ELIZABETHANS

How Modern Britain was Forged

Andrew Marr

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William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Andrew Marr 2020

Extract from Jan Morris’s Conundrum (Faber & Faber Ltd) used with the kind permission of the publisher

Extract from Robin Morgan’s ‘Monster’, Monster: Poems (Random House and Vintage Press, 1971). All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the author

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Andrew Marr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Version: 2020-09-03

Dedication

In memory of William Donald Marr, 1930–2020,

a wonderful father and a fine Elizabethan.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction: The Crown and the Corona

PART ONE: ELIZABETHANS AT HOME

1. Mountains to Climb

2. Proper Behaviour

3. A Word on Americans

4. Between Catastrophe and Golden Age

5. On Our Uppers

6. Upper Class in the 1950s

7. Nancy, and How to Speak Proper

8. British Shinto

9. Diana and Ruth

10. The Ballad of Stephen Ward

11. Punishment by Acquittal

12. The David and Jonathan of Permissive Britain

13. Schooling: The First Defeat of Socialism

14. The Rebel Conservative

15. Graham, a Very Naughty Boy?

16. Other Homosexualities

17. Hashtag MeToo and the Story of Ted

18. The British Journalist

19. Bad Behaviour: Real Women Break Through

20. Out of Control: New Ways of Misbehaving

21. Lara Croft and Her Boys

PART TWO: ELIZABETHANS IN THE WORLD

22. Does Britain Have Friends?

23. Mountbatten and the Navy

24. New-Fangled Wars, Old-Fashioned Heroes

25. Bob the Good

26. Women and War

27. Getting Out

28. The Empire Loyalist

29. Farrokh Bomi Bulsara

30. Jayaben Desai

31. The Idea of a Nation

32. The Leaping Salmond

33. The Rev. Dan Dare

34. Elizabeth David, Good Eating and Europe

35. Europa, and British Europeans

36. The British California

37. Churchill, European Dreamer

38. The Road to Brexit

39. Brexit Warriors

40. From Burning Tower to Hostile Environment

41. Khadija Saye

PART THREE: ELIZABETHANS AT WORK

42. Didn’t We Do Well?

43. ‘Houses and Meat and Not Being Scuppered’

44. Cathode Tubes and Isotopes: New Ways of Making

45. Crash! Sir Geoffrey de Havilland

46. The Robot We Never Used

47. Bernard and Norah: Let’s Have Some Fun

48. To Potter is to Fly

49. How Others Saw Us

50. Success and Failure on the River Clyde

51. When We Made Great Ships

52. Clive Sinclair: Make it Small

53. The Rest of Creation

54. Anita and the Kindly Market

55. Ridley Scott

56. Nice Boys, Really?

57. Outlandish Fruit

58. The Queen of the Curve

59. Strong Suckers and Raspberries: Making It Here

60. A Networked Nation?

61. Posh and Him

62. Beyond the Market

63. A Future

Picture Section

Index

Acknowledgements

Cover Image Credits

About the Author

Also by Andrew Marr

About the Publisher

Introduction:
THE CROWN AND THE CORONA

On the evening of 5 April 2020, speaking at Windsor Castle and attended by a single BBC cameraman hidden behind protective clothing, Queen Elizabeth II gave the fourth televised address of her reign outside her annual Christmas messages. She was talking to the British about coronavirus, as deaths soared and most of her subjects chafed indoors under tight government restrictions. Her subject was patriotism. As she was speaking, her Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was being taken to St Thomas’s Hospital in London, where he would be placed briefly in intensive care, as his coronavirus symptoms worsened.

The Queen was too subtle to compare the coronavirus crisis directly with wartime conditions. Indeed, she emphasized the difference: ‘This time we join with all nations across the globe in a common endeavour using the great advances of science and our instinctive compassion to heal.’ However, the separation of family made necessary by social distancing and the general lockdown in homes made her, she said, think back to the broadcast she had made during the Second World War to the evacuee children.

The Queen repeated the government’s key messages about staying at home and supporting the NHS – she had not spent her life as head of state for nothing – before making her central patriotic appeal.

In the years to come everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge. And those who come after us will say, the Britons of this generation were as strong as any; that the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet good-humoured resolve and of fellow feeling, still characterize this country. The pride in who we are is not part of our past. It defines our present and future.

This is without doubt how most British people would like to think of themselves. The Queen went on to mention specifically the then regular 8 p.m. Thursday applause for NHS and key workers, which would be ‘remembered as an expression of our national spirit’.

‘Our national spirit’ is quite close to being the subject of this book. Exceptionalism – how different are we? – is the staple question of all national history. Yet, in modern circumstances and particularly during a global pandemic, it may be the wrong question.

Most developed human societies are moving in roughly the same direction when it comes to their economies, attitudes to fairness and rights, and their failures, particularly over the environment. There are renegade countries and dissenting civilizations, such as Hungary, Russia and China – far more so than when the ‘end of history’ was vaingloriously proclaimed after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But among liberal democracies today’s Elizabethan Britain is broadly in the mainstream. After Brexit, it is still (much) more like other European cultures than unlike.

So let us turn to that Thursday applause, both origin and object. It should not be too much of a surprise that inspiration came not from a native Briton but from Annemarie Plas, a thirty-six-year-old Dutch software saleswoman and yoga teacher, who got the idea from friends in the Netherlands. Her message, sent by a variety of social media, read: ‘Please join us on 26th March at 8pm for a big applause (from front doors, garden, balcony, windows, living rooms, etc) to show all the nurses, doctors, GPs, and carers our appreciation for their ongoing hard work and fight against the virus.’

All over Britain, huge numbers of people heeded her call. Soon, among those standing on their doorsteps or in their houses to clap were many members of the Queen’s family, the Prime Minister and actors such as Daniel Craig. Television channels made a point of stopping normal programming to record it.

It was heartwarming and proper, and made most British people feel better. But it wasn’t a specifically British thing. Locked-down individuals and families in virus-hit Lombardy, in southern Italy and in Spain had done similar things – as, of course, had the Dutch.

Then there are the identities of those who were being applauded. As the New York Times reported three days after the Queen’s address, of the first eight doctors who died in Britain of coronavirus while treating it, all were immigrants here. Lists of those who had died began to appear in newspapers. One, in the Daily Telegraph, at around the time of the Queen’s address, included the following names: Abdul Mabud Chowdhury, a fifty-three-year-old Muslim consultant virologist working in Romford Essex, who had recently warned the government about the lack of personal protection equipment in hospitals; Edmond Adedeji, sixty-two, working in Swindon; Fayez Ayache, seventy-six, who had migrated from Syria, working in Ipswich; Alice Kit Tak Ong, a seventy-year-old nurse from Hong Kong, working in the Royal Free Hospital in North London; Jitendra Rathod, fifty-eight, a heart surgeon working at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff; Alfa Saadu, from Nigeria, still working at sixty-eight in the Whittington Hospital North London; and Adil El Tayar, a sixty-three-year-old Sudanese doctor working in Middlesex. The New York Times listed the countries from which the first dead had come as being India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Sudan.

Again, anyone familiar with modern Britain would be unsurprised by that list. The British National Health Service has long relied on doctors and nurses who have migrated here from poorer countries. European medical staff, at the beginning of the epidemic, may well have gone back to their own health services to help; and sadly it is not a surprise that immigrant doctors were on the front line doing some of the most dangerous jobs when it struck. But had something similar happened in the early years of the Queen’s reign, then the surnames of the dead doctors would have been more likely to read Wilkins, Smith, Walker, McDonald, Davies, Jones.

When we talk about the experience of the British in 2020, we’re talking about a different people compared to when we talk about the experience of the British in, say, 1950. Contemporary Britain is unusual in European terms in its porousness to migration from non-European parts of the world, for obvious historical reasons. The reader may argue that the essence of modern Britishness is in neither surnames nor radically different behaviour, but in subtler matters: taste in food and drink, humour, propensity to queue or, in the Queen’s words, self-discipline and quiet good-humoured resolve.

There is a lot in that. But it is easily overdone. As lockdowns took place first of all in Italy, France and Spain, the online jokes, cod videos and memes showed that Gallic, Iberian and Lombard humour weren’t much different from British – and just as funny. They felt, reacted and joked just like us. They were as self-disciplined and grumbled just as much. They revered, and applauded, their doctors and nurses just as we did.

One area in which the British response to coronavirus did seem remarkable was when the government asked for volunteers to aid the NHS, deliver food and medicines to the most vulnerable and help keep basic services running. Within a few days 750,000 people had signed up to help, more than three times ministers’ original target. Here, if anywhere, was a whiff of the exceptional. Yet all across France the ‘solidaires’ were doing much the same thing. In the United States, local volunteering networks had sprung up in Minnesota and spread a system of mutual aid from state to state. In Italy, when the government asked for volunteer doctors for the front line, more than 8,000 immediately signed up, while non-medical citizens volunteered to help in other ways through the Protezione Civile and by distributing food. Human nature is pretty much the same the world over. A border-ignoring pandemic seems to make it more so.

The year of the pandemic raised more interesting issues than whether countries were culturally very different. Across Britain, it brought people more together for a common purpose. For many of us it was the first time in which the demands of community and common purpose clearly outstripped the daily prodding for profit and self-advancement. People did start to look to their neighbours, buying and delivering food to the vulnerable, performing innumerable acts of kindness. More important than who the British were exactly in 2020 was perhaps how they thought about themselves and their country. This bigger picture did include some kind of revived patriotism, to which the Queen was speaking.

But there were other storm clouds ahead. The coronavirus lockdown seemed likely to provoke a major recession. As this book was completed during the lockdown, it is hard yet to be sure. Perhaps Britain will bounce back economically more quickly and more vigorously than the current economic consensus expects. But vast numbers of businesses suddenly found their income drying up; and a government spending spree to try to support them would eventually, everybody knew, have to be repaid. Inside the Treasury, the mood was bleak. Within a month of the lockdown, 2 million people had already lost their jobs. One former Bank of England adviser, David Blanchflower, predicted that unemployment could hit more than 6 million and the experience would be worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Whether that proves to be the case or not, the year of coronavirus provoked questions about equality, fairness and all-in-it-togetherness. More of those on the front line who were infected came from minority communities. Then there was the division during the lockdown between those living in the gardenless apartments or tower blocks, observing Britain through windows only, and the more affluent with gardens or even second homes. There was a divide between the older, on whose behalf the lockdown was being implemented, and younger Britons losing their jobs, social lives and hopes for the future. There was a division between the naturally obedient, carefully observing government advice and reporting on errant neighbours, and the disobedient, disinclined to believe ‘experts’ and ready to believe conspiracy theories flying around online. Finally, there was the division between those who observed the epidemic from a distance – if infected, barely noticing the fact – and those who died, or whose relatives and loved ones did. The gap between those who experienced coronavirus essentially as a public-policy news story and those ripped in pieces by it – a misery scale running from inconvenience to screaming disaster – was the biggest inequality of all.

Many of those issues of class, fairness, conformity, immigration and culture are at the centre of this book. Alongside those, it investigates attitudes to work, gender, sexuality and ‘abroad’. To do so, I have been looking at individual lives, the Elizabethans of the title. It has been a genuinely painful process of selection. There are many eminent Britons, from the trade unionist Jack Jones to the artist Barbara Hepworth or the newspaper editor Paul Dacre, who deserved space but haven’t received it. Sometimes that is because they are very well known and have already been well described elsewhere or it is because they have featured in another book I have written. More often, it is simply because I found somebody different to do the same job in this particular history of attitudes. Inevitably, the selection is partial, random and personal, but I hope readers will find it an interesting and thought-provoking slant on contemporary Britain.

The book covers the period between the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and 2020, when she was ninety-four. The reign of a monarch is an unusual measurement of time. Even for historians, centuries, decades or individual years have become more popular. But when a monarch has been on the throne for a long time, as in the case of Queen Elizabeth II, then that measurement, a reign’s-length, becomes more useful than quirky. The period from 1952 to today is, for most British people, at least as long as their adult consciousness of being alive. It’s a lifetime’s-worth. So to ask the questions – What were we like then? How different are we today? And how did that Britain become this Britain? – makes sense.

Most histories of this period focus heavily on the established systems of power, the well-known critical turning points – Suez, the arrival in power of Margaret Thatcher – and changes in consumer behaviour, from holidays to cars. This one is slightly different. I have called it Elizabethans for two reasons. First, it invites us to think of ourselves as people in history, just as much part of our period as the late Tudors were. Yes, we are the second-time-around Elizabethans, or the ‘new Elizabethans’, but we won’t be new for very long. We will be, ourselves, part of history quite soon. Second, the plural is key: I want to tell the story of change through the histories of the individual people.

Why? Social change can seem an abstract concept, as if we all move together in a mass or block. Textbook sociology suggests that we become less religious together, we become more accepting of sexual minorities together and so on, a swooping, twisting, thickening murmuration of attitudinal starlings moving through human history. That’s an unfair caricature, perhaps, but there’s an element of truth in it. And yet every shift in thinking or behaviour is led, then shaped and then confirmed by individual lives, fundamentally solitary experiences. In short, the single bird turns first. Brave or reckless pioneers thrust ahead; other individuals may resist and fight back. Very often the pioneers make mistakes and are promptly outstripped and forgotten. But sometimes they are veering, only half consciously, in the direction the rest of the flock will then follow. Such people, often good, sometimes bad, are the subject of this book.

For instance, we live at a time when women are trying to negotiate lives in which they are both sexual actors and yet also in control of their own destinies. The ‘It Girl’ who appears on front covers and reality TV shows, and is knowingly complicit in her own Instagram brand, has become, for better or worse, a kind of role model. Where did that start? For me, it was right at the beginning of the Queen’s reign with the story of that remarkable, knowing and very tough cookie Diana Dors. But if hers seems too self-congratulatory a story, what about somebody else, in many ways like her (and for a time her friend), Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain? Together, they tell a story of some of the perils and opportunities for women in the 1950s.

Or take the great arguments about the shape of the economy and society in the 1970s, between socialists and Conservatives. These tend to be examined through the prism of general election results and the views of the dominant Westminster leaders – what Heath thought, what Wilson did. But unless you understand how Jimmy Reid, the charismatic communist who led the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ work-in, or Jayaben Desai at Grunwick really thought and how they hoped things would turn out, then you are missing a crucial perspective.

What I have been trying to capture here is often subtle. We all understand the big, visible changes. Hats disappear. Airports become gigantic as millions fly on foreign holidays or take regular business trips abroad. The number of British people with brown or black skins increases fast. Churches empty. Mosques spring up. All of these things are a significant part of our story and must be recorded. If we really want to know how we have changed as a people however, we should dig a little deeper. At some point in the late 1950s and early 1960s, for instance, the British seem to become cheekier, even rebellious. An insolent contempt for established authority begins to creep in. Why? Is it the hangover of irritation about uniformed dolts making bad decisions during the Second World War? That was certainly Spike Milligan’s motivation. But was something else going on? That is worth looking at.

Then there is patriotism in itself. Back then, there did seem to be a clearer understanding of what it meant to be British. It had much to do with swankier, more preening institutions, with bigger flags and brighter brands – the monarchy, the armed forces, the still-present if subsiding Empire. But, under all that, we just felt unEuropean. We felt ourselves to be more private, less exhibitionist than the continentals. We were, and we proudly acknowledged it, more class-conscious. We read and judged one another via minuscule gradations of vowel sound and language, impenetrable to outsiders. Our television dramas and our popular novels are about little else. Compared to coarse Germanic guffaws or the regrettable lewdness of the French, we felt our sense of humour was finer, flint-dry. Our art, from Piper to Britten, was sparer and leaner. Our ritual year was shaped by a Church very different from continental Lutheranism or southern Catholicism. These things were true for the English middle classes: were they true, at all, for working-class Britons, for the Scots, for the Welsh and so on? And if they were not, was there really such a thing as ‘the British people’?

These are hard questions, and I can’t pretend in what follows to have convincingly answered all of them. If I have an end point, it is to ask what it means to be British today. Whom do we admire? Whom do we applaud? Whom do we especially dislike? And here one unmistakable, tousled, deeply divisive and noisy figure elbows his way as ever to the front of the queue. Fresh from his brief confrontation with mortality at St Thomas’s Hospital, Boris Johnson grabs us by the lapels and demands to be inspected.

Here is a man born of intellectual and liberal-minded parents, whose early years tell us much about the Britain of the 1960s. At the time when we were, however reluctantly, accepting American leadership of the world, Boris Johnson was born in New York and spent some time being brought up in Connecticut while his father was working for the World Bank. For most of his adult life he kept an American passport and has publicly speculated about emigrating to the US. But his Americanism goes deeper than citizenship rights. His instinctive belief that everything will get better, a bouncy, untethered optimism, is a far more American than an English trait. Although Boris Johnson is no Donald Trump, Trump recognized a fellow spirit.

‘Make America Great Again’ is not so different from the ‘unleash Britain’ rhetoric of Prime Minister Johnson. Like Churchill, there is a hazily American tinge to Johnson. And yet, in his enthusiasm for classical literature, in his command of French and, as Mayor of London, in his embracing of modern European liberalism, Johnson could also seem a most unAmerican politician. His father Stanley came from an eminent diplomatic Turkish family – although he was born in Cornwall, his father was Osman Kemal, and he was registered at birth as Osman Ali Wilfred Kemal. In 1973, Stanley Johnson moved to the European Commission. Boris was then brought up in Brussels, mingling in the multinational educational soup of bureaucratic exiles. Later, he would make his name at the Daily Telegraph by amusingly if inaccurately lampooning EU directives and senior figures; but in 2016, as he agonized about what to do in the EU referendum, his family were convinced that his fundamental pro-European instinct would win out. Britain’s ambiguous love–hate relationship with the continent is played out in Johnson’s personality; it forms a major theme in this book.

