Don’t knock the Fabulous Fifties, Mr Marr. Unlike you, I was there!
ONCE again we have to listen to Andrew Marr going on about the fifties. As he was not born until July 1959 he did not even experience that decade. Some of his adjectives about the fifties — racist, misogynistic, homophobic, food tasteless and meagre, cities grimy, censorious — are simply incorrect. Andrew, you obviously were not at the oval in 1950 when the West Indies cricket team were cheered off the field by the crowd after demolishing england, len hutton, denis Compton, et al. I was! you obviously did not eat at Strand Palace, lyons Corner house or anywhere else in london’s Piccadilly, Shaftesbury Avenue and Regent Street. I did! Want to see a grimy city? I suggest you go around the back streets of any large town or city now and file your report. And then you make the absurd comment that every variety of sexual experimentation took place and was vigorously attempted. Sorry, no it did not. Wrong again. Wrong decade. That took place in the early Sixties, I suspect, when among other things the Pill became far more widely available. After the austerity of the late forties, the improvement in life in the fifties — housing, jobs, motor cars, etc — gave a huge lift to so many people.
RICHARD MORGAN, basingstoke, Hants
I’ve eagerly ordered Andrew Marr’s study, elizabethans: how Modern britain Was forged. but unlike the author, I actually lived in fifties england as an adult. fresh off the boat from Australia, aged just 22, I found the london of 1953 exciting, rewarding and untroubled by the psychological and cultural concerns that scar life today. As Marr says: ‘yes, life was poorer.’ but only a few years after the war, everyone was hopeful for the future. My own was much enriched by my time in the UK, especially as I fell in love with another immigrant londoner: we celebrated our diamond wedding three years ago. Note that, Andrew!
MURRAY HEDGCOCK, London SW14.