State of Emergency: the Way We Were Read online

  Yet Kilroy-Silk’s analysis certainly resonated with millions of his countrymen, men such as Doug Peach, a 57-year-old shop steward at the Black Country car-parts plant of Rubery Owen. Like so many firms in the mid-1970s, Rubery Owen was plagued by strikes, and in September 1975 its tribulations were the basis for a special feature in the American magazine Time. A family business founded in 1893, Rubery Owen now comprised seven different companies in twenty countries, but had never lost its paternalistic ethos. What fascinated Time, though, was the deep contrast between the lives and values of Doug Peach, representing the workers, and John Owen, the 35-year-old son and grandson of directors, and now managing director in his turn.

  On a typical morning, John Owen left his 16-acre estate at around 8.30 for the short drive to work. He lived in the village of Knowle, 25 miles from the plant, in a rambling, rose-covered sixteenth-century house surrounded by spacious lawns, well-tended flower beds, a small pond and a paddock for Granby, the family pony. Owen, who had played rugby for England and would later become a senior figure in the Rugby Football Union, had three children; on the day Time’s reporter visited, his daughters were looking forward to their morning’s riding lessons from their ‘handsome blonde mother’, while Owen dropped his son off at his private day school on the way to work. With a salary of around £14,200 a year (perhaps £175,000 today), a stylish red Jaguar convertible, an enviable home life in unspoilt countryside and a senior position in his beloved family firm, he was a handsome, confident man, wanting for very little, sure of his place near the top of the social pyramid.

  Doug Peach’s typical day began rather differently, with a cup of tea in his two-bedroom terraced house in Bloxwich, close to the factory. His four sons all worked for Rubery Owen; his wife Hilda ran a textile stall in Wednesfield market. The son and grandson of Black Country welders, Peach had been invalided out of Dunkirk and worked as a welder before becoming shop steward, for which he earned some £4,000 a year. ‘Barrel-chested and brisk-gaited’, giving his height as ‘five foot bugger all’, he was a man of traditional tastes. In the evenings, after work, he liked to feed his chickens and inspect his tomatoes, cucumbers and onions. ‘They are my pride and joy,’ he explained. ‘I look after them like my union members.’ Later, he would eat a cold tea in front of the television, and then perhaps go to the working men’s club for cribbage or the little pub next door for dominoes and a pint of mild. He was no firebrand, no extremist: when far-left militants tried to win over the workers, he recalled, ‘I crushed the bastards.’ But Doug Peach believed that Britain was two nations, not one, and was determined to fight to the last for the interest of the workers. ‘This battle will continue when I have finished. This will always be the case,’ he insisted. ‘There has got to be us and them. There has always got to be us and them.’41

  One very obvious difference between John Owen and Doug Peach was the kind of newspapers they read; indeed, in Britain in the 1970s there were few more instantly recognizable badges of social and political identity. By far the bestselling paper in 1970 was the Daily Mirror, the voice of working-class Labour traditionalism, owned by the gigantic IPC group and read by an estimated 15 million people every day. Perhaps 10 and 5 million people respectively furrowed their brows over the middle-market Daily Express and Daily Mail, more than 3 million read the middle-class Tory Daily Telegraph, 1.3 million read The Times, the self-proclaimed paper for ‘top people,’ and around 900,000 ‘Herbivores’, as Michael Frayn called them – ‘the do-gooders, the signers of petitions, the backbone of the BBC’ – sighed righteously over the pages of the Guardian.42

  Despite its financial woes, the 1970s were good years for the Guardian: many of its innovations, from lifestyle features to a women’s page, soon caught on with its competitors. But the real success story of the decade was a newspaper so utterly different in ethos and content as to come from a different planet. Originally founded in 1964 as the mouthpiece of the affluent society, calling itself ‘a radical newspaper … championing progressive ideas’, the Sun had been a disaster, and was quietly sold five years later to an obscure Australian businessman. Under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch and editorial control of Larry Lamb, however, the Sun was transformed into the tabloid voice of cheeky, hedonistic working-class populism. Lamb maintained that it was still a ‘radical’ paper, and in 1970 he urged readers to vote Labour. But the Sun’s eye-catching mixture of sex, sport and sensation was something new on Fleet Street, and although many old hands were horrified, the public clearly loved it. By 1970, it was already selling 1.5 million copies a day; by 1975, thanks to aggressive advertising, the innovation of Page Three girls and a relentless emphasis on sex and humour, it was selling almost 4 million. And three years later, Murdoch achieved what had once been unthinkable, deposing the Mirror from its throne as Fleet Street’s sales king.43

