In mid-fifties’ Britain, political satire, exuberantly popular in Georgian times, now returned in full force with the advent of the new media of radio and TV. It also featured savage cartoons in the newspapers, staged lampoons and fortnightly mockery in the magazine Private Eye. Among the two million regular listeners to The Goon Show in the mid-fifties were key members of the next generation of comics, men like Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook. The Goons passed the baton to Beyond the Fringe, which passed it to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, from where it went to Little Britain. Each generation built on the humour of the previous one, changed it and then passed it on. Peter Cook, Spike Milligan’s only rival as the outstanding comic genius of his age, sent a schoolboy script to Milligan at the BBC which was good enough for him to be invited up to London for lunch. In turn, the group of comedians who became known as The Pythons were transfixed by Cook and his friends. In the decade that they grew up after the war, Britain was still dominated by the private schools, which were often bleak institutions. The austerity years meant little heating, poor food and few modern facilities, a life conditioned by brutal customs and petty hierarchies often dating back before the Edwardian years to the founding of many of the ‘public schools’ in mid-Victorian times.

Peter Cook’s school, Radley in Oxfordshire, still ’employed’ a régime  which deployed frequent beatings, cold showers, complicated dress codes, compulsory star-jumps, thumpings with hockey sticks for minor transgressions, and a great deal of other forms of bullying, all of which went undeterred by the staff. This forced bright but vulnerable children like Cook to develop mimickry and mockery to deflect bullies. He would make people laugh so that they wouldn’t hit him. Richard Ingrams, editor of Private Eye, attended Shrewsbury School, whose new boys were called ‘douls’ after the Greek for slave; its day started with cold baths; it too had a byzantine dress code, involving different colours of scarf, tie and waistcoat, and when the whole school was sent on cross-country runs, the boys were chased by men with whips. Ingram’s humour was less about mimickry and more about writing mock school magazines with Paul Foot, son of the Labour leader Michael, and Willie Rushton. In many ‘public-private’ schools, such as at John Cleese’s Clifton College in Bristol, boys developed underground languages to cope with their aggressive, closed communities. They knew little of women, which meant that the humour that emerged from them was often ridiculously naive about sex. They were rarely politically radical, since they were from a privileged élite. Cook’s father had been a colonial civil servant in Nigeria and Gibraltar. Ingrams was the son of an eccentric banker and intelligence agent, a one-time member of a pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship Society, and a Catholic mother whose father had been doctor to Queen Victoria. Both men were brought up to look down on the working classes as essentially inferior and comic. Their satire was biting, with underlying layers of anger and hurt. But it would be very public schoolboyish as well, involving much juvenile tittering and snobbery.

The brightest of these ‘boys’ then went on to Cambridge or Oxford, still then mainly male societies, and where in those days there was a direct line from the world of Oxbridge student reviews, like The Cambridge Footlights to the West End theatres. Future satirists mingled with fellow students who would go on to become politicians and business leaders. Peter Cook’s generation at Cambridge in 1957 included the later Conservative cabinet ministers Michael Howard, Kenneth Clarke (just returned sixty years later as an MP and ‘father’ of the House of Commons) and Leon Brittan, as well as various actors and impresarios. Cook’s biographer, Harry Thompson, has pointed out that:

One reason has traditionally produced so many political satirists is that its undergraduates come face to face with their future political leaders at an early age, and realise then quite how many of them are social retards who join debating societies to find friends.

It could be added that the same could be said of those joining theatrical societies and satirical magazines. At Cambridge, Cook simply transferred his monotone sketches about the Radley School butler to his new environment and eventually had half the undergraduates mimicking him and repeating his one-liners. Cook found his voice as a schoolboy and maintained the same deadpan drawl at Cambridge to Edinburgh’s Beyond the Fringe review, to London, New York and global success. Similarly, Ingrams and Rushton transferred their jokes and cartoon characters to the pages of Private Eye. There were, of course, many other comics and satirists from other backgrounds, including Alan Bennett, the Yorkshire grammar school boy and Dudley Moore, the working-class boy from Dagenham who became the other half of the comedy duo with Peter Cook in the TV series Not only… but also… There was also David Frost, the son of a Methodist preacher from Kent. But it was the dominant personalities of Cook and Ingrams which gave them so strong a hold over the satire boom which began in the second half of the fifties. If Cook had any politics of his own, they were difficult to discern, and always took second place to a good punchline, though Fluck and Law, who went on to create the latex satirical puppetry of Spitting Image, were socialist friends of Cook. At the time of the satire boom itself, there was no organic link between the left of British politics and the wave of comedians, mimics and journalists who tore down the facade of Tory Britain towards the end of their thirteen years in power. There could not have been, since too many of the satirists were public schoolboys,  getting their revenge on the nation’s authority figures for the way they had been bullied. Macmillan for them was the image of the head of a decaying prep school, but Labour was also worthy of snobbish ridicule – full as it was with lower middle-class and working-class people with funny accents and petty, mundane concerns.

