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 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.

Introduction: A New Elizabethan Age?

The closer the social historian gets to his own times, the harder it is for him to be sure he has hold of what is essential about his period: the more difficult it is to separate the rich tapestry of social life which appears on the surface of the woven fabric from its underlying patterns. This is the problem of perspective which the historian has to try to overcome in his craft.The period from 1952 to 1977 was one of rapid social change, and one in which the pace and direction of social change itself became a matter of concern in social discourse. The discussion was about whether the surface evidence of change really added up to a social revolution for ordinary people. That argument is still unresolved: more than sixty years later we are still living out its contradictory legacy. Many witnesses to the period are still alive, and each with their own differing memories, impressions and interpretations of the period.

 

One of the most striking features of the period is the growth and importance of the mass media of communication. Television on a mass scale decisively intervened in English Social life, supplementing and then overtaking the already complex networks of communication – radio, newspapers, mass publishing – which are part and parcel of the advanced industrial civilization. These new media also serve to document the social life of the period for the historian. Commentaries, personal testimonies and documentary material which for perviously the historian would have to call from printed sources, dusty archives or directly from eye-witnesses, are now to be found, more comprehensively, in primary form, in radio and television archives, many of which are now available online via the internet, together with more accessible written sources. In the oral and film sources are preserved the living voices and speech patterns of ordinary people, talking about their experiences of, and responses to, the conditions of their lives. They also give us a sense of how the new means of communication fundamentally reshaped our sense of what our collective social experience is like. However, extracts from archive material are not always more useful as printed sources, nor are they more reliable. They tend to be briefer, as well as having been edited for specific purposes. They have been inserted into a programme format, dictated by the special interest of a producer. The witnesses do not have the opportunity to think their way around a topic in the way in which the diarist or letter-writer of a previous period did. There is also an over-abundance of material related to official public events. Yet it is in these voices that we can best grasp the impact of historical forces on the lives of ordinary men and women.

The Windsor Family Tree following the death of George V

 

People began to speak of a new Elizabethan age following the death of George VI and the accession of his daughter in 1952, leading to the great national event of the coronation in the summer of 1953. Many bought their first television sets in order to watch the event live, while the Establishment took up their usual positions at Westminster Abbey. Sir Henry Chips Channon occupied almost the same seat as the one he had at the previous Coronation. He wrote the following account in his diary:

…Finally came the magic of the Queen’s arrival: she was calm and confident and even charming, and looked touching and quite perfect, while Prince Philip was like a medieval knight – the Service, Anointing, Crowning, Communion were endless, yet the scene was so splendid, so breath-taking in the solemn splendour that it passed in a flash. The homage was impressive… The Great Officers of State swished their robes with dignity… Privy Councillors in their uniforms, men in levee dress, the little Queen at one moment simply dressed in a sort of shift, and then later resplendent: the pretty pages; the supreme movements… the nodding, chatting, gossiping Duchesses; the swan-like movements when they simultaneously placed their coronets on their heads… it was all finer, and better organised than the last time, although the Archbishop’s voice was not as sonorous as that of the wicked old Lang.. What a day for England, and the traditional forces of the world. Shall we ever see the like again? I have been present at two Coronations and now shall never see another. Will my Paul be an old man at that of King Charles III?

 

Two other events caught the popular imagination of Britain in 1953/54. They were both firsts for the British Empire. The news of the first successful Ascent of Everest by the New Zealander, Sir Edmund Hillary and the Nepalese Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, came through on the day of the Coronation. The following spring, the country was thrilled again by Roger Bannister’s stunning running of the first four-minute mile at the Iffley Road Athletics Stadium in Oxford, on 6 May 1954. Dr. Bannister’s own account of the race, written two years later, reads as follows:

There was complete silence on the ground… a false start… The gun fired a second time… Brasher went into the lead and I slipped in effortlessly behind him, feeling tremendously full of running. My legs seemed to meet no resistance at all, as if propelled by some unknown force. We seemed to be going slowly! Impatiently, I shouted ’Faster!’ But Brasher kept his head and did not change the pace. I went on worrying until I heard the first lap time, 57.5 secs …he had made success possible… I barely noticed the half-mile, passed in 1 min. 58 secs, nor when, round the next bend, Chataway went into the lead. At three-quarters of a mile the effort was still barely perceptible; the time was 3 min. 0.7 sec., and by now the crowd were roaring. Somehow I had to run that last lap in 59 seconds. Chataway led round the next bend and then I pounced past him at the beginning of the back straight, three hundred yards from the finish. I had a moment of mixed joy and anguish, when my mind took over. It… drew my body compellingly forward. I felt that the moment of a lifetime had come. There was no pain, only a great unity of movement and aim… The only reality was the next two hundred yards of track under my feet. The tape meant finality – extinction perhaps.