  Although the Sun’s critics shook their heads in horror at what they saw as its prurient philistinism, there is a case that it represented a welcome blast of irreverence in the rather staid world of British newspapers. And while its rise looks like a foretaste of the aggressive individualism of the 1980s, it was also the heir to a long tradition, from the scurrilous pamphlets of the seventeenth century to the lurid popular papers of the Victorians. Above all, though, its success reiterated a point of national pride: the fact that the British were some of the most avid readers in the world. No other English-speaking country, and certainly not the United States, devoured so many newspapers, sold so many magazines, or produced so many books per head. As always, there were gloomy reports of crisis and looming illiteracy: surging printing and wage costs meant that many publishers cut back on the production of experimental or ‘niche’ books, while in 1978 the Bookseller mourned London’s ‘dearth of bookshops’ and complained that ‘boutiques, hairdressers, betting shops (now 8,000 of them), shoe shops, hamburger bars’ were forcing booksellers ‘out of the High Street’.44

  But this was excessively pessimistic. Heath’s Britain remained an immensely literate, reader-friendly culture; there were even complaints of a ‘surfeit’ or ‘suffocation’ of books. The Bookseller recorded 24,000 new titles in 1970 alone, rising to 36,000 in 1980. Library lending reached an all-time peak, while book clubs like BCA and the Literary Guild were stunningly successful, boasting more than a million members by 1978. Older publishers sometimes complained that retailers wanted to sell books like records: in 1975 WH Smith pioneered the ‘top ten paperbacks’ list, making household names of such wordsmiths as Wilbur Smith and Jeffrey Archer. But nobody could possibly deny that Britain was a nation of readers.45

  In the 1970s, as afterwards, it was very common to hear that British fiction was in terminal decline. Not only did literary critics, picking up on the latest Continental ideas, wax lyrical about the ‘Death of Literature’, ‘Death of the Author’ and ‘End of Liberal Culture’, but they often argued that British writing, usually as opposed to American, was in a particularly wretched condition. It was ‘in crisis’, wrote Bernard Bergonzi in 1970, characterized by ‘neurotic symptoms of withdrawal and disengagement’. British literature was ‘poorer, more cost-conscious and less outgoing’, agreed Brian Aldiss in a New Review symposium in 1978. Other contributors sounded similar notes: A. S. Byatt thought that British fiction had fallen well behind American writing, Emma Tennant thought that Commonwealth writing was much better, while Nicolas Freeling argued that ‘in a decadent society … weeds flourish’. Literature had been ‘the main underpinning of English culture for the last couple of centuries’, J. G. Ballard claimed in 1981. ‘Now this underpinning has completely gone.’46

  What seems neurotic now, of course, is the exaggerated diagnosis of decline. After all, Aldiss, Byatt and Ballard themselves produced fine books during this period, The Malacia Tapestry, The Virgin in the Garden and High Rise, to name but three. It is true that no particular trend or movement dominated: as David Lodge perceptively noted in 1971, there was now a sense ‘of unprecedented cultural pluralism which allows, in all t
he arts, an astonishing variety of styles to flourish simultaneously’. But the sheer diversity and richness of British literature in the 1970s remains astonishingly impressive. Among established literary novelists, Anthony Powell, Graham Greene, V. S. Naipaul, Angus Wilson, William Golding, Anthony Burgess, Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Bradbury, John Fowles, John le Carré and Lodge himself published new work, while Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis (widely seen as the champion of the new generation), came of age in the mid-to-late 1970s. Fiction by women was arguably even more impressive: Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Margaret Drabble and Iris Murdoch were all on top form during these years, while the works of Angela Carter – The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977) – were not only milestones in feminist fiction but proof that British writers were not immune to major international developments such as postmodernism and magic realism. And this is merely to stick to fiction; for poetry lovers, the publication of Ted Hughes’s Crow (1970), Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971), Philip Larkin’s High Windows (1974) and Seamus Heaney’s North (1975), as well as the emergence of younger talents such as James Fenton, Craig Raine and Carol Ann Duffy, made the decade something of a golden age. Indeed, although poetry remained a minority interest compared with fiction, sales were extraordinarily good: Crow sold 50,000 copies and North 30,000, while the Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman, was one of the nation’s most familiar faces, loved as much for his conservation campaigns and television documentaries as for his deceptively accessible verse.47

