Part One: The Economic Storm and Europe.

Denis Healey, chancellor during Britain’s economic storm,

making a characteristic point to his opponents.

The Return of Harold & the Advent of The Social Contract:

In January 1974, the Heath government announced a three-day working week to save fuel. It is remembered as the darkest month, quite literally, in the story of mid-seventies’ Britain. I was in my first year of A Level studies in Birmingham, writing essays on the kitchen table by candlelight since all the lights went out by 10.30 p.m. each evening. At least there was no TV to act as a distraction! Heath and his government struggled to find a solution to the miners’ claim, but this process was hardly helped when he asked Mick McGahey, the legendary Scottish Communist mineworkers’ leader what he really wanted and was met by the typically blunt reply, to bring down the government. After much messing about with intermediaries and mixed messages, not least from the government’s own Pay Board, it became clear that no effective compromise could be found. The miners voted 81% in favour of striking, including those in some of the traditionally most moderate areas in the country. In February, Heath asked the Queen to dissolve Parliament and he went to the country on the election platform he had prepared two years earlier; Who Governs Britain? The country’s answer was not the one he had hoped for.

Harold Wilson had expected the Tories to win another term and began the campaign in a low-key mood. However, Labour’s cause was helped by its offer of a referendum on EEC membership, which led many Powellites and anti-EEC Tories to think of voting for them, at least covertly. Also, his year in opposition had given him the opportunity to come up with a more workable solution to the problems posed by inflation and union wage demands. The Social Contract was a joint agreement between the union leaders and the Labour shadow cabinet, and was essentially a return to the politics of the forties, with price controls, a complex system of food subsidies and the end of the Tory union laws. In return for this Attlee-age ‘austerity’ manifesto, the unions gave vague promises of voluntary pay restraint. It was a one-way deal, but it was in Wilson’s interests to pretend that he could find practical agreements with ‘the brothers’ where Heath could not.  It was in the unions’ interests to pretend that they were signing up to a new era of sweetness and light which would replace the bitter hostility towards the Tories and their anti-union legislation. Outside observers saw it as it as a ploy for the TUC to gain a privileged place in government in return for very little and a recipe for further inflation.

As it turned out, and with the benefit of hindsight, the three-day week was not the outright disaster it had seemed it would be. Industry had managed to maintain production levels, providing an interesting perspective on the limitations of five and six-day working which economists have periodically pointed to since. It had even provided for greater efficiency, and relatively few jobs had been lost. But Heath’s authority had gone, and in the election campaign the idea of the Social Contract caught on with voters. Wilson was able to present himself on television as the calm bringer of reason and order. A slew of bad economic news arrived during the campaign and was followed by Powell’s declaration that he was quitting the Conservatives over their failure to offer a Referendum on Europe and would be recommending everyone to vote Labour in order to ensure a choice on the subject. A mistake by the Pay Board revealed that the miners were more relatively poorly paid than had been recognised. A surge in support for the Liberals to a quarter of the popular vote also helped Labour more than it aided the Tories. Having decided that Heath should not rule, the government seemed undecided about whether Wilson should replace him. Enjoying a late swing in its favour, Labour won the most seats, 301 against 297, but no party had an overall majority. Heath hung on, trying to do a deal with the Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, who had just fourteen MPs despite the surge in the support for the party, but he eventually conceded defeat. This resulted in the Queen asked Harold Wilson to form his third administration, a decade after his first.

But Wilson was governing without a Commons majority at a time when the economy was still coming to terms with the oil price hike, with rampant inflation, rising unemployment and the pound under almost constant pressure. Furthermore, the fragile ‘Social Contract’ had yet to be tested. Almost the first thing the Labour government did was to settle with the miners for almost double what Heath had thought was possible. The chances of the new government enjoying easy popularity, even with its working-class base, were practically nil, however. Nevertheless, an opposition comprising divided Tories, Liberals, Nationalists and Irish Unionists was unlikely to combine to defeat it on a regular basis. The new Chancellor, Denis Healey, introduced an emergency Budget a few weeks into the new Parliament, followed by another in the autumn which raised income tax to 83% at the top rate of earnings, and 98% for unearned income, eye-wateringly high. Healey claimed that his aim was to squeeze the rich until the pips squeak, a phrase which was to come back to haunt Labour for a generation to come. In the spirit of the ‘Social Contract’ Healey also increased help for the poorest, with higher pensions and housing and food subsidies. He was delivering for the unions as promised, just as Wilson himself was doing in abolishing the Conservative employment legislation. Heath remained as Tory leader, for the time being, convinced that Wilson would soon have to call a second election, which he would win. However, when this came in October, Wilson gained eighteen seats, enough to give him a workable overall majority of three.

Wilson, though, had privately decided that he would go in 1976, and he publicly acted accordingly. The question as to who would succeed him, Jenkins or Callaghan, Healey or even Benn, had become one about the direction of the Labour government, rather than a personal threat to Wilson. He seems likely to have known about the early stages of Alzheimer’s, which was to wreak a devastating toll on him in retirement. He forgot facts, confused issues and repeated himself. For a man whose memory and wit had been so important, this was a grim burden. If Roy Jenkins had been Wilson’s most important minister in the mid-sixties, it was Denis Healey who dominated public perceptions of the Labour government of the mid-seventies. As a Chancellor of the Exchequer during the worst economic storm of post-war times, through both the Wilson and Callaghan governments, he rivalled each of them as a public icon. Healey was one of the most widely read, cultured intelligent and self-assured politicians of modern times, whose early Communism, active war service and a vast range of international contacts did much to establish him in this role.

But the economy Wilson and Healey inherited from Heath and Barber in 1974 meant that much of his energy for the next five years would be thrown into dealing with the newly unstable world economy. The following Labour governments faced huge balance-of-payments crises and the tumbling value of the pound. Healey was taxing and cutting as much as he dared, but his only real hope was to control inflation by controlling wages. Wilson insisted that any incomes policy must be voluntary, with no going back to legal restraints. The unions became increasingly worried that rampant inflation might bring back the Tories. So for a while, the ‘Social Contract’ did deliver fewer strikes. In 1974-75, the number of days lost to strikes halved and then halved again in 1976. Contrary to popular myth, the seventies were not all about mass meetings and walk-outs. The real trouble did not start again until 1978-79. But the other half of the ‘Social Contract’ was supposed to deliver lower wage settlements, and this was an utter failure. By the early months of 1975, wage settlements were already running at thirty per cent above inflation. By June inflation was already up to twenty-three per cent and wage settlements were even further ahead. Healey reflected later that…

Adopting a pay policy is rather like jumping out of a second-floor window: no one in his senses would do it unless the stairs were on fire. But in postwar Britain the stairs have always been on fire.

By refusing to allow companies to pass on inflationary wage increases as higher prices, and by endless haggling with union leaders, Healey did manage to squeeze inflation downwards. It had reached twenty-four per cent by 1975 and came to be seen as a far more important issue than unemployment. On reflection, Healey believed that if the unions had kept their promises it would have been down to single figures by the autumn of 1975. The government was also at the mercy of the International Monetary Fund, which insisted on severe spending cuts. The contraction of manufacturing began to accelerate. There was a national and international political swing to the right as a reaction to against perceived high-taxing and high-spending governments. Demands were being made that governments cease propping up ‘lame duck’ industries with public money. Attacks on trade union power were becoming more and more popular, owing to a growing perception that they had become too powerful and disruptive, as the Miners’ Strike and the three-day week had graphically illustrated. At the same time, Healey was under constant pressure within the Labour party and wider ‘movement’ to show that he was delivering for socialism. He never accepted the Tory argument that high taxes stopped people from working harder and blamed Britain’s poor industrial performance on low investment in industry, poor training and bad management. Healey ultimately suffered quite personally from his own policies. He wrote:

As a result of my tax changes and my determination to prevent ministerial salaries from rising as fast as the pay norm, my own real take-home pay as Chancellor fell to only half what I had been earning as Defence Secretary, although I was working harder and longer.

The Great Debate – The EEC Referendum of 1975:

Against the background of the international economic crisis, Wilson kept his election promise and carried out a largely sham renegotiation of Britain’s terms of entry to the EEC. The reopened talks were understood to be more for Wilson’s benefit than for anyone else’s. He needed to persuade people that he was putting a different deal to the country than the one Heath had put to Parliament two years earlier. Helmut Schmidt, the new German Chancellor (pictured below), travelled to London to help win round the Labour conference, a trip that he regarded more as a cosmetic operation than a mission.

Wilson then put the result to the country in the Benn-inspired 1975 referendum, though when the referendum campaign actually began, his old evasiveness returned and he mumbled vaguely in support, rather than actively or enthusiastically making the European case. There were plenty of others to do this for him, however, and the campaign became a rare high-point in the political decade. To preserve longer-term party unity, he allowed the anti-EEC cabinet ministers to speak from the ‘No’ platform and Barbara Castle, Tony Benn, Peter Shore and Michael Foot were among those who did so, in alliance with Enoch Powell, Ian Paisley, the Scottish Nationalists and others. But the ‘Yes’ campaign could boast most of the Labour cabinet, with Roy Jenkins the chief protagonist, plus most of the Heath team, and popular Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe. Although I missed out on voting by just four days, my eighteenth birthday coming just after referendum day, I remember the sixth form debates, formally in General Studies sessions and informally out on the school playing fields at lunchtime. The arguments ranged from the effects of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on the British economy through to the preservation of peace in Europe. This latter issue was important not just to younger voters, but also to their parents and grandparents who had experienced the Second World War.