 

I felt at that moment that it was my chance to do one thing supremely well. I drove on, impelled by a combination of fear and pride… The noise in my ears was that of the faithful Oxford crowd. Their hope and encouragement gave me greater strength. I had now turned the last bend and there was only fifty yards more… The faint line of the finishing tape stood ahead as a haven of peace, after the struggle. The arms of the world were waiting to receive me if only I reached the tape without slackening my speed… I leapt at the tape like a man taking his last spring to save himself from the chasm that threatens to engulf him. My effort was over and I collapsed almost unconscious, with an arm on either side of me. It was only then that the pain overtook me… I was too close to have failed… The stopwatches held the answer. The announcement came – ’result of one mile… 3 minutes…’ the rest lost in the roar of excitement…

 

The stop-watches were stopped at 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. As Bannister, Brasher, and Chataway took their lap of honour, they knew that they would share a permanent place in sporting history. They were the first athletes to record a mile in under four minutes. Since then the record has been broken several times, but under much better conditions underfoot and in the air. In those conditions, Bannister could not have achieved the time without his fellow-athletes. There was no huge stadium clock to glance up at, only the lap times shouted by the officials from the trackside. It was therefore crucial to get the pace-setting exactly right. In any event, no matter how many seconds are shaved off the four minutes by men, and perhaps women, in the future, Bannister’s run will always remain, as his the title of his 1955 memoir states, The First Four Minutes. And, of course, the cameras were present to record the event on film.

 

Chapter One: Never had it so Good?

Following their victory over Labour in the 1951 General Election, it took the Conservatives longer to remove rationing than they had hoped. The new Tory government continued the consensus policies of the Labour governments and built on their achievements. There was continuing substantial economic growth, with industrial production rising by a third in the decade after 1951. By sacrificing a certain degree of quality, the government was able to build three hundred thousand new houses a year. They also had new towns built, though market forces were allowed to override the regional policy of the previous government, with its emphasis on special development areas. Most of the country’s electrical power was produced by coal-fired stations, but the atomic bomb had been successfully tested in 1952, leading to the setting up of a reactor at Windscale (later renamed Sellafield) to produce the necessary plutonium. Despite a major fire there in 1957, producing widespread contamination, a series of Magnox power stations was built throughout the country. A lonely stretch of coast near Leiston in Suffolk became the site of Britain’s second nuclear power station, built in the early 1960s. In 1966 power began surging out from the grey, cuboid plant into the national grid. By the mid-seventies Sizewell’s five hundred and eighty thousand kilowatts were going a long way towards meeting the electricity needs of eastern England.

Sizewell Nuclear Power Station (2014)

The period from 1952 to 1977 bridges the two worlds of wartime Britain and Britain in Europe, Britain under inflation. The mid to late fifties was the period of affluence. Slowly at first, and then with gathering speed, Britain entered a period of rapid change and growing prosperity, when a great deal of money flowed into the purchase of the newly available consumer goods. Prosperity is underpinned by the continuing revolution in Welfare and by full employment. The rebuilding and reconstruction of the urban and suburban environment, made necessary by the large-scale bombing and the massive social neglect of the interwar period, was in full sway. New kinds of industry, based largely on the revolution in electronic, came into being alongside the old, without displacing them. There was a shift in the patterns of skills, and of work, and in the composition of the labour force, with more workers involved in clerical, highly skilled or service occupations. At the same time, more workers were pushed down into the unskilled ranks of mass production. They became more mobile again, pulled to where the jobs were. The pattern of regional decline in the older industrial areas and of rapid, unorganised growth in the new areas began to re-emerge. In some areas and industries, the long-term pattern of continuity from one generation to the next persisted, while in other, newer areas, this continuity was broken. New housing schemes, including estates and high-rise blocks of flats, plus the new town experiments, undermined the traditional urban working-class environments, robbing them of their intrinsic collective identities. The extended kinship network of the traditional prewar working-class neighbourhoods and communities was replaced by the nuclear family life on the new estates. Rehousing, property speculation, the rise of the consumer society, market forces, urban planning and legislation, all play their role in a further regeneration of working-class culture. In 1972, Phil Cohen, a University of Birmingham sociologist, described these processes in a Working Paper:

