The Great Turning Points of British History (23 page)

Full employment and prosperity encouraged immigration from poorer Commonwealth countries. But immigrants from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan often faced hostility; serious racial violence in Notting Hill and Nottingham led to legislation to restrict immigration in 1958.

In general, prosperity bred contentedness – as Harold Macmillan put it in 1957: ‘Let us be frank about it, most of our people have never had it so good’ – but also the confidence to criticize. Easter 1956 saw the first protest against Britain’s nuclear weapons programme, leading to the foundation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958. The nuclear issue exacerbated splits in the Labour Party, which was going through a bout of internecine struggle that rendered it unelectable in the 1950s.

The Conservative governments of the 1950s, sometimes reluctantly, sustained the welfare state. They feared that its most popular feature, the National Health Service, was wastefully expensive. However, the Guillebaud Committee, established to examine this proposition, reported in 1956 that there was no ‘widespread extravagance’ in the NHS and no need for change. The Conservatives did most for health with the 1956 Clean Air Act, which reduced air pollution – a major cause of death, notably during the great London ‘smog’ of 1952. They also achieved a massive increase in local authority house building. Clement Attlee’s governments had built relatively little, mainly due to their determination to build to high standards; the council houses built in the 1950s were of poorer quality, creating the ‘sink estates’ that Conservatives later condemned.

The inadequacies of the post-war welfare state were becoming obvious, even to some of its strongest sympathizers. Richard Titmuss, Labour Party welfare policy adviser, demonstrated that the middle classes gained most from the welfare state and that much poverty remained. In 1957, J.E. Floud, A.H. Halsey and F.M. Martin published
Social Class and Educational Opportunity
, establishing that the 1944 Education Act had not greatly improved the educational opportunities of the working class. The main beneficiaries of the 11-plus examination and grammar school education were middle-class boys, while girls of all classes fared worst. There were fewer grammar school places for them, so they had to score better than boys in the 11-plus. The great majority of children who left the lower-status secondary modern schools at 15 had few or no formal qualifications. The numbers in higher education were far fewer than in other high-income countries. These findings led to the introduction of comprehensive education by a Labour government in the mid-1960s.

Nevertheless, work and relative prosperity gave working-class youth greater independence. Youth culture was reinvented, breeding moral panics about ‘juvenile delinquency’, stimulated by shock at the ‘teddy-boy’ style of young men with long hair, sideburns, Edwardian-style draped jackets and narrow trousers. The film
Blackboard Jungle
did little to quell the fears of Middle England. Released in Britain in 1956, it portrayed violence in US high schools, accompanied by a soundtrack by the first major rock ’n’ roll phenomenon, Bill Haley and his Comets. In 1957 Haley and his Comets toured Britain to a frenzied reception.

Despite these concerns over the moral fibre of young men, most spent two years in National Service, sometimes dying in the post-colonial wars. The rest spent much of their time in work or education and married in larger numbers than ever. There were low levels of ‘illegitimacy’ in an atmosphere of strong social disapproval of sex before marriage.

Older, more celebrated and more disaffected were the ‘angry young men’ of the arts. Colin Wilson’s
The Outsider
, published in 1956, was an anguished, if often obscure, assault on contemporary society. It appeared in the same week as the first performance of John Osborne’s play
Look Back in Anger
, a more overt assault on accepted conventions. Noel Coward’s wholly conventional
Nude with Violin,
first performed shortly after, attracted bigger, if less intellectual, audiences.

Angry young women were fewer, or anyway less visible and celebrated. Women’s campaigning for equality was weaker than in the 1920s and 1930s, but it had not disappeared. In 1955 women in the civil service, local government and teaching gained equal pay, for which they had campaigned for decades. Hopes that the private sector would follow were not fulfilled. In
Women’s Two Roles
(1956) Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein showed that women lacked equal work opportunities. They demanded more training for older women returning to paid work, extended maternity leave, better child care and shorter working hours for both parents – foreshadowing the Women’s Liberation campaigns after 1968. It seems that the 1950s was not quite the dull, grey decade often depicted.