Business was also strongly in favour of remaining in, a CBI survey of company chairmen found that out of 419 interviewed, just four were in favour of leaving the Community. Almost all the newspapers were in favour of staying in, including the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and Daily Express. So was every Anglican bishop, but their ‘flocks’ were more divided, believing, like my own nonconformist father, that the EEC was a ‘rich man’s club’ formed to rip off the poorer nations more effectively. The fight between ‘the Establishment’ and its critics was far from being funded on an equal basis. Britain in Europe, leading the ‘Yes’ campaign, outspent the ‘No’ camp by more than ten pounds to one. Both sides used scare stories. Britain in Europe constantly warned of a huge loss in jobs if the UK left the Community. The ‘No’ camp warned of huge rises in food prices if Britain remained in the CAP.

Yet this was also an almost carnival-like exercise in participatory democracy of a kind Britain had never seen. There were meetings, several thousand strong, night after night around the country, with hecklers and humour. There were all kinds of stunts and the country was covered with posters. The spectacle of politicians from rival parties who normally attacked one another sitting down together agreeing was a tonic to those watching. There were good television arguments, most notably between Jenkins and Benn. On the Labour side, however, there were awkward moments when rhetoric got too fierce and Wilson had to intervene to mediate between warring minister. Margaret Thatcher was also out campaigning, in a spectacularly hideous jumper with the flags of the member states knitted across her chest. The pictures from the time, shown above and below, captured something of the carnival atmosphere of the campaign.

In the end, the people voted on the simple question on the ballot paper, Do you think the United Kingdom should stay in the European Community (the Common Market)? Their response produced seventeen million, a two-thirds majority (68.3 per cent) voting ‘Yes’, with 32.8 per cent, some 8.5 million voting ‘No’. Only in the Shetland and Western Isles of Scotland were there majorities for ‘No’. Benn instantly conceded defeat though privately considered the vote some achievement considering we had absolutely no real organisation, no newspapers, nothing. Powell, however, warned that the decision was only ‘provisional’ and might be reopened in the future. As so often, his was a lone voice. More than forty years later, and in the light of the 2016 Referendum result, the biggest question which remains is whether the British were told, by either Heath or Jenkins, the full implications of membership of the supranational organisation they were signing up to. Campaigners in 2016 on both ‘Remain’ and ‘Leave’ sides reported that people ‘on the doorstep’ complained that in 1975 we voted to remain in a Common Market, we didn’t vote to join a political union. Many among the third of the people who originally voted to leave the EEC in 1975 were joined by younger people over the following decades in suggesting that Heath and Jenkins had lied to the country, at least by omission, because they had not explained that the European Community’s law and institutions would sit above those of Westminster. What is the truth about this? Britain in Europe campaigners can point to speeches and advertisements which directly mention loss of sovereignty. One of the latter read:

Forty million people died in two European wars this century: Better lose a little national sovereignty than a son or daughter.

Yet both in Parliament and the referendum campaign, although the importance of securing a Pax Europa was constantly featured, the full consequences of membership for national independence were mumbled, not spoken clearly enough. Besides, it was the job of NATO to keep the peace, not the EEC. Undoubtedly, a free trade area in Europe would assist in this process, but it was not the primary purpose of the European Community. Geoffrey Howe, who drafted Heath’s European Communities Bill, later admitted that it could have been more explicit about lost sovereignty. Heath talked directly about the ever closer union of the peoples of Europe but was never precise about the effect on British law, as compared to an incoming tide. It flows into the estuaries and rivers. It cannot be held back. Hugo Young, the journalist and historian who studied the campaign in great detail, wrote:

I traced no major document or speech that said in plain terms that national sovereignty would be lost, still less one that categorically promoted the European Community for its single most striking characteristic that it was an institution positively designed to curb the full independence of the nation-state.

Above: In the 1975 referendum, both sides campaigned more about the cost of food than about the constitutional implications of surrendering sovereignty.

There were, of course, the explicit warnings about lost sovereignty delivered by the ‘No’ campaigners among the more populist arguments about food prices. Above all, these arguments came from Enoch Powell, Michael Foot and Tony Benn. Powell’s language can be gauged from a speech he gave to political journalists in the Commons while the Bill was being debated. He lamented that the Commons was…

…perishing by its own hand. Week by week, month by month, the House of Commons votes to divest itself of what it had gained by through a length of time not much shorter than the History of England itself.

Of course, a lot depends on when you begin your reading of the History of England from, but Powell (pictured above) would almost certainly have traced it back to the end of the tenth century, a period of a thousand years. In fact, the History of Parliament could be traced back only to the early thirteenth century, to the time of the De Montfort Rebellion, and it was only in the seventeenth century that it acquired real power. Michael Foot, though recovering from an operation and so not as prominent in the campaign as he might have been, wrote in The Times that the British parliamentary system had been made farcical and unworkable. Historians, he said, would be amazed…

…that the British people were urged at such a time to tamper irreparably with their most precious institution; to see it circumscribed and contorted and elbowed off the centre of the stage. 

Tony Benn, confiding to his diary his reaction to the possibility of a Europe-wide passport, showed how much the left’s instincts could chime with those of the right-wing opponents of European change:

That really hit me in the guts… Like metrication and decimilisation, this really strikes at our national identity.

All these arguments were made in the press, despite the overall bias, and repeatedly in public meetings and broadcast debates. So it is not as if people were not told, but the truth revealed by opinion polls both at the time and more recently, is that sovereignty as an issue did not, and does not concern the British public as much as jobs and food prices. By later standards under Thatcher, Major and Blair, the position of Parliament was not taken as seriously in public debates as it was by some leading, vociferous parliamentarians. It may be that ‘sovereignty’ as an abstract concept is always only of great interest to the political ‘classes’, not to the ordinary working-classes and professional middle-classes, except where a loss of sovereignty directly impacts on daily life and produces resented laws. In the seventies, as now, Britain’s political class was not highly respected, and Europe seemed to offer a glossier, richer future, especially for younger voters. Though the pro-Community majority in business and politics did not strive to ram home the huge implications of membership, the idea that they deceitfully hid the practical, political nature of what was happening was, and is a myth, a convenient one for those who subsequently changed their minds about the benefits of membership. The argument would return fifteen years later to the Conservative backbenches, though few people cared about it elsewhere until the divisions among Tory MPs spread to the cabinet a full forty years after the first referendum, provoking the second vote on the issue in 2016. This time, the issue of sovereignty was given a popular edge by the ‘inability’ of successive governments to control internal migrations to Britain from within the EU, and their continued failure to control immigration from the Commonwealth and elsewhere in the world.

Goodbye to Ted and Harold, and All That… :

Much of the remaining time of Wilson’s final government was taken up with foreign affairs. Despite American disapproval, the Labour government began the final withdrawal from east of Suez, giving up any pretensions of continuing British influence in the Far East. The Empire was finally, formally, over. A few ‘outposts’ remained, most significantly Hong Kong, and the lines it had drawn on the map in the Middle East – Transjordan, Israel, Iraq – were to provide the focus for continuing and future conflicts. In Iraq, an unpopular king was overthrown in a military coup, leading to the régime of Saddam Hussein. The Commonwealth was never a coherent policy-setting organisation, and this was particularly so after the UK decided to stay in the European Economic Community. Her members often had diametrically opposed trading interests. Time and again, on issues such as Apartheid South Africa, Rhodesia, and questions of migration, the Commonwealth would fracture, or embarrass London. Was it kept going out of nostalgia and sentimentality or to give the Queen a role outside the UK? At least it provided the last English-speaking worldwide ‘club’ not dominated by the USA.

Wilson, by now clearly to the right of the party, was equally determined that Tony Benn would not introduce a socialist economy via the National Enterprise Board. When it eventually arrived, the NEB was a weak, ill-funded repository for lost economic causes, British Leyland in particular. Benn’s enthusiasm for workers’ control continued to irritate most of the other ministers and civil servants he worked with, so that he confided in his diary that he felt like he was trying to swim up the Niagara Falls. He was particularly keen on co-operatives, and took up the cause of the Meriden Motorcycle factory, struggling to survive under workers’ control. But these were the last days in the era of planning and public control of industry and Benn’s support for these made him a traditionalist rather than a radical. Later, Healey brutally summed up his rival’s contribution as minister to British industry. There were only two monuments to Benn in power, he said: a uranium mine in Namibia he had authorised as energy secretary, which helped support apartheid; and Concorde, used by rich people on expense accounts and subsidised by poorer taxpayers.

Wilson retired, as he had always said he would, at the age of sixty. Nevertheless, his announcement astonished his cabinet and left London awash with rumours. He was still witty enough to joke that, in respect of his preferred successor Jim Callaghan, that he was making way for an older man, and wily enough to give Callaghan a tip-off which helped him steal a march on the other candidates, including Healey, who only heard the news of Wilson’s retirement from Wilson himself in the gents toilet before the cabinet meeting at which he formally announced it. Wilson saw his reputation sink steadily downwards with his memory. It was a sad way for a fundamentally decent man to subside.

Meanwhile, in the middle of June 1974, a speech by Sir Keith Joseph signalled a major shift in Tory thinking. Joseph was the son of a rich London businessman, who had risen to become housing and then health minister under first Macmillan and then Heath. He had spent heavily on a bigger bureaucracy for the NHS and higher social security levels. Now he was quite literally wringing his hands and rolling his eyes with mortification. There had, he said, been thirty years of government interventions, good intentions and disappointments, thirty years of socialism under both Labour and the Tories. He admitted: I must take my blame for following too many of the fashions. His conversion to free-market, small-state economics had the force of a religious experience. He had joined the Conservative Party in the 1950s, but now felt that he had never really been a Conservative. Within five years, this kind of thinking would lead to the Thatcher revolution and the wholesale rejection of the Heath years, building on the ideas of academic economists right into the centre of British public life. Other fellow travellers were Americans and a few Powellite Tories who were outside the Tory mainstream. Crucial to the success of these ideas in government would be controlling the amount of money in the economy to keep out inflation, which meant squeezing how much was borrowed and spent by the State. As a former cabinet minister with close and direct experience of government. With his Centre for Policy Studies, he was the rain-maker, the storm-bringer, the Old Testament prophet denouncing his tribe. For now, however, the approaching cloud was no bigger than a man’s hand.