The first effect of the high density, high-rise schemes was to destroy the function of the street, the local pub, the corner shop… Instead there was only the privatised space of the family unit, stacked one on top of another, in total isolation, juxtaposed with the totally public space which surrounded it, and which lacked any of the informal social controls generated by the neighbourhood. The streets which serviced the new estates became thoroughfares, their users ’pedestrians’, and by analogy so many bits of human traffic… The people who had to live in them weren’t fooled. As one put it – they might have hot running water and central heating, but to him they were still prisons in the sky… The isolated family unit could no longer call on the resources of wider kinship networks, or the neighbourhood, and the family itself became the sole focus of solidarity… The working class family was… not only isolated from the outside but undermined from within. There is no better example of what we are talking about than the so-called ’household mother’. The street or turning was no longer available as a safe play space, under neighbourly supervision. Mum, or Auntie, was no longer just round the corner to look after the kids for the odd morning. Instead, the task of keeping an eye on the kids fell exclusively to the young wife, and the only safe play space was the ’safety of the home’.

 

However, away from the high-rise blocks, the stubborn continuities of working-class life and culture survived. Nevertheless, the theme of community became a matter of widespread and fundamental concern in the period. The question emerged as to whether, as the conditions and patterns of social life for working people changed, and as what surplus money there was about began to pour into the new consumer goods on offer, people might not only be uprooted from a life they knew, and had made themselves, to another made partly for them by others. This might also involve a shift from the working-class values of solidarity, neighbourliness and collectivism, to those of individualism, competition and privatisation. The BBC archive material from the period record how television played a role in this transition to more middle class attitudes:

Nowadays, there’s a tremendous change, an amazing change, in fact, in just a few years. People have got television. They stay at home to watch it – husbands and wives. If they do come in at the weekend they’re playing bingo. They’ve now got a big queue for the one-armed bandit as well. They do have a lot more money, but what they’re losing is togetherness.

 

The real spread of television happened only in the early years of the fifties. Commercial TV opened in 1955. By monopolising the channels of public discussion, television also centralised the power to make its images of social life stick. It communicated, at rapid speed, highly selective, if not distorted, images of one community or section of society to another. It also helped to form an overall image of where the whole of society was headed. It gave an almost tangible visibility to the quite limited rise in consumption and in spending money, signifying the world in terms of the goodies produced in the new consumer industries and seeking markets among the working class. It created the spectacular world of commodities. It is difficult to assess how far this advertising imagery of consumption entered the lives of ordinary men and women. It seems, in retrospect, to have been wildly exaggerated. The telly in the corner made a difference – but it did not suddenly dismantle the culture of working people. Alan Sillitoe, in his The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959), gave this assessment of its impact:

Night after night we sat in front of the telly with a ham sandwich in one hand, and a bar of chocolate in the other, and a bottle of lemonade between our boots., while mam was with some fancy-man upstairs on the new bed she’d ordered… To begin with, the adverts on the telly had shown us how much more there was in the world to buy than we’d ever dreamed of when we’d looked into the shop windows but hadn’t seen all there was to see because we didn’t have the money to buy it with anyway. And the telly made all these things twenty times better than we’d ever thought they were. Even adverts at the cinema were cool and tame, because now we were seeing them in private at home. We used to cock our noses up at things in the shop that didn’t move, but suddenly we saw their real value because they jumped and glittered around the screen and had some pasty-faced tart going head over heels to get her nail-polished grabbers on them or her lipstick lips over them, not like the crumbly adverts you saw on posters or in newspapers as dead as doornails; these were flickering around loose, half-opened packets and tins, making you think that all you had to do was finish opening them before they were yours, like seeing an unlocked safe through a shop window with the man gone away for a cup of tea without thinking to guard his lolly… mam used to call us the Telly boys…

 

If the British working class was entering a sort of affluence, it was also, at the same time, trying to comprehend what affluence was about. It was easy and tempting to mistake the highly visible indices of change for the real movement below the surface. It was a temptation that many at the time fell into, and one that many historians have done since. The myths of affluence became inextricably interwoven with the contradictory experience of affluence. No wonder that one commentator, writing about Britain in the late fifties, called it Britain – Unknown Country. In one section of the population, change did register in a peculiarly strong and visible way: among the young. The 1950s saw the rise to prominence, for the first time, of a distinct and identifiable culture of the young – something different from the culture of the private public schools that George Orwell had known, or the high spirits of Oxbridge students. For ordinary young people, the war – which they had experienced as young children, really did divide history into before and after; and they belonged to after.