Another theme will be British family life. Boris Johnson’s mother was an artist, Charlotte Johnson Wahl, who came from a liberal English, American and Russian-Jewish family. When Johnson was young, she suffered a nervous breakdown. She divorced his father in 1979. Later she told a BBC interviewer she thought Johnson’s oft-described childhood ambition to be ‘World King’ was a reaction to that experience, ‘a wish to make himself unhurtable, invincible, somehow safe from the pains of life – the pains of your mother disappearing for eight months, the pains of your parents splitting up’. Conservative moralists who see infidelity and family break-up in the 1960s at the root of many current problems could pull up Johnson’s childhood as an example.

He and his three siblings formed a tough, tight ‘us against the world’ team, albeit riven by personal rivalries. Johnson went to Eton on a scholarship, learning to make potentially threatening boys laugh and causing staff to despair at his reluctance to follow the rules. His housemaster wrote: ‘I think he honestly believes it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.’ Many acquaintances and colleagues would echo that.

Does it matter, in the wider scheme of things, that Boris Johnson was educated at Eton? In some ways, not very much. A great swathe of the British political class is privately educated in one way or another – and that even included Johnson’s 2019 socialist opponent Jeremy Corbyn. And wherever he acquired it, Johnson certainly had the common touch. From his two elections as London Mayor through to the 2016 referendum and 2019 general election, his bluff directness meant many working-class voters simply didn’t see him as an alien toff.

But on a wider perspective Johnson’s Eton upbringing matters a lot. Despite all the social reforms in Britain during the post-war period, our retention of a deeply divided educational system stands out as marking the modern country. Around 7 per cent of British children are expensively educated in private schools. That is a relatively small number, but they then tend to sashay into plum jobs, partly through the social networks based on those schools. Politics, the Army, the civil service, the media, business and the City, all tell the same story.

As with so many of the political elite, Johnson then went on to Balliol College, Oxford (which will also feature later in this book) where he mingled with among others a predecessor as Prime Minister, David Cameron, and other Tory colleagues and rivals such as Michael Gove and Jeremy Hunt. Long ago, after the prime ministership of another Old Etonian, Harold Macmillan, the senior Tory politician R. A. Butler suggested that the party was run by a ‘Magic Circle’ of Eton friends, which visited much damage upon the party’s democratic reputation. But in some ways Balliol College in particular and Oxford in general provide further tight circles of the clever and privileged. The notorious photograph of Boris Johnson and other members of the restaurant-smashing Bullingdon Club, including his rival and one-time boss David Cameron, had something of the same effect in the twenty-first century as the Magic Circle had in the 1960s. None of this defines Boris Johnson. But it tells us a lot about the sticky persistence of an exclusive class divide in modern Britain.

However, it is the final part of Boris Johnson’s sentimental education that may be the most important. He became a journalist. Throughout the age of parliamentary democracy in Britain, journalism and politics have been deeply intertwined. Many of the great Victorian statesmen formed close friendships with newspaper editors. Some even wrote for the press and, although this was looked down on, by the time Winston Churchill embarked on his career at the very end of the nineteenth century, a bit of journalism on the side was becoming accepted as a way of subsidizing unpaid politics. Since then, journalism has grown in influence, almost beginning to rival the law as a background occupation. As an American columnist once reflected, in the old days journalists had waited at the gates to watch politicians going in to dine: ‘Then we began to dine with them. And then we dined on them.’

In London, Michael Gove was a journalist before he went into politics. So was the Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson. Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor Nigel Lawson was a journalist. On the Labour side, this was likewise true of the shadow Chancellor Ed Balls and his wife, the powerful shadow minister Yvette Cooper, and many more. Boris Johnson, thanks to a personal connection, landed a job on The Times until he was caught making up a quote and sacked. He moved briskly on to the Daily Telegraph, first as a leader writer and then, crucially, as its Brussels correspondent, where from 1989 to 1994 he became a pungent and highly criticized opponent of the EU hierarchy.

From the 1990s to the first decades of the new century, Johnson’s journalism made him famous. He used his deep reserves of education and native wit to make similes skip and metaphors turn cartwheels. He demonstrated a witty, salty, addictive and provocative style that made editors desperate for his copy – admittedly partly because he often filed so late. Johnson himself said his journalism gave him a ‘weird’ sense of power and influence inside the Conservative family. Margaret Thatcher was a fan. But he wasn’t a journalist who stood instinctively with other journalists. He deeply angered many when a recording emerged in 1995 in which he agreed to pass the address of an investigative reporter to a friend of his, Darius Guppy, who wanted to have him beaten up for probing into his criminal behaviour. In due course, Johnson became an editor himself, of the Spectator. By then he had become a staple on popular TV news channels and chat shows, perfecting the cheerfully dishevelled appearance behind which he has always hidden his ambition.

In a broader account of modern Britain, does any of this matter? It does, because contemporary British journalism tells us much about the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary British culture. Its strengths – let’s start with those – are inherently democratic and conversational. As we would expect from a culture which extols the liberal arts over science and engineering, British newspapers – and on rare occasions British broadcasting – produce some of the strongest and most vivid writing anywhere. Clever, voluble, fluent people trade controversies daily. Following Orwell, polemical writers from the left and from the right hone and sharpen their philosophical disagreements into headlines and phrases with the cutting power of Neolithic hand axes. Millions of British people feel more connected to political arguments because of the daily hard work and anti-bullshit thinking done by much maligned journalists.

But admiration of its raucous verbal forum, essential to popular democracy, is as far as it goes. British journalism is notoriously innumerate. It prioritizes the shock factor and polarized arguments over sophistication and nuance. The cheaper newspapers have a disgraceful history of bending the truth in order to score a political point, to indulge in prurience or even just to make a joke. Deadlines and speed of writing are admired over strict accuracy; presentation wins awards which footnotes never do. Too few journalists have any deep understanding of the sciences, medicine or engineering. Detailed inquiry reports and official documents, crammed with useful and enlightening information, languish unread. British journalism is, in short, a slapdash preparation for serious politics. And when Boris Johnson, remarking that ‘They don’t put up statues to journalists,’ moved into politics, he brought some of that slapdash quality with him.

Again, perhaps, so what? His direct, provocative way with words and his clowning – though his schtick always seemed to this writer more that of an opinionated landlord in a chaotic popular pub than a circus act – brought him the chuckling adulation of the Conservative Party and millions of voters who never thought of themselves as natural Tories. ‘Boris’ won; and who can argue with winning?

Electorally, he had a lot in common with his political hero Winston Churchill, still the dominant figure at the beginning of the Queen’s reign. They both produced an instantly recognizable physical caricature – wild blonde hair or cigars, gurning or growling. Both used short, memorable phrases to define themselves. Both were adept at employing humour to defuse embarrassment and unbalance opponents. Both were adored by some but loathed by others. Both were compulsive and speedy writers of quotable prose. Both ended up known almost universally by their first names. What’s not to like?

Historians will note that the great successes based on Boris Johnson’s obvious strengths as a campaigner and national figure – the 2016 Leave campaign and the 2019 general election that completed it – were immediately followed by the coronavirus crisis, which demanded very different qualities both from Johnson and from the British state. This is being written in the middle of things, before the lockdown has ended. It is a bit like trying to produce the verdict on a rugby match (Johnson is a rugby fan) while the game is still going on, a greased ball shooting through slippery hands in heavy rainfall. Nevertheless, the statistics seemed to show that the countries coping best were ones whose political managers had instantly followed scientific advice and ignored populist hostility to new regulations and whose health systems were based on years of patient investment and on carefully accumulated and stored kits for testing and intensive-care ventilation. Britain was not one of these countries.

Johnson, in characteristic style, had begun with boosterish promises that all would be well, and assuring people that he for one would continue to shake hands. His initial instincts were all against forcing people to stay in their own homes, closing pubs and the rest of it. In 1911 Arnold Bennett published a short novel, The Card, whose hero, the rising politician and chancer ‘Denry’ Machin, is said to stand for ‘the great cause of cheering us all up’. That’s Boris Johnson. Yet nothing could be further from cheering than the news he was now bringing Britain. As things became graver, he became graver. After being admitted to the intensive care unit at St Thomas’s Hospital, where his very survival hung in the balance all through one long day and night, he gave an eloquent and deeply moving tribute to the National Health Service.

There was no doubt now about just how serious coronavirus could be. But his beloved NHS was still struggling to acquire enough protective equipment. Johnson’s government had been unable to conduct the kind of extensive testing programmes that had allowed South Korea, Germany and Denmark, for instance, to limit the viral spread and fatalities.

Was there something in all this, that spoke to the weaknesses of the British state and economy, and more generally of its political culture? The Elizabethans were being tested at home; but their government was being tested also by international comparison. Relative death rates are a clear, hard measure of individual national administrations’ success in dealing with a common viral threat. As I say, this is a report being written in the thick of things. Elizabethan Britain may yet come out of this nightmare well. Ministers were not slow to reassure us that we had the very best scientists and health system in the world. But did we have the best industrial pharmaceutical capacity; the best levels of investment; the most robust preparation? Or had we become a little slack, not quite serious enough, even a little slapdash as a country?

In the early summer of 2020, what was perhaps most remarkable in politics was that the great division which had riven Britain apart even before the referendum of 2016 now seemed to belong to a different century. Under a common threat, the bitter tribal hostility between pro-Brexit Leavers, convinced that the country was regaining its glorious independence at last, and defeated, bitter Remainers, who saw in all of this only xenophobia, nostalgia and retreat, was fading as fast as old election posters left out in the sun. Boris Johnson had arrived in office determined, he said, to heal. And he had many of the strengths a healer would need. When he emerged from hospital himself, he made a point of particularly thanking two nurses who had stood by his bed all night during the darkest time – Luis Pitarma, a senior staff nurse from Aveiro in Portugal, and Jenny McGee from Invercargill, New Zealand. The dependence of the NHS, like the rest of Britain, on migrants from the EU as well as from other countries around the world, hardly needed to be spelt out.

Many questions about the quality of modern Elizabethan life and politics, brought into sharp focus by coronavirus, lie behind what follows in this book. Here you will find scientists and inventors who often don’t make it into general histories of the period; industrialists who messed things up or valiantly fought through; the shapers and makers of our modern cult of individualism, and those who battled them every inch of the way. William Langland, the great English medieval poet, described a vision he had in the Malvern Hills as showing ‘a fair field full of folk’. This, I hope, is something similar.

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 male to female 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. Then there are pages of the various outfits and badges of the Women’s Voluntary Service, the Civil Defence Corps and Red Cross Cadets, before we reach scores of uniforms for mainstream civilian jobs, from top-hatted bank messengers to water and gas employees.

Britain was a drilled and ordered place, and the war’s direct consequences were still being felt – the continuation of rationing, a rolling mist of grey privation and the swagger-stick of National Service waving over almost all young men. Away from rural villages and suburbs, Britain was a factory-dominated industrial nation, millions of whose workers were subject to the alternative disciplines and solidarities of mass trade unionism. It was a country of clocking-on, bellowing foremen, compulsory branch meetings and the tyranny of the timesheet.

This was unusual in British history – we have rarely been a heavily organized and conspicuously law-abiding country – and it made Britain unusual in the world. Work was the most important thing. Britain was never more focused on manufacturing industry than in the 1950s and 1960s. As the historian David Edgerton has pointed out, ‘The share of manufacturing workers in total employment peaked in the 1950s, the absolute number of workers in manufacturing in the 1960s. This was British manufacturing’s moment; the moment too, of the industrial working class.’

The beginning of the 1950s saw 9.5 million people paying regular trade union dues (compared with around 6 million today, in a much larger workforce). Unions had their own clear hierarchies, and powerful, often socially conservative leaderships, whose writ ran in mines, dockyards, offices and engineering shops. Just as young men going into the Army would face bullying rituals, dramatic haircuts and parade-ground square-bashing designed to erode their individuality, so too, in thousands of factories, young apprentices would be subjected to initiation ceremonies designed to humiliate them and above all ensure that they knew their place.

A vivid sense of all this is conveyed by the former Labour politician Jack Ashley, who grew up in Widnes in Merseyside. As a child, he recalls, ‘Respect for authority was a tangible factor in our lives. Mam was anxious about any contact with people such as priests, doctors or employers. For the priest’s weekly “collection” visit, she always gave some money, no matter how impoverished we were. This was a practice I resented from a very early age.’

He then went on to work in a chemical factory owned by ICI and remembers the atmosphere for a fourteen-year-old beginning work in industrial Britain:

I began to capture the moods of industry which I came to know so intimately in the years ahead: bawdy banter, passionate arguments about football, dogmatic assertions about the job and the bosses, and an underlying sense of comradeship … The ribaldry caused me more embarrassment than it would any fourteen-year-old today. When the men had exhausted their standard repertoire of jokes about babies, busts and bottoms, left-handed spanners, sky hooks and barrow-loads of steam, we settled down to the humdrum work of the factory …

Later, he came across a classic foreman: ‘A curt, sharp-spoken man, he always wore a black suit and a dark cap. His word was law, and I was surprised at the submissiveness of the men as he issued instructions.’

Jack Ashley, this writer’s father-in-law, is a good exemplar of many working-class values in the immediate post-war period. He had known genuine poverty, brought up with his sisters by his mother in a dilapidated terraced council house, and he entered politics in 1946 as a teenage rebel councillor protesting against local Labour Party housing policies. His was an Irish Catholic family and the young Ashley, with a good singing voice, served as a choirboy. He later turned against religion, but his values and passion for justice seemed rooted in the Gospels.

It has often been argued that the 1950s were a golden age for upward social mobility, as grammar school children from poor backgrounds made it to the expanding universities. Ashley did not go to a grammar school, but having left school at fourteen for the chemical works became a crane driver: he got his chance thanks to another ladder sometimes underplayed by historians – the trade union movement, winning a scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, where he got a diploma in economics in 1948, before he went to Cambridge and started work again as a researcher for the National Union of General and Municipal Workers.

Ashley had no visible lack of self-confidence about class origin: from the first time he came across public schoolboys at Cambridge and learned about mysteries such as homosexuality, he regarded the ‘posh’ as a mildly amusing form of eccentric fauna. As a young man he had been fast with his fists but, rising to become president of the Cambridge Union Society and travelling on debating tours to the United States, he became fast with his tongue as well. After a career as a producer and presenter with the BBC, he was elected Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent South in 1966. Soon afterwards, as a result of an operation that went wrong, he became profoundly deaf.

Something in his hard, early years had given Ashley abnormal determination: against all expectations, he carried on in Parliament and learned to work effectively as a backbench MP. A lifelong admirer of Harold Wilson, and spoken of at times as a possible future Labour leader himself, Jack Ashley demonstrated through a wide range of campaigns, aided by his indomitable wife Pauline, that backbenchers could achieve as much as most ministers. He became Britain’s foremost campaigner for disablement rights, as well as leading successful fights for compensation for Thalidomide victims and on behalf of victims of domestic violence and Army bullying. He was quietly but intensely patriotic, fascinated by military history and suspicious of all intellectual, ideological theories. He had been forged in a world which assumed everyone had a settled future. He simply thought that ridiculous.

The imposition of authority and hierarchy at industrial workplaces is often sidelined when compared to the effects of war and conscription; but in taming young men, and separating them from the female world, the parallel is obvious. Even in a much later television comedy, Are You Being Served?, set in a comparatively genteel department-store world, the social (and generational) hierarchies – departmental managers in stiff collars versus sarky, larky counter staff – are glaringly obvious. Another TV series from the same era – the early 1970s – On the Buses, shows the importance of work hierarchies in a very different setting: drivers and inspectors belong to different, mutually antagonistic worlds. If Britain today is a much more feminized society, this is not entirely the achievement of feminists; it is also a reflection of a fundamental shift in how people tend to spend their working days.

At the conclusion of a highly disciplined and hierarchical working week, Britons went to church. It was, compared to the country of the twenty-first century, a religious, churchgoing nation. Roughly speaking three times as many people were regularly attending Anglican services, for instance, as happens now – despite a vastly bigger population. In raw numbers, 1930 had been the high point for British church membership (an admittedly vague concept) with 10.3 million in regular attendance. But in the late 1950s the figure was almost as high, and in fact higher than church membership during the 1940s, perhaps reflecting a wish to bind and give thanks after the traumas of the war. Scotland, where the Scottish Presbyterian kirk had a strong grip, and Northern Ireland were particularly strong churchgoing societies.

Although the proportionate number of churchgoers across Britain continued to fall, it fell only gently during the late 1950s and early 1960s – perhaps thanks to a combination of the effect of the hugely popular Billy Graham Christian revivalist crusades, which each attracted more than 2 million followers, and the arrival of immigrant Irish Roman Catholics keen to attend Mass in their adoptive new home. The religious revival of the 1950s would have wider social effects. It was followed by a revived campaign against homosexuality, which in turn led to intense debates on the issue. These would lead to its decriminalization.

The big decline in church attendance came in the 1970s and afterwards. By 1990, the then Bishop of Southwark said that Britain had moved from a country ‘where Christianity is culture, to one where Christianity is choice’. Ten years later the Archbishop of Canterbury called Britain a country in which ‘a tacit atheism prevails’. It was an immense change, which perhaps we still do not understand. In 1950s Britain, churchgoing reinforced social conformity as powerfully as did factory working or National Service. Children attended Sunday school, where they were tutored in Bible stories and Christian morality. Their parents sat through sermons. Adulterers and the left-behind of broken marriages would be pointed out and embarrassed. Vicars, ministers and priests made regular visits to homes all over Britain, unannounced but expected. And whatever happened to overall churchgoing numbers, Christianity remained a powerful political and moral force throughout the Queen’s reign.