Keith Joseph argued that the Britain of the mid-seventies had a fundamental choice to make between a socialist siege economy or a breakaway into proper liberal capitalism, in effect between Benn and Joseph. He could not have formed his ideas without the libertarian and monetarist thinkers of the fifties and sixties. During the Tories’ years in opposition from 1964 to 1970, Joseph had educated himself in free-market economics and was soon using as his speechwriter Alfred Sherman, an East End boy from a left-wing family who had fought as a machine-gunner in the Spanish Civil War before swinging right round later and becoming an insistent right-wing critic of the British way. But in Heath’s government, Joseph’s radicalism had gone into hiding again, and Sherman described him dismissively as a good man fallen among civil servants. But the defeat of 1974 had shaken Joseph and with other monetarists he began a rethink of the Heath years, culminating in a shadow cabinet post-mortem when they argued that the early radicalism of 1970-71, led by the Cliveden group, had been right, and the subsequent U-turn a disaster. Heath blankly refused to listen, or at any rate to heed, the attack. Heath’s haughty assessment in his autobiography was that Joseph…

…had resumed a friendship with a person called Alfred Sherman, a former communist, and undergone what he liked to call “a conversion” as a result … (this) failed to cut any ice with the great majority of his colleagues, though we did them the courtesy of listening.

In fact, many Tories were beginning to listen. With Joseph were Geoffrey Howe and Margaret Thatcher. Early on, Howe warned,

I am not at all sure about Margaret. Many of her economic prejudices are certainly sound. But she is inclined to be rather too dogmatic for my liking on sensitive matters like education and might actually retard the case by simplification.

There were other new radicals, such as the Powellite MP John Biffen, the young economist Nigel Lawson and a crowd of journalists and academics. They produced an intellectual analysis, hard and uncompromising, which excited a generation of new recruits to the party, while it repelled Tories of the comfortable, compromising Macmillan persuasion. Macmillan himself said of Joseph that he was the only boring Jew I’ve ever known. and later there would be much snide muttering about the men Thatcher learned from and worked with – Hayek, Sherman, Joseph, Lawson and Friedman. Jews were prominent in intellectual thinking on the right, as they had been on the left, bringing opposite lessons to Britain from the disasters of continental Europe. A serious commitment to ideas and old-fashioned attitudes to education gave them their unique influence in politics. Thatcher was open to these ideas, ready to listen, unprejudiced, unlike many traditional Tories.

In the winter of 1974-5, after Heath had lost his second successive election to Wilson, there was no such thing as ‘Thatcherism’. Margaret Thatcher was still expressing her public support for the politics of ‘consensus’. She backed intervention in the housing market and queried the sale of council housing by Tory-run local authorities. Neither was there any sign that she would become the leader of the Tory party. Heath was stubbornly determined to stay on, insisting that his supporters, who included most of the well-known Tories of the day, were backing him in this determination. Indeed, polls suggested that seventy per cent of Tories wanted him to stay on. Yet there was deep dissatisfaction on the Tory benches in Parliament. Sir Edward Du Cann, who chaired the all-important backbenchers’ 1922 Committee, began to take soundings about a challenge to Heath. He was backed by the arch-intriguer Airey Neave, but Neave soon pulled out in favour of Keith Joseph. He then made a catastrophically ill-judged speech in which he suggested that working-class women were having too many babies and should be prevented from degrading the gene pool. This finished the man who Private Eye had already dubbed the mad monk.

Heath had failed to accept that two successive general election defeats meant he really had to go so that Tory moderates were not lining up to replace him. Airey Neave persuaded many of them to vote for Thatcher because she had no chance of defeating Heath, but a contest might force him out, as a ‘stalking horse’, then allowing more serious candidates to stand. On 4 February 1975, she shocked everyone by defeating Heath in the first ballot by 130 votes to 119. She then went on to beat the two other candidates easily. The undercurrent of free-market thinking that had been gurgling around since the fifties broke to the surface in spectacular fashion, changing Britain for good. Few of the Tory MPs in what was called the peasants’ revolt realised quite where their new leader would take them. For the next four years, supercilious, misogynist remarks from first Wilson and then Callaghan would be continually directed against her, but then she would turn her femininity, if not her feminism, against them to great effect. She was to break the mould of the Wilson-Heath era in more ways than one.

(to be continued…)

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.

 

Chapter Three: A Multi-cultural Society?

 

By the end of the 1950s, although the populations of the nations and regions of the British Isles had become more permanently mixed than ever before, and added to by those refugees from central and eastern Europe who had now been exiled by the triumph of Soviet Communism in the establishment of the Warsaw Pact, as yet there had been very little New Commonwealth immigration to Britain. It was only in the sixties and seventies that the country began to be transformed into what came to be known as a multi-cultural society.

 

Following the wartime Emigracja – immigration to Britain, there was a further wave of Poles arriving in the UK between 1950 and 1971. According to the 1971 Census, this amounted to 13,470 persons, seventy-five per cent of whom were women. Some of these were relatives of previous refugees who had decided to stay, while others were traditional devout Catholics and anti-Communists. The Polish Educational Society Abroad was established in Britain with the main aim of giving financial support and assistance to Polish voluntary schools in order to maintain Polishness by educating the children of Polish parents and preparing them for their return to Poland. The beginning of the Polish schools in Britain goes back to the 1950s when Polish parents began to be seriously concerned about the maintenance of Polishness in their children. While the underlying motive was the return to the homeland, the need to establish schools was also driven by the concern that, with Poland under Communist rule, many families did not know when they would be able to return safely and permanently. While, at first, the schools were located in private houses, later they moved into the halls of Polish churches throughout the country. When the numbers grew and they could no longer be accommodated in the church halls, more space had to be hired in state schools. In 1977 it was estimated that there were eighty-eight Polish Saturday Schools with over seven thousand pupils. In addition, the Polish Scout and Guide Movement was formed in the 1950s, a nationalistic exile group centred in London with, by 1961, an organisational network in over twenty countries. In that year, there were one and a half thousand Polish boy scouts and a thousand guides in Britain, with a further four hundred Rovers and six hundred adult members of attached groups. The organisation reinforced the work of the Saturday Schools by offering invaluable opportunities for using and developing the Polish language in a variety of realistic communication settings.

Following the unsuccessful Hungarian Uprising and Soviet invasion of October – November 1956, people from all classes and groups who had suffered under the Communist repressions and who feared reprisals for having participated in the uprising, found their way to Britain. Many of them were en route to the USA, but of the two hundred thousand who fled Hungary, about twenty-six thousand were admitted to the UK for settlement. Three Hungarian Associations were formed in the 1950s, the British Hungarian Fellowship in London being one of them. In addition, three associations were formed between 1965 and 1971. Otherwise, the Hungarian expatriates seem not to have been so determined to maintain their separate cultural identity in their host country, becoming fully integrated in British society within a short period of settlement, though keeping up their familial ties with their home country. This may have much to do with the relative freedoms of travel and association allowed during the period of Goulash Communism, especially from the early 1970s, and partly to do with the relative difficulty of learning and using Hungarian outside the home environment, even when both parents were native-speakers. Only in London was this ever a real possibility.

 

During and immediately after the Second World War about forty thousand Ukrainians found refuge in the UK, none of them having left their home country of their own free will. The majority of those who settled permanently in the UK came from the rural areas of western Ukraine, and only about three per cent had completed secondary and tertiary schooling (to eighteen) before arriving in Britain. They were employed in low-paid jobs in agriculture, mining and textiles, in domestic service and as ancillary personnel in hospitals. After a time they moved to better-paid jobs, encouraged their children to do well at school, so that it is sometimes suggested that, as a result of strong family ties and parents’ ambitions for their children, the proportions of Ukrainian children who gained academic success at the various educational levels were greater than the national levels. The Ukrainians who settled in Britain were predominantly male, young and single. Only about ten per cent were women, so Ukrainian men had to look outside the community for marriage partners, mainly among other continental settled in Britain. Later, about two thousand displaced Ukrainian women came to Britain from refugee settlements in Poland and Yugoslavia following the decade between when Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union again, and Poland was forced to join the Warsaw Pact in 1955.

Of the first émigrés, who were predominantly male, about forty per cent didn’t marry, and a large percentage of the rest, maybe half, married non-Ukrainian women. The majority of them hoped at first that they would be able to return to the Ukraine. Most, however, learnt some English in their workplaces. Those who married Ukrainian partners use their native tongue when speaking with them and, in most cases, with their children. A minority considered that speaking Ukrainian at home would be detrimental to their children’s education, however, and so deliberately avoided using the language in the family. Second generation British Ukrainians used English in their workplaces and with friends, in places of entertainment, while using Ukrainian with parents and older members of the exile community, switching to English to talk to Ukrainians of their own generation. They were also encouraged to use Ukrainian in the Saturday schools, meetings and camps of youth organisations. During rehearsals of choirs or dance groups, popular among the second generation, they often used both languages to describe events or experiences connected with these. This was regarded within the community as a sign of language loss rather than of retention in the bilingual setting.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, due to the political situation in the USSR, and its international relations, contacts with the home country were limited and, despite the efforts made by the community to preserve the language, there were significantly fewer third generation speakers. The community life revolved around the churches, principally the Ukrainian Roman Catholic Church and the Autocephalous Eastern Orthodox Church, together with a variety of organisations catering for women, young people, ex-servicemen, students and professionals. It also built a number of properties in addition to churches, including cultural centres and school premises, commercial enterprises, summer camps and retirement homes. Family and personal contacts mainly took the form of correspondence, and well-chaperoned choirs and dance groups from the Ukraine sometimes toured the UK. In the Brezhnev years there was freer intercourse with Ukrainians living in Poland and Yugoslavia, with many more exchange visits taking place. In Ukraine itself, the language came under strong Russian influence, whereas the majority of first-generation British Ukrainians spoke a rural variety of Western Ukrainian at home. In 1966, there were nearly two and a half thousand pupils attending forty-three Ukrainian Saturday Schools throughout Britain, run by over two hundred teaching staff. The curriculum consisted of Ukrainian language, literature, history, geography, religion and folklore. Pupils had two or three hours of classes a week over eleven or twelve years, starting with nursery classes. A GCE Ordinary level examination in Ukrainian became available in 1954, and the language became available as a subsidiary subject at the University of London in 1970. Coventry LEA was the first to provide material support for community Saturday schools.