 

This break in the heroic narrative of Britain gave a strong generational marking to the relationships between adults and youth. If incomes had gone up a little for many working people, they had improved at a faster rate for young adults; and since their families had a little more economic security than between the wars, a higher proportion of what they earned was left over for spending on themselves and their own recreations and pursuits. Affluent Britain was not a society which allowed spare cash to accumulate in anyone’s pockets for long. The surplus in the pockets of young working-class boys and girls was quickly funneled into the new industries servicing working-class leisure, and out of this emerged distinctive youth styles which so marked the fifties that youth itself became the metaphor for social change. Violence also began to increase in British society, not only in terms of crime, but also in riots by teenage Teddy Boys in the late 1950s. Bringing together youth, new dance music, extravagant dress and a reputation for insolence and violence that shocked a nation still largely wedded to prewar and wartime vales, they were the first modern youth culture. A teenager interviewed by the BBC described their dress in great detail:

Short jackets, two little vents at the back, three buttons, single-breasted, maybe blazer stripes, wearing blazer, Italian rounded collar shirts, usually navy blue, white or red, trousers with no turn ups, usually 16 inch, 17 inch bottoms, pointed toe shoes, you know. That’s about all. Oh, and they wear big overcoats, with pointed collars or macs, white macs, you know. It’s all derived from the French and Italians.

T.R. Fyvel, in The Insecure Offenders (1961), wrote that there was a sexual twist in the make-up of Teddy Boys which could be ascribed to their excessive interest in their own and each other’s clothes and hair-styles, such as the habit of the early Teddy boys having their hair permanently waved. The stock answer of Teddy boy dandies to inquiring journalists about this was: If the girls do it and make themselves look nice, why shouldn’t we? An Irish informant was sure that this revealed a basic effeminacy and nothing else. He felt that the main motive for their dress was jealousy of the girls for being the centre of attention. Listening to these Teds as they stood around talking to each other in the dance-halls, all he could hear about was clothes and style:

They could talk literally for hours about styles and cut and prices, the way you usually only hear women talk. But even if they weren’t all effeminate,… the main thing with these Teds was that they had to outshine the way the girls dressed… The Teddy boy was always the person who had to stand out.

Two processes were at work here. The new youth styles, expressing themselves in terms of consumption patterns, also indicated subtle shifts in attitude and outlook: but no-one changed their life-situation, life chances or social position by becoming a Teddy Boy or a Mod. The other process, the route out of the working class into the professional ranks through education – the Eleven Plus, the Grammar School, the University – may have offered a more permanent route of social mobility, but far fewer could ever take it; and the social and personal costs for first generation Scholarship Boys and Girls were punishing – the loss of roots, of a sense of connection to their own communities, even to their own families. In Michael Young and Peter Wimott’s famous 1957 report on Family and Kinship in East London, one of the informants was the first girl at an East End elementary school to pass the scholarship examination for grammar school. Coming home on the day the results came out, she tried to tell her mother as casually as she could that she had passed, but soon broke down. Soon afterwards a messenger arrived from the headmistress to summon her mother to the school to receive her congratulations and those of her staff. Her school was given a half-day holiday in celebration. However, the rejoicing of the teachers was not generally shared within her working-class community. It was a breach of custom for little women to go to secondary schools to prepare for paper work in offices, and, if they did, they were made to feel their peculiarity. They lost their classmates as friends and they were isolated in their street; there was probably no-one else going to the grammar school. They became sort of reserved and regarded as someone apart. The uniform, supposed to be a mark of superior status, became the target of inverted snobbery. The gym tunic, panama hat, gloves and long black woollen stockings which had to be worn all year round until they reached the upper form, made the scholarship girls figures of ridicule among their peers who all attended an ordinary school. She commented:

I was more or less ostracised by the other girls in the street… They would shout out something about being stuck up or a ’swank-pot’. It was not just that they made fun of us, we just didn’t have much in common. They had different ideas…

 

Their non-conformity was very apparent when they reached fourteen, the minimum leaving age. All the other girls in the street left elementary school and went to work at a proper manual job. She remembered passing two girls who had just started work on the way to the bus stop. They wouldn’t speak to her any more and she felt they were probably thinking, the lazy little so and so. Adults were no more sympathetic, though less vocal, than their children: This was a working-class community, and those who tried to become something else were not behaving as they should.

