WERE THESE REALLY THE GOOD OLD DAYS?
In 1962, The Beatles were new, the Bond films were born – and we had the worst teeth in the Western world! So...
Just how good were the good old days? Given the choice, would you prefer to be living back in 1962? In this short book – an interlude in his vast, ongoing history of post-war Britain – David Kynaston offers a snapshot of Britain in the summer and autumn of 1962, a time when the nation was, as the title has it, on the cusp, ‘a country where doors and windows were about to be pushed open a little wider’.
Old ways were set to be pushed aside to make way for a more egalitarian, more mechanised, less traditional society. With his eagle eye, Kynaston selects details and incidents that serve as emblems of larger shifts in the zeitgeist.
He starts by listing the goings-on in a single week in June 1962. England were in the World Cup quarter-final against Brazil, but there was no coverage of the match on either of the two television channels: instead, the BBC showed hymns from the Tabernacle Welsh Presbyterian Church in Bangor, followed by Wagon Train and then a Swedish circus.
In Brighton, hooliganism was out in force, with leather-jacketed motorcyclists ripping apart boats in order to light bonfires on the beach.
At the Alcan aluminium works in Banbury, members of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers held a secret ballot to answer the question ‘Should coloured workers be admitted to the factory?’ – 205 answered yes, and 591 answered no.
On the Thursday, the comic actor Kenneth Williams was horrified by the licentious goings-on he witnessed in Hyde Park. ‘Full of girls who sit up, bending over their male companions who are lying down, receiving their kissings and caressings. It is disgusting to watch.’
A fledgling group from Liverpool, The Beatles, made their second radio appearance, on a programme called Teenager’s Turn – Here We Go.
At his progressive boarding school, the 14-year-old Gyles Brandreth noted in his diary that the school doctor was ‘old and grumpy… The girls say that he takes his time putting his stethoscope across their chests and is quite creepy!’
More reassuringly, on Coronation Street, dull and dogged Ken Barlow could be seen talking a suicidal girl out of throwing herself off a factory roof.
Some things never change: on the radio there were debates over whether or not the country was going to the dogs. Other things change, but only in the detail: nowadays, young people are preoccupied with global warming; back then it was nuclear war.
As you can tell from this selection, Kynaston presents a detailed panorama of the country that year, offering both progressives and nostalgics sufficient fuel for their different viewpoints. For instance, 1962 saw the release of the Pilkington Committee report on the future of broadcasting. It concluded, sniffily, that ‘Triviality is more dangerous to the soul than wickedness’. Today’s TV listings show that this is a battle that Pilkington lost. But faced with Love Island, Big Brother and Naked Attraction, many who argued for a more easy-going approach may now be wondering if they backed the wrong horse.
Mentions of Steptoe And Son, or the young Jacqueline du Pré, or the launch of the world’s first passenger-carrying hovercraft (across the Dee estuary from Wallasey to Rhyl) may well produce a glow of nostalgia. But other items can be guaranteed to send a shiver down the spine.
At a meeting of the National Health Service Executive Councils’ Association in October 1962, it was revealed that the UK had the worst incidence of dental decay in the Western world: one person in five was wearing false teeth by the age of 20.
In September 1962, one of the early presenters of the BBC’s Blue Peter, Anita West, felt obliged to resign from the programme as she was in the middle of divorce proceedings.
Back then, divorce was still a contentious matter. We hear that in Wick, near Littlehampton, the Mothers’ Union was split on the question of whether a marriage should end if the partners hate each other.
And in Trafalgar Square on the first Sunday of July 1962, less than 20 years after the war, 3,000 people attended a meeting of the British National Socialist Movement espousing the theme ‘Free Britain from Jewish control’.
Kynaston draws his material from an impressive range of outlets. In one sentence he will quote from the Bideford And North Devon Gazette, and in the next from the Architectural Review. He lets us know not only who was appearing in Blackpool in the summer of ’62 – Thora Hird, Ken Dodd, Harry Worth and Sooty and Sweep – but also the distinguished authors who were appearing at that year’s Edinburgh Festival – Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Muriel Spark, William Burroughs, Colin MacInnes, Malcolm Muggeridge and L.P. Hartley.
He is a wonderfully diligent chronicler of the changing face of popular culture at the time. Which other historian would record the line-ups of successive episodes of Juke Box Jury? To my mind, the episode featuring Dion, Fenella Fielding, Rupert Davies and Jane Asher must have been a treat.
1962 was the year The Beatles began to take off, followed by The Rolling Stones. In his slyly deadpan tone, Kynaston notes that in July, the magazine Jazz News observed in its Stop Press column that ‘Mick Jagger, R & B vocalist, is taking a rhythm and blues group into the Marquee tomorrow night’. His group was going to be called The Rollin’ Stones, and Jagger was quoted as saying: ‘I hope they don’t think we’re a rock and roll outfit.’
The passages dealing with the great debate over Britain’s application to join the European Common Market exert a disconcerting, echoey effect. ‘Over half a century later, post-Brexit, this moment in the ultimately tragi-comic story of Britain and Europe feels simultaneously a very long time ago and the day before yesterday,’ writes Kynaston.
He quotes an Oxford economist’s summary of the dilemma from 1961. It’s a mirror image of the arguments employed 50 years later: ‘As freedom of movement clashes with xenophobia, so the problem of supranationalism touches the deeper suspicions against the outside world. In defence, Britain has long abandoned independence; in economics, a country as heavily dependent on the rest of the world can only ever be master of its own fate to a very limited degree; but the formal merger of decision-making procedures, the absence of a formal veto… go against the grain even of many who on most other grounds would like to see Britain join the Community.’
Even when the ground is as well trodden as Britain in Europe, Kynaston can still come up with surprising new angles. I didn’t realise, for instance, that the moderate Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell was against Britain’s involvement, warning at a party conference that joining would mark ‘the end of a thousand years of history’. His wife Dora, seeing a standing ovation from Gaitskell’s enemies on the Left, noted in a worried voice that ‘all the wrong people are cheering’.
Nor had I ever read this shrewd observation by the Labour stalwart Douglas Jay: ‘Belief in the Common Market had a natural attraction for Liberals. First it could be represented as “progressive” and “new”; secondly it kept one away from sordid, backstairs subjects like housing, food prices and old-age pensions. It was a seductively drawing-room form of radicalism.’
Kynaston is a master at mixing key political and social movements with the more humdrum details of everyday life. We hear from the 40-year-old Philip Larkin, seething with annoyance having just taken his mother on a bus excursion to the Peak District. ‘God,
I must NEVER do such a MAD thing again: it was a boring, irritating HELL.’ On a sunnier note, at the Ipswich and East of England flower show, the Bishop of Edmundsbury and Ipswich wins seven prizes in the pot plant and vegetable sections.
On The Cusp is peppered with sightings of the great and the good in their youth, before they became famous. Towards the end, an almost biblical litany of names, spread across four pages, charts what the young comets were up to way back then: Joe Cocker, 18, was working as a fitter for the East Midlands Gas Board; Sandra Goodrich, 15 (the future Sandie Shaw), was working at Ford’s in Dagenham; John Ravenscroft, 23 (the future John Peel), was selling crop-hail insurance to farmers in Texas.
The book ends on October 5, 1962 with the release of The Beatles’ first single and the premiere of the first James Bond film, Dr No, which Evelyn Waugh found ‘fatuous and tedious, not even erotic’. At The Woodstock pub in North Cheam, only two people could be bothered to pay to see The Rolling Stones perform live, with a further four people outside listening for free. But whether the British people like it or not, a new age was about to dawn.