A Brief History of the Relationship between Judaism and Christianity over Two Millennia.

In addition to researching the relationship between Christians and Jews in the time when the New Testament was written, and in the millenarian movements of medieval Europe, I found an article summarising the relationship since the first century, by H L Ellison. It helps to fill some of the gaps between the apocalyptic literature of the first century and the twentieth century.

At first, Christians were regarded as a Jewish sect by both Jews and Gentiles. This led to opposition and persecution of the church by the Jewish authorities, who objected to its doctrines and the admission of Gentiles without their accepting the Law. Yet since Jews were also already scattered in communities throughout the Empire and beyond, they provided Christian missionaries with an entry into the Gentile world. Since the first of these, like Paul and other apostles, were Jews, they used the synagogues, both inside and outside Judaea and Palestine as ready-made centres for evangelism. Paul regularly used the local synagogue as the starting point for bringing the gospel to a new place.

Recent archaeological evidence at Capernaum and elsewhere in Palestine supports the view that early Christians were allowed to use the synagogues for their own meetings for worship. Although most of their fellow Jews remained unconverted, many God-fearing Gentiles, who were attracted to Judaism but had not gone through the ritual of total integration into the Jewish community, became Christian converts. In fact, in spite of the growing divergence between the church and the synagogue, the Christian communities worshipped and operated essentially as Jewish synagogues for more than a generation.

Apart from the period of the Jewish wars, the Roman Empire enjoyed three hundred years of peace and general prosperity. This was known as the Pax Romana, the Roman peace. It allowed both Christians and Jews great freedom to travel throughout the Mediterranean world along superbly engineered roads and under the protection of the Roman government. Paul was able to do this until the final years of his life, but he was only the first of many missionaries. Equally, pilgrims to Jerusalem were able to travel in the opposite direction.

This was part of the reason why Paul emphasised the importance of good government, but once Christianity began to diverge, Christians lost the special privileges given to Jews. Jews were specially exempted from taking part in the cult of emperor-worship. Christians also sought this exemption, since they recognised only one God and served one Lord, Jesus Christ. But when the Church became largely composed of Gentiles, it was no longer possible to shelter under the wing of Judaism. Christians refused to offer a pinch of incense on the altar to the divine Emperor, and this was interpreted as being unpatriotic since most people saw it as purely symbolic of loyalty to the Empire. As a result, the Roman attitude to the Christians became less favourable, as they became known for their ‘anti-social’ practices in worship gatherings held now in homes, rather than synagogues. Emperor Nero (54-68) used this developing prejudice against them in order to carry out massacres against them in July 64, scapegoating them for the burning of Rome.

After the Jewish revolts against Rome (AD 66-73) most Christians dissociated themselves from the Jews. The Jewish Christians’ refusal to support the revolts caused them to be regarded as national enemies, at least within Judaea. From this time onwards few Jews were converted to Christianity, as a result. After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70, Jews took strong action against Christians in their midst, and anti-Christian additions were made to the synagogue prayers. Although there were Jewish Christians throughout the second century, few of these remained in Jerusalem or Judaea. They had already moved to more northern parts of Palestine by the end of the first century. Increasingly, and especially when the church was recognised by Constantine following his conversion in 312, becoming the accepted state religion by the end of the fourth century, Christians saw in the refusal of the Jews to convert a deliberate hatred of the ‘gospel’ of Jesus Christ. Legal discrimination against them gradually increased, until they were deprived of all rights. Until the time of the French Revolution, there was no distinction between the attitude of the Church and the State towards the Jews.

In the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, the Jews were exposed to constant harassment, frequent expulsions and periodic massacres. One of the worst examples of the latter occurred, as I have written about elsewhere, during the First Crusade (1096-99) and again in 1320 when Christian millenarianism was at its most vocal and violent. The Jews were banished from England in 1290, from France in 1306, 1322 and finally in 1394. They were given the choice between converting to Christianity or banishment or a violent death. In Spain, the massacres of 1391 led to many ‘Marranos’ to accept Christianity, though often only in name. The Inquisition investigated, with all its horrors, the genuineness of their faith. Only in the Moorish Kingdom of Granada were they treated with tolerance and respect, until they were finally expelled even from there, together with their Muslim defenders, in 1492. Throughout the medieval period, contacts between Christians and Jews were minimal, except when the latter were being massacred. Those who survived these massacres were forced to wear distinctive dress and to live in special streets or districts known as ghettos.