In the postwar years, the Greek Cypriot community in Britain grew significantly and came from a variety of backgrounds. There had been a sizeable group in interwar and wartime Britain, but it was after the war that substantial numbers of Greek Cypriot men arrived, followed by their families as soon as they had found a permanent job and reasonable housing. The 1955-60 Independence struggle gave rise to further immigration to Britain, as did the civil struggles in 1963 and the invasion by Turkey in 1974, so that the estimated Greek Cypriot population in the UK reached two hundred thousand. This meant that one Cypriot in every six was living in Britain by the late seventies. While the largest part of this population was concentrated in London, there was also much smaller but still significant community in Birmingham. Greek Cypriots left their homes mainly for economic reasons. Most of them came to Britain to find work and improve their standard of living. The largest section came from the lower socio-economic groups. They set out with high aspirations, confident in their hard-working nature, and supported by the strong feeling of solidarity which bonded them to their compatriots. In the fifties and early sixties Greek Cypriots worked mainly in the service sector, in catering, in the clothing and shoe manufacturing industries, in hairdressing and in grocery retailing. In the villages in Cyprus, most of the women’s work was confined to the household and the fields, but in Britain a substantial number went to work in the clothing industry, either as machinists in small factories or as out-workers sewing clothes at home at piecework rates.

By the late sixties self-employment was becoming more common among Greek Cypriot men who had established a variety of small businesses – restaurants, estate agents, travel agencies, building firms, etc. – building gradually what Constandinides (1977) called an ethnic economy. These small businesses often provided goods and services primarily for other Cypriots, although by the second generation there was a tendency to move away from these traditional forms of employment. Their interests moved away from the world of kebab takeaways and Mediterranean grocery shops into the more successful and highly competitive world of property development, manufacturing industry, import-export, travel and tourism, printing and publishing. Mother tongue teaching activities were inevitably concentrated in the areas of greatest Greek settlement, the first classes, in Haringey, dating back to 1955, while classes in Coventry were established around 1963. Children spent between one and four hours per week at these community-run classes.

 

In Coventry, the small wartime Indian community had expanded to an estimated four thousand by 1954, occupying some of the more rundown housing stock to the north of the city. Like other immigrants to Coventry at this time – the Welsh, the Irish, Poles and Ukrainians, the Indians were keen to protect their own religious and cultural identity. In October 1952, Muslim members of the Indian community applied to the Planning and Redevelopment Committee for separate burial facilities and land for the building of a Mosque. Although relatively few in number, Coventry’s Indian community was already beginning to experience the racial prejudice that was already beginning to disfigure Britain nationally. It was also soon reported that local estate agents were operating a colour bar. It has already been noted how trades unions and management in the car factories agreed measures to keep them from working on the production lines, relegated to menial cleaning tasks. In October 1954 the editor of the Coventry Standard had reported that a branch of the AEU had approached Miss Burton M.P. on this subject. He commented:

The presence of so many coloured people in Coventry is becoming a menace. Hundreds of black people are pouring into the larger cities of Britain including Coventry and are lowering the standard of life. They live on public assistance and occupy common lodging houses to the detriment of suburban areas. … They frequently are the worse for liquor – many of them addicted to methylated spirits – and live in overcrowded conditions sometimes six to a room.

This article was not the juvenile outpourings of a bigoted cub reporter but the major editorial. Racism appears to have infected a wide spectrum of Coventry society by the mid-fifties as it had also begun to infect the country as a whole. Change was not comfortable for many to live with, and not always easy to understand, and it was easy to project the problems which it presented in everyday life into stereotypical images, as this extract from the transcript of a BBC archive disc shows:

It is getting too bad now. They’re too many in the country and they’re over-running it. If they come into this country, they should be made to live to the same standards as we live, and not too many in their house as they always have done, unless someone puts their foot down. They bring in diseases and all sorts of things that spread to different people, and your children have to grow up with them and it’s not right.

 

Above: The Windrush Generation: One of the first Jamaican immigrants seeking work and lodgings in Birmingham in 1955.

They in this extract were, of course, immigrants from the West Indies and Pakistan and/ or India who, from the mid-fifties on, came in substantial numbers into the booming cities and industries. Many West Indian immigrants encountered considerable racial prejudice when seeking accommodation. A teenage motor-cycle maniac who was still living with his parents and knew that every time he went out they were on edge, could casually remark about going down Notting Hill Gate… to punch a few niggers up. The scene soon shifted onto a bigger backcloth, and from Notting Hill to Nottingham, but the story was the same, and one which was to become more and more familiar over the coming decades – one of growing intolerance, if not cultural bigotry, in British society. In August 1958, as violence against coloured immigrants became a serious problem, The Times reported on the demands for immigration controls being made by Conservative MPs:

Seeing the Nottingham fight between coloured and white people on Saturday night a red light warning of further troubles to come, some Conservative M.P.s intend to renew their demand for control to be placed on immigration from the Commonwealth and the colonies when Parliament reassembles in October… A resolution is on the agenda for the Conservative Party Conference. It has been tabled by Mr Norman Pannell, Conservative M.P. for the Kirkdale division of Liverpool, who obtained the signatures of about thirty Conservative M.P.s for a motion (never debated) during the last session of Parliament. This expressed the growing disquiet over ’the continuing influx of indigent immigrants from the Commonwealth and colonies, thousands of whom have immediately sought National Assistance’. Mr Pannell said yesterday, ’… The Nottingham fighting is a manifestation of the evil results of the present policy and I feel that unless some restriction is imposed we shall create the colour-bar we all wish to avoid… The object of my representation is to get some control, not to bar all colonial and Commonwealth immigration, but to see that the immigrants shall not be a charge on public funds, and that they are deported when they are guilty of serious crimes.

 

Paradoxically, then, just as Britain was retreating from its formal imperial commitments, Commonwealth immigration into Britain, principally from the West Indies and South Asia, was becoming an increasingly important issue in domestic politics. During the 1950s, the number of West Indians entering Britain reached annual rates of thirty thousand. Immigration from the Indian subcontinent began to escalate from the 1960s onwards. The census of 1951 recorded seventy-four thousand New Commonwealth immigrants; ten years later the figure had increased to 336,000, climbing to 2.2 million in 1981. Immigration from the New Commonwealth was driven by a combination of push and pull factors. Partition of the Indian subcontinent and the construction of the Mangla Dam in Pakistan had displaced large numbers of people, many of whom had close links with Britain through the colonial connection.

In Britain, postwar reconstruction, declining birth rates and labour shortages resulted in the introduction of government schemes to encourage Commonwealth workers, especially from the West Indies, to seek employment in Britain. Jamaicans and Trinidadians were recruited directly by agents to fill vacancies in the British transport network and the newly created National Health Service. Private companies also recruited labour in India and Pakistan for factories and foundries in Britain. As more and more Caribbean and South Asian people settled in Britain, patterns of chain migration developed, in which pioneer migrants aided friends and relatives to settle. Despite the influx of immigrants after the war, however, internal migration within the British Isles continued to outpace overseas immigration.

 Above: West Indians in London in 1956. About 125,000 people from the Caribbean came to live in Britain

between 1948 and 1958, hoping to escape the poverty in their home islands.

The importance attached to the Commonwealth in the 1950s prevented the imposition of immigration controls on New Commonwealth citizens. However, by the 1960s, Britain’s retreat from the Commonwealth in favour of Europe and events such as the Notting Hill and Nottingham race riots in 1958 heralded a policy of restriction, which gradually whittled away at the right of New Commonwealth citizens to automatic British naturalisation. Although the 1962 Immigration Act was intended to reduce the inflow of blacks and Asians into Britain, it had the opposite effect: fearful of losing the right of free entry, as many immigrants came to Britain in the eighteen months before restrictions were introduced as had arrived over the previous five years.  

 

The census of 1961 showed the 1954 estimate of Asians living in Coventry to be an exaggeration. In fact, immigration from the new Commonwealth over the previous ten years had been a trickle rather than a stream, accounting for only 1.5 per cent of the population compared with 6.1 per cent from Ireland, including the North. The total number of immigrants from India and Pakistan was less than three thousand five hundred, and there were about another one thousand two hundred immigrants from the Caribbean as a whole. Between the census of 1961 and the mini-census of 1966, however, some major shifts in the pattern of migration into Coventry did take place. A substantial increase in immigration from Commonwealth countries, colonies and protectorates had taken place during the previous five years. The total number of those born in these territories stood at 11,340. The expansion needs to be kept in perspective, however. Nearly two-thirds of the local population were born in the West Midlands, and there were still nearly twice as many migrants from Ireland as from the Commonwealth and Colonies. Indeed, in 1966 only 3.5 per cent of Coventry’s population had been born outside Britain, compared with the national figure of five per cent. The Welsh stream had slowed down, increasing by only eight per cent in the previous fifteen years, and similar small increases were registered among migrants from Northern England. There were significant increases from Scotland, London and the South East, but only a very small increase from continental Europe.