Out of this first generation of working-class boys to complete their education, the late 1950s also saw the Angry Young Man syndrome emerge. The literary and dramatic prototype for this was Jimmy Porter, in John Osborne’s play, Look Back in Anger (1956). In the play, Jimmy had observed:

It’s pretty dreary living in the American Age – unless you are an American, of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans… I suppose people of our generation aren’t able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and forties, when we were still kids. There aren’t any good, brave causes left. If the big bang comes, and we all get killed off, it won’t be in aid of the old-fashioned grand design. It’ll just be for the Brave-New-nothing-very-much-thank-you. About as pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of a bus.

While many insisted that the new permissive society was essentially civilised and liberating, prophets of doom believed that Britain had progressed from austerity to affluence and, finally, to decadence. Complaints were made about materialistic values, striptease clubs, drink, gambling and the alarming increase in juvenile delinquency, prostitution and illegitimacy. The Profumo and Vassall affairs, although talking place in echelons of society which were high above the man in the street, and a generation removed from the Scholarship Boys, were nevertheless held up as examples of a decline in sexual morality. The Profumo episode, erupting into the House of Commons in March 1963, was a fitting post-script to the era of affluence. It was, as Wayland Young wrote at the time, scandal and crisis together. It exercised some of the purgative and disruptive functions of a revolution. Certainly, concern was also registered about the waning influence of established religion, or even nonconformist religion.

Typical of the critical comments on youth culture were those of BBC Radio’s Any Questions team, when asked to comment on the events surrounding Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock. Mary Stocks remarked that young people were merely exhibiting a sort of unexpended animal spirits, while Lord Boothby expressed the view that he’d rather they went off to Cairo and started Teddy-boying around there. Jeremy Thorpe said that Jazz to me comes from the jungle and this is jungle music taken to its logical conclusion… musical Mau-Mau. But was the Britain of this period a decadent society in any meaningful sense? Young people were certainly more sceptical about traditional values, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they cared about cultural values. After all, there was also a more serious side to the cultural revolution of the late fifties and early sixties. Nevertheless, the angry young men and women who found a cause in joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) also came under verbal attack. When the 1958 Aldermaston march began, and the first ragged ranks swung into view on the first day, one observer commented:

This must be a bunch of bloody psychotics, trying to extrovert their own psychic difficulties, you know, to neither end nor purpose. It’s like a bunch of tiny dogs yapping at the back door to the big house – it will accomplish sweet nothing.

 

They did find some support from among the prewar generation, especially from those who remembered being young when the Peace Pledge Union was formed with high, if somewhat impracticable ideals, in the mid-thirties. Radio commentator and writer René Cutforth lent his cryptic support to the new generation of peace campaigners by suggesting that they might just be the only people left alive. Certainly, the shadow of what Jimmy Porter called the big bang lengthened across the whole face of affluent Britain throughout the whole decade, and into the sixties, when the anti-Vietnam war movement developed alongside CND. However, CND received a set-back when the next Labour leader, Harold Wilson, originally a Bevanite advocate of unilateral disarmament, made a pragmatic switch to a determined opponent of it. Regardless of the eventual outcomes of these movements, the extra-parliamentary politics which they introduced changed the nature of post-war politics over the next decade, crystallising the popular mood of protest and dissent against the enforced calm of prosperous Britain. 

 Below: Aneurin Bevan, Labour’s Health and Local Government Minister

Above: Winston Churchill won the 1951 General Election was returned to office as PM of a Conservative peace-time government for the first time

In the view of many hindsighted historians, the period of Conservative governments from 1951 to 1964 was of one of illusion, of an Indian summer, an Edwardian era which preceding a period of crisis and conflict. The Conservatives had come to power in the 1951 General Election largely because the electorate had become disillusioned with Labour. Prolonged Austerity was remembered more clearly than the benefits of the Welfare State. Churchill had been returned to power promising a bonfire of controls. The removal of the symbols of austerity, especially rationing, the housing programme masterminded by Harold Macmillan and the boom of the early fifties all presaged well for the Conservatives. They were aided in this by the internecine struggles within the Labour Party between Gaitskill and Bevan over the succession to Attlee, beginning Thirteen Wasted Years for it. When Gaitskill became leader, he made it clear that he was opposed to further nationalisation, putting a hold on any return to the socialist idealism of 1945-8.