Apart from passing references to the Festival of Light, such Christian moralism is rarely made much of by historians. This is because history is so often the history of institutions, and the deeper history, of what is going on inside people’s heads, is hard to uncover. But we have the autobiographical testament of numerous political and social leaders to remind us of how important Christian values were in their lives. Of course, the very term ‘Christian values’ raises many questions. On the conservative side of the argument, its importance is perhaps better understood. The impact on Margaret Thatcher of her father’s Methodism is accepted by all her biographers.

As a young woman, she was a preacher herself. She was a sophisticated enough Christian not to assume that the Bible required any particular line in voting. But for her the Bible always had political consequences. In a speech at St Lawrence Jewry in 1978 in the City of London, she argued that higher taxation was reaching its limits and that the time was soon coming when what the taxpayer was prepared to do would be less than what the individual had been willing to give ‘from love of his neighbour. So do not be tempted to identify virtue with collectivism. I wonder whether the State services would have done as much for the man who fell among thieves as the Good Samaritan did for him?’

She had never thought that ‘Christianity equipped me with a political philosophy,’ but she thought it did equip her with standards by which political actions could be judged. Her Christianity emphasized the family rather than the collective; individual will; the virtues of hard work; private charity; and one’s duty to look after one’s own. It brought her into conflict with the Church of England in 1985, after the publication of a report commissioned by Archbishop Robert Runcie, Faith in the City. This responded to inner-city tensions by calling for more public spending and declared that ‘too much emphasis is being given to individualism, and not enough to collective obligation’. Criticizing the comfortable and well off, it argued that the exclusion of poor people was ‘pervasive and not accidental’. According to her biographer Charles Moore, Mrs Thatcher underlined these words and drew two large question marks beside them, ‘well aware that she stood accused’.

Hurt and offended by the Church’s criticism, Mrs Thatcher tried to explain herself as a Christian three years later in her so-called ‘Sermon on the Mound’ to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. She argued that Christianity was not about social reform but about spiritual redemption. She quoted St Paul’s adjuration, ‘If a man will not work he shall not eat.’ This infuriated some Scottish clerics; but what the row demonstrated, really, was that there were still very contrasting views of Christian ethics and that, as late as 1988, they mattered to both sides of the political argument. How important was it that the Good Samaritan was wealthy enough to have money in his pocket to help the man lying robbed and bleeding? Or was the instinct that sent him across the road to help his neighbour, unlike the wealthy and powerful Levite and Pharisee who had both passed by, the central part of the story?

Christianity encouraged some Conservative leaders to think harder about poorer and less powerful people, in a way that went well beyond market economics. With the exception of David Cameron, who said, quoting his then friend Boris Johnson, that his religious faith came and went like intermittent radio reception in the Chilterns (though he did so in the context of a speech robustly asserting Britain’s Christian heritage), most Tory leaders have been overtly Christian. Harold Macmillan was religious, as, in a quiet way, were Alec Douglas-Home and Edward Heath. What did this mean in policy terms? It is probably fair to say that for twentieth-century British Christians the New Testament mattered much more than the Old; and that its kernel was Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

Thus politicians who were committed to limiting the size of the state and strongly believed in individual free will, exercised in the free market, also believed that they had obligations to all their fellow citizens. Much of the consensus evident in the so-called Butskellite social policies of the 1950s and 1960s – emphasizing high employment, the role of the trade unions, welfare spending and relatively lavish support for the National Health Service – was perhaps the result of a pervasive, slightly diluted New Testament ethic running through the Tory Party. Margaret Thatcher was in this, as in so much else, a partial exception to the rule.

The influence of Christianity is even more striking on the left of British public life. Harold Wilson said that the Labour Party owed more to Methodism than to Marx. When it came to mid-twentieth-century Labourism, he was absolutely right. He himself had been brought up, not quite as a Methodist, but as a Congregationalist (the man who followed him as Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, was a Baptist) and was married in a chapel to the daughter of a church minister. In later life, he said that his religious views explained why he thought that high unemployment was immoral. The radical-egalitarian aspect of Christianity, the sense that everyone owes obligations to everyone else, and that everybody is equal in the sight of God, runs through modern politics as a constant, nervy source of virtuous disturbance.

Even atheists who went on to lead the Labour Party, such as Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, had strong Christian nonconformist connections – Foot’s through his Plymouth family and Kinnock’s through Welsh chapel culture. John Smith, who followed them, was a devout Christian. Among politicians we shall come to later, the effect of the New Testament on Tony Benn was profound and transforming. Tony Crosland was brought up in the strict Plymouth Brethren tradition and, although he rebelled against its puritanism, ‘thy brother’s keeper’ remained central to his political vision. Shirley Williams, another politician with a strongly ethical view of the role of politics in society, came from a devout Roman Catholic background.

Tony Blair, whose religiosity concerned his advisers throughout his political career (‘We don’t do God,’ instructed his spokesman Alastair Campbell), converted to Roman Catholicism after he left office. He had been brought to a closer understanding of Christianity’s political implications by an Australian priest while he was a student at Oxford, and later came under the influence of the Christian philosopher John Macmurray. In a speech to the Labour Party conference in 1995 he explained what religion meant for him: ‘I am worth no more than anyone else, I am my brother’s keeper, I will not walk by on the other side. We are not simply people set in isolation from one another, face to face with eternity, but members of the same family, same community, same human race. This is my socialism.’

His successor, Gordon Brown, was the son of a Church of Scotland minister and retained a close interest in the importance of the New Testament. In a book devoted entirely to the political use made of Christ’s Good Samaritan parable, the writer Nick Spencer concluded of the Brown version, following the financial crisis of 2008, ‘This was the Good Samaritan as justification for state intervention. The travelling Samaritan has become the multi-billion-pound British government, stepping across the treacherous financial road and binding the wounds of a damaged and vulnerable public with billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.’

So, is this something or nothing? If Christianity, indeed the same stories from the New Testament, can be used by Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown for almost opposite political conclusions, should we conclude that religious influence in British public life is meaningless? I am not arguing that, as a result of their faith, politicians were translated into junior members of the angelic horde – that they never fibbed or acted immorally. But it is possible for a way of thinking to be so widely distributed and so influential that we barely notice it.

In the case of Christianity in twentieth-century British life, its ‘everywhereness’ is the point. Millions of people who might not have been motivated by political philosophers had a moral imagination formed by the New Testament – by Sunday school, Bible class, church parades. This, consciously or otherwise, made them see the democratic system as more than a way of pursuing their own economic advantage. The Queen forthrightly referred to her religion in her Christmas messages, but for many millions of her subjects who didn’t even go to church, Christianity was the ethical water in which they swam. For politicians of the centre-left, striving to make life more successful and tolerable for poorer fellow citizens, the impulse for their ideas did not come primarily from reading Friedrich Engels or Das Kapital, from Marcuse, Gramsci or Fanon, but from an early and immersive dunking in the four evangelists.

The Christianity of elective politicians is only the start. Consider the influence of Lord Soper, the prominent Methodist leader, on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; of Bruce Kenrick, the founder of Shelter and also a minister in the United Reformed Church; of the Rev. George Macleod and his Iona community in Scotland; of the Quakers who helped found Oxfam. But even bearing all of them in mind, we only begin to scratch the surface of the impact of the New Testament on British social policy in modern times. As we shall see, the hugely popular Eagle boys’ comic was a consciously Christian undertaking, created by a Southport vicar. Religious influence lingered long after church congregations had shrivelled. During the coronavirus crisis of 2020, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and other Church of England priests delivered their services and sermons online. It seemed that ten times as many people were watching and listening as regularly attended physical churches, all of which were then closed.

In many ways, reading the novels of the period seems to show that respectability was as strong in the Britain of the early years of the Queen’s reign as in the heyday of her predecessor Queen Victoria. Respectability, loathed or admired, is important in the early comedies of Kingsley Amis, as in the somewhat bleaker novels of his friend Philip Larkin. Jim Dixon, anti-hero of Lucky Jim (1953), a horny drunk, knows that his professional fate lies entirely in the hands of his professor and is constantly threatened by his own misbehaviour. He too had to worry about his equivalent of the factory foreman or the passing priest. Respectability mattered. In a famous attack in the Sunday Times, Somerset Maugham wrote of Amis’s characters: ‘They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious … Charity, kindliness, generosity are qualities which they hold in contempt. They are scum.’

Britain of the 1950s was also an overwhelmingly white society, with only small numbers of immigrants from the Caribbean arriving in London and a few Midlands cities. The arrival of so many black American GIs ahead of the invasion of Europe had introduced many white British communities to their first dark-skinned neighbours. The overall reaction was mildly enthusiastic. There was considerable British hostility to the American ‘color bar’.

But these were visitors. Visitors who were just passing through were easier to respond to than settlers. The docking of the Empire Windrush in 1948, bringing 492 West Indian immigrants to Tilbury and now celebrated as the real beginning of multicultural Britain, drew the following rebuke from eleven Labour MPs – Labour, not Conservative – to the then Prime Minister Clement Attlee: ‘The British people fortunately enjoy a profound unity without uniformity in their way of life, and are blessed by the absence of a colour racial problem. An influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impair the harmony, strength and cohesion of our people and social life and cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned.’

There were smaller Chinese, African and Indian communities in the East End of London and some port cities. For the majority population, the Empire was still largely an abstraction – something people went across the seas to ‘serve’, not a policed global system whose unwinding would have big repercussions at home. Newspapers and political parties, except for small numbers on the far left, regarded the Empire as an almost unqualified good, an achievement British people should be proud of. Until 1958 (it was renamed by the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan) Empire Day was celebrated every March, with decorous parades, speeches and church services. From the Prime Minister downwards, people spoke unselfconsciously about ‘the British race’, and regarded foreigners as humorous, dangerous or merely unfortunate. Blacked-up ‘minstrel’ entertainers featured on television; gollywogs were cuddled by small children and advertised by jam makers; newspaper cartoonists used racial stereotypes which would be unprintable today.

The British of 1952, in short, were a quietly religious, homogeneous, stratified, socially conservative, proud and comparatively closed-off country. Compared to today, they were much less connected with the European continent, socially, culturally and in terms of personal wealth. The middle classes didn’t have boltholes in the Dordogne. The working classes had never been to Spain – unless they were part of a tiny minority who had been fighting for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

In this much more local world, people had less information at their fingertips. Perhaps, therefore, they concentrated harder on what they did know – memorized verses and songs, local nature lore and childhood stories, worn smooth and made familiar by repetition. Books, to be borrowed from libraries, and much more densely written newspapers provided a slower, more thoughtful way of spreading information and opinion. Television news, and radio news too, was calm and dry. Outside a few shadowed streets in a few city centres, where a few men lurked, pornography was little known.

If dim throbs of Elgar are by now hanging over these sentences, we must remember that ours was always, also, a contested country. Dissidents, whether sexual-minority groups or angry young men and women using new styles of clothing or music to cock a snook at their parents, were increasingly obvious as the wartime norms eroded. Communists and militant trade unionists – and, from the mid-1950s, anti-nuclear campaigners – were visible and much discussed. There was rising worry about inner-city gang violence.

Any would-be recorder of this period, therefore, is faced with a problem. Because the stories of the numerous rebels against an essentially conservative, stratified and rationed society tend to be colourful and specific – frankly, more exciting – there is a serious danger of forgetting the majority view. Oh, look! There is Sir Bertrand Russell sitting with his philosophical legs crossed as he protests against the Bomb. Look! There are some Teds in their dead-cool drainpipes and crêpe-soled shoes; and there’s Lonnie Donegan twanging away at a skiffle club … And so, because our attention is stolen by the unusual and the vivid, the cavorting heralds of different futures, we fail to notice the calm majority – all the young people having serious conversations in Christian youth groups in the Midlands; the millions of Labour voters who admired stodgy, unprogressive mainstream leaders such as Herbert Morrison or Bessie Braddock; and all the households listening, not to the new rock ’n’ roll, but to show tunes and swing bands.

Yes, everything was changing – but gently and piecemeal, in rivulets and plashing borders, not in one brightly coloured waterfall. Wartime disciplines slowly eased. For every would-be satirist who resented National Service, there were scores of youngish middle-aged men meticulously polishing their shoes, proudly maintaining shorn hairstyles and supping mild ale on a Friday night at the British Legion. There’s a common misconception that, having voted in a socialist government in 1945, the British were speeding towards the more open, liberal, rebellious country we became later.

But this is nonsense. There was no logical connection between the policies of the post-war Labour Party and the waves of liberalization which began a shift in values towards where we are today. The nationalization of the steel industry and the abolition of corporal punishment in prisons do not go hand in hand; nor do changes to the law on adultery and abortion have anything to do with a more progressive income tax policy; nor indeed does the end of hanging connect to a regime of trade union rights. The dominant figures of the left, from Clem Attlee to Ernie Bevin, were social conservatives – indeed, by today’s standards, deeply reactionary.

Many other countries, from post-war France and Italy through to Britain’s closest Commonwealth allies, Canada and Australia, stayed more conservative for longer. Nothing about British liberal reform was inevitable. Indeed, had there been a rolling political revolution after 1945, in which the Labour movement had gone much further than the creation of the National Health Service and limited nationalization and stayed in power for several decades, then Britain would probably have been a more socially conservative society than it has proved. The great sexual scandals of the middle part of the century and the rise in anti-establishment satire were products of Tory years, not of Labour ones. The angry young men of literature turned out to be men of the right, not of the left.

Yet somehow the left came to take ownership of social changes that went much wider than the agenda of earlier twentieth-century governments – the sexual revolution, the pushing back of the punitive state, the use and tolerance of drugs and an unmistakable decay in social and religious hierarchies. This was the achievement of a small number of individual politicians, of whom the most important were never Prime Minister themselves – Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins.

They were reacting to a weariness in post-war Britain, and an anti-establishment frustration which has been a constant in British politics from the 1840s onwards. We have never been a particularly stable society. But a relatively small number of people saw their chance during the first part of the Queen’s reign to push a shift in values and did so. Along with Margaret Thatcher, who saw herself to some extent as their nemesis, they were the most influential of Elizabethan weather-changers. And much of their thinking came from over the Atlantic.

3
A WORD ON AMERICANS

The most obvious division in British public life is between left and right. But the division between social conservatives and social liberals is just as important, and not the same. And in its influence on British social attitudes during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the impact of America cannot be overstated. Later, we will see how important the US-hating Enoch Powell would be when it came to the great argument over Britain and Europe. We will also see how fears over the violence and crudity of American culture grew in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. But before all of that it’s important to reflect on the vast admiration for America felt in the decades after the Second World War; and to recall that this was felt even more strongly on the liberal left than on the conservative right.

Take that influential woman Shirley Williams. The Labour, and later SDP, politician had a determined self-certainty which came from her intellectual and privileged upbringing. She was the daughter of the famous 1930s writer Vera Brittain, and was brought up in a Chelsea household where the Indian independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru and H. G. Wells were visitors. But her popularity as a politician came from her style, a breezy, no-nonsense rule-breaking informality that set her apart. A good example of it came in 1966 when she was appointed a minister in Harold Wilson’s government, at the Home Office in charge of, among other things, pornography and prisons. There have been many prisons ministers. None of the others decided to have themselves incarcerated for a few nights as a prisoner to see what it was actually like.

Shirley Williams persuaded the authorities to send her to Holloway women’s prison, her identity kept secret. This was a time when there was much newspaper comment about prison life being too easy and comfortable. In order to experience the lifestyle for herself – the smells and sensations, the food and the boredom – the Minister of State posed as a convicted prostitute:

I did go through the business of being accepted into the prison, stripped and searched, given prison clothes, endlessly laundered and totally lifeless, and put in a stained and grubby cell. I had to explain to my cell-mates … what I was in for. I decided the hardest to check up on, was prostitution, so I told them I was ‘on the game’. The ‘game’ extended to a wide spectrum of women, from the elegant mistresses of Mayfair to the cheap £5-a-go end of the business around mainline stations such as King’s Cross and Victoria … I found the conversation highly enlightening.

This gave her a special authority back in Whitehall, and she became a particular expert on the poor quality of toilets and showers in female prisons.

So where did this airy readiness to ignore the normal way of doing things come from? The answer may simply be her temperament – by her own account, even as a young girl, Williams was tousled, impatient and unruly. But it’s equally likely that she became a liberal rebel partly because she was educated not in Britain but, during the war, in America. Because her mother was a well-known pacifist and her book Testament of Youth was loathed by the Nazis, Shirley Williams’s parents were on a Gestapo blacklist to be eliminated as soon as the Germans had invaded Britain.

Vera Brittain was determined to stay on and rally her fellow pacifists: she decided, though, that her children should be sent to the United States for safety. Brittain had done pre-war lecture tours in the US. Friends she had met from Minnesota sent her a telegram which simply read: ‘Send us your children.’ Williams and her brother were dispatched across the Atlantic, despite the threat of U-boats, to a farm outside Minneapolis. There they were exposed to a land without obvious class divisions, and a culture far less formal than contemporary Britain’s. Williams later wrote that, in her three years as an evacuee, ‘I lived in a classless society, whose members shared the same accent and the same values … the walls between the social classes were porous … Money and talent would enable one to traverse them. The absence of accent as a defining feature enabled Americans to present themselves as whatever they wanted to be.’

This sunny world, without crabbed, confined divisions, would greatly influence British liberals (though they seemed strangely blind to America’s extreme racial divide). It wasn’t simply America’s greater material wealth – the domestic labour-saving gadgets, the lavish food, the bigger cars – that impressed post-war visitors. It was also the informality and democratic optimism that was so alluring. This was primarily transmitted not in films or books, but person to person and family by family.

Anglo-American relations were intimate as much as they were official – evacuated children, billeted GIs and their brides, and family friendships made between serving officers during the war, which lasted well into the 1960s and beyond. Beyond all this, there were the scholarships and the lecture tours which introduced ambitious young Britons to America – Jack Ashley had been one example. British student bodies regularly sent their best debaters to argue their way around the US during the 1950s and 1960s. The Rhodes Scholarships founded in 1902, designed by the imperialist mining magnate and politician Cecil Rhodes to bind together the Anglo-Saxon world through postgraduate study at Oxford University, were followed by similar programmes, taking Britons in the opposite direction.