Ian Fleming was also a fine example of how the British society was tightly twisted at the top. He was yet another Etonian, and yet another character who flitted between journalism, intelligence and high society. From a Scottish banking family, he had tried Sandhurst, foreign correspondence – including in Stalin’s Moscow – and the City, before joining Naval Intelligence during the war. There his wild schemes for sabotage and dirty tricks were widely considered more fit for novels. After the war he ran a network of foreign correspondents and tried to work out ways of moving out of the dreary reality of austerity London. He eventually built a house in Jamaica, then still a colony, which he called Goldeneye. It was here that the Edens fled after the Suez Crisis to recuperate. In different ways, all these people, from Nöel Coward to the newspaper barons, Hugh Gaitskell to the Flemings, were struggling with time warp lives and challenged patriotism. Morals were becoming more fluid and new kinds of pleasure were seeping in. Gaitskell in particular was able to appreciate Fleming’s books, writing of the Bond books in the New Statesman that:

I am a confirmed Fleming fan – or should it be addict? The combination of sex, violence, alcohol and – at intervals – good food and nice clothes is, to one who lives such a circumscribed as I do, irresistable.

There’s probably no better testimony to the way in which the austerity years gave way to the affluent society. James Bond became one of the most successful if mildly ironic symbols of recovering British pride after Suez. From Russia, with Love, first published in Britain in April 1957, is the fifth novel by Fleming to feature his fictional British Secret Service agent. Fleming wrote the story in early 1956 at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica; at the time he thought it might be his final Bond book. The novel deals with the East–West tensions of the Cold War, and the decline of British power and influence in the post-Second World War era.

Fleming’s sketch showing his concept of the James Bond character.

From Russia, with Love received broadly positive reviews at the time of publication. The book’s sales were boosted by an advertising campaign that played upon a visit by the British Prime Minister’s visit to Fleming’s Goldeneye estate. Fleming’s first work of non-fiction, The Diamond Smugglers, was also published in 1957 and was partly based on background research for his fourth Bond novel, Diamonds Are Forever. Much of the material had appeared in The Sunday Times and was based on Fleming’s interviews with John Collard, a member of the International Diamond Security Organisation who had previously worked in MI5. Even before they were transformed into the endless films, the novels provided a glorious fantasy for a nation in trouble, and in his earlier Bond stories Fleming worked to satisfy the almost pornographic lust of the British for the richer, more colourful consumer culture over the Atlantic. But though Fleming was a connected member of the élite, and had pictured his hero as an Old Etonian, it was a Scottish working-class body-builder, Sean Connery, who was chosen to play him in the first films. After that, Bond became, ironically, something of an outsider figure in the popular imagination, which perhaps helps to explain his endurance as a British cultural icon. Fleming’s original establishment character might not have appealed to a mass film audience in the more egalitarian atmosphere of the sixties.

Source:

Andrew Marr (2007), A History of Modern Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

 

Looking more broadly, in the mid-fifties Britain was still a world-wide player, connected and modern. Her major companies were global leaders in oil, tobacco, shipping and finance. The Empire was not quite gone, even though the new name of ‘Commonwealth’ was more widely used in official circles. Britain was not a country closed to foreign influence, whether from America or Italy or Scandinavia. Something first promoted as ‘Italian Welsh rarebit’, later known as ‘pizza’ was in evidence. The idea of a powerful, self-confident Britain, independent of American cultural influence, seemed not only possible but likely. Per capita, Britain was still the second richest country in the world.

However, after the Suez Crisis, Britain would no longer possess independent power or influence in the Middle East. The age of American power there, based on support for Israel and the oil alliance with the Saudi Royal Family, took the place of British hegemony. Suez also provoked the arrival of the Mini car, designed in the wake of the petrol price shock caused by the seizure of the canal. Macmillan replaced Eden as PM and decided to remain in the tiny nuclear club as a cheaper alternative to imperial swagger. He authorised the first British H-bomb explosion at Christmas Island in May 1957. It was partly a fake, a hybrid bomb intended to fool the US into thinking its ally was further ahead than it really was. The next year, at a crucial showdown between British and American scientists in Washington, the British Aldermaston team persuaded Edward Teller’s Los Alamos men that Britain was just as far advanced as the US in the field of nuclear weaponry.