Austerity with its characteristic lack of consumer products was replaced by affluence with the plethora of those same products which came to characterise the country as a consumer society. But Conservative policy also led to inflation based on the continuous demand that this generated, and government failed to intervene to deal adequately with the growing problems in the economy. In 1955, when, as a result of a Government-assisted boom in industrial development, demand began to run ahead of capacity and the economy became overstrained, R. A. Butler deliberately pushed up the cost of living by raising purchase tax on a wide range of goods, and at the same time a number of measures were taken to discourage capital investment. The policy eventually succeeded in slowing down the pace of wage increases, which was one of the factors behind the 1955 inflation. But it took nearly three years to do so, at the cost of a virtually complete industrial standstill and a number of financial crises and major industrial disputes.

One particularly unfortunate aspect of this period was the Government’s attempts to restrict investment in the public sector, an attempt which was largely unsuccessful because of the long-term nature of most of the projects involved, which made it quite impossible to turn them on and off like a tap to meet the short-term fluctuations in the economy. One economist, writing in 1961, commented that it was too early to assess the long-term damage to the British economy from this period of enforced standstill, but that it certainly left us with a lot of leeway to catch up. He also pointed out that it was not until the recession of 1958 that this policy was reversed by the Treasury. Some historians have argued that the consensus politics of the post-war era, followed by both major political parties, meant that new perspectives for examining old economic problems could not be forthcoming. The illusion of continued affluence, as well as the idea of maintaining a world role, were the results of this. But others have argued that while politics may have remained the same, society did not. New beliefs, values, and attitudes began to show themselves. In this way the idea of consensus eventually came into question and the illusion of affluence was also made transparent. However, for the time being, these social changes continued to work in favour of the Tory ascendancy, as people believed that, under their rule, every day, in every way, things were getting better and better. In a speech made in Bedford on 20 July 1957, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan caught, encapsulated and articulated this optimistic mood:

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

When he went to that country in 1959, it was behind the slogan You’ve had it good. Have it better. Vote Conservative! When the Economist took stock of the situation for the Tories in May of that year, what it glimpsed, much to its pleasure, was The Unproletarian Society:

The old-fashioned Conservative is one who looks out at the comforts made achievable by rising incomes and the hire-purchase revolution and who feels vaguely that the workers are unfairly luckier than he was as a boy – that they are getting above their station. The modern Conservative should be one who looks up at the television aerials sprouting above the working-class homes of England, who looks down at the housewives tight slacks on the back of the motor-cycle and family side-car on the summer road to Brighton, and who sees a great poetry in them. For this is what the de-proletarianisation of British Society means; and the changes in social and industrial attitudes of mind it could bring with it are immense.

It was not only Conservatives who took this view. In 1956 Anthony Crosland, in his influential book, The Future of Socialism, recognised much the same trend towards the threshold of the new era of abundance:

 

…even these poorer workers are themselves peering over the threshold; they have accepted the new standards as the social norm, and are already thinking of the day when they too will acquire these goods. All this must have a profound effect on the psychology of the working class.

When the leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, faced the 1959 Conference at Blackpool after the third successive defeat of the traditional party of the working class at the polls, the second under his leadership, he certainly believed that these psychological changes were indeed part of a deep and permanent secular trend:

In short, the changing character of labour, full employment, new housing, the new way of life based on the telly, the fridge, the car and the glossy magazines – all have had their effect on our political strength.