In 1925 Edward Harkness, one of America’s richest men through his family investments in Standard Oil, founded the Harkness Fellowships, bringing British students to study in the US. Among the post-war beneficiaries were a vast range of opinion-formers, including Alastair Hetherington who edited the Guardian from 1956 to 1975, Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times, the BBC broadcasters Alistair Cooke and Bridget Kendall; the writers Hugo Young, Jan Morris, David Lodge and Adrian Wooldridge; Geoff Mulgan, who ran policy for Tony Blair in Downing Street; Howard Davies, the Bank of England mandarin and Director of the London School of Economics; and Mark Damazer, Controller of BBC Radio Four – as well as innumerable politicians, composers, surgeons, scientists, historians and artists.

The Thouron Awards were established in 1960 to create a special relationship between Britain and the United States through exchanges between British universities and Pennsylvania University. Among its British beneficiaries was Norman Blackwell, another head of the Downing Street Policy Unit; Sir Paul Judge, who created the Judge Business School in Cambridge; Sir Mike Moritz, the California-based billionaire Welsh investor who supported education in Britain; Robert McCrum, the British journalist and author; and Sir Robert Cooper, one of the key British figures at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Bit by bit, name by name, personal life story by personal life story, the British and American elites were being quietly tied together in ways generally undiscussed by historians.

This was particularly true of politics. After the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, the then Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, helped create Kennedy Scholarships, sending Britons to Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in JFK’s memory. The Trustees of the scheme read like a gazetteer of the modern British establishment with Kennedy Scholarships appealing strongly to the politically ambitious. Beneficiaries included Ed Balls, the Labour shadow Chancellor, who served in the Treasury under Gordon Brown; the former cabinet minister Yvette Cooper; the former Tory International Development Minister Alan Duncan; the former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband; the former Labour Environment and Culture Secretary Chris Smith; and William Waldegrave, cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher; and influential journalists such as Stephanie Flanders, former economics editor of the BBC, Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor of The Economist, and Anatole Kaletsky, the columnist.

This knitting together of the elites goes both ways, of course. The Marshall Scholarships were created by the British Parliament in 1953 as a ‘living gift’ to the United States to say thank you for its generosity in the post-war Marshall Plan, which had helped rebuild Europe. Its beneficiaries have included members of the Supreme Court and US Congress, American cabinet members and no fewer than four winners of Pulitzer prizes. President Clinton was just one of the many American winners of a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. At a slightly lower level there are the more specialized programmes, such as the Lawrence Stern Fellowship, which brings British journalists to work for the Washington Post for one summer, and again, a vast number of prominent British broadcasters, newspaper editors and writers have benefited from that.

Now that’s a long list. But it’s here for a reason. It is easy to forget the importance of the life-changing effects of awards made to people at the most malleable periods of their lives. At a time when they are also ambitious and successful, the effects cascade over into society at large. We can spend a lot of time talking about the impact of Hollywood films, but changing the perspective of the future editors, politicians and judges can be more powerful still. This is genuine ‘soft power’, pushing its long, well-manicured fingers through British life.

Decades before politics-obsessed young Britons became entranced by the liberal fantasy of the television series The West Wing, American democracy was tugging gently but persistently at the British class system. Many older Britons noticed, and didn’t like it. They would point out the danger of exchanging a system based on caste and convention for one based crassly on money. In 1972, following the student demonstrations of the late 1960s, a British mimicry of American counterculture protest, Angus Maude, a Tory MP who would later serve in Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet, complained that ‘As we try to grapple with our major imports from America – violence, drug taking, student unrest, the hippy cult and pornography – our own permissive leftists have been hailing them as signs of progress.’

The truth was, American culture was simply too big and too magnetic to be resisted. Britain would be forced to ‘copy and paste’ ideas and fashions from the other side of the Atlantic. Pro- and anti-Americanism rose and fell among British liberals and conservatives, depending on the mood of the time. Tories found go-getting American business culture particularly appealing during the free-market boom of the post-war Eisenhower years, and then again during the Ronald Reagan period; the left, by contrast, was most pumped up by Kennedy’s America; and much later by Obama’s. Donald Trump’s national optimism and use of social media was observed and copied by London. Throughout the Queen’s reign, her country’s leadership responded like a nervous and unpractised dance partner to new moves from across the Atlantic. And this was something that would not have surprised in the slightest the most vehement and emotional herald of Anglo-Saxon Atlanticist civilization, Queen Elizabeth’s very first Prime Minister.

4
BETWEEN CATASTROPHE AND GOLDEN AGE

The old man made the slow journey across wet and dismal London in the back of his car, weeping copiously. Winston Churchill had been busy preparing a major assault on Labour in the House of Commons over secret plans for war with communist China. All of that had been immediately forgotten when he had received the news he called simply ‘the worst’. Churchill had known King George VI intimately throughout the war. So dominant is the Churchill cult these days, we tend to forget the King’s role. But Churchill understood his importance and was shattered by his death. When reminded of the promise of the new young Queen Elizabeth II, he was, to start with, dismissive: ‘She is only a child.’

Churchill, the old lion, was seventy-seven and little more than a year away from a major stroke. But he wasn’t toothless. The story of his last administration is often told as a sad, withdrawing ebb – the hiss and rattle of impatient and jealous colleagues trying to nudge him into retirement; a few last great sea-gurgles, and clatterings of stones, as he warned of the dangerous new atomic age and tried to forge a better relationship with America, still committed as well to federal Europe; and then the slither of his great shadow into darkness.

This is a highly partial picture, however. As with the King’s war, Churchill’s old age has been unfairly remembered, thanks to the memoirs of the impatient younger men all around him. He might have been old, with his attention periodically wandering, but he had vast powers of recuperation and was intently interested in the modern world. This one-time cavalry officer under Queen Victoria, First World War Admiralty leader, staunch imperialist and global statesman of the 1940s, was able to see the beginning of the new reign with a perspective unlike anyone else’s. The English, he came to believe, would again be Elizabethans – the Scots, of course, for the first time. As with Tudor England, the archipelago would be a magic island full of noises, crammed with invention and ambition, looking outwards to the world.

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, Churchill’s romanticism about Britain in 1952 is easy to mock. But despite the economic and physical hammering she had taken during the war, Britain was a potently interesting place. She boasted composers of the stature of William Walton and Vaughan Williams for her Coronation music. In the American-born poet T. S. Eliot and the philosopher Bertrand Russell, she had two recent winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature (Churchill himself would soon be a third). She had explorers and adventurers; cutting-edge scientists and inventors, responsible for everything from the hovercraft to the jet engine. British artists such as Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein and Churchill’s bugbear, Graham Sutherland, gave Britain the kind of serious role in art that she had rarely enjoyed in the previous century. In short, if the new Elizabeth’s Britain wasn’t quite the ‘nest of singing birds’ that Shakespearean England had been, it was a vigorous and striking cacophony of ideas, images and expressive ambitions.

Yet all around her were wild seas and fresh horrors. The Cold War was beginning. The scale and monstrosity of Stalin’s dictatorship was only starting to become clear. The mushroom clouds of the nuclear age overshadowed all conventional diplomacy. From the hideous communal violence of India to uprisings in the Far East, the British Empire was coming bloodily apart. Five days after welcoming her to London, Churchill noted in the House of Commons that the new Queen was beginning her reign halfway through ‘the terrible twentieth century’. He went on: ‘Half of it is over and we have survived its fearful convulsions. We stand erect both as an island people and as the centre of a world-wide Commonwealth and Empire, after so much else in other lands has been shattered or fallen to the ground …’ But what was coming next? That was the real question.

Churchill believed that the beginning of the Elizabethan era marked a moment when the British, still impoverished after the war, could look ahead with fresh ambition, and he wondered what would befall them. There would, he thought, be more material wealth. The first signs of a new consumer economy were already clear in the United States. New inventions, from atomic energy – thought then to imply almost free electricity – to jet airliners and the first computers, promised to reshape daily life. If there were terrors, there was also great promise.

Churchill told the Commons that Elizabeth ‘comes to the throne at a time when a tormented mankind stands uncertainly poised between world catastrophe and a golden age’. He spent most of his waking hours worrying about the threat to peace, from divided Korea to divided Germany. But if the world’s leaders could get themselves through this dangerous period and achieve a global armistice, Churchill suggested, ‘an immense and undreamed-of prosperity with culture and leisure ever more widely spread can come … to the masses of the people in every land’. And, of course, he was largely right.

There is so much about the Britain of the 2020s which would utterly baffle the first of the new Elizabethans, looking at us from 1952. We have become a people who have forsaken factories; whose skies are now clear of choking smoke; who are as variegated in the colour of their skins as the world’s population itself; whose mosques are crowded and whose churches are emptying; a people with only meagre armed forces to protect them; who spend much of their time staring at small glass screens on which images of all human culture can be seen; who are giving up the use of physical money; and whose children often browse pornography of an explicit nature that simply didn’t exist in the 1950s. Churchill’s ‘immense and undreamed-of prosperity’ has birthed an unexpected new Britain. But it has been made, not merely by anonymous historical forces, but by specific, identifiable individuals, leading the way and working together.

The British had two really big, overarching projects during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. The first was to build the world’s most successful – the most fair, the most equal and the most generous – welfare state. This was more the project of the left than of the right, though many Conservatives threw themselves into it with gusto and determination. The range of early supporters stretched from Winston Churchill to the likes of Jack Ashley. By the 1970s, however, this project was in crisis.

A collapse of industrial discipline which would have surprised Labour politicians of the immediate post-war period led to higher taxes and a sense of weary malaise, provoking a backlash among working-class voters as well as among the middle classes. There was a crisis of values, a widespread questioning of democratic socialism. In the decades since, although worship of the National Health Service has become a national religion, celebrated with fervour during the coronavirus crisis of 2020, that wider dream which gave it birth has been in retreat. Meanwhile, there has been a second great project.

This was to impress British influence on the new world, as a ‘great power’, even as the traditional Empire was wound up. This might be done through the Commonwealth or, some came to believe, through British membership of the European Union. This project too has failed. Despite thinking of themselves as one of the great change-making peoples in world history, the modern British proved unable to hold territory, win guerrilla wars or maintain moral authority far beyond their borders. Instead, those borders became porous, so that for many people they barely seemed to exist at all.

This, too, provoked a crisis of values: immigration and emigration changed the texture of the country and made it impossible for the modern British to believe there was a truly special ‘British race’, as their grandparents had imagined. Britain suffered a loss of national self-belief – and, with it, the single-mindedness, the brutality and the Machiavellian ruthlessness that would have been needed to impose British will on a more prosperous and fast-changing world. To make an empire requires a nation of imperialists. By the 1970s, certainly, the British were that no longer. Why not? One answer is that we simply became better educated about the rest of the world, and about the darker aspects of our own history. Nor did we have the muscle to impose ourselves – the huge Navy, the tanks and the fleets of bombers and missiles backed up by a potent world currency.

Modern Elizabethans, while displaying great ingenuity, and a certain amount of buccaneering commercial spirit, failed to produce the outstandingly energetic and highly productive economy that would have been needed to make Britain either a modern superpower or a lavishly funded and wealthy welfare society – the two big, ambitious projects.

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, the British made major advances in everything from aeronautics to the structure of DNA, computers, innovative substances such as graphene and much else besides. Although it is a pretty bizarre measurement, Britain easily beats any other European country in the number of Nobel prizes awarded to her citizens – and won far more during the 1950s and 1960s than before or since. What we apparently couldn’t do, or do well enough, was to make things cheaply enough and well enough and consistently enough to earn ourselves the living we thought we deserved.

It’s true that in financial services, insurance and other less tangible areas London (for the moment) still punches above her weight. But we have been cursed by that dullest of curses, low productivity. This is, of course, relative. Despite the Blitz, Britain had escaped the wholesale battering and expropriation of the war years: poorer and less developed rival economies, including some in Europe, were bound to catch up in the end, giving the appearance of British decline. In the 1950s Britain had the most manufacturing-centred economy of any country in the world except for Germany.

British governments poured money into research and development, as did private British companies. The historian David Edgerton says:

The economic benchmark in the 1950s and 1960s in terms of income per head was the USA. It was roughly twice as productive per capita. In terms of rates of growth, the standard was not set by the USA but by France, Germany, Italy and Japan. They grew faster than the UK, but from a lower base of income per head. The fundamental process was that of convergence – with the poorer of these economies growing faster than the richer ones. Slow growth was for a country like the United Kingdom a sign not of weakness, but of wealth.

After a high-water mark of manufacturing in the 1970s, things began to decline, although by the 1980s the natural gift of North Sea oil and gas, and increasing agricultural efficiency, meant that Britain no longer needed to worry as much about manufactured imports as she had done. There are many stories of individual corporate failures, bad government investment decisions, goofy bosses and suicidally destructive shop stewards; but there has been more flagellation about economic failure than actual economic failure. The trouble is, we are a relatively small nation, with an inflated sense of ourselves, so we expect more in terms of wealth and a global prestige than is, perhaps, reasonable.

Here is the truth that grand old Winston Churchill, for all his perspective and wisdom could not confront: we are an ordinary country. We are a beautiful, diverse, law-abiding, hard-working and ingenious country, but we are an ordinary one – not New Jerusalem nor Greater Britain. Yet it seems we have never quite been able to believe it. That, really, was what eventually did for Tory dreams and Labour schemes. As somebody who loves Britain, the author does not find this depressing. Once we cast aside the illusions and forget the absurd ambitions, there is much in our recent history to celebrate, enjoy and learn from.

5
ON OUR UPPERS

So, in February 1952, what were the British arguing about among themselves when their new Queen touched down from Africa at London Airport – that modest new civil-engineering project plonked across some useful market gardens, now known as Heathrow? One sidelight on national talking points can be found by simply reading all the copies of The Times newspaper for that winter. It’s a partial picture, naturally. There are few photographs, and no gossip, in what was a remorselessly factual upmarket news service; the voices of working-class people are almost completely absent, while for its staff all that really mattered was foreign affairs, politics and business.

And yet this dry paper is nonetheless juicily fascinating and unexpected. For one thing, just seven years after the end of the Second World War, Britain had not yet confronted the reality that her Empire was slipping away: The Times divided all its news pages into two categories – home news, on the one hand, and imperial and foreign on the other. Reading through both, the British still seem very much at war. A bloody conflict in Korea, the first hot war between the democracies and communism, staggers on. British tanks and troops are fighting ‘terrorists’ in Egypt, Africa and the Far East. Later in the year, in October, Britain will become the third country in the world to test its own thermonuclear weapon.

War, war, war. As he folded his copy of the paper each morning, Churchill himself was obsessed about the danger of invasion by the Soviet Union. We think of Dad’s Army as a phenomenon of the 1940s, but by 1952 some 30,000 men had been registered into the Home Guard as a protection against (Russian) ‘raids, descents and sabotage’. Churchill’s speeches described a new, still-unfamiliar world order, based on division between Soviet aggression and capitalist defence. Correctly, he believed that it would last for most of the century.

In the most famous of these speeches, at Fulton, Missouri in 1946, he laid out in uncompromising terms the basics of what would become the Cold War. On the one side, there was the Soviet Union, led by his old friend Joseph Stalin. The Soviets did not actively want war but did want ‘the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines’. On the other side there was a new alliance between the people of the English-speaking Commonwealth and those of the United States. And of course an Iron Curtain now lay across Europe, ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’. For a man who saw himself as a peacemaker, deeply worried about the coming nuclear age, this was a hard and aggressive speech. So much so that many of the leading American newspapers at the time recoiled from it in horror. The Times did not.

But how wise was Churchill, the dominant voice of 1950s Britain? Marilynne Robinson, the American Christian novelist and writer, gives the alternative view:

Has anyone really read the Iron Curtain speech lately and pondered how much of the worst policies for dealing with the Soviet Union in the post-war period are set out in it? And this is in 1946, when Russia had not yet had time to reckon its truly staggering losses? … After the Iron Curtain speech, angry crowds surrounded Churchill’s hotel in New York. Stalin was not alone in considering the speech a declaration of war – in 1946, for heaven’s sake, before the ashes of the last war were cool. In the speech Churchill proposed the British Empire as the de facto encirclement of the Soviet Union, urging Americans to sustain what Britain could not, for the advantage it would give us in a coming atomic conflict. From the side of wounded Russia, encirclement may have looked very much like an iron curtain. While Churchill did not foresee all the worst consequences of the Cold War, he did help to make them inevitable.

What this account of Churchill omits is how recently Britain had come close to invasion, and the effect of that on British thinking. However outlandish it seems today, in the early 1950s the possibility of a Russian invasion of the UK weighed deeply on policymakers in London. And the impact filtered, subtly, through British society. Churchill was talking to his ministers about organizing what would have been effectively a new British Army, 250,000 strong, into 500 ‘mobile columns’ to answer an airborne attack by Soviet forces.

A high proportion of young British men spent eighteen months (or, after the declaration of the Korean War in 1950, two years) doing National Service in the Army, in the RAF or, more rarely, in the Navy. All men aged between seventeen and twenty-one were liable for call-up, though there were reserved occupations, such as coal mining, agricultural labouring and service in the merchant navy. In the average fortnight, 6,000 young men would be called up, given haircuts and put into uniform. A total of 2.3 million British men experienced National Service during the 1950s, and although its abolition was announced in 1957, it carried on until 1960 and the very last conscripted men were not returned to civilian life until 1963.