  To many ordinary readers, of course, most of the above names remained either obscure or irrelevant. Popular taste was increasingly tolerant of explicit sex, violence and horror, as illustrated by the success of, say, Jackie Collins’s Lovehead (1974) and The Bitch (1979), or James Herbert’s The Rats (1974) and The Fog (1975), which surely would have been far too shocking for previous generations. But while the decade produced bestsellers that reflected the new political and cultural concerns of the day, such as Richard Adams’s Watership Down or Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (both 1972), most readers had markedly conservative tastes. These were boom years, for example, for the romance publishers Mills & Boon, who produced more than twenty books a year and saw sales increase by 33 per cent between 1972 and 1974 alone. They were also good years for writers like Alistair MacLean, Wilbur Smith and Dick Francis, whose stories of rugged masculine heroes under extreme stress offered reliable, reassuring escapism from the depressing headlines of the day. And it is notable that two of the most conservative and enduringly popular twentieth-century writers of all, Agatha Christie and J. R. R. Tolkien, enjoyed huge commercial success with books published after their deaths: Sleeping Murder (1976) and The Silmarillion (1977). Neither of these books fared very well with critics, and neither could be said to reflect the themes and interests of the 1970s – though this was hardly surprising given that Christie had written her book during the Second World War, while Tolkien had begun work on his myth cycle in 1914. All the same, their enormous appeal makes a mockery of the idea that Britain had experienced some kind of cultural revolution, and is another reminder that despite the headline-grabbing innovations of the day, most people’s tastes changed only gradually, if at all.48

  Across the cultural landscape of the 1970s, in fact, the same pattern repeated itself: enormous richness and diversity, yet also an intense popular thirst for nostalgic escapism. For the critic Christopher Booker, the 1970s was an age of ‘cultural collapse’ and the ‘most dramatic dead end in the history of mankind’. But this was certainly not how millions of people saw it at the time. Although the Heath government horrified the arts world by introducing gallery charges – with the result that admissions to the National Gallery dropped by a third in just twelve months – these were generally fine and fertile years for the arts. The Tate’s blockbuster exhibitions on landscape painting (1974), Turner (1975) and Constable (1976) drew enormous crowds, while the British Museum’s Tutankhamun show in 1972 attracted a staggering 1.7 million people, many queuing for up to eight hours and taking home T-shirts, wall-charts and postcards, like latter-day Grand Tourists carrying off their booty. At a time when the headlines were dominated by terrorism, strikes and political unrest, the queues were a sign of the underlying civility and intellectual curiosity of British life. One man queued for fourteen hours to get a ticket on the exhibition’s first day, while Londoners soon got used to the sight of people camping outside the museum overnight. And since hundreds of thousands of tickets were reserved for school groups, the charges of rampant commercialism were not entirely fair. The show was ‘smashing’, one schoolboy told The Times’s reporter, who judged that the word ‘summed up the day to most children as they emerged, eyes popping, after an hour amid all that gold’.49