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The period between 1945 and the mid-1970s was an unprecedented ‘golden age’ of near-full employment and rising living standards, though the benefits were not universal: there was periodic unemployment in regions such as Clydeside and Merseyside, and regional inequalities in income and health. Pay and work conditions improved, notably in the large, key industries nationalized by the post-war Attlee government: coal, iron, steel and railways. Almost everyone had two weeks’ annual holiday with pay. For the first time, retirement at 60 or 65 became normal, providing an unprecedented period of leisure in later life.

Women had access to a wider range of jobs, but were still limited in pay and had fewer opportunities for promotion and training. This caused growing protest in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to the 1970 Equal Pay Act and the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. Inequalities diminished but remained significant to the end of the century.

This was the heyday of the long, stable marriage, with life expectancy rising and divorce hard to obtain. Most women married and had children at earlier ages than before. Families remained small – averaging 2.5 children – and most women expected to return to work as their children grew.

The Attlee government did much to reconstruct the post-war economy and made a brave but incomplete attempt to construct a ‘welfare state’. However, by the mid-1950s it was clear that much poverty remained. The Labour governments of 1964–70 attempted to carry forward the Attlee legacy, introducing comprehensive education.

The next twenty-five years were quite different. Following the ‘oil shock’ of 1973 and growing international economic stability, unemployment rose, remaining high for over twenty years and fuelling fears that the British economy was failing to compete in Europe, the US, and increasingly Asia.

In response, the Conservative governments of the 1980s sought to reconstruct the economy. As a result, the manufacturing industry declined, causing growing unemployment and cultural dislocation in industrial areas.

The twenty-five years between 1975 and 2000 saw significant demographic changes too. The birth rate declined, divorce soared, fewer people married and cohabitation became socially acceptable. By the end of the 1980s one-third of babies were born to unmarried, often cohabiting partners.

The unified British state was also breaking up. Conflict in Northern Ireland between Roman Catholic Nationalists who sought a unified Ireland and Protestant Unionists raged from 1968 until the end of the century. Nationalist movements in Wales and Scotland led to the election in 1999 of devolved assemblies, with considerable control over domestic affairs.

1960
‘Supermac’ visits South Africa
. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan tells the South African Parliament that ‘a wind of change is blowing through the continent’ and Reverend Trevor Huddleston establishes the British anti-apartheid movement, yet this doesn’t stop police killing sixty-seven Africans at an anti-apartheid meeting at Sharpeville.

1964
Wilson wins the general election
. After thirteen long years in the wilderness Labour, led by Harold Wilson, returned to government with a majority of just four seats. It wasn’t all plain sailing for Wilson. Labour Shadow Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker was defeated in Smethwick in an election campaign dogged by allegations of racism; in fact, the battle for the Smethwick seat was so bitter that Wilson described the eventual victor Peter Griffiths as a ‘parliamentary leper’.

1968
Anti-war marches spark violence
. Four years of increasingly bloody conflict in Vietnam led to a series of huge anti-war demonstrations in cities across the world. London’s march centred around the home of the US ambassador to Britain on Grosvenor Square, and culminated in clashes between the protesters and police.

1973
Britain joins the EEC
. Prime Minister Edward Heath finally took Britain into Europe after two previous applications to join (in 1963 and 1967) were rejected by the French president De Gaulle.

1979
Economic gloom descends
. As the decade neared its end, Britain found itself in the grip of the ‘winter of discontent’, marked by crippling strikes, the ‘threeday week’ and growing unemployment. This spelt disaster for Jim Callaghan’s Labour government, and he was replaced by Britain’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.