The cohort of young men who might otherwise have been at their most rebellious were subjected to tough military discipline in wooden or prefab barracks. They were taught to obey orders, to look after their clothes and personal hygiene and to tolerate considerable boredom. Those who weren’t going through this process were being disciplined in tough agricultural work or down coal mines. We have already seen the importance of manufacturing and religion in shaping social attitudes, but a drilled and more obedient country was first forged by National Service. It wasn’t just the plan of Churchill’s Conservatives. When people talk today about the great reforming Labour government of 1945, they tend to miss out the 1948 Act responsible for this last great blast of British militarism.

Enough, for the moment, of the men. One great issue for millions of British women was the impact of unregulated childbirth on family budgets. After the disruption of the war, when many marriages had been ruined and millions of children had grown up fatherless, there followed a time when rebuilding traditional families seemed a personal, and national, necessity.

The most dramatic years of the so-called ‘baby boom’ occurred immediately after the war, but there was an annual increase in births throughout the 1950s – an average of 839,000 a year, and then another increase during the 1960s, when the annual average rose again to 962,000. This happened even though British families had more opportunity to limit the number of babies. The birth rate had fallen markedly during the first half of the century, from twenty-eight live births per thousand to sixteen. Government statisticians believed that the major part of the fall was taking place in working-class families. The cause? Newly available contraception.

More mouths meant hungrier families. But if married women could keep the wolf from the door by using condoms and contraceptive caps, there were many others who couldn’t. The war had brought a dramatic increase in single mothers. The National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (which continues in a different form today under the name Gingerbread) was dealing with ninety or so new cases a month in 1939: by the beginning of 1946 that had risen to 400, a total of more than 16,000 during the war years.

As a history of post-war single-parenthood explains:

In 1945, 25 per cent of all … cases concerned US servicemen. If these men denied paternity or had left the country, there was little hope … When the children were ‘coloured’ there was a particular problem, especially in the large areas of Britain unaccustomed to people of different skin colour. In 1945, the League of Coloured People reported to the [government] that it knew of 554 ‘illegitimate’ children born to ‘coloured’ US servicemen …

Among those worried about this was Queen Mary, the Queen Mother, who wrote to the National Council via a lady in waiting. She did not blame the soldiers particularly: ‘they are friendly, generous and have a great deal of money to spend; and there is no reason to believe that they are particularly ill behaved, though I fear there is very little doubt but that many English girls – often about 15 years of age – do run after these men (and their money!) most persistently …’

But, Queen Mary went on, rather contradicting her image as a starchy figure, ‘This is not chiefly a question of morals … American men refuse to allow Negroes to associate with white girls, and they are ready (unpunished by their own authorities) to “beat up”, first, the offending blacks, and subsequently the white girls who encouraged them.’ Alarmed by the prospect of lynchings in Britain, Queen Mary suggested there should be no media coverage of the issue, and that English girls should be warned of the disastrous consequences that could follow if they became pregnant by black Americans.

But whether the fathers were black or white, many children grew up in the immediate aftermath of the war slowly realizing that they were not living with their biological parents. The rock musician Eric Clapton was born to a sixteen-year-old woman who had had an affair with a married Canadian serviceman. He went home. She too moved to Canada after the war, though with another man. This left Eric with his grandparents, whom he long assumed were his parents. It was, he wrote in his autobiography, a house full of secrets: ‘But, bit by bit … I slowly began to put together a picture of what was going on and to understand that the secrets were usually to do with me. One day I heard one of my aunties ask, “Have you heard from his mum?” and the truth dawned on me that when [Uncle] Adrian jokingly called me a “little bastard” he was telling the truth.’

Illegitimate war children were common at the beginning of the Queen’s reign; and illegitimate children continued to appear in large numbers throughout it. The ‘moral 1950s’ wasn’t the fabrication of nostalgic historians or journalists. There was a desperation to get back to a kinder, more traditional, stable world, and for many British people that meant a return to an imagined Christian community. But it didn’t restrain the sexual urge. And it didn’t stop millions of women looking around and wondering whether there was a life of more fun, and less drudgery, to be had. That meant contraception, but it wasn’t easy to get hold of. This was still the age of the backstreet abortionist, who had wearily seen it all, knocking on the back door with her bag full of knitting needles and vinegar. For many, giving birth and then passing on the inconvenient child was a safer, kinder and less terrifying option.

Many children born outside marriage lived perfectly happily with other members of their extended families, learning much later in life that ‘Mother’ was in fact a granny or aunt, and that brothers and sisters were, in biological fact, cousins. But large numbers of children were adopted, often informally or outside the law, through adverts in newspapers or even arrangements made in pubs or shopping queues. Pauline Prescott, then a hairdresser in Chester, who later married the future Deputy Prime Minister, had her first child in a Catholic home for unmarried mothers, St Bridget’s House of Mercy. The baby boy was later adopted by a family living many miles away in Wolverhampton.

The Prescotts only made contact with him again when he was in his forties, after a long and honourable military career. The story is worth mentioning not because it is unusual, but because informal and formal adoptions were so very common, an inevitable result of a strictly pro-marriage culture. One more example: the mother of the novelist Ian McEwan had her first baby during the war, while her husband was serving overseas, and placed an ad in her local paper: ‘Wanted, home for baby boy aged one month: complete surrender’. She handed the baby over to a couple at Reading Station. The boy, David Sharp, had a happy childhood and grew up to work as a bricklayer. He lived a few miles away from the famous novelist, without either knowing about the other’s existence for half a century. It is an extraordinary story, but not as rare as we might think.

A careful study of the papers of the National Council by the historians Pat Thane and Tanya Evans challenges the notion that the mothers and children from ‘illegitimate’ marriages were generally harshly treated in the tougher ethical climate of the 1950s. It is true that there were moral panics in Parliament about the number of children being adopted by people other than their relatives – about a fifth of illegitimate children – and about the number of couples changing a surname by deed poll to hide the fact that they were not married. But the somewhat chaotic system of informal adoptions was reined in after the 1949 Adoption Act, which required all adoptions to be sanctioned by law, and everyone wanting to adopt a child to be properly assessed.

This meant that mothers lost their right to know the identities of the adopting families; and the children who were adopted in England and Wales had no right to know the names of their natural parents – until this law was finally amended again in 1978. It would cause a huge amount of pain and baffled misunderstanding for decades to come. Slowly, over the decades, attitudes changed and it became easier for unmarried mothers to live openly with their children. But in the meantime it seems that attitudes on the street were more kindly and more liberal than they were in the media and political establishment – where they could be icy. At one point, in a speech in 1959, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, seriously proposed that adultery should be made a criminal offence. His argument was not pursued at Westminster – the Tory Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, never took Fisher terribly seriously – and this probably marks the highest ambition of the post-war morality police.

When it came to contraception, the demand from ordinary British families suggested that things were already changing. In 1938, just before the war, there had been sixty or so birth-control clinics in Britain. By 1963 there were more than 400. In 1958, the Church of England – not the Roman Catholic Church – had at last accepted the importance of family planning, albeit only within the context of Christian marriage. By the beginning of the decade, contraceptive methods were spreading fast, with the IUD and the diaphragm preceding the pill in 1961.

Did this mean that people were increasingly seeing sex as a source of pleasure rather than simply procreation? Mass Observation, the pioneering sociological survey, conducted a poll in the late 1940s which found that only around a third of those questioned thought that a good sex life was essential to happiness. The same poll, twenty years later, found that 67 per cent thought sex was very important. People may have tried harder to limit the size of their families because they were worried about poverty in the austerity years; but having done so and having discovered contraception, they promptly revealed that it had cheering side-effects.

Even at this early stage, it’s possible to see that the drilled and disciplined masculine Britain of National Service and the engineering workshops was giving way to a subtle but important power shift that started in the home. Contemporary observers thought so, anyway. The Polish-born sociologist Ferdynand Zweig said in his study The Worker in an Affluent Society, published in 1961 and based upon interviews with working-class Britons he had conducted in 1958–9, that there had been what he called:

a process of softening in the worker … I would venture to call it his feminization. The worker’s world was formerly known for its masculinity. Now he has mellowed considerably. The women around him imbue him with feminine values. He accepts his wife as his companion on more or less equal terms, especially when she goes out to work and earns her own living. All this means that the worker is moving away from his mates.

In 1957 Michael Young and Peter Willmott conducted a major survey of working-class families in Bethnal Green, East London, and in Essex, published that year as Family and Kinship in East London. They too found male authority and exploitation in decline: ‘the old style of working-class family is fast disappearing. The husband portrayed by previous social investigation is no longer true to life. In place of the old comes a new kind of companionship between man and woman, reflecting the rise in status of the young wife and children which is one of the great transformations of our time.’

These assessments are fascinating and correct a too-simplistic view of the era. But this is also a class issue. Sociologists are better-educated, university people, peering down on their teeming subjects like biologists staring through a microscope. In the 1950s, as it happens, the majority of British people classified themselves as working class. They were still governed, as well as investigated, however, by aliens.

6
UPPER CLASS IN THE 1950S

Whitaker’s Almanack, a book Sir Winston Churchill considered indispensable, contains a vivid portrait of just how class divided Britain was during the Queen’s early reign. It carefully lists the orders of peers, the bishops, the greater clubs, the higher rankings of the civil service and the military high command, forming a meticulous social taxonomy of the hierarchy. And of course, in outer form, some of it still exists. London’s clubland, from White’s and the Carlton to the Reform and the Garrick, continues to fascinate foreign observers in the twenty-first century. Furtive-looking chaps in weary tweeds, named after the lesser counties of England, potter in and out for lunch; filmmakers use the grand staircases they potter up as sets; some of the richest clubs are still doing fine. They still smell of boiled beef and they still serve potted shrimps.

In 1952 it was all on a different scale. There were no fewer than 107 proper, grand, listed London clubs, including many long vanished. Who now remembers the comfort and glory of the Bath Club in Brook Street, or the Challoner (Roman Catholics only) in Pont Street, or the Eccentric in Ryder Street, or the Goat in New Bond Street, or that fine establishment, the Ladies’ Empire Club in Grosvenor Street, or that succulently named gathering, the Sesame, Imperial and Pioneer, also in Grosvenor Street, or the Oriental in Hanover Square, or even the Royal Toxophilite in Albion Mews (for archers, obviously)? And on, and on, and on. Nor was London the only city where the well-off and well-connected met daily to flock, nibble and murmur. In the early 1950s Birmingham boasted eight gentlemen’s clubs. Liverpool had ten ornate, exclusive clubs. So did both Edinburgh and Glasgow, for the city’s stockbrokers, bankers, accountants and councillors.

We must be careful not to confuse archaic names and a grandiloquent style with fundamental social change. It could be argued that the growth of private clubs in modern London, where rich City employees can mingle with the children of Russian oligarchs and riff-raff from television or the cinema, are pretty much the same phenomenon as the old clubs of the grandees. The designer clothes are very different from the Savile Row suits; the hair is longer and fewer buttons are done up; the cocktails are stronger and the wine, perhaps, is no worse. It’s just that the nature of the elite has changed; in modern London, the influential, rich and connected can still hang out together well away from the prying eyes of ordinary folk. The real difference may be that in the 1950s the members of these clubs were part of a homogeneous English aristocracy – men and women who had gone to the same schools, had the same attitude to nation and Empire and shared the same private language.

From Moscow to São Paulo, Beijing to Chicago, the elites hang together. But in the lost Britain of the mid-twentieth century there was a tight solidarity of basic assumptions that we don’t find today. Unironic, full-throated enthusiasm for the monarchy and a rather myopic view of British history ran through the old ruling order like golden threads, rejected by only a few weirdo socialists and faddists. The best novelists, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, knew this world well. As the 1952 Almanack reminds us, Britain’s class structure also reflected a more Christian nation. It still observed twenty-eight ‘red-letter days’ when scarlet robes had to be worn by senior judges; and these mingled religious festivals (11 June, the festival of St Barnabas; 25 January, the Festival of the Conversion of St Paul) with royal birthdays (21 April, ‘Princess Elizabeth’s birthday’).

But if one lifts one’s eyes from the taxonomy, it was pretty clear that taxation had devastated much of the traditional British aristocracy in the decade after the war. Of all the grand London houses, only Londonderry House and those owned by the royal family were left. The Duke of Wellington’s Apsley House at Hyde Park Corner, where the annual commemorative Waterloo dinners were held, had been handed over as a national museum in 1947, though the dukes of Wellington were allowed to carry on living there in a few back rooms. Almost all the rest of the grand houses had been sold to be redeveloped as offices or hotels.

With land prices still depressed, grand-sounding families were scuttling and giving up: this was the great age of pulling down country mansions, too. In his history of The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, the historian David Cannadine gave a sonorous roll-call of destruction: ‘Panshanger, Normanhurst, Lowther Castle, Rufford Abbey and Ravensworth Castle were only the most famous victims. Between 1945 and 1955, four hundred country houses were demolished, more than at any other period of modern British history. Indeed, by 1955, the peak year, they were disappearing at the rate of one every five days …’ If you had the cash it was a good time to buy Old Masters. But of course not many people did.

Yet on the surface, despite the impact of socialist taxation, Britain still felt mildly feudal. This was certainly reflected in the culture. In Ealing comedies, in West End plays and in novels, both crime and comic, the country-house setting remained a standard one. And if many of the old houses had been abandoned, demolished or converted into golf or spa hotels, their occupants had certainly not departed the national stage. The British peerage was headed by an impressive battlefleet of 26 dukes, 39 marquesses, 210 earls and 121 viscounts.

Many would eventually be forced to find new ways of surviving. Cannadine, writing in 1990, revealed that the ninth Earl of Buckinghamshire, who had died in 1983, had ended his career as a municipal gardener in Southend. He continued:

The present Earl of Breadalbane lives in a bed sitting room in Finchley while the Earl of Effingham – a cousin of the Duke of Norfolk – lives in the Cromwell Road … Earl Nelson is a police constable. Lord Northesk is a jewel salesman in the Isle of Man. The Countess of Mar is a saleswoman for British Telecom. Lord Simon Conyngham is an assistant in a delicatessen. Lord Teviot is a bus conductor. Lord Kingsale, the premier baron of Ireland, is a silage-pit builder in the west country …

In 1952, these horrors lay far ahead. The press was still greatly excited by the doings of a real-life, flesh-and-blood duke or baroness. Morning coats and top hats were worn even by socialist politicians. Up until 1958, when the practice was abolished by the new Queen, aristocratic young girls known as debutantes, sheathed in dresses of white, ivory or pink silk and garlanded with ropes of pearls, would be presented at court, curtsying and walking backwards as they bashfully sized up potential male admirers. This marked the start of the English social ‘Season’, to be followed by other highlights including Cheltenham races, the Chelsea flower show, the Badminton horse trials, the Epsom Derby and the Henley Royal Regatta – each of them an opportunity for flamboyant social display by the upper classes, a lengthy mating dance that kept milliners, florists and wine merchants in excellent humour.

To what extent was it all nostalgia for a pre-war world? There is no doubt that from the novels of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers through to the ‘society’ pages of the newspapers, Britons were reacting to the disorientating new post-war world with its unfamiliar global order by burrowing snugly into the rituals and traditions of the first part of the century. But this post-war social conservatism, which would soon be so exuberantly challenged, was itself an aberration. There never has been a placid social or historic norm. The 1920s had been a turbulent decade, and the 1930s even more so. To the extent that the British of the 1950s were harking back to what seemed stable, ordered and reassuring, they were misremembering. And the same is true of those who hark back to the stable, comforting 1950s today. Underneath, the country is always changing fast. It just rarely seems to feel like it now.

7
NANCY, AND HOW TO SPEAK PROPER

During the 1950s and early 1960s, class anxiety seems to have been at a high level. Consumerism and the break-up of the old industrial order meant that rebel working-class culture, which would soon take its most vivid form, was flowering. Yet the sense of a class-divided nation, in which those in charge spoke differently, remained very strong. Today, listening back to middle-class voices in films and broadcasts of the period, they sound like the Queen. (Rather, as she used to be: even the Queen in old age sounds less cut-glass regal than she did as a young woman.) In the 1950s, working-class people who wanted to ‘get on’ flocked to elocution teachers. More than trad jazz or skiffle bands, the confident plosives and icy sibilance of 10,000 neighbourhood elocution lessons should really be the sonic background to this period in British history.

Working-class icons were not exempt. In Liverpool, the young John Lennon, being brought up by his indomitable aunt, was taught from an early age not to speak the working-class ‘Scouse’. His chaotic father returned, pleased to find a small boy who spoke ‘like a gentleman’ and who gravely enquired of him, ‘Shall I call you Pater?’ Down in Leicester, John Orton, who would later grow up to be the shock playwright and smasher of bourgeois convention Joe Orton, managed to escape from the Saffron Lane council estate by getting himself elocution lessons from a local lady.

Want to get on – in politics, retail, banking? First and foremost, water down the local tang. Ambitious for the stage or television? Elocution lessons for you then. The need to ‘speak proper’ not ‘common’ was fostered by the new mass influencers. In the days before the independent broadcasting companies, BBC ‘received pronunciation’ was squirted into millions of kitchens and workplaces, where it must often have sounded quite alien. Working-class poets such as the Glaswegian Tom Leonard, and Liz Berry from the Black Country, have recorded the powerfully undermining effect on working-class self-confidence.

By the early 1960s, actors, politicians and other public figures rarely had strong local accents, though comedians seem to have been a permitted exception. History’s richly variegated and pungent archipelago of different speech patterns, phrases and words was starting to sound more like a modern British monoculture. This would change as a culturally rebellious working class fought their way to the front of the stage, but in the 1950s speech anxiety was impossible to dodge.

But class anxiety was not restricted to poorer Britons. One of the great, if ridiculous, talking points of the mid-1950s originated with a lunch in Paris, at which an earnest if witty professor of linguistics at Birmingham University, Alan Ross, was introduced to the wicked, hugely popular upper-crust novelist the Honourable Nancy Mitford.

