1965

The Year Modern Britain was Born

Christopher Bray

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781849833875
• eBook ISBN: 9780857202796
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

There is Britain before 1965 and Britain after 1965 - and they are not the same thing. 1965 was the year Britain democratised education, it was the year pop culture began to be taken as seriously as high art, the time when comedians and television shows imported the methods of modernism into their work. It was when communications across the Atlantic became instantaneous, the year when, for the first time in a century, British artists took American gallery-goers by storm. In 1965 the Beatles proved that rock and roll could be art, it was when we went car crazy, and craziness was held to be the only sane reaction to an insane society. It was the year feminism went mainstream, the year, did she but know it, that the Thatcher revolution began, the year taboos were talked up - and trashed. It was when racial discrimination was outlawed and the death penalty abolished; it marked the appointment of Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary, who became chief architect in legislating homosexuality, divorce, abortion and censorship. It was the moment that our culture, reeling from what are still the most shocking killings of the century, realised it was a less innocent, less spiritual place than it had been kidding itself. It was the year of consumerist relativism that gave us the country we live in today and the year the idea of a home full of cultural artefacts - books, records, magazines - was born. It was the year when everything changed - and the year that everyone knew it.

1

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT

In which our stage is set

‘If it is agreed that those who seek to rebuild what Mr Churchill likes to call “traditional” Britain have no hope of fulfilling that end, it follows that there must be a new Britain in a new civilization.’

Harold Laski⁽¹⁾

‘History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors’

T. S. Eliot, ‘Gerontion’

He had loathed the modern world. He had loathed modern culture. Most of all, he had loathed modern painting. Though Evelyn Waugh had thought him ‘always in the wrong’² he had thought Waugh right to have one of his characters argue that ‘modern art is all bosh’.³ True, when Graham Sutherland was commissioned to paint his portrait he called the resultant picture ‘a remarkable example of modern art’.⁴ In private though, he was rather less given to irony. The picture, he said, made him look like a ‘down-and-out drunk who has been picked out of the gutter in the Strand’.⁵ As soon as he decently could, he had his wife burn it. An amateur watercolourist himself, he once asked the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Alfred Munnings, whether he detested Picasso – and if so, then ‘would you join with me in kicking his something, something, something?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ Munnings told a laughing RA audience he had gleefully replied. ‘I would.’⁶

But Munnings had died at the end of the fifties, and now, five years later and almost two weeks since what turned out to be his final stroke, Winston Churchill’s own ‘great heart was still’.⁷ It was 24 January 1965, and for the next six days, before his funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral, Victorian Britain, imperial Britain – the Britain that had made Churchill and that he had spent the bulk of his ninety years trying to remake – lived again. Within hours of his death Buckingham Palace announced that Churchill was to be given a state funeral – the first non-royal to be granted such an honour since the burial of William Gladstone in 1898. On that occasion Queen Victoria had only reluctantly acceded to Parliament’s request. This time round, there was no such dithering. Indeed, the gun carriage that transported Churchill’s coffin to the funeral service in St Paul’s was the same one that had been used to take Victoria to her own final send-off.

For the Queen thought as highly of Churchill as most of her subjects did. Churchill had once said of Queen Elizabeth II that ‘All the film people in the world, if they had scoured the globe, could not have found anyone so suited to the part.’⁸ It was a compliment the Queen was happy to return. She was certain that the British couldn’t have found a man more fitted to leading them through the war against Hitler. Like Sir Edward Bridges, the wartime cabinet secretary, she believed that only Churchill had ‘had the power to make the nation believe that it could win’.⁹ And so, not content with kick-starting the organisation of the funeral for a commoner, she let it be known that she would be in attendance at the ceremony.

Before that, though, there was the lying-in-state. During the course of Churchill’s final days, the streets around his home at Hyde Park Gate hadn’t been short of well-wishers and lookers-on, all busy mumbling silent prayers and wondering whether their country, and even their world, would ever make sense again. At any one time no fewer than 250 people had maintained that cold, wet watch on their wartime leader. But their numbers were as nothing when set against the crowds that would turn up to say their last farewells to ‘good old Winnie’. For the three days preceding the funeral, on 30 January, Churchill’s catafalque was placed in Westminster Hall, during which time more than 300,000 people filed past to pay their last respects. And on the day of the funeral itself, with Big Ben silenced, hundreds of thousands more turned out to watch the gun carriage that took Churchill’s coffin through the streets of central London to St Paul’s. Many further millions around the globe watched the proceedings on television. A great national production number though Churchill’s funeral was, it was also, like the moon landing that would follow it four years later, one of the world historical events of the 1960s.