The major international event of 1957 was the signing of the Treaty of Rome, the beginning of what we know today as the European Union.The continental negotiators were shocked and disappointed by Britain’s lack of serious interest, but the six founding members shrugged off Britain’s attitude. They were still rebuilding shattered cities and healing torn economies, and for them the coming of the ‘community’ was manifest destiny. Coming so soon after Suez it provoked increasingly agitated head-scratching in Whitehall.

For Britain, the world was still differently shaped. The Commonwealth was then more than a worthy outreach programme for the Royal Family. Its food and raw materials poured into Britain and there was an illusion that Britain’s manufacturing future would be secured by selling industrial goods to South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. Out would flow engines, cars, clothing, aircraft and electronics, in exchange for butter, oil, meat, aluminium, rubber, tobacco and wood-pulp. The poorer members of the sterling club kept their reserves in London, so Britain acted as banker as well as manufacturer for much of Africa and parts of Asia. Most people believed that to cut adrift the Commonwealth and join a new club would be economically ruinous as well as immoral. For Labour, Harold Wilson told the Commons that if there has to be a choice, we are not entitled to sell our friends and kinsmen down the river for a problematical and marginal advantage in selling washing machines to Dusseldorf. Later, Hugh Gaitskell told the Labour Conference that membership of the European Economic Community would mean an end to a thousand years of history:

How can one seriously suppose that if the mother country, the centre of the Commonwealth, is a province of Europe… it could continue to exist as the mother country of a series of independent nations?

At the same time, the European market, thirsting for new consumer goods, was growing spectacularly fast, while the Commonwealth trading group was by comparison falling behind. Most of the smaller countries did not want Britain anyway and the richer nations of the Commonwealth would soon turn to the United States for their consumer goods.

Yet membership of the EEC would subordinate Britain to the continent in other important ways. It was recognised from this earliest date that sovereignty and independence would be lost. Other forms of subordination and loss of independence had already happened, however. The foundation of the United Nations and the establishment of NATO had involved the relinquishing of traditional freedoms of action. Nevertheless, Europe was something different. Those who had looked clearly at the Treaty of Rome were struck by its overwhelming ambition. Lord Kilmuir, Macmillan’s Lord Chancellor, told him that Parliament would lose powers to the Council of Ministers whose majority vote could change British law; that the Crown’s power over treaties would partly shift to Brussels and that British courts would find themselves in part subordinate to the European Court of Justice. Macmillan himself tended to brush these concerns aside with reassuring words, trying to keep everyone happy, but Kilmuir was joined by Lord Home, the future  PM, in giving outspoken warnings.

Had Britain been involved in the European adventure from the start, as the French had initially wanted, the EEC and the EU might well have evolved differently. There would certainly have been less emphasis on agricultural protection and more on free trade. ‘Europe’ might have appeared to be a little less mystical and a little more open and democratic. Even after the shock and humiliation of Suez, the Commonwealth and Anglo-American relations still took precedence for London. Macmillan’s team, centred on Edward Heath, hoped that somehow the trading system of the Commonwealth supporting English-speaking farmers from across the world could be accommodated by the protectionist system in Europe. They seem to have thought that any loss of sovereignty would be tolerable if such a deal could be struck. Macmillan had nothing like the reverence for the House of Commons felt by Enoch Powell, on one side of that House, or by Hugh Gaitskell on the other. Meanwhile, Britain’s struggle to keep up in the nuclear race led to private Anglo- American negotiations which infuriated the French. After the Treaty of Rome took effect at the beginning of 1958, French attitudes hardened with the return of General de Gaulle as President, determined that the new continental system would be dominated by France and would exclude the Anglo-Saxons.

1957 was also the year in which some Tories first began to break with the Keynesian economics of the post-war consensus in favour of a return to their older doctrines of economic liberalism. Antony Fisher, a chicken-farmer and utterly self-certain individualist and anti-socialist, had made enough money to found the Institute of Economic Affairs, undoubtedly the most influential think-tank in modern British history. Set up by Fisher and the Liberal, Oliver Smedley, the IEA was intended to combat the socialist influence of the Fabians. It first began to influence British politics during the winter of 1957-8, when inflation was rising above 4% and wage settlements were in double figures. Macmillan was worried about the confrontation which might emerge from cut-backs and unemployment, and he had many spending ministers, taking care of the armed forces, hospitals and welfare who were strongly opposed to cutting back. On the other side of the argument were the Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, and his two junior Treasury ministers – Nigel Birch and Enoch Powell. They insisted that it was vital to control the money supply, a position advocated by the IEA. They put together a planned series of cuts which included a fifty per cent rise in the cost of school meals, freezes on pay rises and the removal of family allowances for the second child.  It would have hit five million families, including millions of middle-class mothers whose support the Tories needed. In the end, the Treasury team lost the battle in cabinet and all three resigned. Macmillan dismissed the whole matter as a little local difficulty. Yet it marked a turning point, away from the ideas of free marketeers and towards the last phase of the planning economy and, eventually, to Thatcherism. In the Thatcher Government, Lord Thorneycroft became Chairman of the Conservative Party.