Quite bizarrely, Ross had been asked to write an academic paper on British upper-class usage for a Finnish scholarly journal. Lacking conventional sources, he had rifled through one of Mitford’s earlier novels as a guide for what was, and was not, acceptable usage for aristocratic Britons. (Academic rigour has intensified since then, not always with happy results.) Mitford, a successful writer and the daughter of an impecunious peer, was living in Paris, where she was pursuing a love affair with Gaston Palewski, one of General de Gaulle’s leading supporters.

Despite living a glamorous life based at her chic townhouse in the centre of the city, Mitford was chronically worried about cash. With an instinct for the soft underbelly of the British psyche, she immediately saw the market potential in selling to her neurotic countrymen her explanation of what was – and what was not – acceptable aristocratic language. She asked Ross to send her a copy of his article. She loved it, writing to a friend in London that it was ‘dreadfully funny throughout because written in a serious scientific style … He is a great new character in my life and a card if ever there was one.’ Many pound signs flashed before her immaculately made-up eyes. She wrote to her bookseller chum in London, Heywood Hill, that her ‘crazy friend Prof Ross’s essay … is a natural for the Christmas market’.

Although he was initially reluctant to be dragged into a confected jape, Ross eventually allowed his piece to appear in the highbrow magazine Encounter. Mitford proved to be right. The magazine sold out. She then wrote her own essay to go with Ross’s, on ‘the English aristocracy’. With further contributions by Evelyn Waugh among others, and a fine satirical poem by John Betjeman, in 1956 Hamish Hamilton published it all in one slim volume, which may still be the most influential, if satirical, study in modern times of the British upper orders, Noblesse Oblige.

Professor Ross had briskly, ruthlessly divided words and accents into those acceptable for gentlemen, and presumably ladies – ‘U’ – and the mistakes made by lesser people, ‘non-U’. He had a very clear notion of class, beginning his essay with the forthright sentence: ‘Today, in 1956, the English class-system is essentially tripartite – there exist an upper, a middle, and a lower class.’ However, he went on, after a period of socialism and war, ‘It is solely by language that the upper class is clearly marked off from the others … Today, a member of the upper class is, for instance, not necessarily better educated, cleaner, or richer than someone not of this class.’ Ross argued that, nevertheless, U or ‘gentlemanly’ people were different in their tastes and behaviour. They had an aversion to telephones, cinema and the wireless. ‘Again, when drunk, gentlemen often become amorous or maudlin or vomit in public, but they never become truculent.’

To mark off real members of the upper class, the professor explained, certain pronunciations could be immediately spotted: ‘In Berkeley, Berkshire, clerk, Derby, U-speakers rhyme the first syllable with dark (or bar), non-U speakers with mirk (or burr).’ All of this transfixed a generation of Britons brought up on the importance of class distinctions. Help! More rules! Sent down from above, too. Where did they themselves stand? Innumerable conversations started, along the lines of ‘Aunt Anne, say Berkshire for us will you, dear?’ But if subtle distinctions of accent – and the essay is full of them – weren’t enough, Ross also provided a long list of words and phrases used by proper gentlemen, as distinct from unctuous middle-class parvenus.

Here is a brief and necessarily incomplete summary, with posh U usage, followed by common non-U in brackets: have a bath (take a bath); bicycle (cycle); lunch (dinner); dinner (evening meal); sick (ill); rich (wealthy); hall (lounge); lavatory-paper (toilet-paper); looking-glass (mirror); writing-paper (note-paper); pudding (sweet); wireless (radio) … All of this was alarming enough to people who suddenly realized that talking about cycles and mirrors marked them out as being drearily middle-class; but Ross pushed ruthlessly on to explain that many apparently ordinary innocuous expressions, marked out their users as pathetically common: ‘Pleased to meet you! This is a very frequent non-U response to the greeting, How d’you do? U-speakers normally just repeat the greeting; to reply to the greeting (e.g. with Quite well, thank you) is non-U.’ Suddenly new verbal landmines were being set and primed all across the land.

Nor did Alan Ross have much good news for those who had not been born into the upper orders: ‘In England today,’ he wrote,

the question, ‘Can a non-U speaker become a U-speaker?’ is one noticeably of paramount importance for many Englishmen (and some of their wives). The answer is that an adult can never attain complete success. Moreover, it must be remembered that, in these matters, U-speakers have ears to hear, so that one single pronunciation, word, or phrase will suffice to brand an apparent U-speaker as originally non-U (for U-speakers, themselves, never make ‘mistakes’).

It is hard to imagine a more terrifying salvo aimed at the status anxiety of the British middle classes and, as Mitford had happily predicted, the Ross essay provoked a furore. It even rebounded a little on its authors: Mitford cattily complained of Ross himself, ‘poor duck speaks of table napkins’; and she herself had to go back through her earlier novels obliterating mirrors, striking out mantelpieces, tearing up note-paper and censoring other solecisms.

Nancy Mitford’s own essay on the British aristocracy began with all the breezy self-confidence of Alan Ross, before making an altogether more ambiguous argument about the current state of the upper orders. She was quite clear that the English aristocracy (she had little time for the Scots, or even the word Scottish, which she claimed was non-U; the hideous and incorrect ‘Scotch’ was her preferred form) ‘is the only real aristocracy left in the world today. It has real political power through the House of Lords and a real social position through the Queen. An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off: it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.’

She then roundly mocked modern British aristocrats for being indolently uninterested in making money, and so being forced to sell land, paintings and property in order to enjoy the easy lifestyle they expected for themselves. Although she must have known of the slaughter of the great country houses described by David Cannadine, Mitford produced her own list of grand homes whose owners had, either by dodging taxes or by letting in the public for a fee, stayed put. Most people, she said, took for granted that the aristocracy was utterly impoverished, ‘a view carefully fostered by the Lords themselves’. Only a violent crime, which brought police and reporters into a country house, revealed that the world in which manservants waited on single women at dinner still existed.

There are still many enormous fortunes in the English aristocracy, into which income tax and death duties have made no appreciable inroads. Arundel, Petworth, Hatfield, Woburn, Hardwicke, Blenheim, Haddon, Drumlanrig, Alnwick, Stratfield Saye, Harewood, Knole, Knowsley, Wilton, Holkham, Glamis, Cullen, Cliveden, Highclere, Althorp, Mentmore – all vast houses – are still inhabited by Lords who have inherited them, or by members of their families.

How had the peerage achieved this? Mitford argued robustly that they had done so by avoiding death duties, by handing the estates on to heirs. The duty did not have to be paid if the original peer then managed to live on for another five years: ‘one agreeable result of this rule is that old Lords are cherished as never before. Their heirs will do anything to keep them alive.’ But the aristocracy were also keen to flog off anything they could – farmland, outbuildings, Caravaggios – and charge outrageous sums for commoners to come and visit their homes.

This was all much too close to the bone for her fond but critical friend Evelyn Waugh. In his Noblesse Oblige essay he tartly reminded Mitford that she was twelve years old when her father succeeded to his peerage: ‘at that age, an indelible impression was made; Hons were unique and Lords were rich.’ Waugh accused her of revolutionary socialism – not, in his book, a compliment.

Clearly, a lot of this was what Nancy Mitford called ‘a tease’ and it had the desired effect. In September 1955, she wrote to another London friend about the response to the original Encounter article – ‘such wonderful … mail – furious baronets, furious Scotchmen, furious friends saying how vulgar I am …’ Eventually, as the mid-twentieth-century equivalent of a Twitter storm swirled around them, both Mitford and Waugh grew disgusted with the subject and referred to Noblesse Oblige as ‘the book of shame’.

Across the British media, the controversy continued to gambol and frisk for years to come. An almost throwaway line in Waugh’s own essay provided the next class-watchers with a new shorthand, MIF, for milk-in-first. Waugh wrote:

All nannies and many governesses, when pouring out tea, put the milk in first. (It is said by tea-fanciers to produce a richer mixture.) Sharp children notice that this is not normally done in the drawing room. We have a friend you may remember, far from conventional in other ways, who makes it her touchstone. ‘Rather MIF, darling,’ she says in condemnation.

So now the mundane and humble business of making a cup of tea became yet another tiny battleground.

Waugh rejected the extreme vision of Britain as a class-divided society, substituting instead the more realistic idea that, status-conscious as it still was, everybody was alert to those below them in some obscure pecking order: ‘everyone draws a line of demarcation immediately below his own heels’. There was relatively little horizontal stratification, he thought: ‘There is instead precedence, a single, wholly imaginary line … extending from Windsor to Wormwood Scrubs, of separate individuals each justly and precisely graded. In the matter of talking together, eating together, sleeping together this mysterious line makes little difference, but every Englishman is sharply aware of its existence …’

Waugh was by far the greater novelist but Nancy Mitford, affectionately satirizing the retreating aristocracy and gentry, was enormously popular in the first part of the Queen’s reign. Was she, therefore, in fact just an old-fashioned snob? Her biographer Selina Hastings thought not, but with reservations: ‘She was not a snob in the sense of looking up to someone solely because he had money or rank; but Nancy was never a member of the public … She believed that everyone should know his place, and in language was to be found one of the most crucial lines of demarcation.’

Everyone should know his – or her – place. That was the real, old way of thinking behind the U and non-U kerfuffle, and behind ‘milk in first’. David Hill, sent out as a young boy in the mid-1950s to start a new life in Australia, remembered Britain, even as the welfare state began to change things as a country in which ‘most Britons lived and died poor, in a land of appalling class rigidity and social inequality where there was virtually no prospect of social mobility’. Speech inflections, from East End costermongers to south-coast baronets, policed this Britain. And it is often when things are breaking down that the policing becomes heaviest. British drama of the period (Terence Rattigan), British comedy of the period (Joyce Grenfell and Alastair Sim) and many of the novels of the period, such as those of Anthony Powell, suggest that widespread sensitivity to subtle class hierarchies was real. And as Nancy Mitford made clear in her essay, the class system depended then – as it does now – on the monarchy, with the Queen as apex.

8
BRITISH SHINTO

On 6 August 1957, outside Television House, then the headquarters of ITN in London’s Kingsway, a tallish, urbane man, briefcase in one hand, was assaulted. John Grigg, the second Lord Altrincham, received a forceful, full-hand slap across the side of his face. It was strong enough nearly to knock him over, though he was able to recover and clamber, with an unconvincing smile, into a waiting taxi. His assailant was Phil Burbidge, a well-known and active member of the League of Empire Loyalists – of whom more later.

Burbidge was quickly led away by two policemen and charged. The following day, when he was fined 20 shillings, he told the court that he was defending the honour of the Queen: ‘Due to the scurrilous attack by Lord Altrincham I felt it was up to a decent Briton to show resentment.’ He added that the fine was the best investment he had ever made. The Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Sir Laurence Dunne, who had fined him for breach of the peace, seemed to agree, remarking that ‘95 per cent of the population of this country were disgusted’ by Grigg.

What was Grigg’s offence? He wasn’t an obvious candidate to infuriate patriotic Middle Britain, although by this time he was being attacked by almost every newspaper and commentator in the country. This Old Etonian and former Guards officer had served during the war with distinction. He was the son of an imperialist Conservative politician who had also been military secretary to the Prince of Wales and, indeed, a member of Churchill’s wartime government. But now Grigg, the owner of a small-circulation monthly, the National and English Review, had broken the ultimate taboo and used it to launch a personal attack on the Queen.

He had argued that in her speeches she came across as too upper-class and British, and that she should strive to be more ‘classless’. Her style of speaking was ‘a pain in the neck … Like her mother, she appears to be unable to string even a few sentences together without a written text … The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth is that of a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for Confirmation.’ He hadn’t thought it would be much noticed; and hadn’t bothered to increase the print run of his review.

Instead, all hell broke loose. Grigg’s attack echoed around the world. It was picked up and discussed in the United States, which the Queen was about to visit. There the author and early television celebrity Malcolm Muggeridge, published a second attack on the ‘Royal soap opera’ which implied that Britain no longer needed a monarchy at all. There were plenty of people who agreed with both Grigg and Muggeridge in the mid-1950s, but criticism of the royal family directly was well beyond the pale.

It was the middle of the summer ‘silly season’ when the press had little else to write about, and a tirade of abuse fell on the heads of both men. The pile-in included the Prime Minister of Australia, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the main newspaper columnists and even an irate Italian aristocrat who challenged Grigg to a duel. Grigg, who eventually accepted the challenge but suggested they fight with rolled umbrellas, always insisted that he was himself a monarchist and had meant the criticism to help the Queen modernize.

Intriguingly, she may well have agreed. Martin Charteris, then her assistant private secretary, had a quiet meeting with Grigg to discuss the matter. After it, in December of the same year, the Queen made her first televised Christmas broadcast, during which she said she hoped television would make her message more personal and direct, though she also warned against ‘unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery’. Some thirty years later, meeting at Eton (where else?), Charteris told Grigg that by helping to change the atmosphere at court ‘You did a great service to the monarchy and I’m glad to say so publicly.’

Grigg reflected much later in the Spectator magazine that the real reason why there had been such a sensation was that the article:

contained direct criticism of the Queen (as well as considerable praise), at a time when the general treatment of her in the media ranged from gushy adulation to Shinto-style worship. This most unhealthy climate had prevailed since her accession and had been intensified by the secular religiosity of the Coronation in 1953. It was completely out of keeping with the traditional British attitude to the monarchy, which has always combined strong loyalty to the institution with a readiness to judge individual members of the royal family, favourably or unfavourably, on their merits.

British public opinion is hard to fathom properly, in part because the media was intensely nervous about reflecting any possible support for the criticisms: the reason Grigg was leaving the headquarters of ITN on the day he was assaulted was that he had just been interviewed there by Robin Day. The BBC had blacked out the entire controversy – in effect pretending that it hadn’t happened, so horrific was the thought of comparing the Queen to a schoolgirl. But Grigg argued that opinion polls, letters to newspapers and letters he received himself showed that most people at least understood his position and also felt that the Royal Household was out of date.

If so, this is another powerful piece of evidence to suggest that the 1950s were nothing like ‘the 1950s’. The Grigg episode is usually cited by historians to point out how different things were in the middle of the twentieth century. But consider the ferocious response to tweets criticizing Meghan Markle in 2018 when she was still engaged to Prince Harry. Direct attacks on the royals still produce the kind of Pavlovian response they did then. By the end of the Queen’s reign, there is no evidence whatever that old-fashioned, stuffy monarchism had in fact gone out of fashion at all.

Progressive thinkers of the 1950s often argued that Britain was on the verge of a major democratic overhaul, and that this might need to include the monarchy itself. They have been proved wrong. A decade after the Grigg episode, Tony Benn tried much more seriously to shake up the court as part of a project that was self-consciously republican in its aim. There was a serious tussle about removing the Queen’s head from postage stamps, but Harold Wilson’s instinctive working-class monarchism ensured that the Benn project went absolutely nowhere. It may be discreet. It may be rarely discussed. But British Shintoism is alive and well.

9
DIANA AND RUTH

For the vast majority of the 49 million British people in the early 1950s, post-war daily life was physically harder than it is today. It has become a commonplace to say that there was a yearning for fun, colour and excitement in the early years of the Queen’s reign, after the long, grey austerity years and the war itself. It is a commonplace because – basically – it’s true. But the greyness was not uniformly distributed. For the wealthiest Britons, as we shall see, the post-war years quite quickly brought a return to continental travel and more interesting food. Further down the social pecking-order, things remained a lot more meagre for a lot longer. And the group who had the worst time were working-class women.

Men had returned from the war, traumatized and angry, to be accommodated into families which had learned to live relatively happily without them. Women who had had clerical or factory work were encouraged to give it up so that there was ‘something for the men’. And this is the era just before labour-saving household appliances became common – when clothes were still often washed by red, calloused hands over porcelain sinks with wooden scrubbing brushes and dried in backyards with mangles; when doorsteps and stone floors were cleaned by hand, and when food shopping involved a long walk, a heavy basket and a sore back on the way home. Entertainment, before television became common, was limited to the wireless, comic strips in the newspapers and a weekly walk to the pictures. For the most impatient and ambitious women, who wanted something more – a more colourful and unpredictable life – this meant there could be dangerous choices ahead. The story of two friends reminds us why.

Among the films which had been playing in Britain in the winter before the Queen’s accession was an embarrassingly duff comedy from the Rank Organisation called (titter ye not) Lady Godiva Rides Again. Filmed in Folkestone, Kent, it was a fantasy about a young provincial English girl who wins a local beauty pageant and then plays Lady Godiva, going on to fame and fortune. It might deserve to be entirely forgotten except for a curious coincidence, a real-life one more interesting than anything in the script. This is a true 1950s story about working-class women, power, manipulation, success – and failure.

Among the film’s cast were three people who would all go on to become famous – in one case, notorious. The first was born Diana Fluck in Swindon; she had changed her name because, as she later said, ‘what would happen if they put my name up in lights … and one of the bulbs burst?’ She had chosen the name Diana Dors, and very soon was being touted as Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. The second was the young Joan Collins, in her first screen role. And the third, who became a friend of Diana Dors during this filming, was Ruth Ellis. She was the last woman to be hanged in Britain.

Dors and Ellis shared quite a lot that would help them to bond on the film set. Both had been born to working-class women having trouble with rackety men during the Depression in provincial towns. Though not quite the same age, they had much in common. Diana was born in 1931. Her father, a veteran of the First World War, was a railway clerk who played the piano in local pubs, although since her mother was having an affair with the lodger she was never quite sure whose daughter she was. Swindon was not the most exciting spot in the world in the 1930s and Diana’s mother, Mary Fluck, enjoyed the most common imaginative escape route of the time, taking her daughter from a very young age to weekly films. Diana also attended a private school run by two spinsters, saying later, ‘I loathed them and their stuffy little school.’