 

Perhaps Gaitskill really did believe that the strong cultural under-currents in British society were pulling the Labour boat out to sea, and that there was little he could do about it, or perhaps he was just a captain looking for the first available port amid a storm of criticism from a potentially mutinous crew. In retrospect, given the deliberate slowing down of the boom of the mid-fifties, the general economic condition of Britain the following year and the forecasts being made for its development, it is difficult to understand how Macmillan could have justified his talk of affluence had Gaitskill sought to expose the illusion. Yet, it seemed, consensus politics even extended to the pretence that the affluent boom could not have been higher. However, the bubble burst soon after the election. When the myths of deproletarianisation and the new era of abundance were exploded with it, the reality was that it was still, fundamentally, the same Britain which had existed a decade before when Orwell was still writing. All that had happened was an era of Newspeak. The proles and the poor were not only still within British society, but the latter were increasing in numbers again: poverty was out there, simply waiting to be rediscovered, as soon became apparent once again. The economic miracle turned out to be no more than a conjuring trick that had everybody fooled for most of the time. The Tories had not only failed to solve the problem of production, but they had also managed to side step what was supposed to be an era of redistribution of wealth.

By the end of the fifties, the American dawn of the Macmillenium had failed to break over Britain. Affluent Britain, successor to Austerity Britain, had proved to be no more than a mood change, not a sea change, as politicians had pretended. The country had risen to a sharp curve of feeling, only to stutter to a halt. There had been signs enough to read. They were, by now, many young, secular new nonconformists who were challenging Macmillan’s establishment mantra, repeated in his January 1961 interview with the Daily Mail, that… We’ve got it good. Let’s keep it good. There is nothing to be ashamed of in that. But had there ever been any substance to Macmillan’s claim, even in places like Bedford? To examine whether there is any local, social and micro-economic evidence for it, I will take up his suggestion by first heading up-country to the industrial areas of the Midlands, before turning east to visit the farms of Suffolk.

 

Certainly, by 1950 Coventry had made so rapid recovery from wartime damage and so smooth a transition to peacetime production of motor cars, that in that year The Financial Times reported that at least half a dozen government ministries were now trying to limit such expansion. The city’s economy was poised for yet another expansionary spurt, which manifested itself in rapid population growth, continuing to add an average of three and a half thousand every year. As in the period of mass immigration from 1926-41, this was essentially a young population, many of whom had come from Wales, Ireland, Scotland and the North of England (now including the North-East), to join relatives and friends already settled in Coventry. The predominant group among the newer migrants were prime aged males in 1951, so that by 1961 there were 21,600 males aged twenty-five to thirty-four in Coventry, representing an increase of fifty per cent, compared with the average figure for England and Wales of only three per cent. However, even this increase was not enough to satisfy the thirst for labour and this in itself helps to explain much of the increase in the occupied population of Coventry between 1951 and 1971.

 

During the early 1950s most British quality cars bore the Coventry seal of Armstrong Siddeley, Alvis, Daimler, Jaguar and Rootes (the latter through its control of Humber). Their combined output was comparatively small, totalling no more than twenty-five thousand vehicles a year, no more than a quarter of the city’s total output. Of this share, Rootes produced over half. By 1960 Armstrong-Siddeley had left the market and Daimler was taken over by Jaguar, which was itself taken over by BMC in 1966. Jaguar’s production tripled over the 1950s and through the purchase of Daimler the company not only gained additional car-producing capacity, but was also enabled to diversify into the profitable bus division. Among the mass-producers, Rootes and Standard remained relatively small compared with Ford and Austin Morris, suffering because of their inability to make the economies of scale which were necessary to compete effectively in this market. Again, in 1959, the Times predicted that such small firms and plant would be unable were bound to suffer more in the event of a serious recession in the motor industry. Both Rootes and Standard were well aware of this problem, spending much of the fifties negotiating with each other, as well as with other firms, for mergers or takeovers. Having itself taken over Singer in 1956, Rootes was then gradually taken over itself by Chrysler in the next decade, while Standard merged with Leyland.

Until the mid-fifties, Coventry’s industrial over-specialisation went relatively unnoticed, except by a few economists writing in The Times and The Financial Times. The motor industry continued to expand and the city continued to act as a magnet to labour from other parts of the UK. In search of secure work and high wages in the city’s burgeoning industries. It was only when the aircraft industry began to contract that a growing awareness began to develop of the narrowness of the industrial base with its increasing over-reliance on the fortunes of the motor industry. This in turn was compounded by the fact that within the British motor industry as a whole Coventry was steadily becoming of less importance as a source of output and coupled with relatively low profits and investment levels, the economy’s stock was slowly ossifying and becoming increasingly inflexible. In the late fifties, the economy still appeared, on the surface, to be as prosperous as Macmillan’s remark suggested. It is easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to regard it as complacent. The incentives to embark on a vast restructuring of industry, whether national or local, were simply not there, especially since the policy of successive governments was to divert industry away from the new industry areas of the interwar period in favour of Britain’s depressed areas, or development areas, as they had been redesignated in the immediate postwar period.