Source:

Andrew Marr (2007), A History of Modern Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

 

 

Despite the evidence of the destruction of traditional social relations brought about by high-rise housing developments, there are plenty of other sources which suggest that, behind the new consumer goods and gadgets, the stubborn continuities of working-class life and culture survived the 1950s. But ‘community’, a notion which is unthinkable in English social experience without the context of the typical working-class neighbourhood, became a matter of widespread and fundamental concern. Behind the clear manifestations of change there emerged the question as to whether, as the conditions and patterns of social life for working people changed, with their increased wages being poured into the new consumer goods, people might be uprooted from the life they had known and largely made for themselves, and transplanted in another one largely made for them by ‘others’. This might involve a move not just from one social class to another, but also from the class ‘ideal’ of solidarity, neighbourliness and collectivity to that of individuality, social struggle to ‘keep up’ and ‘get on’. People became visibly and audibly more middle class, determined to ‘keep themselves to themselves’.

Above: The Willenhall Estate in Coventry, in its early days in the late 1950s. By the 1980s, it was commonly considered one of the poorest, most run-down estates in the city.

Were working-class people losing their ‘togetherness’? Did a bit of ‘do-it-yourself’ around the house signify ‘privatisation’? There were still many working-class families living in one room, with damp walls, no running water, no bathrooms, and with three or more families sharing one outside toilet (see the picture of Spon Street, Coventry, above-top, now part of a tourist attraction!) Composite social images, constructed out of a very partial experience of one corner of the South-east, utterly failed to represent how far a ‘prehistoric age’ still survived in most other places. Entering a sort of ‘affluence’, Britain was, at the same time, trying to comprehend what ‘affluence’ was all about. It was tempting to associate it with the visible indices of change on the surface of society, rather than with any ‘real movement’ underneath. It was a temptation which almost everyone fell into. In this way, the ‘myths of affluence’ became inextricably interwoven with the contradictory experience of affluence.

The other reason for this confusion was the advent of television. The spread of BBC television had happened only in the early fifties, followed by the opening of the commercial ITV channel in 1955. This development fed the confused situation in two ways. First, by monopolising the channels of public discussion and debate in society, television also centralised the power to make its images of social life stick. It communicated, at very rapid speed, highly selective and distorted images of one community or section of society to the others. It also helped to promote an overall image of where the whole society was headed. Secondly, it gave an almost tangible visibility to the quite limited rise in consumption and in spending money. It promoted the new consumer products seeking markets among the working classes by creating the spectacular world of commodities. Advertising and the spurious social images which it portrayed represented only one way in which television helped to disguise the deeper sources of change which underlay society.

The extent to which this imagery of consumption entered the lives and imaginations of ordinary men and women now seems, in retrospect, to have been wildly exaggerated. Where people could test ‘images’ against ‘experience’, life may have felt glossier than before, but Richard Hoggart, writing in The Uses of Literacy, called it a candy-floss culture. It is doubtful whether many people thought they were on the threshold of a new Utopia of affluence. The ‘telly’ made a difference, but it did not suddenly dismantle working-class culture, rooted as it was in the persistent structures of the British class system.

In one section of the population, however, change was registering in a strong and visible way: among the young. For ordinary young people, the war – which they had experienced, if at all, as young children – really did divide history into ‘before’ and ‘after’; they, of course, belonged to ‘after’. This made for a strong generational division between adults and ‘youth’. While incomes had improved only a little for many working people, they had increased at a faster rate for young adults; and since their families had greater economic security than before the war, a higher proportion of what they earned was left over for spending on themselves, their own recreations and pursuits. ‘Affluent Britain’ was not a society which allowed spare cash to accumulate in anyone’s pockets for very long. The surplus in the pockets and purses of young working-class people was quickly funnelled into the new industries servicing working-class leisure, and distinctive youth styles marked the late 1950s, and ‘youth’ itself became a metaphor for social change.  Yet no-one changed their life-situation by becoming a Teddy Boy or a Mod. The more permanent route up and out of the working class into the professional ranks was via the ‘Eleven Plus’, the Grammar School and University, but far fewer could take this route. The social and personal costs for the first generation ‘scholarship’ boys and girls were punishing – the loss of roots, of a sense of connection with the life of the community and even with their own families.