Not surprisingly, the young Diana dreamed as a child of becoming an actress, writing when she was nine years old in a school essay, ‘I am going to be a film star, with a swimming pool and a cream telephone.’ It’s the cream telephone that tells you everything. Diana’s relationship with the man who might have been her father was cold. She matured early and, aged thirteen but pretending to be seventeen, entered a local beauty contest, winning third prize. By the close of the Second World War, still a young teenager, she was entertaining American soldiers in camp concerts (the word camp is, at this early stage in Dors’s career, used in a strictly military sense). By her mid-teens Diana Fluck had had numerous boyfriends, including the future writer Desmond Morris. She was also allowing herself to be photographed semi-nude for ‘French postcards’. Aged fifteen, she enrolled at the London Academy of Dramatic Art and was appearing in plays and post-war British films remarkably soon.

Ruth Ellis was almost exactly five years older, but otherwise her early story is strikingly similar. She was born in Rhyl, North Wales to a French-Belgian mother, also in an unhappy marriage – and also to a jobbing musician. Arthur Hornby was always in the picture houses, but in his case playing the piano before the advent of the ‘talkies’ put him out of a job. He may have abused his daughters. The marriage was unhappy, and Ruth’s mother carried her children off to Basingstoke and to Reading, until the family was reunited in London during the war. Ruth took longer than Diana to get into the glamour business, working in factories and as a waitress, though with a personal motto Dors would have approved: ‘a short life and a gay one’.

While Diana was entertaining the soldiers, Ruth was a cinema usherette and a ‘photographer’s assistant’. Aged seventeen, she met and became pregnant by a Canadian soldier who turned out to be already married. Like Diana Dors, who had had a brief fling with an American soldier, Ruth Ellis was soon also enticed into nude photography. Not long after her first child was born, she saw an advert: ‘Wanted. Model for camera club. Nude but artistic poses. No experience required …’ With her dyed-blonde hair and good looks, she got the job and was quickly drawn into a very specific post-war world of Mayfair gambling and prostitution clubs. This was run under the dangerous and baleful eye of one of the major crime figures of the period, Morris Conley – named by the People newspaper as ‘Britain’s biggest vice boss and the chief source of the tainted money that nourishes the evils of London night life’.

Already, although their backgrounds and trajectories were similar, there were subtle but important differences between Diana and Ruth. Dors had more real talent as an actress and was appearing in her first films while still a teenager. She was hanging out with violent and predatory men in the hard-drinking so-called ‘Chelsea set’, but she had an obvious career escape route. Ruth Ellis did not. Her job as a ‘hostess’ involved sitting in one of Conley’s clubs and having drinks with clients; sex was negotiated separately but Ruth was probably making around five or six times more money each week than she could have made in a factory. At one of the clubs she met her next husband, George Ellis, an alcoholic dentist who beat her up badly and made her pregnant for the second time. In fact, she was four months pregnant when she appeared in Lady Godiva Rides Again.

As her biographer Victoria Blake put it, there was already a pattern of unstable relationships between this working-class girl and dangerous men. It was a world of ‘unpredictability, jealousy and violence, and a weak, alcoholic partner from a middle-class background who both tantalised and dashed her hopes of social respectability’. This man, David Blakely, was another outwardly smooth middle-class type with a serious drink problem and delusions of grandeur – in his case that he would be a successful racing-car driver. It was at one of the Conley clubs that he met Ruth Ellis and, despite her taking an instant dislike to him, began a relationship.

Soon, as Blakely pursued his dreams of building a racing car, he was sponging off Ellis. The two of them were living in a drunken, erratic West London milieu, dominated by traumatized former servicemen and young, would-be-theatrical women on the make. Backstreet abortions, furious public arguments and a perennial shortage of cash were the norm. A composed Ellis later told the court about Blakely at her trial: ‘I realised that he didn’t get any money. It would be spent on his racing car: but I did not mind this. I estimate that excluding rent, I was spending between £200 and £250 a year on David … He started becoming violent. He was constantly trying to belittle me …’

The comparisons with Diana Dors’s husband, Dennis Hamilton, are close. Hamilton was also a violent, drunken sponger, a middle-class boy who was drifting through the alcoholic haze of post-war West London. Diana’s biographer describes him as ‘an out-and-out louse: a thug, gigolo and serial philanderer who treated even his friends and most especially his girlfriends despicably, while always seeming to get away with it’. Like Ruth Ellis, Diana Dors had a weakness for aggressive and dangerous men. Her marriage to Hamilton, who frequently interfered in her career, usually with disastrous results, went on for years; her friends often noticed bruises from his beatings. Just like Blakely, Hamilton had delusions of importance and grandeur. His arrogance cost Diana a full-fledged Hollywood career: after insulting the film bosses who had lured her out to California as the ‘British Marilyn Monroe’, Hamilton was at the centre of a drunken scuffle at a poolside party that led to the pair of them being drummed out of America.

But – and this is the key point – Dors was tough enough to ditch Hamilton. The conundrum about Diana Dors is how much she was exploited, and how much she was an exploiter – of the growing and increasingly frank British interest in sex. Hamilton, who had met her on the set of Lady Godiva Rides Again and married her within weeks, promoted her as a sex star. He took and sold nude pictures of her and – according to rumour at the time – hired her out to producers and other actors who wanted to experience her in bed. Hamilton, eventually rejected by Dors, died shortly after their return to the UK, in 1956, from tertiary syphilis.

Diana Dors flew high above him, continuing to make films, cut records and appear on stage and television, always exploiting her sexual allure. In 1960 she sold her memoirs, full of outrageously fruity stories, to the News of the World for the then unthinkable sum of £36,000. Towards the end of the age of 1950s austerity she outraged MPs by driving around in a powder-blue Cadillac and being filmed going down the Grand Canal in Venice wearing only a specially made mink bikini … though in keeping with the ethos of ‘make do and mend’ it later turned out that the bikini was in fact sewn together from rabbit fur.

The journalist who got the best sense of the real Diana Dors was the Guardian’s Nancy Banks-Smith. She wrote in April 1999: ‘Certainly I remember Diana Dors. She was sitting on a wall looking like Jessica Rabbit and swinging her entertaining legs. At the other end was a humorous smile, like someone who has seen the joke first.’ Damon Wise, who authored a biography of her, absolutely agreed:

She was way ahead of her time. There are elements of Diana, Princess of Wales, about her, and there are elements of the Sex Pistols about her. She created the idea of glamour as an illusion of wealth and success. She was her own Malcolm McLaren, her own press manipulator, and she lived her life in the full glare of publicity at a time when nobody did that kind of thing. She was the kind of woman the Archbishop of Canterbury called a ‘wayward hussy’ but she was also the kind of person the British public mourns like a royal when she died.

Trevor Hopkins, the producer who made an ITV biopic about her, said later: ‘when I see all of these young British actresses trying to make it in Hollywood, and all the It girls trading their looks for tabloid pages, I see the mould Diana Dors created’. In the end, she was in charge. She was a change-maker and a pioneer.

But if Diana had indeed seen the joke first, she also understood what might happen to those who made slightly worse choices. After Ruth Ellis had been hanged, Diana Dors starred in a 1956 film Yield to the Night in which she plays Mary Hilton, a woman who shoots dead another woman she believes was responsible for her lover’s suicide and is eventually led to the gallows. The film was based on a book by Joan Henry, but the story and film were heavily influenced by the Ellis story. Like Ellis, Hilton never denied that she had committed murder – and, like Ellis, she might have got away with it on the continent where the defence of ‘crime of passion’ was possible. As happened to Ruth Ellis in real life, Diana Dors’s film character Mary is visited by her mother before she is hanged. Afterwards she sobs: ‘She doesn’t care about me. She never did. She always said I’d come to a bad end. Now she just wants to gloat at me because she was right. I didn’t ask to be born!’ Yield to the Night, Diana’s most substantial, least glamorous piece of film work, suggests that just a little extra misfortune, a certain lack of steel, can have catastrophic consequences.

So how did Diana herself triumph, rather than trip? The truth is that she was a big enough star, and rich enough early enough, to be partially protected even from Hamilton. She also had a self-protectively ruthless streak. She was perfectly able to manipulate men and had a series of second-fiddle partners after she got rid of Hamilton. Although Ellis is often portrayed as being cold, perhaps she just wasn’t quite as cold, as tough, as Dors – not quite as good an earner, nor as self-protective, or cynical. The two girls who had met and made friends on that cheesy film set in the early 1950s seemed on the face of it so very similar – two cheerful, determined, bottle-blondes from provincial towns, using their physical charms to escape the drudgery and boredom that was the lot of so many working-class women at the time. Yet there were small variations of temperament and talent that, for Diana and Ruth, would mean the difference between life and death.

This is also a story about booze. The British have always been big drinkers. Read accounts of Soho life or Fleet Street journalism in the period and the amount of alcohol being put away is astonishing. The flare-ups and the beatings between Hamilton and Dors generally happened late at night when both of them had been drinking heavily. In 1953, Dors ended up in court after Hamilton, following an all-night bottle party in Blackpool, took her with him and broke into a friend’s house and stole the contents of his cocktail cabinet. Dors and Hamilton ran drink-fuelled sex parties and orgies in their houses, with two-way mirrors and, later on, cine cameras.

In Ruth Ellis’s short life, the drinking and the rows happened in public, in clubs and bars rather than private houses. One of Ruth’s fellow barmaids, who watched the relationship between Ellis and Blakely at first hand, explained that in the final six months they were both drinking ‘a very great deal of spirits. Ruth Ellis would start drinking at 3 p.m. and go on to the small hours of the morning. She drank mainly gin and ginger and Pernod, sometimes champagne … I used to give her water instead without her knowledge. I estimate that she would regularly drink half to a bottle of gin a day besides Pernod.’ In this woozy atmosphere, Ruth Ellis then met her final lover, Desmond Cussen, director of a family tobacco business and, like Blakely, part of the post-war motor-racing world.

A generous three-way triangle was formed and eventually, in one of the most notorious crime episodes of the 1950s, Cussen gave Ruth his revolver, taught her how to use it and helped her track down Blakely. And so, outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead, Ruth Ellis confronted her violent lover (who had recently punched her in the stomach, causing a miscarriage) and shot him repeatedly, emptying the six-chambered gun at point-blank range. As Blakely lay in a pool of blood she waited, quite calmly, for the police to arrive, telling them to take the gun and arrest her. She never made any attempt to deny the murder and would remain courteous and helpful throughout the grisly period that followed, of imprisonment, trial and finally execution at Holloway prison in London.

Placid, politely grateful to the guards and composed, she became the last woman in British history to be hanged, on 13 July 1955. There had been a fierce legal battle, centred on the extent of Cussen’s involvement and provocation. He had, after all, driven her to the pub, and he had cleaned, oiled and prepared the gun, as well as giving it to her and showing her how to use it. Yet Ellis made no attempt to use this as part of a defence until far too late in the process. She had told the court, condemning herself at a crucial moment in her trial, ‘It is obvious that when I shot [Blakely] I intended to kill him.’ The night before the execution, she told her lawyer that she was ‘still feeling all right’ and that the staff in the prison had been ‘simply wonderful’. After a tot of brandy, she was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint, who later told her sister that she had been ‘as good as gold’ and had ‘died as brave as any man, and she never spoke a single word.’

Ruth Ellis’s calmness and passivity helped stoke a ferocious public argument about hanging. The leading paper of the time, the Daily Mirror, conducted a poll, finding its readers two-to-one in favour of ending capital punishment. The Mirror’s popular columnist William Connor wrote that the day of her death had been a fine day for fishing, or lolling in the sunshine, not for hanging: ‘in this case I have been reviled as being a sucker for a pretty face. Well, I am a sucker for all human faces because I hope I’m a sucker for all humanity, good or bad. But I prefer them not to be lolling because of a judicially broken neck.’

Looking at the life stories of Ruth Ellis and Diana Dors, it’s clear that the dividing line between them was paper thin. The hangman Pierrepoint had visited Dors on one of her film sets. She could move in just as dangerous and criminal an underworld as Ellis. She was friendly with and mildly supportive of the East London gangsters the Kray twins, for instance. Both women had to cope with violent and controlling men. Both had illegal abortions. Both had children out of wedlock. Neither was a saint. Diana Dors continued to run voyeuristic sex parties until shortly before her death, and her final husband, Alan Lake, was getting into trouble with the police as late as 1980 for knife fights and drinking.

Had Ellis been just slightly better as an actress and stayed a little less long in the worst of the West End clubs, it is not impossible to imagine her having a career almost as successful as that of Diana Dors rather than ending up as a hanged murderess. And yet the two have almost opposite reputations, the cold killer and the national icon. Two days before Diana died, of cancer in May 1984, even the sharp-taloned Jean Rook of the Daily Express told her that the nation was praying for her: ‘You’re our solid “Golden Oldie”, the very best of unbeatable British. We love you and are proud of you for what you have been for 52 years. Our own! Bounce back, soon!’

Ruth Ellis never bounced back, but her legacy was more important. The hanging of Ruth Ellis contributed hugely to the campaign for the end of capital punishment. Thanks in large part to the efforts of the backbencher Sydney Silverman, working under the approving eye of Roy Jenkins, the death penalty was suspended for an experimental period of five years in 1965 and then, in December 1969, was abolished. It is almost always in this context that Ruth Ellis is remembered. But it was also a story about the ambitions of post-war working-class women, and the dangerous choices they made when they aspired to the short-cut route – the ‘glamorous’ route – out of drudgery and poverty. If Ruth Ellis is the classic example of a woman making bad choices, largely about violent and drunken men whom she allowed to control her, then her co-star Diana Dors shows how, even in the 1950s, it was possible to make slightly different choices and emerge triumphant.

Their stories were about class as well as about changing values. During the 1950s, particularly when power, alcohol and sex were shaken together, some remarkable pioneer travellers were crossing class boundaries in new ways. Another friend of Diana Dors, and of Ruth Ellis, was Stephen Ward, the mysterious man at the centre of the Profumo scandal. Ward was pro-Soviet, pro-hooker and a friend of one of Moscow’s leading spies in London, the baby-faced Yevgeny Ivanov. In 1963, Ward entangled John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War (the euphemistic title Secretary of State for Defence had not yet been invented), with Ivanov, via the showgirls and models Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies.

10
THE BALLAD OF STEPHEN WARD

From disguised princes in medieval stories visiting smoky cottages to the Tudors’ upwardly mobile bureaucrats or Restoration rakes and whores interlacing frantic fingers in London parks, British society has always included bold migrants across the fiercely policed barriers of class division. But by the middle of the twentieth century a mixture of working-class self-confidence, rising up, and the dilapidated condition of the tax-ravaged upper classes, starting to look down, meant that social mixing was happening on a new scale.

This is why the Profumo scandal of 1963 remains such a reliable staple of modern British history. But the most interesting figure in it is not Christine Keeler or Rice-Davies; not Profumo himself, not even Ivanov. It is the shadowy man Stephen Ward around whom the rest of the cast of politicians, spies, call girls and super-rich aristos swirled. We will never properly know his side of what happened, because he committed suicide while standing trial for living off immoral earnings. The phrase about him that recurs endlessly, in books and on the internet, is ‘socialite osteopath’, or sometimes ‘osteopath and artist’. That barely scratches the surface. With his weak face, large and hypnotic eyes and lank hair, he stares out of press photographs as if he’s yearning to be loved or yearning at the very least to be understood.

There was a doomy masochism about Ward. He was the son of a quiet vicar and a flamboyant Irishwoman who was sent off to a boarding school, where he was unjustly accused of hitting another boy and thrashed in front of the rest of the school – even though ‘everybody knew’ he had done nothing. This was an incident which seems to have stayed with him throughout his life. Ward himself felt that this was, in essence, also the story of his involvement in the Profumo affair, calling it ‘a political revenge trial … Someone had to be sacrificed and that someone was me.’ The great contemporary critic Ken Tynan entirely agreed: ‘Society created him, used him, ruthlessly destroyed him, and then closed ranks around his body.’

This is a story also about sexuality and – that slippery, loaded word – decency. Lord Denning, the judge employed by the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to report on the affair, bluntly described Ward as ‘a really wicked chap … the most evil man I ever met’. Mervyn Griffith-Jones, the prosecution barrister, described him as ‘this filthy fellow’ who had slithered up ‘from the very depths of lechery and depravity’. And listening agog to racy tales of ‘swingers’ (a word brightly redolent of 1963 but in fact in use in England since the 1540s) and sadomasochism, the jury was easily persuaded. One juror tracked down by the authors Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy, told them:

most of us had already made up our minds when we heard about all the perversions and sex. You have got to remember that we weren’t as liberal-minded as we are today. It was all very disgusting to us. But some of us find it odd because Stephen Ward didn’t look like what he was supposed to have done. It was all a bit beyond our comprehension, these two-way mirrors and whippings and things …

So who was this ambiguous, lecherous, shadowy martyr? The first thing is that Stephen Ward was not simply an ‘osteopath’. He had a proper, full medical degree from a university in Missouri, where modern osteopathy was born. A genuinely talented healer, he had studied osteopathy before and during the war, when his patients included many British soldiers but also Mahatma Gandhi. The second thing to say is that he was not simply a ‘socialite’: he was one of the best-connected men in London in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As an osteopath and an amateur artist, he was friendly with the Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Margaret, the Duchess of Kent and other members of the royal family.

His political friends included not just John Profumo, the War Minister, but also Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, Anthony Eden and the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell. Ward knew and treated a wide range of the richest people in Britain, including the plutocratic Astors. Among his show-business friends were Frank Sinatra, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Ava Gardner, Sir Malcolm Sargent, Sir Thomas Beecham, Sophia Loren, Kenneth More, Jack Hawkins and Peter Sellers. He was thick with most of the powerful figures in British newspapers, and well known to important artists of the period, key London ambassadors and members of the European royal set. To call him a socialite is like calling Turner a chap who messed around with watercolour.