For what was being commemorated wasn’t merely the death of one man. Just this once, people were right to talk about the end of an era. Or eras. As Clement Attlee, who had replaced Churchill as Prime Minister after the war, once said, there was about him ‘a layer of seventeenth century, a layer of eighteenth century, a layer of nineteenth century and possibly even a layer of twentieth century. You were never sure which layer would be uppermost.’¹⁰ Never sure, perhaps, but in general it was a good bet to put your money on Churchill’s nineteenth-century layer coming out on top. He was nothing if not a child of Britain’s imperial age. Like Macaulay, from whose books of Whig history he learned so much, he was happy to count himself a member of ‘the greatest and most highly civilised people that ever the world saw’.¹¹ Macaulay gave Churchill the faith to believe in his own knee-jerk notion that Britain was the moral and political leader of the world. Right to the end he never doubted that he had been born into the country whose duty it was to civilise anyone unlucky enough to have been born elsewhere.

Certainly he had been born into the Whig interpretation of history. He was a descendant of John Churchill, the most successful general of his age, and the man appointed by Queen Anne as the first Duke of Marlborough. A couple of years later, after Churchill’s victory against French and Bavarian troops at the Battle of Blenheim, the Queen and a grateful nation gifted the duke the wherewithal (£300,000 of wherewithal⁴) to build Blenheim Palace. Designed by Sir John Vanbrugh, this top-heavy slice of English baroque was finished in the early 1720s. And it was there, a century and half later, on 30 November 1874, that Winston Churchill came into this world.

His military sensibility was spotted early. Churchill’s father, Randolph, a Whiggishly wet Tory (and very briefly Chancellor of the Exchequer who foresaw, if not invented, the idea of the twentieth-century welfare state), never thought much of young Winston’s intellect. Indeed, he never thought much of – or about – Winston at all. But he liked the way his son played with his toy soldiers. He seemed to be having more than just fun with them. He seemed to be thinking about how best they could be used in the field. If the Church wouldn’t be quite right for him, much less the law – let alone politics – then perhaps he could make something of himself in the forces. After ‘Army Class’ at Harrow Winston enrolled at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst in September 1893. (It took more than one go: he failed the entrance exam not once but twice.)

Short of leg and pigeon of chest (Churchill was known to disparage himself as a pygmy), his greatest joy at Sandhurst lay in riding. So much so that against his father’s wishes that he join an infantry regiment – the 60th Rifles – he determined to sign up with the cavalry. Fortunately for Churchill, his mother, Jennie, was a friend of Colonel John Brabazon of the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars, and on 20 February 1895 (not uncoincidentally less than a month after Randolph Churchill’s death) Winston was enrolled into their number. Even now, with his father gone, he was determined to prove himself a hero in action in the hope of winning for himself the approval and acclaim he felt he had been denied.

At the same time, he wasn’t certain that a military career would be enough. He wanted, he told his mother, not just to be there in the thick of the action but to be back home telling people about it, too. He wanted, in short, to be a reporter. Once again, Jennie pulled some strings, and soon enough Winston found himself in Cuba writing war reports for the Daily Graphic: ‘When first in the dim light of early morning I saw the shores of Cuba rise and define themselves from dark-blue horizons,’ Churchill wrote, in one of his early pieces, ‘I felt as if I sailed with Long John Silver and first gazed on Treasure Island. Here was a place where real things were going on. Here was a scene of vital action. Here was a place where anything might happen. Here was a place where something would certainly happen. Here I might leave my bones.’¹² Here, too, he might start building a reputation as a master of the English language.

Subsequently, Churchill would see service in India (on the North-West Frontier), in the Sudan, and in the second Boer War. There is no doubting his bravery – he seems to have been thrilled at the thought that death could be so near at hand, and thrilled yet more by the faith it granted him in his invincibility – but nor is there any denying that what really made his name were the Ripping Yarns-style stories (by now he was writing for the Morning Post, too) and books he spun out of his adventures. And yet believe in this stuff though he did, Churchill was sage enough to see that the jingoistic jig was up. ‘It did seem such a pity that it all had to be make-believe’, he recorded in the first volume of his memoirs. ‘If it had only been 100 years earlier what splendid times we should have had!’¹³

But there are different kinds of splendour, and by 1899 Churchill had made enough money from book sales to be able to contemplate the political career his father had thought beyond him. He didn’t win the by-election he fought in Oldham that year – a special correspondent for The Times called Churchill out for taking ‘too much pain with his orations’ and not appreciating that the good people of Oldham ‘prefer solid argument to smart epigrams’¹⁴ – though little more than a year later he was elected the town’s MP in the general election of 1900.