For the ‘modern Conservative’, these changes represented the de-proletarianisation of British society, changes which would transform social and industrial attitudes of mind. One ‘old’ Conservative who fully absorbed this message was the Prime Minister himself, Harold Macmillan, who uttered the following memorable words during a speech at Bedford in July 1957:

Indeed, let us be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good. Go round the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms, and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my life-time – nor indeed in the history of this country.

When he went to the country two years later, it was behind the slogan, You’ve had it good. Have it better. Vote Conservative. This was a clever illusion, but it contained just enough truth to cut through to ordinary voters. By the late fifties, almost everything had changed for the better – but, in reality, only a little. No segment of society, no corner of the nation, no aspect of life remained untouched. One part of the story was the story of change, of emergent patterns, of new relationships and conditions of work and life for ordinary men and women, of a, of a sense of discontinuity with the past. Change is not always comfortable to live with, and not always easy to understand; in the ‘affluent’ society which threw up such paradoxical signals, it was easy to project the problems which life presented into simple and stereotypical remedies. But in doing so it revealed that this was not yet a social revolution. The change of the late fifties left so much exactly where it was. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Ordinary men and women were caught somewhere inside this paradox, between two worlds.

Source:

Theo Baker (ed.) (1975, ’78), The Long March of Everyman. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

 

The middle and late 1950s in Britain was the period of ‘affluence’. Slowly at first, after the defeat of the post-war Labour government, Britain entered a period of rapid change. It was a period of growing prosperity, when a great deal of money flowed into the purchase of newly available consumer goods, underpinned by the revolution in welfare, and by full employment. The rebuilding and reconstruction of the urban and suburban environment – made necessary, partly, by large-scale bombing and by the massive social neglect of the inter-war period – got under way.

The new housing schemes – the development of urban flats, of new housing estates and of the new towns – and the slow processes of rehousing certainly did not destroy the typical and traditional urban working-class environment, but they seemed to be making inroads into it, to undermine it, robbing it of something of its corporate stability. For the first time, there was an emergence of contrasting images of the ‘extended family network’ of the old working-class neighbourhoods, and the ‘family-centred’ or ‘nucleated family’ life of the new working-class estate.

Phil Cohen, a sociologist writing in 1972, commented on the effect of high density, high rise schemes:

The first effect… was to destroy the function of the street, the local pub, the corner shop, as articulations of communal space. Instead there was only the privatised space of the family unit, stacked one on top of each other, in total isolation, juxtaposed with the totally public space which surrounded it, and which lacked any of the informal social controls generated by the neighbourhood. The streets which serviced the new estates became thoroughfares, their users ‘pedestrians’, and by analogy so many bits of human traffic, and this irrespective of whether or not they were separated from motorised traffic. It is indicative of how far the planners failed to the human ecology of the working class neighbourhood that they could actually talk about building ‘vertical streets’. The people who had to live in them weren’t fooled. As one put it – they might have hot running water and central heating, but to him they were still prisons in the sky…

(It was demolished in the 1980s)

The second effect of the redevelopment was to destroy kinship networks; nuclear families of marriage were separated from their families of origin, especially during the first phase of redevelopment. The isolated family unit could no longer call on the resources of wider kinship networks, or of the neighbourhood, so the family itself became the sole focus of solidarity. This meant that any problems were bottled up within the immediate relationships within the family unit, and those relationships were invested with a new intensity in order to compensate for the wider diversity of relationships previously generated through extended kin and neighbours. Although these traditional kinship and neighbourhood networks had broken down, the traditional patterns of socialisation, communication and control continued to reproduce themselves within the nuclear family. The working class family was therefore not only isolated from the outside, but also undermined from within. Women became ‘housebound’ wives and mothers, since they could no longer send their children out to play in the street under ‘neighbourhood’ supervision. Mum or Auntie was no longer just around the corner, able to look after the kids for the odd morning. The only safe play-space for the kids was the home, and the young mother was the sole supervisor. Cooped up with the kids, and cut off from the outside world, it was hardly surprising that she occasionally took out her frustration on her husband, if not on her new washing machine, and possibly aided by her non-stick frying pan.