The rate of migration into Coventry was undoubtedly slowing down by the mid-sixties. Between 1961 and 1971 the population rose by nearly six per cent compared with a rise of nineteen per cent between 1951 and 1961. The failure of Coventry’s manufacturing industry to maintain immediate post-war growth rates was providing fewer opportunities for migrant manual workers, while the completion of the city centre redevelopment programme and the large housing schemes reduced the number of itinerant building workers. Between 1951 and 1966 the local population increased by approximately four thousand every year, but in the following five years the net annual increase fell to about a thousand per annum. Moreover, the proportion of this increase attributable to migration had dramatically declined. Between 1951 and 1961, a Department of the Environment survey estimated that migration accounted for about forty-five per cent of population growth in the Coventry belt, whereas in the following five years it made up only eighteen per cent. In the following three years to 1969 the survey noted that the same belt had begun, marginally, to lose population through out-migration.

 

The 1968 Immigration Act was specifically targeted at restricting Kenyan Asians with British passports. The same year, Conservative MP for Wolverhampton and government minister, Enoch Powell made a speech in Birmingham, that contained a classical illusion that most people took to be a prophecy of violent racial war if black immigration continued:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ’the river Tiber foaming with much blood’.

 

The speech became known as The Rivers of Blood Speech, and formed the backdrop of the legislation. Although Powell was sacked from the Cabinet by the Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath, more legislative action followed with the 1971 Immigration Act, which effectively restricted citizenship on racial grounds by enacting the Grandfather Clause, by which a Commonwealth citizen who could prove that one of his or her grandparents was born in the UK was entitled to immediate entry clearance. This operated to the disadvantage of Black and Asian applicants, while favouring citizens of the old Commonwealth, descendants of white settlers from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. Thus immigration control had moved away from primary immigration to restricting the entry of dependents, or secondary immigration.

 

The employment available to new immigrants in 1971 continued to be restricted to poorly paid, unskilled labour. In addition, since the mid-fifties, many West Indians faced prejudice in finding private rented accommodation and all new Commonwealth immigrants faced official discrimination in the residency requirements for council housing.

To overcome this prejudice, immigrants to Birmingham tended to congregate in poorer inner city areas or in the western suburbs along the boundary with Smethwick, Warley, West Bromwich (now Sandwell), and Dudley, where many of them also settled. As in Coventry, there was a small South Asian presence of about a hundred, in Birmingham before the war, and this had risen to about a thousand by the end of the war. These were mainly workers recruited by the Ministry of Labour to work in the munitions factories. Birmingham’s booming postwar economy attracted West Indian settlers from Jamaica, Barbados and St Kitts in the 1950s, followed by South Asians from Gujarat and the Punjab in India, and Bangladesh from the 1960s onwards.

 

By 1971, the South Asian and West Indian populations were equal in size and concentrated in the inner city wards and in north-west Birmingham, especially in Handsworth, Sandwell and Sparkbrook. Labour shortages had developed in Birmingham as a result of an overall movement towards more skilled and white-collar employment among the native population, which created vacancies in the poorly paid, less attractive, poorly paid , unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in manufacturing, particularly in metal foundries and factories, and in the transport and health care sectors of the public services. These jobs were filled by newcomers from the new Commonwealth. In the 1970s, poor pay and working conditions forced some of these workers to resort to strike action. Hostility to Commonwealth immigrants was pronounced in some sections of the local white population. One manifestation of this was the establishment of the Birmingham Immigration Control Association, founded in the early 1960s by a group of Tory MPs.

In Coventry, despite these emerging signs of a stall in population growth by the end of the sixties, the authorities continued to view the city and its surrounds as a major area of demographic expansion. In October 1970 a Ministry of Housing representative predicted that the city’s population would rise by a third over the next twenty years. The economic boom under the Conservative Heath government and Anthony Barber’s Chancellorship, which greatly benefited the local motor industry, temporarily reversed the stall in population growth. By 1974, it was estimated that the local population was rising by two thousand per year, twice the rate of the late 1960s. By 1976, however, the youthfulness of the city’s population was being lost as the proportion of over sixty-five year-olds rose above the national average. By the mid-seventies Coventry was faced with a new challenge posed by changes in the age-structure of its population. The city was having to care for its increasing numbers of elderly citizens, a cost which soon became difficult to bear, given its declining economy. Coventry, with its large migrant element, began to lose population rapidly during this decline, from 335,238 to 310,216 between 1971 and 1981, a fall of 7.5 per cent. Nearly sixty thousand jobs were lost during the recession, and given the shallowness of the family structure of many Coventrians, this resulted in a sizeable proportion of its citizens being all too willing to seek their fortune elsewhere. For many others, given the widespread nature in the decline in manufacturing in the rest of the UK, there was simply nowhere to go.

 

As New Commonwealth immigrants began to become established in postwar Birmingham, community infrastructures, including places of worship, ethnic groceries, halal butchers and, most significantly, restaurants, began to develop. Birmingham in general became synonymous with the phenomenal rise of the ubiquitous curry house, and Sparkbrook in particular developed unrivalled Balti restaurants. These materially changed patterns of social life in the city among the native population. In addition to these obvious cultural contributions, the multilingual setting in which English exists today became more diverse in the sixties and seventies, especially due to immigration from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean. The largest of the community languages is Punjabi, with over half a million speakers, but there are also substantial communities of Gujarati speakers, as many as a third of a million, and up to a hundred thousand Bengali speakers.

 

Within the British West Indian community, Jamaican English, or the patois – as it is known – has had a special place as a token of identity. While there were complicated social pressures that frowned on Jamaican English in Jamaica, with parents complaining when their children talk local too much, in England it became almost obligatory to do so in London. One Jamaican schoolgirl who made the final passage to the Empire’s capital city with her parents in the seventies put it like this:

It’s rather weird ’cos when I was in Jamaica I wasn’t really allowed to speak it (Jamaican creole) in front of my parents. I found it difficult in Britain at first. When I went to school I wanted to be like the others in order not to stand out. So I tried speaking the patois as well… You get sort of a mixed reception. Some people say, ’You sound really nice, quite different.’ Other people say, ’You’re a foreigner, speak English. Don’t try to be like us, ’cos you’re not like us.’

 

Despite the mixed reception from her British West Indian friends, she persevered with the patois, and, as she put it after a year I lost my British accent, and was accepted. However, for many Caribbean visitors to Britain, the patois of Brixton and Notting Hill was a stylised form that was not, as they saw it, truly Jamaican, not least because British West Indians came from all parts of the Caribbean. Another West Indian schoolgirl, born in London and visiting Jamaica for the fist time, was teased for her patois. She was told that she didn’t sound right and that. The experience convinced her that…

… in London the Jamaicans have developed their own language in patois, sort of. ’Cos they make up their own words in London, in, like, Brixton. And then it just develops into patois as well.

Researchers found that there were already white children in predominantly black schools who had begun using the British West Indian patois in order to be accepted by the majority of their friends, who were black:

I was born in Brixton and I’ve been living here for seventeen years, and so I just picked it up from hanging around with my friends who are mainly Black people. And so I can relate to them by using it, because otherwise I’d feel an outcast… But when I’m with someone else who I don’t know I try to speak as fluent English as possible. It’s like I feel embarrassed about it (the patois), I feel like I’m degrading myself by using it.

 

The unconscious racism of such comments pointed to the predicament of the Black Britons. Not fully accepted, for all their rhetoric, by the established native population, they felt neither fully Caribbean nor fully British. This was the poignant outcome of what the British Black writer Caryl Phillips called The Final Passage. Phillips, who came to Britain as a baby in the late 1950s, was one of the first of his generation to grapple with the problem of finding a means of literary self-expression that was true to his experience:

The paradox of my situation is that where most immigrants have to learn a new language, Caribbean immigrants have to learn a new form of the same language. It induces linguistic schizophrenia – you have an identity crisis that mirrors the larger cultural confusion.

 

In his novel, The Final Passage, the narrative is in Standard English. But the speech of the characters is a rendering of nation language:

I don’t care what anyone tell you, going to England be good for it going to raise your mind. For a West Indian boy you just being there is an education, for you going see what England do for sheself… It’s a college for the West Indian.

 

The lesson of this college is, as Phillips puts it, that symptomatic of the colonial situation, the language has been divided as well. In the British Black community, and in the English-speaking islands of the Caribbean, English – creole or standard – was the only available language.

 

The story of 1970s Britain, whether viewed from an economic, social or cultural perspective can be summed up by one word, albeit a long one – deindustrialisation. By 1977, if not before, its role as the world’s first and leading industrial nation was finally over, just as its time as an imperial power had effectively ended fifteen years earlier, as Dean Acheson had commented. It was another question as to whether the British people and politicians were prepared to accept these salient facts and move on. Employment in manufacturing reached a peak of nine million in 1966. It thereafter fell rapidly, reaching four million by 1994. Much of this loss was sustained in the older industries of Northwest England, but the bulk of it was spread across the newer industrial areas of the Midlands and Southeast (see map). As with the processes of industrialisation two centuries before, Britain led the way in what was to become a common experience of all the mature industrial nations. The so-called maturity thesis suggested that, as industry developed and became more technologically sophisticated, it required less labour. At the same time, rising living standards meant that more wealth was available, beyond what would normally be spent on basic necessities and consumer goods, giving rise to a growing demand for services such as travel, tourism and entertainment. By 1976, services had become the largest area of employment in all the regions of Britain.