  But the nation’s artistic life was not confined to the major galleries of the capital. From Scotland to the south coast, as the Observer’s Richard Findlater noted in 1975, mass enthusiasm was the hallmark of British cultural life. ‘Never before in British history’, he wrote, had the arts ‘been so accessible to so many people: the evidence is there in the record-breaking attendance figures at major exhibitions; the sale of LPs, prints and paperbacks; the viewing statistics for opera, ballet and drama on television’. Never before, either, had ‘there been so much do-it-yourself art – amateur acting, music-making, Sunday painting’, and never had there been ‘so much money’ in ‘institutions, objects and events’. Indeed, despite the economic troubles of the period, business patronage for the arts reached a record £6 million by 1979, while Arts Council funding for regional arts associations more than trebled during the decade. Between 1967 and 1981, the number of local arts centres in England and Wales grew from 34 to 174, while there were also innumerable new theatre groups, dance troupes, art workshops, newsletters, magazines, bookshops and presses.50

  With public interest booming, theatres and concert halls did particularly good business, enabling them to keep afloat when many people feared inflation would finish them off. It was in this period that Benjamin Britten wrote his last two operas, that Michael Tippett reached his peak, that Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies came of age. It was also in this period that the London Symphony Orchestra faced perhaps the greatest trial in its history, when Edward Heath appeared on the platform in November 1971, baton in hand, to conduct Elgar’s Cockaigne overture. In fairness, he acquitted himself pretty well, and afterwards, by his own account, ‘found myself laughing with delight’, which seems a bit unlikely. But the critics seemed to like it: The Times quipped that ‘we could well hear more of this Mr Edward Heath’. Sadly, not all of his musical ventures were quite so successful. Passing through Paris in the late 1970s, where Heath had just conducted the European Youth Orchestra, the journalist Alexander Chancellor claimed to have seen the banner headline ‘Heath a massacré Mozart’. Years later, when Heath agreed to conduct a professional orchestra in Salisbury Cathedral, his dictatorial manner drove them to the brink of mutiny. Eventually the leader could no longer restrain himself. ‘If you don’t stop being so rude to us, Sir Edward,’ he burst out, ‘we may start obeying your instructions.’51

  As the victim of a court assassination plotted by a strong woman, Heath might not have appreciated Trevor Nunn’s intense version of Macbeth (1976) with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, perhaps the most acclaimed production in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s history. But these were golden years for the RSC, for whom Patrick Stewart, Janet Suzman, Ian Richardson, Francesca Annis and Ian Holm gave a succession of mesmerizing performances. Indeed, with the emergence of radical young playwrights such as David Hare, David Edgar, Howard Brenton and Trevor Griffiths, with Harold Pinter, Michael Frayn, Alan Ayckbourn and Peter Shaffer continuing to delight audiences, and with an enormous proliferation of fringe and radical theatre groups, these were golden years for British theatre as a whole. Only the West End, with its feeble diet of farces and revivals, stood out as a disappointment. Even there, though, change was coming. ‘I c
an think of no other modern score that does more to reawaken one to what musical theatre is for,’ The Times’s critic wrote of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in February 1973. Not everyone was so impressed: after going to see Evita five years later, the National Theatre supremo Peter Hall returned home depressed at the ‘cult of kitsch … inert, calculating, camp, and morally questionable’. But even he admitted that he was ‘out of step with popular taste’, for that very month, Jesus Christ Superstar became the longest-running musical in theatrical history, having taken more than £6 million and been seen by almost 2 million people – another victory for the conservatism of popular taste.52

  In the years of Heath’s first steps up the political ladder, by far the most popular form of popular entertainment had been the cinema. By the time he became Prime Minister, however, the days when millions of people went to the pictures every week seemed a distant memory. The late 1960s had been terrible years for the British film industry, which, as the critic Alexander Walker put it, had been reduced to the status of Hollywood’s kept woman, dependent on handouts and burning with resentment. Disastrously, however, few of the British-made block-busters – Doctor Dolittle, Battle of Britain, a musical remake of Goodbye, Mr Chips – made any money, and when Hollywood understandably decided to call off the affair, the domestic industry was left high and dry. In 1968, American studios had invested £31 million in Britain; by 1974, they were investing less than £3 million. Production collapsed dramatically: in 1970, Britain made 84 films; by 1979, it made just 41, most of them feeble low-budget ‘comedies’, using the term very loosely. All in all, it was a woeful picture.53