Source:

Theo Barker (ed.)(1978), The Long March of Everyman, Harmondsworth: Penguin. 

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Geroge Soros has warned that ‘economic reality is beginning to catch up with the false hopes of the general population’, who he says ‘believed the promises of the popular press that Brexit will not reduce their living standards’.

‘The fact is that Brexit is a lose-lose proposition, harmful both to Britain and the European Union. It cannot be undone, but people can change their minds. Apparently, this is happening. Theresa May’s attempt to strengthen her negotiating position by holding a snap Election has badly misfired: she lost her parliamentary majority’.

Mr. Soros also suggested that ‘we are fast approaching the tipping point that characterises all unsustainable economic developments’.

100 word news by The Hooting Times.

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Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870-1950), pictured above, was a South African statesman and member of the British Imperial War Cabinet from 1917 to 1919. In June 1917, as a colonial prime minister, he joined the ‘new imperialists’ – Curzon, Milner and Balfour – in the cabinet, giving his view of the development of the British Empire and Commonwealth as he saw it:

The British Empire is much more than a State. I think the very expression ‘Empire’ is misleading, because it makes people think as if we are one single entity, one unity, to which the term ‘Empire’ can be applied. We are not an Empire. Germany is an Empire, so was Rome, and so is India, but we are a system of nations far greater than any empire which has ever existed; and by using this ancient expression we really obscure the real fact that we are larger and that our whole position is different, and that we are not one nation, or state, or empire, but we are a whole world by ourselves, consisting of many nations and states, and all sorts of communities under one flag…

I think that this is the fundamental fact which we have to bear in mind – that the British Empire, or this British Commonwealth of Nations, does not stand for unity, standardisation, or assimilation, or denationalisation; but it stands for a fuller, a richer, and more various a life among all the nations that compose it. And even nations who have fought against you, like my own, must feel that they and their interests are as safe and as secure under the British flag as those of the children of your household and your own blood. It is only in proportion as that is realised that you will fulfil the true mission that you have undertaken. Therefore, it seems, speaking my own individual opinion, that there is only one solution, that is the solution supplied by our past traditions of freedom, self-government and the fullest development. We are not going to force common Governments, federal or otherwise, but we are going to extend liberty, freedom and nationhood more and more in every part of the Empire.

T E Lawrence was one of those who took Smuts’ vision of Empire at face value. He became closely identified with this new strategy of ‘extending liberty’ by inciting an Arab Revolt against Turkish rule, under the leadership of the Sharif of Mecca, Husain Ibn Ali. Lawrence was an Oxford historian turned undercover agent, an archaeologist, a linguist, a skilled cartographer and an intuitive guerrilla fighter, as well as a masochist who yearned for fame, only to spurn it when it came. He was the illegitimate son of an Irish baronet and his nanny; a flamboyant Orientalist who delighted in wearing Arab dress. His affinity with the Arabs was to prove invaluable. His aim was to break the Ottoman Empire from within, by stirring up Arab nationalism into a new and potent force that he believed could trump the German-sponsored jihad against the British Empire. Turkish rule over the deserts of Arabia had been resented for centuries and sporadically challenged by the nomadic tribes of the region. By adopting their language and dress, Lawrence set out to turn their discontent to British advantage. As liaison officer to Husain’s son Faisal from July 1916, he argued strongly against deploying British troops in the Hejaz. The Arabs had to feel they were fighting for their own freedom, Lawrence argued, not for the privilege of being ruled by the British instead of the Turks. His ambition, he wrote, was…

…that the Arabs should be our first brown dominion, and not our last brown colony. Arabs react against you if you try to drive them, and they are as tenacious as Jews, but you can lead them without force anywhere, if nominally arm-in-arm. The future of Mesopotamia is so immense that if it is cordially ours we can swing the whole Middle East with it.

It worked. With Lawrence’s support, the Arabs waged a highly effective guerrilla war against Turkish communications along the Hejaz railway from Medina to Aqaba. By the autumn of 1917 they were probing Turkish defences in Syria as General Edmond Allenby’s army marched from Sinai towards Jerusalem. The Arab revolt helped to turn the military tide for Britain in the middle east, and so take the pressure off the Suez Canal and the oil fields for the duration of the war. But this did not solve Britain’s long-term problem of how to safeguard her middle eastern interests now that the old Turkish buffer was gone; or the short-term problem connected with it, of how to avoid quarrelling with her friends over it. To settle these problems she had come to a secret arrangement with France in April 1916 – the Sykes-Picot Treaty – which was supposed to determine how the Ottoman empire would be partitioned after the war. When it was revealed to the world after April 1917, following the entry of the USA into the war, Sykes-Picot was on the face of it a blueprint for a cynical piece of imperialistic plunder, and Britain was embarrassed by the look of it to the Arabs, who got to know of it from the Russian Bolsheviks later that year. T E Lawrence claimed that it was evident to him that Britain’s promises would amount to nothing, and confessed that he himself had been party to deliberately misleading them:

I risked the fraud, on my conviction that the Arab help was necessary to our cheap and speedy victory in the East, and that better we win and break our word than lose.