Another problem faced by the manufacturing sector was the long-standing British taste for imported goods. Many observers noted that not only was the country failing to compete internationally, but British industry was also losing its cutting edge when competing with foreign imports in the domestic market. The problem of deindustrialisation therefore became entwined with the debate over Britain’s long decline as a trading nation, going back over a century. It was seen not only as an economic decline, but as a national failure, ownership of which in speeches and election propaganda, even in education, struck deep within the collective British cultural psyche.

There were three periods of severe recession, but here we are only concerned with the first of these, from 1973-75. British industry’s share of world trade fell dramatically during these years, and by 1975 it was only half what it had been in the 1950s, to just ten per cent. Nor could it maintain its hold on the domestic market. A particularly extreme example of this was the car industry: in 1965, with Austin minis selling like hot-cakes, only one car in twenty was imported, but by 1978 nearly half were. In addition, many of the staple industries of the nineteenth century, such as coal and shipbuilding, continued to decline as employers, surviving only, if at all, through nationalisation. In addition, many of the new industries of the 1930s, including the car industry, were seemingly in terminal decline by the 1970s, as we have seen in the case of Coventry. Therefore, deindustrialisation was no longer simply a problem of old Britain, it was also one for new England. It was also a problem for East Anglia, because although it was not so dependent on manufacturing, and services were growing, agriculture had also declined considerably (see map).

A great variety of explanations for the decline in British industrial competitiveness were put forward, and have continued to be debated since. None of these explanations has proved wholly satisfactory, however. One explanation suggests that there is a cultural obstacle, that the British have been conditioned to despise industry. This might be a relevant argument to apply for new England, with an industrial heritage going back only two or three generations, and to old England, the traditional rural areas, although even in these areas it would be something of a stereotype, but it would be difficult to apply to old Britain, with its generations of coal miners, shipbuilders, foundry and factory workers. During the depression years of the 1930s many of these workers, finding themselves unemployed, had, like the father of Norman Tebbitt (Margaret Thatcher’s Party Chairman in the late seventies) got on their bikes, or walked long distances, in their hundreds of thousands to find work in the new manufacturing areas. With no jobs to find anywhere in the seventies, these were pretty pointless words of advice. Pointless or not, Tebbitt’s speech was picked up by the popular Tory press and appeared in the banner On Your Bike headlines which have since become so emblematic of the Thatcher era. Unfortunately, the same press used them to put forward a related argument that the British were not sufficiently materialistic to work hard for the rewards associated with improved productivity. Complacency from generations of national success has also been blamed, as has the Welfare State’s cosseting of both the workforce and those out of work.

Alternatively, the government’s failure adequately to support research and development has been blamed, together with the exclusive cultural and educational backgrounds of Westminster politicians, government ministers and civil servants. This exclusivity, it is argued, left them ignorant of, and indifferent to, the needs of industry. Obstructionist trade unions were a favourite target of many, particularly after the coal dispute of 1971-72, which led to a series of power cuts throughout the country and a three-day working week. Management incompetence or short-termism, leading to an abdication of responsibility and the failure to restructure factories and industries, was seen as another cause and this, as seen in the case of Coventry, was an argument which had some local evidence to support it, although unions were sometimes equally short-sighted in some instances.

 

Britain’s falling competitiveness was making it difficult, throughout most of the seventies, for governments to maintain high employment by intervening in the economy. Since 1945 successive governments had followed the tenets of the economist J M Keynes, borrowing in order to create jobs if unemployment approached a figure deemed as unacceptable (in the 1970s this was about six hundred thousand). During the decade, this became increasingly difficult to do as Edward Heath’s government (1970-74) struggled to follow such policies in the face of a global recession associated with the tripling of oil prices in 1973, by OPEC (the international cartel of oil producers). This caused immediate recession and fuelled international inflation. Attacks on trade union power were becoming more popular owing to a growing perception that they had become too powerful and disruptive, holding the country to ransom. The Second Wilson Labour administration that followed faced a huge balance-of-payments crisis and the tumbling value of the pound and they soon found themselves under the control of the IMF (International Monetary Fund), which insisted on severe spending cuts. The contraction of manufacturing began to accelerate and inflation was also increasing alarmingly, reaching twenty-four per cent by 1975. It came to be seen as a more urgent problem than unemployment and there was a national and international move to the right and against high-taxing and high-spending governments. Demands were made that they should stop propping up lame duck industries with public money or by taking them, however temporarily, into public ownership.

 

Keynes’ argument had been that keeping workers in employment multiplied the effect through the economy as they spent part of their incomes on goods and services was shown to operate in the opposite direction through the effects of rising unemployment. However, the majority of people of working and voting age had no adult memory of their own of the 1930s, and radical politicians were able to exploit these demographics to their advantage to argue the case for monetarism with tight controls on public spending. In these circumstances, voters felt that spending public money on ailing industries was wasteful and inappropriate, especially as it raised their tax burden.

Printed Sources:

Barry Cunliffe, Asa Briggs, et.al. (eds.) (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British and Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

McCrum, Cran & MacNeil, (eds.) (1986), The Story of English. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

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

Safder Alladina & Viv Edwards (eds.) (1991), Multilingualism in the British Isles I: The Older Mother Tongues and Europe. Harlow: Longman.

Bill Lancaster & Tony Mason (eds.) (n.d.), Life and Labour in a Twentieth Century City: The Experience of Coventry. Coventry: Cryfield Press (University of Warwick).

Theo Baker (ed.) (1978) The Long March of Everyman. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Simon Schama (2002), A History of Britain: The Fate of Empire, 1776-2000. London: BBC Worldwide.

Richard Brown & Christopher Daniels (1982), Documents and Debates: Twentieth Century Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Derek Wilson (1997), A Short History of Suffolk. London: Batsford.

Chapter Two: A Social Revolution?

The main achievement of the first quarter century of Elizabeth II’s reign was to be found in the significant expansion of education across England and Wales, caused mainly by the post-war baby boom and the continuing rise in birth-rates throughout the fifties and sixties. This was largely the achievement of the Local Education Authorities, given their statutory responsibilities by the 1944 Butler Act. In Coventry, the Labour-controlled Authority used the selective system to establish most of its initial comprehensive schools and, of the schools that opened in the 1950s, only Binley Park began with a predominantly secondary modern intake. The first head of the Woodlands School told his audience of Rotarians in 1954, that the Comprehensive School is not revolutionary; all the things have been tried time and time again; we have only brought them together. In 1954, the Chairman of the Education Committee was reported as saying that Coventry had decided to build schools where a variety of courses could be provided rather than building a number of different schools. However, Coventry continued to provide secondary education in a variety of different schools alongside its comprehensives: secondary modern schools, two selective grammar schools for girls and a boarding school for boys. In addition, it continued to provide places for boys to attend the two Direct Grant Grammar (later independent) schools in the city.

At this point, it looked as if Labour would win the local elections in 1955 and be able to carry through this plan itself. However, the local elections of May 1955 were preceded by a month of high Cold War controversy. Objections had appeared in the local press as well as among Conservatives against Labour’s opposition to the civil defence plans of the Conservative Government. Councillor Hodgkinson had consistently argued the futility of implementing precautionary measures against a nuclear attack. His wartime experience of Coventry’s Blitz had convinced him that international fraternity was of far more value than local defence expenditure. However, prior to 1955 the issue had been somewhat marginal. The situation changed dramatically in 1955 when a party of delegates from Stalingrad were invited to Coventry by the City Council to repay a visit of the previous year to Russia by its members. The lavish hospitality provided for the guests, no doubt an attempt to match that received in Russia, was widely reported. An article in the Coventry Standard reported how,

Mellowed by an eight course dinner at which vodka and five different kinds of wine were served, the two hundred people who attended the banquet in St Mary’s Hall… to mark the end of the Stalingrad delegation, (listened as the leaders) spoke affectionately of each other’s countries.

The new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, who had commanded the Soviet troops in Stalingrad during the war.

The visit, albeit during the thaw in the Cold War following Stalin’s death and the speech of Khrushchev (above) to the CPSU Congress, proved to be the moment the Conservatives had been waiting for. The Standard told it readers that the issue before them on polling day was simple, … the Kremlin versus Coventry. It’s Conservatism versus Communism. The Conservatives entered the local election with the slogan, Clear out the Reds. It was also pointed out that the local Labour Party’s view of Civil Defence and the H-bomb was the opposite of the national Party’s policy. The Standard reported that its own survey of the population revealed that Coventrians were equally divided on the Stalingrad issue, but the Conservatives were able to use it to claim that the local Labour Party was dominated by a few extremists who did not represent the views of ordinary Labour voters. Certainly, despite the special relationship with Stalingrad that had been developed through the popular wartime campaign for the opening of a second front, the Party leaders had seriously misjudged the mood of the local population. The city was highly prosperous and enjoying the fruits of Eden’s mixed economy. The Conservatives were enjoying rising fortunes nationally. Moreover, many local workers, particularly those in the aircraft industry, were dependent on the continuation of defence contracts for their livelihood. Five seats, both in the city centre and around the outskirts, including Lower Stoke and Walsgrave were lost by Labour. Most of these wards were relatively affluent areas dominated by skilled or semi-skilled factory workers. Although Sidney Stringer claimed that the campaign had been the most vile in all my years in politics and blamed the result on the local press, they really had only themselves to blame in taking their voters for granted and not guarding against a well-known enemy in the Tory press.

However, the Coventry Labour Party soon appeared to have learnt the lessons of their 1955 losses. Civic adventurism in bricks and mortar, either in the rebuilding of the centre, or the schools around the outskirts, were entirely acceptable, but taking a firm stance on foreign and defence matters was not what local government, even a municipal socialist one, was for. In future, although civic links were established, through the Blitz commemorations, with town and cities around the world, these were low-key in nature and, in the case of eastern Europe, were largely abandoned after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The message from Labour supporters in the local elections of May 1955 was underlined in the Parliamentary elections that took place the following month. Not only were Labour majorities reduced in Coventry but the eve of poll ritual march from the major factories to Pool Meadow in the city centre, to hear the addresses of the Labour MP’s, Crossman and Edelman, were poorly attended.