Yet other car towns, notably Birmingham, Cowley, Dagenham and Luton were subjected to similar pressures but retained the bulk of their manufacturing capacity by the end of the seventies. The problem peculiar to Coventry was not only that the local economy became overdependent on the motor industry but that virtually all the automotive firms were, by the 1960s, ill-suited because of their size to survive the increasing competitiveness of the international market. It is no accident that most of what remained of the British motor industry was centred in towns which were dominated by one single large manufacturing plant. A major reason for Coventry’s long boom was the multiplicity of firms in the motor industry, but in the seventies this became the major cause of its decline. The only viable motor car establishment to survive this deep recession was Jaguar.

 

From the industrial Midlands, I next pay a visit to old Macmillan’s farms, or rather to one of the more agricultural areas of England. By the mid-fifties, the people of East Anglia were not yet having it as good as many parts of the Home Counties that Macmillan probably had in mind when he made his famous remark. Then, from the opening of the first stretches of motorway in the winter of 1958/9, including the M1, there was a major improvement in the road network. By 1967 motorways totalled 525 miles in length, at a cost of considerable damage to the environment. Bridges were built over the Forth and Severn between 1964 and 1966. The development of new industries and the growth of the east coast ports necessitated a considerable programme of trunk road improvement. This continued into the mid-seventies at a time when economic stringency was forcing the curtailment of other road building schemes. East Anglia’s new roads were being given priority treatment for the first time. Most of the A12, the London-Ipswich road, was made into dual carriageway. The A45, the artery linking Ipswich and Felixstowe with the Midlands and the major motorways, had been considerably improved. Stowmarket, Bury St Edmunds and Newmarket had been bypassed. By the end of the decade, the A11/M11 London-Norwich road was completed, bringing to an end the isolation of northern and central Suffolk.

The railways were also made more efficient with the closure of almost six thousand miles of track and two thousand stations after the Beeching report of 1963. Thereafter, they concentrated on fast intercity services and bulk-freight transportation. The docks also began to be modernised, with ports like Tilbury and Felixstowe hastening the decline of London, which could not handle containerised freight. In 1955 the Felixstowe Dock and Railway Company had had on its hands a dilapidated dock that needed dredging, and warehouses, quays and sea walls all showing signs of storm damage. The total labour force was nine men. By the mid-seventies the dock area covered hundreds of acres, many reclaimed, made up of spacious wharves, warehouses and storage areas equipped with the latest cargo handling machinery. The transformation began in 1956 as the direct result of foresight and careful planning. The Company launched a three million pound project to create a new deep water berth geared to the latest bulk transportation technique – containerisation. It calculated that changing trading patterns and Felixstowe’s proximity to Rotterdam and Antwerp provided exciting prospects for an efficient, well-equipped port. Having accomplished that, it set aside another eight million for an oil jetty and bulk liquid storage facilities. In addition, a passenger terminal was opened in 1975. The dock soon acquired a reputation for fast, efficient handling of all types of cargo, and consignments could easily reach the major industrial centres by faster road and rail networks.

 

There were many reasons for this unprecedented growth. which brought Suffolk a prosperity unknown since the expansion of the cloth trade from the mid-fourteenth century. As back then, Suffolk’s depression gave a boost to new development. Most of the county was within eighty miles of London and served by improving road and rail connections. Ports like Felixstowe were no further from the capital than those of Kent and they were a great deal closer to the industrial Midlands and the North. Some of Suffolk’s most beautiful countryside was no further from the metropolis than the stockbroker belt of the Home Counties, and yet land and property prices in Suffolk were less than half of what they were there. People were becoming more mobile and light industries were less tied to traditional centres. Companies escaping from high overheads found that they could find both the facilities and labour they needed in Ipswich, Bury, Sudbury and Haverhill. Executives also discovered that they could live in areas of great natural beauty and yet be within commuting distance of their City desks. Moreover, the shift in international trade focused attention once more on the east coast ports. As the Empire was being disbanded and Britain was drawn increasingly towards trade with the European Common Market, producers were looking for the shortest routes to the continent. More and more lorries took to the roads through Suffolk.