Writing in 1954, Lord Vansittart claimed that Lawrence’s Arab army was overrated, and that it had raced rather than fought its way to Damascus. He had believed that the Arabs occupied the city first, but later found out that it was the Australians who bore the brunt of the siege.  Of Lawrence himself, he wrote that…

He felt too big for the pumps in which he entered my office, boasting of having torn off his British decorations… Lawrence was one of the people I was glad to have known and not to have known better. He was an acquaintance, not a friend, a relative so distant that we never mentioned the subject… He wanted to go far with him, seeming to think that I could ‘do something about’ the kingdom terrestrial yet not of this world, on which he had set his public heart.

In June 1917, there were six ‘young imperialists’ in the wartime cabinet, including Leopold Amery and Mark Sykes, who were there to advise on eastern and middle eastern affairs. Harold Nicolson was seconded to work with Sykes. John Buchan was deputy director of a new Information Ministry created to brief ministers. It was a remarkable resurrection of a school of imperialism which had been thought to be dead and buried for years, spurned by successive electorates since 1906. In ordinary times it would have remained mouldering under the ground, but the extraordinary circumstances of war had acted like an earthquake, throwing up the coffin and breaking it open. As Bernard Porter has put it, Joseph Chamberlain walked the earth again. Leopold Amery’s first and foremost war aim was the immediate security and, still more, freedom for the development and expansion of the British Commonwealth in the world outside Europe. A Cabinet Committee on Territorial Desiderata chaired by Curzon in 1917 recommended that this expansion be concentrated in east Africa and the lands between Egypt and India. It was clear what these new imperialists had in mind, if they were still in control of government when the war was over.

The Great War was a total war, and, for its duration, it stretched the Empire’s resources to the limit. When peace eventually came, she would be much less able to hold the empire by force: even now she could ill afford to keep tied up in the colonies troops which were badly needed in Europe, or to count on reinforcing them in an emergency. In India, for example, the number of British troops numbered only 15,000, which was 23,000 fewer than on the eve of the mutiny, sixty years earlier. The perils of the situation were clear, and could only be met by compromising with any insurgency or emergency which might arise. Given the somewhat feigned antipathy of the USA for being harnessed to imperialists after April 1917, concession was a means by which the British could retain control of their empire, but it was also a way in which that control was diluted as well. The war forced it into all kinds of actions which were unwise in the long-term, but the sort of war it was made these almost inevitable. In wartime there could be no long-term coherent policy for the empire. Everything was overshadowed by the war on the Western Front. Consequently colonial policy decisions could not be other than pragmatic, unplanned, short-term, often inconsistent. Quite often they came to be regretted afterwards, especially those made to curry favour from various quarters, to nationalists in India and the middle east.

In India the promises came very slowly, because until 1917 it looked as if they might be done without. India was relatively tranquil when war broke out, and Indians refrained from exploiting the difficulties of their British ‘masters’. It seemed that Britain would not need more than 15,000 troops to control them. Nevertheless, some of the members of the government, including Edwin Montagu, were keen to announce reforms from the beginning. India’s representation at Imperial Conferences of the ‘white’ self-governing dominions, were met with considerable opposition from those dominions who protested that India was neither ‘white’ nor ‘self-governing’. Despite this, India was admitted at the beginning of 1917, and promises of political reforms followed in August. Both concessions were late enough to suggest that they were born out of fear rather than persuasion, for in the year before the nationalists had healed both of the main breaches: between Congress and the Muslim League by the Lucknow Pact of December 1916, and between moderates and extremists when Tilak, released from gaol in 1914, was readmitted to Congress in the same month, capturing it soon afterwards. In 1916 the nationalists had gone on the offensive under him and, ironically, the Englishwoman Annie Besant. Montagu wrote later that it was her activity which really stirred the country up. By June 1917, they were threatening enough to persuade the Indian government to intern Mrs Besant, which provoked further agitation. In July the viceroy wrote home that the situation was urgent, and any further prevarication over the reforms would be fatal. It was at this moment that Montagu, who had returned to the India Office as Secretary of State in July, was allowed to make a declaration of intent for India to provide…

…the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.

