of what seemed like a cultural war around this issue, a final extension of the permissive age, which Morris calls ‘for all its excesses, a time of joyous liberation throughout the western world’. Perhaps a useful corrective is to think back to her story and remember that, whatever the statistical count, each of these stories is a unique and individual one, which depends upon the courage, sagacity and imagination of the person concerned. A great virtue of Jan Morris is that there is no self-pity in her account, however harrowing it may at times be. She never saw herself as a victim because she was always more interested in the great world than in herself.

That, perhaps, is a lesson for all of us. There is no such thing as a typical transgender story, any more than there was a typical cavalry officer standing at the base camp of Mount Everest in 1953. This is one small example of how, by digging back a little deeper into our national history through individual stories, we can recapture some of its lost freshness. Even our recent history was rarely as straightforward as it is often painted. This is, rightly understood, a cheerful truth.

There is a breezy historiography which, broadly speaking, sees the twentieth century in Britain as an erratic but unimpeded move from darkness into light. Once we were racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and we lived in a dim, gaslit pre-liberalism. In television terms, it’s as if we have made the move from black-and-white into colour. And there is no doubt that aspects of post-war Britain were dingy. The food was meagre and tasteless, the cities were grimy, the clothes were unflattering, industrial and domestic smoke hung in the air.

We were a bit smelly. The literary critic Cyril Connolly, writing in the magazine Horizon in 1947, called London ‘the saddest of great cities’. He went on to describe its ‘miles of unpainted half-inhabited houses, its chopless chop-houses, its beerless pubs … under a sky permanently dull and lowering like a metal dish-cover’. A recent biography of the painter Lucian Freud reminds us that the Paddington area of London where he lived during roughly the same period was run by violent gangs, and so infested with rats that he bought a Luger pistol to keep them down. A calmer, cleaner, more law-abiding Britain it certainly wasn’t. This was still the Britain of the school cane and the hangman, a Britain where homosexuals were hunted down in public toilets and publicly disgraced.

So much for the vast condescension of posterity. ‘Everything is getting better.’ But a moment of common-sense reflection tells us that the British of the early years of the Queen’s reign must have lived their lives in full colour; that the young were brimming with youth; that every variety of sexual experimentation was vigorously attempted; and that, despite the Movietone News depictions of an endless grey winter, spring kept coming around more or less on time every April.

Was it a more prejudiced country? Certainly; but black American GIs in a segregated army had been warmly welcomed into a country whose ordinary bars, cinemas and restaurants were open to all colours. Gay men, to take another example, found many ways to live full lives, deploying private languages, discretion and a culturally self-confident underworld of clubs and parties, a world now vanished. Britons may have more rights today, and be wealthier materially, but that does not make us necessarily happier, more fulfilled or more virtuous. We have a much greater understanding of our neighbouring cultures in Europe and others around the world; we consume more of their foods, books and films; but because we hover for far less time over dense, traditional texts we may also (whisper this) be shallower.

2

PROPER BEHAVIOUR

The monarchy inherited by Princess Elizabeth in 1952 was almost unimaginably different from the Britain over which she was still reigning in her nineties. Two years after the war, when still a young princess, Elizabeth had given a radio broadcast from South Africa in which she declared to the former Empire that ‘my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to … the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong’. That post-imperial system was still overwhelmingly white. ‘We’ did not properly include the vast mass of impoverished Asian and African workers, certainly not black women. Yet the Queen lived to see her grandson Harry marry a mixed-race, divorced American woman, in a service at Windsor Chapel addressed by a black American pastor and featuring a black South London choir. At roughly the same time, there was a move by Oxford students to tear down a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist pioneer who had helped create British South Africa.

How one Britain became the other is an intricate story. But at its heart are values – moral judgements, behaviour towards others, personal expectations from life. Often, historians instinctively distinguish between political and economic history on the one hand – ‘the serious stuff’ – and lighter, brighter, apparently triter social history on the other. By starting with values, or ‘right behaviour’, we can see that the public sphere and the private sphere are not to be pulled apart. The Britain of 1952 was a society in which the vast majority of people felt they had a place. They might have resented that place or they might have biddably ‘known’ their place. Yet however much they may have chafed against their position in the social spectrum, people understood that certain norms of behaviour were expected – at work, in the family, in streets and in towns and villages. These covered everything from appropriate headwear to the need to keep the front doorstep spick and span, orderly queueing and daily formal greetings.

Of course, there are norms today as well; but they have changed and mean different things. In general, today’s norms are more about blurring and ignoring difference than about reinforcing it. In 1952, it would have been rude, if common, to stare at somebody unusually dressed walking down the street: today, to fail to make eye contact with someone of a different culture, and smile at them, would be thought ruder still. In 1952, to wear a bowler hat showed that you were a member of the upper-middle classes. Today, to wear a bowler hat suggests bohemian and satirical tendencies. Today, to address somebody in a coffee shop or pub as ‘Mr Jones’ or ‘Mrs Simpson’ is likely to prompt a raised eyebrow – ‘Are you trying to make fun of me?’

In 1952, to address a neighbour or shopkeeper by their first name only would be to make a daring assumption about intimacy. Today, to address someone simply by their second name – Jones or Simpson – would come across as insulting. In 1952, it would have been blandly unremarkable. Today, to turn up at work in stained jeans, with a T-shirt allowing you to display swirling arm-length tattoos, would say nothing of your social origins, although it might imply a high-value job in the tech sector or entertainment. In 1952, it would have signified that you were a filthy, jobless, unrespectable hobo. Or maybe a gypsy or a merchant seaman.

We still have our signifiers, but they crash across traditional barriers of class and employment. What was once literal has become sarcastic; and these are the norms for a more class-confused and culturally heterogeneous Britain.

This underlying sense of order in the Britain of 1952, against which many millions were already itching, was partly the result of the Second World War, which had mobilized and disciplined the British more comprehensively than ever before. A tiny little children’s booklet produced in 1955 by the now defunct News Chronicle newspaper, I-Spy People in Uniform, is like a time capsule of a different society: Girl Guides are drawn in three sharply delineated varieties, as Sea, Air and Land Rangers; a sergeant of the Boys’ Brigade is shown with white chevrons and a kepi-style cap; a bugler from the Church Lads’ Brigade sports a tasselled and emblazoned uniform that wouldn’t have disgraced a Napoleonic chasseur. ...