Were the 60s a swinging decade of sex and mini skirts … or the start of a decline into
In David Kynaston’s telling, the past is like a gigantic flicker-book. Having examined newspaper reports, diaries, letters, media bulletins, and contemporary memoirs, plus heaps of other sources, he is able to tell us that in the period under review, the mid-Sixties, Petra on Blue Peter had puppies, John Prescott went to Hull University and was snubbed by Philip Larkin, Sooty had a girlfriend, Soo, but ‘they had to keep their paws off each other’, multi-flavoured Golden Wonder crisps came in, as did open-plan offices (‘theoretically less hierarchical’), Pizza Express appeared, and the Moors Murderers were put on trial.
English models walk down the pavement
In celebrity culture, Peter Cook’s satire boom took off (‘the difficulty is to combine freedom of expression with a full sense of responsibility’) and The Beatles received the MBE. ‘We’re more popular than Jesus now,’ bragged John Lennon. ‘All they do is exploit a basic jungle rhythm for money,’ complained a retired puce-faced army colonel.
Harold Pinter’s plays were considered ‘absolute drivel and incomprehensible nonsense’. Ken Dodd began a nine-month run at the Palladium, and though the family favourite was Val Doonican, it was Tom Jones who went to No 1, with It’s Not Unusual.
On the political front, as Deep Into The Sixties: Britain 1965–66 explains, Harold Wilson’s Labour Party were bringing in high taxation, ‘a most disgusting attack on anyone who wants to make his way in the world’, as a City analyst exclaimed. Manual work and traditional industries were fast disappearing – foreshadowing the strikes and strife of the Seventies. It was the beginning of the end of textiles and clothing manufacturing, shipyards, coal, cotton mills. There were (as today) shuttered shops, closed pubs, the appearance of tattoo parlours and discount booze outlets.
At the same time there was immigration – by 1967 Birmingham had more than 60 Pakistani shops; in 1968 Enoch Powell would deliver his ‘rivers of blood’ speech. When a black man entered a Bristol pub, the landlord called the police. Eight constables and an inspector immediately arrived in a Land Rover. The black man spent the night in the cells.
Meanwhile, the government was intent on getting rid of grammar schools and the ‘hated and feared’ 11-plus, and imposing instead the non-selective comprehensive system.
Tom Jones was King of the charts
The most tragic move throughout the Sixties was the wanton destruction of the urban landscape and the visible beauty of Britain. This had begun with Richard Beeching’s railway closure programme, when lovely halts and stations went, eg Adlestrop on the Cotswold Line. Fewer trains meant more motor traffic, congestion, pollution.
Kynaston breaks this reader’s heart as he gives details of all the attractive Victorian terraces, Georgian squares, historic timber-framed houses, Italianate market halls, theatres and clock towers replaced in town after town by blocks of high-rise flats, pedestrian precincts, shopping plazas, concrete office blocks and car parks.
Local authorities and planning committees, and their policy of ‘destructive philistinism’, did more damage to Britain than the Luftwaffe – inner ring-roads and road-widening schemes, underpasses, motorways. It was not an ‘economic proposition’ to conserve anything, ran the official line. That there is any Victoriana left is due to the efforts of John Betjeman, who in his television documentaries woke people up to what was being demolished in the bogus name of progress.
The Sixties witnessed the legalisation of abortion, a rise in divorce (37,800 in England and Wales in 1965) and an increase in illegitimacy (70,000 in 1967). Kynaston’s account of forced adoptions – by Church of England charities – and the cruelty meted out to single mothers is shocking; medieval in its brutality.
Yet brutality was condoned – they called it ‘discipline’. In the Sixties the police routinely beat suspects up and there was corporal punishment in schools. Homosexuality may no longer have been a criminal offence, but most citizens still considered it ‘wrong, unnatural, degrading and disgusting’. Some politicians even feared gay liberation would usher in ‘an age of lawlessness, violence and crime’.
Indeed, anything to do with sex got people’s knickers in a knot. Joan Bakewell, ‘deploying her endless legs to maximum seductive effect’, was a popular presenter of current affairs programmes. Frank Muir called her ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’. Mary Whitehouse set herself up as an arbiter of good taste, quick to complain about anything permissive – sex outside of holy wedlock, adultery, nudity, mini skirts. By the way, top-shelf magazine Penthouse started publication in March 1965. It was Whitehouse’s belief that the BBC was ‘determined to do everything in their power to present promiscuity as normal’.
What was normality in the Sixties? When the Pill was prescribed, ‘it often seemed easier and, believe it or not, more polite, to sleep with a man than to chuck him out of your flat’, a witness tells Kynaston. If feminism arose it was in reaction to misogynistic films such as Alfie, equal pay disputes and the requirement of a woman to have a man countersign her legal documents. As Fay Weldon is quoted as saying, ‘We saw that the indignity, emotional pain and helplessness that went with being a woman in the 1960s was monstrous and couldn’t, mustn’t, last.’
On the whole, however, reality, with its shabbiness and disappointments, was encapsulated best in the Carry On films, where sex and married life is off-putting, England is still full of restrictions, the Swinging Sixties is a myth and nothing much happens anyway. Kynaston cites the world expert on the subject – me, as it happens: ‘It is a life of delayed or cancelled gratifications. People drive rusty cars. They go on day trips to paddle in the English Channel. They eat pork pie picnics. They go on no-frills, self-catering weekends where Hattie Jacques is queueing for the turbo-toilet.’
I was glad to hear from Kynaston that at Pinewood, Warren Beatty said hello to Kenneth Williams, which (wrote the comedian in his diary) ‘secretly pleased me enormously’. So that’s something. The Sixties, nevertheless, as it emerges from this epic of ‘collective historical memory’, does seem the very moment when it all started to go wrong, from educational deterioration, architectural rubbishness and endemic mental health issues to general disaffection and social divisiveness.
‘We never asked for mass immigration,’ a Cockney who grew up in the Fifties is quoted as saying. ‘We never asked for multiculturalism. We never asked for diversity… I wish to be allowed to continue to live my life immersed in my own culture, with all its foibles and faults as well as its joys.’ As Kynaston points out, the seeds were already being sewn for Brexit.
Deep Into The Sixties, with its encyclopaedic detail, shows how those politicians, bureaucrats and commentators, while believing themselves agents of advancement, were in fact Britain’s elegists, bringing much to an end. Much needed to be brought to an end, but not everything.