Once the scandal broke in 1963, most of these people dropped him, or pretended they’d never known him. The drawings he had made of the Duke of Edinburgh and other royals were mysteriously bought off the walls before his first West End exhibition opened, we must assume on behalf of the royal family. But before all that, while he was on the up and fashionable, Stephen Ward was almost ludicrously well plugged in. He had magical fingers.

So what about his seedy side? Ward’s biographers believe that he himself did not have a strong sex drive, but rather that he got a kick out of bringing on vulnerable girls. He liked to educate them in the ways of the world, polishing and helping them, and then to introduce them to powerful men. He used them to weave a web of influence. Following George Bernard Shaw’s character, who educated Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, friends called it Ward’s ‘Henry Higgins syndrome’. So he was able to introduce Lord Astor, Profumo and the spy Yevgeny Ivanov to women with whom they then had affairs.

The distinction between ‘young and promiscuous women’ and sex workers, and between ‘making introductions’ and living off the earnings of prostitution, can be narrow. The blurring of this line would destroy Stephen Ward. Yet any suggestion that he was a sainted victim is also ludicrous. At different times of his life he certainly enjoyed sex, and he certainly knew many prostitutes. Just as he revelled in mixing with the rich and famous, so he got a kick from mixing with West Indian drug dealers, gangsters and prostitutes in the poorer parts of West London. Prince Philip one day, the jazz singer ‘Lucky Gordon’ the next. In Britain’s mid-century class system, Ward was both balloonist and deep-sea diver. He travelled vertically.

And that was the nub of the issue because, for goggle-eyed newspaper readers, what was most striking about the Profumo scandal was that it mashed together the grandest and most pompous men with cheeky, sassy young working-class women like Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. It showed up the former and it raised up the latter. While stodgy, socially conservative middle-class readers trudged about their daily business, the upper classes and the wilder fringes of the working classes were, it appeared, behaving just as ‘badly’ as each other. Perhaps there was nothing new in this: in Queen Victoria’s time, Lord Randolph Churchill famously said that ‘the aristocracy and the working class are united in the indissoluble bonds of a common immorality’.

Rather like the Gloucestershire racecourse during the Cheltenham Gold Cup, the world of the Profumo affair was one in which the middle classes and their values were virtually absent. The nobs and the disreputable kids were having far too much fun and it simply wasn’t fair. Peers of the realm had urges, it appeared, just as earthy – and often dirtier – than anyone cavorting in a drug-addled Notting Hill club. Sex was coming out into the open. (Seven years later Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper would print its first topless Page 3 girl.)

It now seems, however, that the scandal was, in truth, more serious than was widely understood at the time. Politically, Ward meant well. He had been working with MI5, and doing his naive, deluded best to bring the Americans and the Russians together during the most dangerous period of the Cold War. In October 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, Ward’s friend the Russian naval attaché Ivanov, who was working for Soviet military intelligence, suggested on behalf of the Kremlin that Britain host a summit in London between President Kennedy and the Soviet Premier Khrushchev. The then Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home felt that this was an attempt to drive a wedge between Britain and the United States and didn’t like the idea; and it was, in any case, overtaken by events as the crisis played out.

There was a more malign and dangerous side to Ivanov’s activities. In his history of Soviet intelligence, the historian Jonathan Haslam relates how Ivanov, introduced by Ward, got invitations to Jack Profumo’s London home, overlooking Regent’s Park. There, allowed to wander at will by Profumo’s wife, the actress Valerie Hobson, Ivanov used a Minox camera to photograph key Western secrets, including details of experimental high-altitude hypersonic aircraft, as well as contingency plans for Western battle groups after the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961. Haslam writes: ‘Had a conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact broken out at that moment, Soviet knowledge of these plans would have enabled them to inflict severe damage on Western conventional forces that held the line in Berlin.’ Also revealed were the top-secret plans for the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe: ‘These were matters of considerable importance for NATO during a period of heightened international tension …’

Thus the Profumo affair, which in theory centred on whether or not the War Minister had lied to Parliament (he had) and the sexual shenanigans at Lord Astor’s grand country house Cliveden, went to the heart of Western security. This may explain, in what now looks like a rigged trial, the government’s desperation to have Stephen Ward convicted for living off the earnings of prostitutes and sent somewhere ‘safe’, where he could name no more names. By safe, the security services, the political elite and the judiciary meant prison. Ward, swallowing handfuls of pills, chose to make an abrupt exit to somewhere even more secure.

Ivanov, in his ghost-written memoirs, was briskly dismissive of any suggestion that Stephen Ward was himself an agent:

Frankly, a less suitable candidate for intelligence work would have been difficult to imagine. Ward was simply a loose cannon careering wildly across the deck of contemporary intelligence, demolishing the carefully assembled plots and counter-plots of each side indiscriminately. Far from being the ‘thoroughly filthy fellow’ or the ‘wicked, wicked creature’ painted … at his trial … Ward was merely a tremendously insecure fantasist, eager to please both sides for his own self-glorification.

However, in those same unreliable and highly entertaining memoirs, Ivanov reveals just how open to spies London in the early 1960s had become. This self-described Russian ‘fox in the henhouse’ recounts a detailed argument with Winston Churchill, for instance, and conversations with the Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Margaret.

And he, at least, understood the true tragedy of Stephen Ward – that this was a scandal of class and belonging, as much as one of sex. Ward, said Ivanov, worked for nobody and lived by his own rules, constantly trying to create a reputation for himself in medicine and in art:

but his every attempt met a wall of rejection, at school, where he was ordered to keep silent about a crime committed in his presence; in the army, where his superiors used his medical skills but did not admit this officially; and in his family life … His tragic life was a protest against a society which he loved but which rejected him again and again. He climbed to considerable heights in his life, but there were also a number of falls. His main problem was that he could not find a foothold …

It took a Russian spy to see the thing clearly.

The Profumo scandal would help destroy Harold Macmillan’s government. It revealed the crumbling morality of the establishment, and the ruthless willingness of powerful men to exploit young women, a constant from the beginning of written history right through to the early decades of the twenty-first century. All the ingredients for the scandal were there beforehand: Ward was simply the catalyst which made them blow up. At the time the British were sold a false account, which went no further than the misleading of Parliament and romps by a swimming pool. Jack Profumo went on to redeem himself with good works in London’s East End.

Stephen Ward died the victim of corrupted and perjured evidence and a vindictive prosecution. The central role of Britain’s secret services remained hidden. So did the genuine and serious loss of secret information to the Soviet Union. So, almost certainly, did the identity of many of Ward’s close friends: today parts of the official archive remain closed, even to professional historians. The final part of this famous affair that has not, perhaps, received its full due is the racial aspect: part of the problem with Ward, in the eyes of the British establishment of the time, was that he was mixing with West Indians in a particularly volatile part of London.

11
PUNISHMENT BY ACQUITTAL

The Mangrove Restaurant in All Saints Road, in Notting Hill, West London, dished up rich, spicy food of the kind its owner, Frank Crichlow, remembered his mother serving when he was brought up in Trinidad. Frank was a large, bearded, genial figure whose regular customers included a wide selection of bohemian London life. He served Black Power radicals, literary voyeurs and the hipper celebrities of the age. Among his customers from 1968 to the early 1970s, he could count the rock legends Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley, the singer-activist Nina Simone, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Sammy Davis Jr, the actress Vanessa Redgrave, the novelist Colin MacInnes and the Caribbean Marxist intellectual and cricket fanatic C. L. R. James. It was an acquaintanceship list almost as varied as Stephen Ward’s. And indeed, among the occasional visitors to the Mangrove were many of the fringe players in the Profumo drama, including Christine Keeler … and Ward himself.

London is the crucible of multiracial Elizabethan Britain. What was about to happen in Notting Hill was a story that could only have happened in the capital. But it’s important to remember that racial issues affected many other urban centres, from the Nottingham riots of 1958 when more than a thousand people fought using razors, knives and bottles, to the Bristol bus boycott of 1963, when black citizens fought for four months to overturn racial segregation which barred them from working on the city’s transport system. In each case, these are truly stories of the end of Empire. The Bristol boycott was led by Paul Stephenson, whose father was West African and his mother British, who had served in the RAF and later became that city’s first black social worker.

The Bristol story had national repercussions. It is widely thought that the bus boycott led to Britain’s first race relations legislation, relatively puny though that was, in 1965. This, in turn, was strengthened with the 1968 Race Relations Act, which made it illegal ‘to refuse housing, employment, or public services to a person on the grounds of colour, race, ethnic or national origins’ and created the Community Relations Commission to promote ‘harmonious community relations’. One of the targets of Enoch Powell’s so-called ‘rivers of blood’ speech, the 1968 Act also provides the background to the big legal struggle that was about to erupt in London.

The Metropolitan Police hated the Mangrove. Was it because it was flying the flag for successful black business in the heart of West London? Was it because, as Crichlow suspected, they disapproved of the mingling of black men and white radicals? At any rate, in the eighteen months from January 1969, there were no fewer than a dozen major police raids, overtly in search of illegal drugs. None were ever found yet drawing a blank never seemed to diminish police enthusiasm for another raid, another go. Slowly, bit by bit, Crichlow came to believe he was the victim of police harassment. His anger grew.

Frank Crichlow had arrived in Britain as one of the early migrants from Trinidad, in the same month as the Coronation. When he first settled in West London, he felt lonely and uneasy. There were very few other black people around, and the locals were far from friendly. Working out of digs in Paddington he was employed by British Rail before starting a moderately successful Caribbean band, a four-piece good enough to be broadcast on radio and television. But he wasn’t good enough, or at least enthusiastic enough, to stick at it. With the money he had raised, he then decided to start a café, the El Rio, in Notting Hill. John Profumo and Christine Keeler were among his customers.

By the summer of 1970, when he had been repeatedly raided for non-existent drugs and had his licence revoked for technical infringements, this relatively diffident, even shy man who was in fact strongly opposed to drugs, had had enough. With the help of a recently formed group, copying their more famous US counterparts, the British Black Panthers (who had been able to acquire a headquarters in Britain when the art critic John Berger donated to them half his winnings for the Booker Prize for best novel), Crichlow organized a protest march around a handful of local police stations. It was always going to be angry and noisy, but it wasn’t supposed to be a very big deal.

The banners attacking the ‘pigs’ were aggressive enough and there were ragged chants of ‘black power’, but those who took part estimated that only about 150 people were involved. The police responded with massed rows of constables in military formation, using snatch squads to haul out protesters and fling them into the backs of vans. The Mangrove demonstration was tiny compared to the major protests of the day against the Vietnam War, the industrial disputes of the time or indeed the urban riots of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But it attracted a barrage of prosecutions for riot, affray and physical assault on police officers. Nine black activists, seven men and two women, faced a variety of charges at Paddington Magistrates’ Court, where some of the police charges of incitement were immediately dismissed.

There then followed one of the longest trials in British legal history, at the Old Bailey. Two of the nine, Darcus Howe and Althea Jones-LeCointe, decided to defend themselves and demanded to be tried by an all-black jury. The legally trained Darcus Howe called in aid Magna Carta’s insistence on the right to judgment by a jury of one’s peers. In the decades that followed, Howe would go on to be one of the most familiar and consistent critics of British racism. In the past, he argued now, Welsh defendants had been allowed a Welsh jury, Italians a half-Italian one, and so on. He got nowhere; but then the defendants successfully challenged potential juror after potential juror until they got two black ones. The trial went on for fifty-five days in 1971, with a constant small Black Power demonstration outside, as the prosecution did their best to persuade the court that the Mangrove Restaurant was ‘a haunt of criminals, prostitutes and ponces’.

In the end, it seemed, the Mangrove was indeed just a restaurant: all the defendants were acquitted. By then, the judge had horrified both the Met Police and the Home Office by saying in his summing up that the case had ‘regrettably shown evidence of racial hatred on both sides’. The implication of institutional racism within the police in London, which would become central to the Stephen Lawrence murder case in the 1990s, was something that the Met tried to have withdrawn. The judge, having reflected deeply, refused. Much later, in 1998, in his inquiry into the Lawrence affair, another judge, Sir William Macpherson, concluded that the Metropolitan Police had been ‘institutionally racist’. If the Mangrove Nine affair had been – as it seemed – a trial of strength between the British Elizabethan state and its black subjects, then the subjects had won.

Frank Crichlow himself returned to Notting Hill and his restaurant, and set up the Mangrove Community Association to help drug users and alcoholics. Thanks in part to the socialist expatriate American Claudia Jones, who said she was trying to ‘wash the taste out of our mouths’ after the racist Notting Hill riots of 1958, West London was beginning to experience its annual carnivals. These have been compared to the ancient Bartholomew Fairs, a joyful popular celebration of misrule which continued into the nineteenth century. By the time the Mangrove Nine trial was finally over, the Notting Hill carnival was beginning to assume its modern form, with massed steel bands and exuberantly costumed dancers. The Mangrove became one of its hubs. Crichlow was one of its leading supporters.

The police continued to stalk him. Despite being hostile to marijuana, he was charged with drug offences in 1979 – and again cleared. Nine years later police officers smashed open the front of the Mangrove with sledgehammers in yet another drugs raid. This time Crichlow was charged with possession of heroin and cannabis, though he always insisted these were planted. He was – yet again – acquitted. Crichlow took action against the police for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution, finally winning damages of £50,000 in 1993. He died in 2010 of prostate cancer, and is remembered as one of the fathers of the Notting Hill black community, a pioneer in the fight for black rights. Subject for much of his life to ‘punishment by acquittal’ he was always gentle, always modest, always determined.

We have looked at class and morality, as they ensnared Ruth Ellis but not Diana Dors. We have looked at the toxic effects of shaking up sex and a crumbling establishment, leading to a rigged, unjust trial; and seen how the challenges of multiracial culture eventually provoked another, more influential trial. The first part of the Queen’s reign had seemed a disastrous period for the old establishment. But sadly, and quietly, one establishment is always being replaced by another. Away from the headlines, at just the same time, a new moral order was forming itself.

12
THE DAVID AND JONATHAN OF PERMISSIVE BRITAIN

Often, pre-war homosexual affairs at Oxford and Cambridge were not merely private events. They affected the course of poetry, diplomacy and politics. The gay circles that intersected with student communist politics produced the infamous ‘Cambridge spies’. The secrecy of gay men in the age of criminalization, with their secret assignations and private language, may have laid them open to blackmail, but it certainly helped them become good espionage agents. Later, David Cornwell, writing as John le Carré, persuaded modern Elizabethans that, despite the obscure heroism of his protagonist George Smiley, there was something deep, dark and rotten at the heart of the security state; and that this had been rooted in the fascism-haunted 1930s, before it spilled over into post-war crises. History books and popular films, following a similar agenda, probed the gay student friendships whose actors later did so much work for Moscow.

But there was a less well-known pre-war gay relationship – at Oxford not Cambridge this time – which would deeply affect the Elizabethan age in another way. It had nothing to do with spying, or indeed communism. This story was about mainstream domestic politics and social change. For this brief and passionate affair drew together two of the most important reformers in post-war British politics. It was a friendship and a rivalry which lasted a lifetime. Both debonair, thrusting, louche Tony Crosland and quicksilver, sardonic Roy Jenkins could, in very slightly different circumstances, have been famous British prime ministers. Neither made it. But between them they can claim to have reshaped the country more effectively than many of those who did, including their theoretical leaders Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.

As a young man, Tony Crosland had been irresistibly glamorous. Abrasive and brilliant, with the face of a corrupted choirboy, he was brought up in the strict and puritanical Exclusive Brethren sect, before fighting in the war with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. As a paratrooper in Italy, he had observed one of the most shameful moments for the British Army in its entire history. In 1945 many tens of thousands of disarmed German, Russian, Ukrainian and Cossack prisoners were passed over to the Soviet Army. They were then executed or sent to communist concentration camps. Crosland was well aware of what was happening, writing in his diary: ‘all one saw was a lot of simple uncomprehending men being shepherded off under guard to a black and hopeless future: in the case of the officers, going to certain death. However, it all went off with only a single hitch …’

This traumatic experience hardened him against the Marxism that had attracted so many of his generation and pushed him instead towards a belief in social democracy. He was a tough-minded twenty-eight-year-old when he returned to Oxford in 1946 and threw himself into democratic socialist politics. The then Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, who had an eye for attractive young left-wing men, brought Crosland into his circle. By then, Crosland himself had seduced another socialist undergraduate.

Roy Jenkins was the son of a Welsh trade unionist who had served the National Union of Mineworkers. Jenkins left Oxford during the war to work in the British Army as an intelligence officer. He, like Crosland, would become central to the social democratic project of the more leftish Elizabethans. Politically, they were two of a kind. Jenkins remembered first coming across the older man: ‘Tony was immensely good-looking and elegant. He wore a long camel-hair overcoat, and drove a powerful MG sports car known as the Red Menace. I found him rather intimidating, until he came to my rooms on some minor Labour Club business and remained talking for nearly two hours. Thereafter, I saw him nearly every day.’

The biographer John Campbell later confirmed, using love letters, that Jenkins had been seduced at least once by Crosland. From early on, Crosland realized that this lisping, apparently shy Welshman, who was already training himself to speak like a member of the upper classes, had an almost insatiable ambition, a well-disguised steely inner core and a determination to exercise power. Crosland would go on to write the book that provided the basic text for Labour thinking about society for decades to come; Jenkins would make himself the pivotal figure in a cascade of social reforms that followed it.

The two spent the rest of their lives eyeing each other, ambitious rivals whose friendship would endure to the end. Both were absolutely central to the shift in laws and values that would mark the middle years of the Queen’s reign. They were both, through most of their adult lives, uncompromisingly and enthusiastically heterosexual; but they remained close allies for decades. Intellectuals, war veterans, deep drinkers and promiscuous lovers, they were the David and Jonathan of the permissive society. Yet we have some important things to blame them for: together they may have made Britain more civilized, but they didn’t make it much more open or more equal. And that was down to the story of British schooling – Crosland’s greatest cause, and biggest failure.

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