 

The Renaissance and Reformation enabled a few more learned Christians to revise their opinions and to adopt a more enlightened view of Judaism. But even a theologian like Martin Luther (pictured above) made bitter and despicable attacks on them. In one particularly vulgar tract, he recommended that all the Jews be deported to Palestine. Failing that, they should be forbidden to practise usury, compelled to earn their living on the land, their synagogues should be burned and their books, including the Torah, should be taken away from them. Eventually, Jews were allowed to settle in the more liberal and tolerant Netherlands in 1598, in Hamburg in 1612 and in England in 1656 during Oliver Cromwell’s ‘Commonwealth’.

From 1354, Poland was the chief centre of European Jewry. As the country grew weaker, the Jews were increasingly subjected to the hatred of the Roman Catholic Church and the hostility of the people. When, after 1772, Poland was partitioned, most Polish Jews found themselves under either Roman Catholic Austria or Orthodox Russia. Economic pressure and the Russian massacres (the ‘pogroms’ of 1881-1914) led to the exodus of nearly two million Jews from eastern Europe, mainly to the United States. Meanwhile, the ‘Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century brought a new attitude towards the Jews throughout most of Europe. In opposing traditional Christian doctrine, many thinkers also attacked long-held prejudices against the Jews. This led to the complete emancipation of French Jews during the French Revolution (1790). By 1914, emancipation had occurred throughout Europe up to the frontiers of the Russian Empire and the Balkan States. In every nation-state, the Jews became fully integrated into mainstream society. Nevertheless, Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian Jew who came to prominence at the end of the nineteenth century, could foresee that this ‘happy’ situation was only a temporary respite from persecution, and therefore began the Zionist movement, demanding a national homeland for the Jewish people.

The first real missionary concern for Jews since the days of the early church was shown by the Moravians and the German Pietists in the first half of the eighteenth century. But there was no major advance until Jewish missions were started in the Church of England in 1809, among Presbyterians in Scotland in 1840, and in the Free Churches in 1842 throughout Britain and Ireland. This general missionary movement spread to other Protestant countries such as Norway. The mass exodus of Jews from eastern Europe to America resulted in further missionary work there. Some Roman Catholics also sought to evangelise among Jews. Most of the converts, however, belonged to the secular fringes of Jewry. This was partly due to the bitter individual, familial and collective memories of the past which meant that the majority of Jews had a deep-seated suspicion of both the motivations of the missionaries and that, even where trust existed, they remained sceptical that attitudes among the general Christian population had really changed.

Of course, Jewish people were proved to be justified in their scepticism. Political acceptance of Jews did not remove the deep-seated popular prejudice with which they were still confronted as a people. This had reasserted itself as early as 1878 when a movement of Antisemitism soon spread throughout the ‘civilised world’. Even in the United States, where the Jews had never been discriminated against, antisemitic feeling took root, often accompanying anti-German feeling in the First World War. In Germany and central Europe, it was given expression by the growth of popular nationalism and anti-communist feeling, and in the rise of National Socialism in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, which led on to Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’, a ‘Holocaust’ (‘Shoah’ in Hebrew) in which six million Jews, a third of world Jewry, perished. Among those who tried to save Jews from persecution and deportation were many devout and sincere Christians, and their commitment has since been recognised throughout the world, and especially in Israel. Since 1939-45 and the Holocaust, Christians have tended to stress mutual understanding, the removal of prejudices and inter-faith dialogue rather than attempting a direct missionary approach, although some extreme evangelical churches in the United States have recently developed a ‘Christian Zionist’ movement, based on literal interpretations of the apocalyptic literature of the Bible and those ‘prophecies’ which point to the mass conversion of the Jews, and their return to Israel as a pre-requisite for the Second Coming of Jesus as Messiah at the ‘End of Times’. Most ‘mainstream’ churches reject these extreme interpretations, though politicians have been keen to take advantage of them, both in the USA and Israel. At the same time, especially throughout Europe, there has been a further rise in antisemitism, particularly in relation to the ongoing Arab-Israeli Conflict although Arabs, like Jews, are themselves Semitic in ethnic origin. The rise of ‘militant’ Islam has been a major factor in this.

Source:

John H Y Briggs, et. al. (eds.) (1977),  The History of Christianity. Berkhamsted: Lion Publishing.  

The Failed Coup that ended Communist Rule

In August, holiday-time, Gorbachev went to his villa at Foros on the Black Sea. In June the old-guard Communists had tried, unsuccessfully, to unseat him by constitutional means in the Congress of People’s Deputies. Now they attempted to remove him by force. In Moscow, early in the morning of 19 August, as Gorbachev’s holiday was drawing to a close, radio and tv began broadcasting a statement by the State Committee for the State of Emergency. It claimed that the President was ill and unable to perform his duties; Vice-President Yanayev had assumed the powers of the Presidency, and a state of emergency had been declared. It was a coup, but to the ordinary citizens of Moscow and Leningrad, this was, as yet, unclear. Information about Gorbachev’s whereabouts and state of health was hard to come by. The television schedule kept changing, with the ballet Swan Lake replacing the usual diet of news bulletins.

The true story was that the previous day, Sunday 18th August, a delegation from Moscow had arrived at the seaside villa to see Gorbachev. Before they were admitted, he tried to telephone out, but the phone lines had already been cut. At sea, naval craft manoeuvred menacingly near the shore. The conspirators pushed their way in: Oleg Baklanov, Gorbachev’s deputy at the Defence Council; Party Secretary Oleg Shenin; Deputy Defence Minister General Valentin Varennikov; Gorbachev’s Chief of Staff, Valery Boldin. They tried to force the President to approve the declaration of a state of emergency, to resign and to hand over his authority to Yanayev. Gorbachev refused, for to do otherwise would have legitimised the plot. They put him under house arrest, cut off from communication with the outside world, and left.

The plotters included several other members of the government: Prime Minister Pavlov; KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov; Interior Minister Pugo; Minister of Defence Minister Dmitry Yazov. Most of them had been urging Gorbachev for months to impose emergency rule. Now they imposed it themselves, and hoped he would go along with it. He had underestimated their strength; they had underestimated their his determination to resist. His refusal to give in was brave, but the real struggle was to be in Moscow.

In every Moscow ministry and in the republics, every civil servant had to make up his or her mind what to do. Most temporised and waited to see how things would turn out. Enough of them, together with those in the military and the KGB refused to obey orders from the Emergency Committee to ensure that the coup would not succeed. Gorbachev’s insistence on moving towards democracy was paying off. Resistance was led from the White House, the seat of the Russian Parliament, by Boris Yeltsin. Usually at odds with Gorbachev, stood firm. He denounced the coup and those behind it, rallying support for legitimate government and a liberal future rather than a return to the dark ages of totalitarian tyranny. He called for a general strike, so that those who had the courage to support him went to the White House, ringed by troops and tanks, to declare their support. Eduard Shevardnadze was one of the first to arrive.

President Bush was also on holiday in Kennebunkport in Maine, where he had gone to bed on the Sunday night of Gorbachev’s ‘arrest’. When the telephone rang with the news from Moscow, he faced a classic diplomatic dilemma as to what he would say in his statement early the next day. It was agreed that he would talk to the press early the next morning, and he met them at eight, praising Gorbachev as a “historic figure”, hedging on Yanayev and stopping short of outright denunciation when he called the seizure of power “extra-constitutional.” He insisted that the US reaction would aim not to “over-excite the American people or the world… we will conduct our diplomacy in a prudent fashion, not driven by excess.” It was not much more than wait and see.

At Foros, the Gorbachevs were listening to events in Moscow on the BBC World Service, using a transistor radio which their captors had failed to confiscate. Raisa recorded her indignation in her diary at the reporting on state television. Kazakhstan’s President, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was reported to have appealed to the people of his republic “to remain calm and cool and maintain public order. She noted that there was “not a word about the ousting of the President of the USSR.” Her husband sent a message to Yanayev: Cancel what you’ve done and convene the Congress of People’s Deputies or the USSR’s Supreme Soviet.

On the night of 20 August, the first blood was spilt. Three young men were killed by armoured personnel carriers moving towards the White House in support of the coup. Had the Emergency Committee been more resolute, many more lives would certainly have been lost. They were hesitant, however, unsure of themselves and their supporters, perhaps even of their cause. The coup had already failed, but in the rest of eastern Europe and beyond, this had not become clear. In Hungary, many families were away from home at their weekend houses, enjoying St Stephen’s Day, the national holiday and listening occasionally to their transistors, dreading the prospect that the recently withdrawn Soviet troops would soon be rolling back into their country, as they had done in 1956. I remember being on holiday with my father-in-law, who was firm in his view that this was more than a possibility if the coup succeeded.

It was announced the following day that a delegation would be permitted to leave Moscow for the Crimea to see for themselves that Gorbachev was gravely ill. At Foros this caused alarm. The couple was already boiling all the food they were given in case of poisoning. Would the plotters now try to make to make their statements come true and somehow bring about Gorbachev’s death? Meanwhile, back in Moscow, crowds surrounded the Russian Parliament building, where Boris Yeltsin led the resistance against the unconstitutional coup (pictured above). The delegation, which actually wanted to negotiate, reached Foros at 5 p.m. and asked to see Gorbachev. It included Kryuchkov, Yazov, Baklanov, and Anatoli Lukyanov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet. Gorbachev refused to see them until proper communications were restored. At 5:45 p.m., the telephones were reconnected. Gorbachev rang Yeltsin who said:

Mikhail Sergeyevich, my dear man, are you alive? We have been holding firm here for forty-eight hours.

Shortly afterwards, a Russian delegation arrived, led by Alexander Rutskoi, Yeltsin’s Vice-President, to bring Gorbachev and his family back to Moscow. Without packing, they prepared to leave. Later, Kryuchkov wrote to Gorbachev, expressing remorse; Yazov, with his excellent military record, confessed that he had made an ass of himself; Lukyanov had no good answer to Gorbachev’s question: “Why did you not exercise your own constitutional powers?” In Moscow, Yanayev took to the bottle; Pugo shot his wife and then himself when the loyalists came to arrest him; Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, Gorbachev’s military advisor, also committed suicide. He left a note stating, “everything I have worked for is being destroyed.” Bessmertnykh, who had been careful not to commit himself either way, had to resign. When Gorbachev returned to Moscow on 22 August, he made a spontaneous statement:

I have come back from Foros to another country, and I myself am a different man now.

However, the restored President soon gave the impression that he thought things could carry on as before, even reaffirming his belief in the Communist Party and its renewal. This was not what many in Moscow needed to hear as, on 23 August, Gorbachev was first jeered in the Russian Parliament and then humiliated when Yeltsin, without warning, put into his hand a set of minutes he had not seen before  and forced him to read them out loud on live television.  The document implicated his own Communist colleagues in the coup against him. Yeltsin was now in charge in Moscow and both Russian viewers and  US diplomats watching these pictures knew that Gorbachev was finished, destroyed by a failed coup.

By this time, Gorbachev had also lost power away from Moscow, in the republics. On the 20 and 21 August, Estonia and Latvia declared independence, joining Lithuania, which had declared its freedom from the USSR in 1990, which it now reaffirmed. The republics of Ukraine, Belarus, Moldavia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kirghizia, Tadzhikistan, and Armenia, all followed suit soon after. On 24 August, Gorbachev resigned as leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, disbanding the Central Committee. On 29 August, the Soviet Communist Party effectively dissolved itself.  After seven decades, Soviet Communism, as an ideology and a political organism, was on its death-bed. Meanwhile, the Russian tricolour was paraded in mourning for those few who died during the failed coup.

Source:

Jeremy Isaacs & Taylor Downing (1998), Cold War. London: Transworld Publishers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Conquest (Settlement of the Magyars in Hungary) Magyar: Magyar: Honfoglalás (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

PPP: When Was Hungary

• Pre-history: It is generally believed that, during the Third Millenium BC, the Finno-Ugric group of languages originated with the ancient tribes living in the area to the west of the Ural mountains in the central-northern modern day Russian Federation. Of these surviving modern languages, Finnish and Estonian are believed to be, related to Hungarian. Before the arrival of the Slavic peoples in modern Russia, speakers of Finno-Ugric languages may have been scattered over the whole area between the Urals and the Baltic.

•  A.D. 406-453: Attila the Hun, who built up a powerful empire in Eurasia, has been wrongly assumed to be an ancestral ruler of the Hungarians. The name ’Hungary’ comes from the seventh century, when Magyar tribes settled in the former land of the Bulgar-Turkish alliance of the On-Ongour, meaning ’Ten Arrows’ in Turkish, or ’Ten Tribes’. There were several tribes bearing this name living between the Dneyper and Volga rivers from the fifth to the ninth centuries, mixing with the Magyars. The terms spread into French and German through the Latin, Hungaricus, in the seventh century, and led to the confusion of the Magyars with the Huns, since Attila had occupied the Carpathian basin before the arrival of the Magyars.

• A.D. 896: The Magyars established one of the first unified countries of Europe, before the establishment of the early French  and German kingdoms and the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Árpád united the Magyar tribes in the Covenant of Blood, effectively creating one nation (though it wasn’t recognised as such) in the plains and hills surrounded by the Carpathian mountains.

• A.D. 955: Battle of Lechfield – the quick Hungarian (Magyar) horsemen were defeated by the heavy German cavalry. The nomadic tribes settled in the Carpathian ’basin’, beginning to farm the land. This was followed by stability and the adoption of Christianity with the foundation of a kingdom.

• 1000: Hungary was established as a Roman Catholic kingdom, recognised by Papal authority, in December of that year, with Vajk, baptised and re-named Stephen (István), receiving the Holy Crown as Stephen I. His kingdom was three times the size of the country determined by the Trianon Peace Treaty of 1920.

• 1222: Andrew II introduced the first constitution in Europe, called The Golden Bull (seven years after the Magna Carta in England). It limited the King’s power and declared the lesser noblemen equal to the magnates. They were also entitled to petition the monarch with their grievances, leading to the institution of parliament. Medieval Hungary controlled more territory than medieval France, and its population was the third-largest in Europe.

• 1526-70: Following the defeat and death of King Louis II at the Battle of Mohács, a large part of Hungarian territory was occupied by the Ottoman Empire for 150 years, with the area to the west of the Danube becoming part of the Habsburg Empire. The Ottoman sultan recognised János Szapolyai as the heir to the Hungarian throne, but many of the Hungarian nobles favoured the the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand of Austria, in their resistance to Turkish rule. For more than a decade there was a civil war between the forces of the two kings. This ended with the capture of Buda by Suleiman II and the division of Hungary into three parts. In the west, Ferdinand continued to rule less than one third of the old kingdom, while in the east there was a vassil state of the Ottomans, which became a new Hungarian state, Transylvania, by the Treaty of Speyer of 1570. The third part, the central plain, was ruled directly and extended gradually by the sultan until 1568, when the Treaty of Adrianople determined its borders.

• 1606-64: By the early seventeenth century, the Turkish hold on central Hungary was weakening. Transylvania emerged as an important and prosperous European power, ruled by Prince Bethlen Gábor (1613-29) (picture below). He was a staunch defender of Calvinism in central Europe during the Thirty Years’ War, but was also tolerant of other churches and religions. His influence, and that of his successor, György I Rákóczi meant that the Habsburgs couldn’t enforce the Counter-Reformation as brutally in the parts of Hungary they controlled as they did elsewhere. However, in 1657 the army of György II Rákóczi was destroyed by the Tartars while attempting to seize the crown of Poland. The Turks took advantage of this defeat by invading the Principality, seizing the western part, including the town of Várad. The  Habsburgs then won a surprise victory against the Turks, but the latter kept most of their gains under the settlement of Vasvár of 1664.

• 1678-1699: A young Transylvanian, Imre Thököly, raised the standard of revolt and occupied a large part of central Hungary. The Turks sent a huge army into Hungary in 1683, laying siege to Vienna, and putting the whole balance of power in Europe under pressure. However, the siege was lifted by September, 1683, due to the intervention of King Jan Sobieski of Poland, and by 1699 the Imperial forces swept the Turks out Buda (picture below) and most of Hungary, including the whole of Transylvania, which the Habsburgs now annexed.

• 1703-1711: Ferenc II Rákóczi of Transylvania (below), led a peasants revolt to drive the Hapsburgs out of his homeland. He had hoped for French support, but France had been defeated at the Battle of Blenheim by the Anglo-Austrian coalition in the War of the Spanish Succession. Any chance of a reconciliation with Vienna was destroyed by Rákóczi’s election as Prince by the Transylvanian nobles in 1704. The Principality became independent until the revolt was finally put down in 1711.

• 1718-1775: The Habsburgs gradually freed Hungarian lands in the east from Ottoman rule, but tried to keep them for themselves by creating a new crownland, which they named the Banat of Temesvár. However, in 1775 the Hungarian Diet persuaded them to return this land to Hungarian civil administration. Transylvania retained a separate status, though strongly Hungarian in character. The old borderlands of Hungary were governed by Transylvania until 1732, when an Imperial agreement allowed both countries to retain a share of them, while the Transylvanian borderlands to the east remained under Habsburg military administration.

• 1780-1835: Hungary’s relationship with the Austrian monarchy had always been, in Hungarian eyes at least, a voluntary one. In the 1780s and thereafter, the attempts of Joseph II and his successors to Germanise the Magyars had met with resistance. The abolition of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 ended any territorial ambitions the Habsburgs had to expand northwest into Germany, opening the way for Prussia to assert its dominance among the German states. The Empire they were left with was a denial of the fashionable nineteenth-century doctrine of national self-determination.

• 1835-1848: Ferdinand V’s subjects spoke more than twelve different languages and belonged to four major churches, Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist and Orthodox, as well as Judaism. The Emperor could not ignore demands for language rights and religious freedoms. Although the plains of Hungary were largely monolingual, most parts of the Austrian Empire contained a mixture of peoples and languages. The Slav minorities began to assert their own identities through new national literatures, music and political organisations. Tensions between Vienna and Budapest over the Hungarians’ demands for Home Rule made relations with other nationalities still more complex. The Hungarians wanted control over all the traditional territories of their crown, and were themselves unwilling to extend equal political rights to the mix of Slavs which these lands contained. It was against this background that a series of national-liberal revolutions broke out around and within the Empire in 1848, spreading throughout Central Europe.

Sources:

Géza Balázs (1997), The Story of Hungarian: A Guide to the Language. Budapest: Corvina Books.

András Bereznay, et.al. (2002), The Times History of Europe: Three Thousand Years of History in Maps. London: Times Books (Harper-Collins).

György Bolgár (2009), Made in Hungary. Budapest: Kossuth Publishing Corporation.

István Lázár (1968, 1996), Hungary: A Brief History. Budapest: Corvina Books.

István Lázár (1989), An Illustrated History of Hungary. Budapest: Corvina Books.

István Lázár (2001), A Brief History of Hungary with Sixty-two Pictures in Colour. Budapest: Corvina.

István Gombás (2000), Kings and Queens of Hungary; Princes of Transylvania. Budapest: Corvina.

Péter Hanak, et. al. (1988), One Thousand Years: A Concise History of Hungary. Budapest: Corvina.

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