There was a cruel irony for Labour in the events of 1955 in that the main energy of the local Party since 1945 had been directed into the rebuilding of the central area of the City. By 1955 the precinct was just beginning to take shape and Coventry’s affluent workers had a shopping centre commensurate with their spending power. Yet the connections between the availability of consumer goods in bright new shops and the ideals of municipal socialism were difficult to make, even amongst the better informed members of the population. What mattered more was the availability of money to spend and Coventry’s capitalist owned industry was providing this in abundance. Perhaps more attention to housing, health, education and housing would have provided a more solid long-term political allegiance for Labour, particularly in the delivery of a top-class comprehensive secondary school system.

 

Above: Grammar School Boy, Harold Wilson, Labour leader and PM

However, the debate about grammar schools was not simply one which existed between the two main political parties, but also within the Labour Party, which had sought to expand grammar school education before the war as a means of social mobility, and a route out of poverty for many working-class children. Ellen Wilkinson, left-wing Education minister in the Attlee Government, had continued with this policy within a tripartite framework which would include multi-lateral schools. Even in the 1960s, it was not unusual for comprehensive schools to be compared with grammar schools by leading members of the Labour Party, including Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson, who referred to comprehensive schools as grammar schools for all, a strategy that was only partly designed to overcome the fears of the general public, especially parents, who resented the abolition of grammar schools. As products of grammar schools themselves, Labour’s local and national politicians well-understood the emotional attachment and sense of aspiration that many respectable working-class parents still had for these schools. However, hard choices about local priorities needed to be made, and these involved building schools which could serve children of all backgrounds and abilities, however they might choose to structure the curriculum.

A similar strategy was used by Alderman Callow, who chaired the Education Committee between 1958 and 1961, and who compared Coventry’s comprehensive schools with grammar schools when writing in the Coventry Evening Telegraph. He argued that comprehensive schools were both grammar schools and secondary modern schools. All eight of the City’s comprehensives provided the same courses in grammar schools but in addition offered all the courses available in secondary modern schools, having the additional advantage of the possibility of changing from one type of course to another within the same school as aptitudes developed. For Callow, therefore, the Coventry comprehensive was little more than one school that combined all the courses that were available in different schools under one roof. Six years later, Alderman Sidney Stringer, then Chairman of the Education Committee, stated that the Authority was bringing into existence many more schools that were equal to grammar schools, providing courses through which pupils could maximise their intellectual abilities.

 

The city still operated a selection examination at eleven plus, provided places at the Direct Grant schools for boys and maintained two grammar schools for girls, and allocated selective places within the comprehensives. The headmaster of Caludon Castle School commented in his speech day address in 1960 that a truly comprehensive shool hasn’t even been brought into existence… though Coventry has created comprehensive buildings it was still without a single comprehensive school because the schools’ incomplete intake prevented their becoming what their names, size and cost proclaimed them to be. In 1964 the head of Whitley Abbey School concluded that Coventry now needed to choose between returning to a grammar and secondary modern school system or go fully comprehensive. He thought that if the Authority continued to abolish secondary modern schools while retaining grammar schools it would result in a situation whereby the comprehensive schools would be little more than secondary moderns within a selective secondary system.   Therefore, in the early 1960s at least, grammar schools and selection were still at the heart of Coventry’s so-called comprehensive revolution.

In Britain as a whole, the paradox was also apparent. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. In the 1950s, almost everything changed in British society, but only a little. No segment of society, no corner of the kingdom, no aspect of life remained untouched. So, part of the story of the fifties is the story of emergent patterns of change and a sense of discontinuity with the prewar past. However, there was also considerable continuity over the decade itself compared with the decades which were to follow. There was, as yet, no social revolution, unless we mean that the wheel of change came full cycle and returned to exactly where it had been at the beginning of the decade without taking society very far forward.

In October 1963 Harold Wilson, then Labour leader of the opposition, predicted that Britain would be forged in the white heat of the technological revolution. Certainly, living standards continued to rise, aided by the discovery in the North Sea of natural gas in 1965 and oil in 1969, and consumer goods became even more common. But there were also disquieting signs that Britain was approaching an as yet undefined crisis, cultural as well as financial. British economic growth rates did not match those of competitor states, and it was partly for this reason that Britain applied to join the European Economic Community, in 1961 and 1967, entry both times being vetoed by France. In addition, television programmes like Cathy Come Home made the public aware that poverty remained in the midst of Britain’s affluence. The Teddy Boys of the fifties were gradually replaced in the early sixties by Mods and Rockers, their social alienation being fuelled by the new vogue for high-rise flats in which they felt like caged animals. Britain was also becoming a more secular and iconoclastic, as well as a more materialistic society. Sexual intercourse began in 1963, wrote the Coventry-born poet Philip Larkin, perhaps with not a little exaggeration! The 1960s were certainly dramatic years in Britain: demographic trends, especially the increase in the proportion of teenagers in the population, coincided with economic affluence and ideological experimentation to reconfigure social mores to a revolutionary extent.

In 1964 a Labour government had again taken office, under Wilson, after thirteen years of Conservative rule. It promised economic and social modernisation. In an attempt to tackle the residual problem of poverty, public expenditure on social services was expanded considerably, resulting in some small degree of redistribution of income. It issued Circular 10/65 which requested that LEAs provide details of their plans for secondary education with a view to ending selection at the age of eleven in favour of introducing comprehensive schools. Coventry already had a working party in existence which was considering the pattern of secondary education across the city. It was the work of this group which resulted in a shift of emphasis within the LEA and brought about a change in mood on the Education Committee by September 1966. The proposal which emerged was to move towards a fully comprehensive system involving the abolition of the girls’ grammar schools and the disappearance of the remaining secondary moderns.

However, Labour’s ups and downs in the local elections had closely followed national trends since 1955 and in 1966 the Party’s rule in the City was again threatened, this time by the new austerity measures of the Labour Government under Harold Wilson in 1966. Economically, the real problems of the decade arose from the devaluation of the currency in November 1967, and the increase in industrial action. Employment in manufacturing nationally declined, until it accounted for less than a third of the workforce by 1973. Car production slumped and some Coventry firms declared redundancies, as their long boom appeared to be faltering. The incomes policy declared by the Wilson Government was hard to swallow for local engineering workers who had long enjoyed the benefits of free collective bargaining and wage differentials. Thus Coventry began to suffer for the first time since the early thirties with the twin problems of rising unemployment and stagnant wages. By way of contrast, employment in the service sector rose, so that by 1973, over half of all workers in the UK were employed in providing services.

 

Local idealism in Coventry had been toned down since 1955 and by the mid-sixties the Coventry Labour Party had become a party of civic administration. It had run out of new ideas and was failing to attract new, younger members. After a presentation to mark his twentieth year as an MP in December 1965, Richard Crossman wrote in his diary:

I have tended to get depressed about Coventry. … I am… aware of a decline in the Party and a decline in its quality on the council. Mostly it was old people who were there for the presentation; only a handful were young.

This generation gap was to present long-term problems for the local party as the lack of new blood in the sixties and seventies made the party staid and unadventurous. The local Conservatives, by contrast, were able to fight the 1967 local election as the party of opposition to central government as well as local government. They had developed policies on four key local issues. Top of this list was the protection of grammar schools, popular with working-class parents with high aspirations for their children. Secondly, and   predictably, they proposed to prune the rates. The third policy promised council tenants the right to buy their own homes, and the fourth was an especially attractive one on public transport. They proposed a major reduction in fares, which they claimed would produce an increase in passenger numbers and an improved service. They were ably led in the election by Gilbert Richards, and their offensive on national issues, coupled with a new brand of local Tory populism proved decisive.

Labour lost control of the council after thirty years of continuous rule. The average overall turnout across the city was 49 per cent, but in some key marginal wards, such as Wyken, over 60 per cent of the electorate voted. The Tories stayed in power for another three years. Apart from a small degree of financial retrenchment, however, there were few new policy initiatives. Labour’s secondary education proposals were put on hold when the Conservatives gained control of the council. Nevertheless, during their period in power, although the Tories kept their promise to retain the girls grammar schools and continued to purchase places at the direct grant grammar school for boys, the phasing out of the secondary moderns also continued, a further comprehensive was opened, and building programmes went ahead for further comprehensives. After the 1967 local elections, Labour was never again able to recapture the commanding majority it enjoyed in the immediate postwar period. Yet, on the whole, Coventry remained a distinctly Labour city, holding three of the four local Parliamentary seats.

 

Young people were most affected by the changes of the 1960s in Britain as a whole. Education gained new prominence in national government circles and student numbers soared. Higher education in Britain saw particularly rapid expansion over the whole quarter century. In 1938 there had been just twenty thousand students, but by 1962 this figure had increased by nearly a hundred thousand. However, the real increase in numbers came after this, as new plate-glass universities were formed and former colleges of advanced technology were given university status.

By 1972 there were forty-five universities, compared with just seventeen in 1945. By 1966, seven new universities had opened, including the University of East Anglia and the University of Warwick at Canley in Coventry. More importantly, students throughout the country were becoming increasingly radicalised as a growing hostility towards what they perceived as the political and social complacency of the older generation. They protested loudly against poor student accommodation, the unfairness of examination systems, restrictions on academic freedom, civil rights in Northern Ireland, dictatorial decision-making by academic hierarchies, support for the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the Vietnam War. The latter of these issues placed immense strain on the special relationship between the US and British governments. Although protests were generally less violent than those in the US, due partly to more moderate policing in Britain, there were major protest all over the country in 1968 and some, like the one which took place in Grosvenor Square in London, involved police charges against hundreds of thousands of protesters.