1982
Falklands War
. On 2 April 1982, Britain was rocked by the news that Argentinian forces had seized the Falkland Islands, ending 150 years of British rule. A task force of over 100 ships and 27,000 personnel was hastily dispatched and wrested control of the island from Argentinian dictator General Galtieri in a conflict that cost hundreds of lives. Hostilities formally ceased on 20 June, by which time Galtieri had resigned.

1989
End of the Cold War
. The USSR’s policy of glasnost (openness) inspired risings against Communist leadership in Eastern Europe. Mass movements through the Iron Curtain culminated in Berliners destroying the wall that had divided the city since 1961.

1997
Tony Blair wins by a landslide
. The Labour Party, led by Tony Blair, ended eighteen years of Conservative rule with victory in the general election. One of Blair’s first acts as prime minister was to join forces with US President Clinton to persuade the IRA to act as a political party rather than a fighting force. Blair’s first few months in office were also marked by the death of Princess Diana in a car crash in Paris. Diana’s death caused a remarkable outpouring of national grief. Blair went on to be Labour’s longest-serving prime minister.

1999
First elections for Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly
. The minimum wage was also introduced this year. The Metropolitan Police was accused of institutional racism in an inquiry into the 1983 death of Stephen Lawrence. In politics, the number of hereditary peers allowed to participate in the work of the House of Lords was reduced to ninety-two.

We all recognize important moments in the lives and identity of our family. So it is with a nation: the birth of a dynasty; the marriage of movements; the old order changing. For each chapter in this book, an eminent historian was asked to choose the key year in a half-century of British history. In effect the work became a collective pursuit for the enigma of Britishness.

Britishness is how we see ourselves and how others see us. Therefore, Britishness depends on whether we play up to our image and have a reasonable understanding of our history and its supporting values. This presents no difficulty for Scots, Irish and Welsh. Having Scottish roots (my mother was a Robertson), I understand my identity, particularly on the day of the Calcutta Cup when I fly the saltire from the upper yard of my boat. The comedian’s opening routine of ‘There was an Englishman, Irishman and a Scotsman . . .’ (the Welsh rarely get in here) tells us immediately our perceived character identities. Furthermore, that we would subconsciously judge the historical position of each country according to our own nationality is self-evident.

For historical reasons the Welsh, Irish and Scots have a largely common view of the English whereas the English have quite differing views of each of the other three. The English saw themselves as masters and the others as simply three more nations they had put down. And here, this project gets close to the confusion about Britishness and national identity: Britishness is of course, Englishness.

Noel Coward described ‘the Englishman with his usual bloody cold’, meaning the stuffy, almost upper class, stiff upper lip and sniffing colonial servant – the stereotype of all that was British. The British were fair, urbane, sinisterly self-deprecating and most of all, undemonstrative. The rich sent their children away to school playingfields in order to win later battles. The less well-off aspired to be middle class and used the aristocracy as models of style and nature so that they too practised Britishness.

However, Britishness is a recent definition. Those who caused the turning points in British history could not, until well into the millennium, be called British anyway, not even what we now understand to be English. The Danish (and let us not forget the Norwegian) raids of the late eighth century had, by the ninth and tenth centuries, resulted in conquest and settlement in East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia at a time when England had become for the first time a single state. Until Æthelstan (924–39) and then Edgar (959–75), a monarch ruled the people but not necessarily the state. When Cnut arrived in 1016 there was a sense of distinct kingdoms and peoples. Duncan and then Macbeth ruled Scotland (or Scotia), Gruffudd ap Llywelyn dominated in Powys and Gwynedd until overwhelmed by Harold of Wessex and his brother Tostig (1063). Ireland, split into mini-kingdoms, was by the twelfth century identifiable, at least culturally, as a nation.

The arrival of William and his Normans did nothing to change the balance of these islands. England was the superpower and, in that tradition, it was to the twelfth-century Norman knights of Pembroke that Dermot MacMurrough turned to save his Irish throne. It took months to find Henry II, the first Angevin, to get his permission for the intervention in Ireland because he was looking after his interests in France.