Still, a version of The Times’ reporter’s criticism would dog Churchill for the next four decades. Even his admirers thought that his high-flying rhetoric encouraged him to treat events in the real world as if they were just acts in a drama that was forever descending into dullness unless he was on hand to liven things up. Witness his decision, in April 1915, four years into his stint as First Lord of the Admiralty, to launch an assault on the Gallipoli peninsula in what is now Turkey. Yes, had the mission been a success it would have opened up a sea route to Russia (still an ally at that time). But all the evidence shows that Churchill had conceived of the assault for rather less rational reasons. Bored with the endless, dirge-like slog that was the Western Front, he wanted a big, show-stopping number to jolt this hitherto dull war into a second act full of derring-do. It didn’t work out like that. Gallipoli was a disaster for the Allies. They lost more than 70,000 men there before their eventual withdrawal. The only show that was stopped was Churchill’s. He was forced to resign from the Admiralty (and perhaps to seek a kind of atonement in active service on the dreaded Western Front). From now on he would be mistrusted not just for his phrase-turning but for treating the theatre of war as no more than a theatre.

Even as late as the mid-thirties, when Churchill was telling the world that Adolf Hitler was up to no good, the powers that be were still turning a deaf ear to him. They thought Churchill was worried by Hitler simply because he (Hitler) was another stentorian stage-strutter. They thought Churchill’s love of warmongering led him to exaggerate the threats of others. But they were wrong – and Churchill was right when he said that Hitler was more than just another blustering chancer. Their mistake only heightened Churchill’s lustre when he was invited back to the top table after everyone realised that Hitler really was up to no good.

At first he found himself back in charge of the Admiralty, where within months he had engineered something that looked very much like a second Gallipoli – a botched expedition to Norway that ended in retreat. The man who had once rued the notion ‘that the age of wars between civilized nations had come to an end for ever’ had miscalculated.¹⁵ Stuck in his imperial fantasies, he hadn’t stopped to wonder about the threat his battlecruisers could face from the air. This time around, though, it wasn’t Churchill who took the blame, but the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. When he resigned, after a way too narrow win on a no-confidence motion (‘Go! Go! Go!’ howled the opposition), a coalition government was formed to take Britain through the war. Churchill was a shoo-in for the leader.⁵

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Except that in Churchill’s case things worked the other way around. The man had always been there – he’d just been waiting for the hour in which to prove it. He had always known that it was one day going to fall to him to lead his country through a great crisis. Hitler and his ‘Narsis’⁶ were that crisis, and Churchill admitted to ‘a profound sense of relief’ that he could at last ‘walk . . . with destiny’ in the fight against him.¹⁶

On 13 May 1940, his first Monday in office, Churchill addressed the House of Commons. ‘I have nothing to offer’, he told them, ‘but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ In fact, as the speech couldn’t help but make clear, he had something else to offer: his speeches themselves. For all Waugh’s talk of Churchill’s ‘sham Augustan prose’, for all the carping that his rhetoric was all idiom and no style – ‘like a court dress of rather tarnished grandeur from a theatrical costumier’s’¹⁷ – Churchill spoke for the nation. Six days after that first prime ministerial address, on Trinity Sunday, he told the country about the successes Hitler’s forces were enjoying in France, and about how there would soon have to be a fight ‘for all that Britain is, and all that Britain means’.

Nearly all that Britain was was listening. Throughout the war an average of seven in ten people tuned in to hear Churchill’s war broadcasts. Their effect on national morale cannot be exaggerated. Even today, three quarters of a century on, you can’t read or listen to them without feeling your eyes moisten. Roy Jenkins wasn’t wrong when he said that Churchill at the microphone or podium was ‘inclined to go over several tops’.¹⁸ But as great actors know – and Churchill was one of their number; had he not been, nobody would have believed in him – there are times when going over the top is the only way to get under the skin. Some stories are so ridiculous they have to be told hammily. Churchill’s story about Britain being able to resist the Nazis was one of them. Until the Americans joined the war, his rhetoric was all the country had to fight with.

With Hitler vanquished, Churchill and the Tories were thrown out of government. The solidarity he had invoked and embodied in wartime was thought unsuited to the peace. His values seemed out of date. Not that he was forgotten. His memory went on being cherished long after the country decided he had nothing more to offer them. And although over the years it would become a commonplace cat-among-the-pigeons contrarianism to suggest that Britain’s victory in the war against Hitler had been largely illusory and almost entirely delusory, the revisionists never won many converts. When, a few days after Churchill’s death, the historian John Grigg suggested that for Britain ‘the next few days should act as a tonic rather than a sedative’ there was no doubt that he was going out on a limb.¹⁹

Funerals are by definition celebrations of past glories, but wasn’t there something hysterical about the way the British said their goodbyes to Chu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Also by Christopher Bray
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• 1965 Timeline
• Introduction
• 1. Goodbye to All That
• 2. Far Out, Man!
• 3. You’re Going to Lose that Girl
• 4. The Freedom Trap
• 5. Something Is Happening Here
• 6. Class Acts
• 7. Taking Over the Asylum
• 8. Conduct Unbecoming
• 9. Never Such Innocence
• 10. The New Aristocracy
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Select Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• List of Illustrations