                

Anti-establishment and anti-capitalist values spread much wider than the student population. The cultural revolution had a profound effect on sexual behaviour and on women’s rights. Sex before marriage became less taboo and there was a more general feeling of sexual freedom. The Women’s Liberation movement gained considerable ground, leading to the 1970 Equal Pay Act. The family also underwent important changes, many of which had begun in the 1950s with smaller family sizes, aided by changes in the laws on abortion, more widely available and effective contraception, including the pill from 1962, and increased domestic technology. In 1956 only seven per cent of household had had refrigerators; by 1971, this had increased to seventy per cent. By this time, sixty-four per cent of households also had a washing machine. In addition, the rapid and real growth in earnings of young manual workers, sustained over the past decade, had, by the early sixties, created a generation who had money to spend on leisure and luxury. The average British teenager was spending eight pounds a week on clothes, cosmetics, records and cigarettes. In London, their attitude was summed up by the fashion designer Mary Quant, whose shop, Bazaar, in King’s Road, provided clothes that allowed people to run, to jump, to leap, to retain their precious freedom.

 

If London was swinging, Liverpool was providing the beat. No band was more important than the Beatles, though there were others who helped to produce the distinctive sound which emerged from Merseyside. The fab four expressed both a vibrant, diverse youth culture and a keen commercial outlook, the latter largely due to their clever manager, Brian Epstein. They provided British teenagers with an identity that cut across the barriers of class, accent, nationality, region and religion. First known as The Quarrymen, they formed in July 1957 and by October 1962 they had hit the all-important top twenty singles’ chart with Love Me Do. In April 1963 From Me to You became their first number one hit single. Between 1957 and 1970 they performed live in eighty-four different venues in England, fifteen in Scotland, six in Wales and two in Ireland. In Dublin, teenagers sang She Loves You on the double-decker buses which had replaced the trams, children imitated them with tennis-raquets, using tree houses for stages in suburban Middle England, each pretending to be a different member of the group, and young mothers sang I Wanna Hold Your Hand as they crossed busy streets to the brand new precincts in Coventry when out shopping with their children.

Beatlemania swept the British Isles, and pretty soon they became a global phenomenon, playing all over Europe, as well as Australia, Japan and, of course, the USA. Meanwhile, a more working-class sub-culture emerged, particularly in London and the South-East, as rival gangs of Mods and Rockers followed hard rock bands like The Who and The Rolling Stones. In the summer of 1964, they rode their mopeds and motorbikes from the London suburbs down to Brighton, where they met up on the beach and staged fights with each other.

 

The BBC held a monopoly over the radio waves and, in a deal with the Musicians’ Union and record manufacturers, ensured that popular music was not given much air time. Anyone wanted to listen to the new artists and groups had to tune into Radio Luxemburg, but reception was often very poor. At Easter 1964, however, the first illegal pirate station, Radio Caroline began broadcasting from a ship just off the Sussex coast. Within months, millions of young people were listening to the station and to others which sprang up, often, to begin with, from transistor radios hidden from prying parents under their bedclothes. Not only did these stations broadcast pop music, but they also warned that any attempt to silence them would constitute a direct attack on youth. Eventually, the BBC gave way and set up Radio One and, in 1967, the Marine Offences Act outlawed the pirate ships.

The event which marked the high point in popular culture for many in Britain, not just England, was the English national football team’s victory in the 1966. The tournament was held in England for the first time, and the team, built around Bobby Charlton, the key Manchester United midfielder who, along with Nobby Stiles, had survived the Munich air crash earlier in the decade, and Bobby Moore, the captain, from West Ham United, who also had two skilfull forwards in the team in Martin Peters and striker Geoff Hurst. Manager Alf Ramsay had been part of the team which had lost 6-3 to Hungary at Wembley thirteen years earlier, their first ever defeat to continental opposition at home, in the run up to the 1954 World Cup. On 3 August they faced the unlikely winners from that year, West Germany, now a much stronger team than the one that had squeaked past a magical but tiring Magyar team in that final. Although a colour cine film recording of the match was made and released later, people watched it live on TV in black and white. Only the hundred thousand at Wembley that day saw the red shirts of the England team raise the Jules Rimet trophy after the match. People’s memories of the details of the whole match vary somewhat, but most remember (in colour, of course) Geoff Hurst’s two extra-time goals and Kenneth Wolstenholme’s commentary because they have watched them replayed so many times. After the match, people dressed up in a bizarre, impromptu mixture of sixties fashion and patriotic bunting and came out to celebrate with family, friends and neighbours just as if it were the end of the war again, or at jubilee street party, copying Nobby’s knobbly-kneed skipping they had just seen on the box. After that, it was downhill all the way to Mexico in 1970 where England’s 3-2 defeat by Beckenbauer, Müller and company seemed to sum up the change in the fortunes and mood of the nation compared with those of a resurgent West Germany. At least, this time, we could watch the golden Brazilian team thrashing the Azurri in colour, usually at a middle-class friend’s house.

Despite the dramatic increase in wealth, coupled with the emergence of distinctive subcultures, technological advances and the dramatic shifts in popular culture, there was a general feeling of disillusionment with Labour’s policies nationally. In the 1970 General Election, the Conservative Party, under its new leader Edward Heath, was returned to power. When the Labour group regained the ascendancy in Coventry in 1970, they sought to press ahead with the plans for fully comprehensive secondary education they had made four years earlier. The Conservatives accepted the demand for comprehensive education but continued to argue that the rights of parents to have their children educated in a grammar school should be respected. Despite this dogged resistance, the Labour proposal was approved by the Council and subsequently by the government, ending the purchase of direct grant places, reorganising the girls’ grammar schools as comprehensives, and ending the eleven plus.

Edward Heath

In addition, the comprehensive schools would be reorganised as community colleges, each serving a defined neighbourhood. The first of these were opened in the academic year 1972-73, one near the city centre (Sidney Stringer) and the other on an estate on the outskirts of the city (Ernesford Grange). These schools were to have a dual function, operating as community centres which would open for up to fifty weeks of the year, six days a week, and for twelve to sixteen hours each day, with the provision of additional buildings, equipment and recreational facilities. However, this development was not fully completed until 1979, when the ninth of these colleges, Alderman Callow, was finally completed to its planned size. These purpose-built colleges took several years to complete due to the need to build by instalments at that time. However, the comprehensive schools within them were all opened by September 1975. The community element provided facilities covering a range of activities and organisations with playgroups, pensioners, parents and children coming together on one site. The concept of the community college was originally developed from Henry Morris’ idea of the village college, but applied to the urban and suburban context in Coventry. Robert Aitken, the Director of Education responsible for its application in the city, also argued that the community dimension would help to overcome the clash between home and school which existed on many working-class housing estates in the sixties and early seventies, developing pupils’ self-respect and utilising the skills of parents and teachers in tandem.

The principles and practices of the Sidney Stringer School and Community College were the best-documented of all the Coventry schools, both by a succession of headteachers and by its general teaching staff and through evaluation in the wider community. The school population was fifty per cent of Asian background, forty per cent European and ten per cent Caribbean. It opened in August 1972 with an intake of nineteen hundred pupils, a hundred and forty teaching and community staff and seventy non-teaching staff. Among the distinctive features of the school were its mode of government, its House system and its curriculum. Arfon Jones, its second head, claimed that two of the key aims of the school were to raise the consciousness of the people in the area and to develop a mode of democratic control. In these terms, the LEA decided to delegate authority and accountability to local people through the governing body, combining its statutory responsibilities with the strengths of a Community Association. Under this system, the Association elected a Council, some of whose members represented it on the Governing Body, which then involved pupils, parents, staff, local residents and LEA representatives in equal numbers. Besides determining the policy of the school and college, the governors had responsibility for the plant, finance and community development. Although there were some gaps between the scheme and the practical realities of managing the facilities, it did represent a bold attempt to make the school government more broadly and genuinely representative of an albeit loosely defined local community.

 

Contrary to popular mythology about Coventry, comprehensive education was only fully established in the 1970s; first in the voluntary controlled sector, when the Catholic schools became fully comprehensive in 1970 and subsequently in 1975 when no further selective places were available for girls and the Authority no longer purchased places outside the maintained sector for boys. The development of comprehensive education was therefore as slow in Coventry as it was in many other LEAs, including Birmingham. Coventry was still operating secondary school selection well into the 1970s, concerned to offer grammar school courses in many of its schools. By that time, the school-leaving age was raised from fifteen to sixteen in 1973. By 1975 the number of comprehensives in Coventry had increased to twenty-one, five of them Church controlled, with an additional LEA boarding school. In total, the number of enrolled pupils stood at 28,538, compared with 20,385 in 1960.

From the early 1950s to the mid 1970s was a long period of economic expansion and demographic growth which helped to fuel educational development in England in general and Coventry in particular. Over these decades the city’s Director’s of Education, the LEA and the schools themselves pioneered different forms of comprehensive schooling and education, so much so that, in the educational imagination, Coventry became synonymous with educational innovation. Yet the evidence suggests that while Coventry was among the first authorities to build schools with the purpose of comprehensive secondary education in view, this was, for the most part, the result of practical imperatives following the war. In common with many other authorities, it then struggled with the process of developing the principles of comprehensive education. Whether, by 1977, a truly comprehensive system of education had been achieved was open to question, at a time when primary school rolls had begun to fall and practical priorities had to be confronted once more. With the benefit of hindsight, through subsequent decades of economic and industrial decline, it still is open to question.