Montagu was able to use the words ‘responsible government’ in 1917, even though it provoked a storm in the House of Lords and a flurry of resignations in India, because the situation was then more desperate: nationalist opposition more widespread, the need to arrest the further defection of moderate opinion, according to Chelmsford, more urgent, the country, according to Montagu, rolling to certain destruction. This was the result of the war, but the war had also made it less likely that the promise of Liberal reforms to India, when it did come, would be enough to stem the nationalist tide.Indian nationalism was fired enormously by the war: its grievances compounded, its following augmented, its organisation greatly improved, its expectations increased; a seething, boiling, political flood, as Montagu described it in November 1917, raging across the country. Yet the Montagu Declaration and the Montagu-Chelmsford Report had held it back; if nothing else, as Montagu wrote in February 1918, I have kept India quiet for six months at a critical period of the war. The reforms represented the biggest concession Britain had yet made to the demands of the nationalists.  Whether they were big enough to keep pace with them was yet to be seen when the war finally ended.

                 

Sources:

Bernard Porter (1984), The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism. London: Longman.

Niall Ferguson (2005), Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Michael Clark & Peter Teed (1972), Portraits & Documents: The Twentieth Century. London: Hutchinson.

            

In 1957, the Wolfenden Committee, after three years of private hearings in the Home Office, produced its report recommending a change in the law, legalising private homosexual activity between consenting adults aged over twenty-one. The committee, formed in 1954, was headed by a former public school headmaster and university vice-chancellor, and included Tory politicians, a senior official in the Girl Guides and a judge. When Wolfenden later discovered that his own son was gay he wrote asking him to keep out of his way and to wear rather less make-up.

The committee, however, had taken evidence from Peter Wildeblood, among other declared homosexuals. Prosecuted for gross indecency, Wildeblood had declared openly and unashamedly in court that he was a homosexual or, in the language of the day, an invert, and demanded the right to be treated with respect. He declined to apologise for his indecent behaviour. His language was very far from the gay pride rhetoric of more recent decades, but it was clear and dignified:

I am no more proud of my condition than I would be of having a glass eye or a hair lip. On the other hand, I am no more ashamed of it than I would be of being colour-blind or of writing with my left hand. 

He pointed out that Lord Montagu, the bisexual old Etonian who would go on to become famous for his national motor museum at Beaulieu and his co-founding of English Heritage, had done patriotic service in the Grenadier Guards and that Montagu’s co-accused cousin, Pitt-Rivers, had also served bravely in the war, while he himself had served as a meteorologist in Africa. They were all, apart from their sexuality, entirely normal members of the upper middle-class Establishment, about as different in from the Cambridge spies in their views as it would be possible to be. Since homosexuality was, then as now, spread throughout society, some of the Establishment was gay, too.

By 1957, the attitude of the country as a whole towards homosexuality seemed to have changed. There was a feeling that the prosecution’s tactics used against Montagu, Wildeblood and the others, which included forging an entry in a passport, illegal tapping of phones, grooming and intimidating ‘witnesses’ and searching without warrants, were underhand and unfair. Added to this, the growing hostility towards all forms of government meddling which had contributed to the downfall of the Attlee Government, was beginning to extend to private lives. When Wildeblood was released from prison, he found his working-class neighbours in Islington were cheerily friendly. When Montagu was released from Wakefield prison, he got a similar reception. This was, however, by no means a universal shift, especially among their own social circles. Out to lunch at the fashionable Mirabelle Restaurant in London’s West End, he recalled:

…one or two of the neighbouring tables disapproved. The atmosphere became unpleasant and remarks were made which were obviously meant to be overheard with intent to wound.

At this point, however, the then leader of the Opposition, Hugh Gaitskill, who was also lunching there, came to the rescue:

He could see perfectly well what was going on. After a while, he laid down his napkin and crossed the room to our table. “How nice to see you back,” he said, holding out his hand, which I shook with surprise and gratitude. The action silenced the surrounding hostility.

There was continued hostility to homosexuals, but the so-called permissive society of the sixties was already being forged by public reaction in the late fifties to cases such as these. For the time being, the law-makers disagreed. In the first debates on homosexual law reform, the Home Secretary, Maxwell-Fyfe, said he did not think the country would wear such a change. Had he been present with Hugh Gaitskill in the Mirabelle restaurant, he might have realised that he himself was already out of date.

Source:

Andrew Marr (2007), A History of Modern Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan.