State of Emergency: the Way We Were Read online

  Indeed, in many ways Britain still conformed to the stereotype of a nation obsessed with collective membership. One survey estimated that at the dawn of the 1970s, more than half of all adult men and a third of all women belonged to clubs of various kinds. In Birmingham, more than 4,000 active associations – sporting, dancing, educational, social – were recorded during the course of the decade. In Milton Keynes, which had fewer than 100,000 people, there were around 500; in Kingswood, Bristol, with a population of just 85,000, there were some 300. These spanned a wide range, from pony clubs to traditional working men’s clubs. The latter, which really should have died out completely if working-class culture was in such desperate straits, commanded the allegiance of 2 million people at the beginning of the 1970s. In Huddersfield alone, there were seventy working men’s clubs. They had gently changed with the times, admitting women and children, offering billiards, bingo and weekly concerts, and even organizing holidays and trips abroad. But they remained an excellent example of the way in which gradual change could comfortably coexist with reassuring, traditional values. So did the town’s thirty-three bowling clubs, making Crown Green Bowls comfortably Huddersfield’s most popular participatory sport – although because the players tended to be elderly and working-class, many people barely knew it existed.27

  It was not just in working-class areas, of course, that the old ways survived into the world of Brian Clough, Noel Edmonds and The Liver Birds. The diaries of the architectural historian James Lees-Milne, for instance, are famously saturated with anger at social and cultural change. Britain had reverted to a ‘jungle society’, he wrote in the autumn of 1971, which he blamed on the working classes: ‘no loyalties, no gratitude, no morality, no decency.’ Yet his diaries also record a lifestyle that had changed surprisingly little, a world of country-house parties in which women retired from the table while the men lit up and began to complain about Denis Healey’s tax plans. And while Lees-Milne complained that the old values had disappeared, polls do not bear this out. A major Gallup survey of moral attitudes in January 1973 found that two out of three people favoured the death penalty, one out of two believed that the Bible was literally true, one out of two believed that chastity was a virtue, three out of five backed school uniforms, and one in four still believed in innate white superiority. A few months later, marking the thirty-fifth anniversary of its first newspaper poll, Gallup asked people a range of questions from the late 1930s, and found that the answers – on everything from belief in life after death to visiting a dentist, pet ownership, and the desirability of living by the seaside – showed remarkably little change.28

  The point is not that Britain was a stagnant or unchanging society, but that the overall picture was so messy, diverse and variegated that any generalization is bound to be risky. Continuity and change were like two tightly interwoven threads; sometimes one predominated, sometimes the other, usually depending on the viewpoint of the beholder. This was a society that had supposedly thrown off the chains of deference and hierarchy, yet it was also one that voted the Queen the nation’s most admired individual in 1970, tuned in every year for her Christmas message and celebrated her Jubilee in overwhelming numbers. It was the society with the highest divorce rate in Europe, yet it was also one in which couples married earlier than ever and half of all divorcees remarried within five years. It was a society in which a black man captained Britain’s rugby league team to the World Cup and millions enjoyed seeing Muhammad Ali verbally sparring with Michael Parkinson, yet it was one in which Enoch Powell was easily the most popular politician in the country, thanks largely to his position on immigration. It was a society in which only a tiny minority went to church every week, yet it was also one in which almost nine out of ten families had a household Bible.29

  The complications and contradictions of the early 1970s were well illustrated by an article in The Times on 2 January 1973, the day after Britain’s formal accession to the European Economic Community, the outstanding accomplishment of Heath’s premiership. Britain was not what it was, wrote Tom Stacey: ‘Our leaders have for some time done their best to unpick the only context of allegiance in which they can appeal to us – by flooding us with exotic immigrants [and] emasculating us with welfare and taxes.’ As a result, Britain presented ‘an image today of unprecedented sloth, selfishness, envy, greed, insularity and presumption’, quite a charge sheet. And yet Stacey thought that people still talked about ‘our nation’ and ‘know what they mean’. National identity still depended on ‘our inherited characteristics, our shared heroes, our victories and our defeats. Drake, Wellington, Churchill. The defeat of the Armada, Waterloo, Dunkirk, Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy.’ And people still responded to qualities that George Orwell would have recognized: ‘our sense of fair play, and a very high grade of humour, law, government, horticulture and breakfast’.30

  And since any account of the 1970s is necessarily dominated by everything that went wrong – bombs, strikes, riots, disasters – it is worth emphasizing that for most people, these things happened offstage. For the typical family, if there really was such a thing, there was much to lament but also much to enjoy in the everyday experience of 1970s life, from colour television and foreign holidays to the pleasures of the garden and the enjoyment of a good wine. One survey in 1972 found that almost nine out of ten were either ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with their jobs, while eight out of ten were satisfied with their living conditions. Asked in 1975 whether Britain was a good country to grow up in, 84 per cent agreed that it was, a verdict often borne out by the rose-tinted recollections of twenty-first-century adults trembling with nostalgic delight at the thought of chopper bikes and Bagpuss. And even people now remembered as the victims of history, like the Durham miners interviewed by New Society in 1978, regarded themselves as fortunate to be enjoying such expanded opportunities and new horizons. ‘There’s more money through our hands,’ one explained. ‘A miner’s nowadays got a car, a caravan, a garden, things like that. We’re beginning to enjoy ourselves and get about.’31

  At a time when most American correspondents were gleefully wallowing in the miserable condition of Britain’s economy, the corruption of its leaders and the greed of its workers, the Washington Post’s Bernard Nossiter sounded a salutary dissenting note. Despite all the fuss about strikes and violence, he wrote that same year, Britain remained a remarkably stable, polite and tolerant society, marked by its strong sense of ‘fair play and justice’. True, it was a long way from being the New Jerusalem: its inflation and unemployment figures were appalling, the political consensus seemed to have collapsed, and there was a sense of growing tension between working-class whites and their immigrant neighbours. But it was far from the ‘sinking, chaotic, miserable swamp’ of American caricatures, Nossiter wrote. ‘Britain is a solid, healthy society, bursting with creative vigour.’32

  As historians often point out, many of the things popularly associated with the 1960s, from feminism and pornography to gay rights and flared trousers, did not become familiar elements of British life until the following decade. There was far more continuity between these two supposedly so different episodes in post-war history than we often remember; it is not as though, as the clock tolled midnight on New Year’s Eve 1969, people everywhere threw away their silver lipstick, ditched their copies of With the Beatles, dug out their donkey jackets and headed to the nearest brazier to hurl abuse at passing lorry drivers.

  One very marked difference, however, was the almost total disappearance of that supremely fashionable media catchphrase of the mid-1960s, the classless society. At the height of the Swinging London boom – which was merely an embarrassing memory by the time Edward Heath arrived at Number 10 – no self-respecting newspaper had failed to enthuse about the classless Britain spearheaded by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. ‘People like me, we’re the moderns,’ the actor Terence Stamp modestly explained. ‘We have no class and no prejudice.’ Journalists were quick to endorse the idea: the young Jonathan Ait
ken, for instance, wrote in 1967 that Britain had seen the appearance of a new ‘talent class’, in which birth and breeding were irrelevant and only ability mattered – although since some of his examples included the young Norman Lamont and Michael Winner, this was surely a bit dubious. The ‘ancient partitions’ had been ‘swept away’, agreed David Frost and Antony Jay that same year: ‘Mr Edward Heath takes over from the fourteenth Earl of Home: the clubs of St. James’s yield to the coffee houses of Chelsea; Carnaby Street usurps Savile Row; Liverpudlian pop stars weekend at ducal castles; dukes go out to work; ancient universities welcome upstart sons of hobnailed workmen. The bad old system is smashed … The three great classes melt and mingle. And a new Britain is born.’33

  This was utter nonsense, of course. British politics and culture in the 1970s were saturated in class-consciousness; indeed, it is astonishing to reflect how little the affluent society had affected people’s sense of their own place within a social and economic hierarchy. Edward Heath, supposedly a representative of the new classlessness, was actually an excellent example of the survival of class distinctions. When he was hailed as the first Tory leader with wall-to-wall carpeting, the message was not that he was classless, but that his class background – modest, provincial, not gilded by money or family connections – made him different from other senior Conservatives. Indeed, Heath’s palpable insecurity about his background was a sign of how much class distinctions still mattered. As his biographer remarks, one reason his leadership of the party in the late 1960s had been such a nightmare was that the landed interests who dominated rural Tory associations were not impressed by his awkward manner and odd accent, so he never enjoyed the automatic respect given to his predecessors.34

  ‘The class system is alive and well and living in people’s minds in England,’ wrote Jilly Cooper in her humorous investigation into class at the end of the 1970s. It was a messy and confusing concept, she admitted, but it pervaded everything: family, homes, religion, sex, food, drink, dress, language, the arts, even death and gardening. What nobody could agree, however, was what it really meant. During the 1950s, a popular formula had been to divide people into ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’, but by the 1970s this had rather fallen out of vogue. Many analysts now used the National Readership Study’s social grading system, which in 1976 put 16 per cent in the A and B categories (upper-middle- and middle-class), 21 per cent in the C1 category (lower-middle-class), 35 per cent in the C2 bracket (skilled working-class), and 28 per cent in the D and E categories (unskilled workers and the very poorest). This was an attractive formula, making allowances for the pronounced gaps between different kinds of middle-class or working-class families, but it did not exactly catch on with the public at large; nobody ever referred to himself as a C2. Instead, people continued to shift between different models of class: the rich versus the rest, or middle-class versus working-class. In 1966, one survey found that 67 per cent called themselves working-class and 30 per cent middle-class, the rest denying they belonged anywhere. But in October 1974, Gallup produced very different results: 0.3 per cent upper-class, 2.3 per cent upper-middle-class, 30.9 per cent middle-class, 11.9 per cent lower-middle-class, and 49 per cent working-class. It is hard to believe that people’s identities could have changed so much in just eight years; more plausibly, their answers simply depended on what they were asked.35

  Class was not static, of course, and there were plenty of examples of mobility and change. Pop and rock stars who bought country houses and lived like eighteenth-century lords of the manor defied easy classification; so too did the affluent Tottenham Hotspur footballers, all from working-class backgrounds, whom Hunter Davies observed ‘dripping with rings and jewellery’ in their flashy evening suits (‘brocade lapels, satin collars, embroidered jackets and shirts in every colour and material’) at a club dinner in 1972. To make things more confusing, from the early 1960s onwards middle-class youngsters often adopted regional accents or proletarian idioms as a way of annoying their parents and proclaiming their own progressive credentials, following in the footsteps of rock stars like Mick (formerly Mike) Jagger or Jimmy Page, whose accents moved suspiciously down the social ladder after their boyhood appearances on television. Welcoming his great-nephews to lunch in 1972, James Lees-Milne was shocked to find that they had ‘that fashionable cockney accent which is so odd in children of their upbringing. Winchester of all correct schools too.’ Wondering why ‘upper-class boys have to speak like the lower classes’, he concluded that ‘they hear it spoken all around them, and imitate it like parrots’.36

  Despite what had been claimed in the mid-1960s, birth, accent and education still mattered enormously. ‘Class-based inequality persists,’ reported the eminent sociologist A. H. Halsey in 1981, with ‘the top half of the population receiving three quarters of all personal income, the bottom half one quarter’, and the richest 20 per cent owning three-quarters of all the nation’s personal wealth. But of course class was about more than just money. In the 1971 edition of his bestselling Anatomy of Britain series, Anthony Sampson noted that there were 65 Old Etonians in the House of Commons, accounting for 22 per cent of Heath’s new government. Oxbridge, meanwhile, maintained its ‘special hold’ over Westminster, Whitehall, Fleet Street and the BBC, providing 26 of the civil service’s 30 permanent secretaries, and 250 out of 630 members of Parliament. Of Heath’s seventeen-person Cabinet, all but three had been to Oxford or Cambridge. Indeed, one college alone dominated political life in the 1970s: not only had Heath and Healey been Balliol undergraduates, but so had Labour’s deputy leader Roy Jenkins, the former Liberal leader Jo Grimond, the liberal Tory grandee Sir Ian Gilmour, the leading Labour moderate Dick Taverne, and the editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg. Sampson thought it seemed ‘more like a cult than a college’. Reflecting on the late Lord Samuel’s quip that life was ‘one Balliol man after another’, he concluded: ‘It still is.’37

  On the streets of West Yorkshire, a long way from the quadrangles of Oxford, class was no less powerful a force. In his book on working-class Huddersfield, Brian Jackson found it in the ‘wage structure and the chain of authority’ in the mills and the pompous letters sent by council officials to working men’s clubs. ‘Just about everything,’ agreed the Financial Times’s Joe Rogaly ten years later, ‘from the newspapers we read through the food we eat to the holiday we take is differentiated by class.’ Every government statistic was steeped in it: the lower down the scale people were, the more likely they were to have long-standing illnesses, to suffer accidents at work, to die young, even to smoke. Researchers in Nottingham found that even at 4, the middle-class child was much more likely to be talked to at mealtimes and read to at bedtime. At 7, he was much more likely to be taken to the cinema, the library, museums and concerts, to read, paint and draw at home, and to be helped with his homework. And he was much less likely to be smacked; middle-class parents were more likely to reason with him, rather than threaten or beat him. Perhaps it was hardly surprising that youth culture, just like that of adults, was deeply divided by class. A teenager who wore his hair cropped short, spent his Saturdays cheering on Kevin Keegan and John Toshack, and spent his earnings on Slade and Black Sabbath records, probably had very little in common with one who grew his hair, affected vaguely countercultural fashions, and spent his days listening to In the Court of the Crimson King or Tales from Topographical Oceans.38

  In the late 1950s, Richard Hoggart had colourfully evoked Britain’s deep class resentment in a passage describing ‘them’ from the perspective of ‘us’. ‘They’ were ‘the people at the top’, the ‘higher-ups’, the people who handed out doles and National Service call-ups: they ‘aren’t really to be trusted’, ‘talk posh’, ‘are all twisters really’, ‘never tell yer owt’, ‘clap yer in clink’, ‘will do y’ down if they can’, ‘summons yer’, ‘are all in a click together’, ‘treat y’ like muck’. At the time, this sounded outdated: surely all this was being swept away by the great tides of state education, social mobility
and consumer spending? Quite the reverse, in fact, for as the promise of full employment and rising wages turned sour, people fell back on the language and concepts of class conflict. The obvious contrast was with the United States, where political vocabulary in the 1970s reverted to an almost classless anti-Washington populism that had no real British equivalent. The Britain of Edward Heath and Denis Healey was one in which the language and concepts of class came quickly to the tongue. And just as James Lees-Milne was quick to blame the working classes when things went wrong, so many Labour MPs keenly embraced the rhetoric of class warfare.39

  Few readers could have been surprised, for example, by the guest column one Labour MP wrote for The Times in December 1976, entitled ‘Why there must be no truce in the class war’. A former politics lecturer and author of Socialism Since Marx, he explained that the Labour Party was unashamedly a ‘class party’, founded ‘by and for the working class to protect and advance its interests’. Radical redistribution of wealth and power, he said, was not ‘the politics of envy’ but ‘the politics of justice’, for class distinctions ‘poison every aspect of our lives, and it is a class war we are fighting’. And blaming Labour for dividing society was wrong, for ‘it is divided already. Nowhere is this more clear than in the factories where manual workers enter by one gate, eat in segregated canteens and work longer hours in worse conditions than their “betters”.’ It was for them that he was fighting, ‘and only if we win shall we have a civilized society’. Reading such stirring words, few people could then have imagined that Robert Kilroy-Silk would end up smothering himself with cockroaches to amuse the viewers of ITV.40