Chapter 22
In This Chapter
● Understanding why Churchill had to go - and so did the Empire
● Seeing the State become a nanny - and how nanny got into a state
● Swinging through the sixties
This chapter’s something of a roller coaster. If you were in Britain not long after the war - and perhaps you were - you’d have seen a pretty drab country, still with rationing and a general sense of gloom. Britain had won the war but was in the process of losing both its Empire and its prestige. But if you’d visited Britain in the sixties you’d have found London swinging and an upbeat sense of a country on the move. Come back to Britain in the seventies and you wouldn’t find much moving - or working (for even more strikes, head along to Chapter 23). Not for nothing was one form of industrial action called a go-slow. This chapter is about Britain down, then up, then down again. Hang on tight.
We Are the Masters Now
That statement’s more or less what the Labour Party said when it won the General Election in 1945. Its victory still seems a bit difficult to grasp. Churchill (a Conservative) has just led you through the biggest war in history, the Cold War is just beginning - and you choose this moment to ditch the Great Man? Well, yes, and for some very good reasons:
● Churchill completely misjudged the public mood. People linked Churchill’s Conservatives with the unemployment of the 1930s, and their ideas didn’t seem to have advanced since then. Instead of saying how he would set about solving social problems Churchill gave a crazy warning that the Labour Party would establish some sort of Gestapo in Britain if they were elected.
● The army had been running a political education service for the troops, and many of them had become convinced Labour Party supporters.
● Labour ministers had served in Churchill’s wartime cabinet and had more or less run the home front. Now the Labour Party said it would bring in the recommendations of the Beveridge Report.
The Beveridge Report: Fighting giants
During the war, the government set up a special commission chaired by an Oxford academic, Sir William Beveridge, to look into how to create a better Britain after the war. Beveridge talked of five ‘giants’ that had long plagued Britain:
● Poverty
● Disease
● Ignorance
● Squalor
● Unemployment or ‘Idleness’
To fight these ills, Beveridge said, you needed free health care, some sort of national insurance scheme, and full employment. Some people wondered where the money for all this social welfare would come from, but most people thought the Beveridge Report was just what the doctor ordered.
The ideals of this report were something worth fighting for.
Going into Labour
People were expecting big things of this new Labour government. Would it be able to deliver? The big match was about to kick off, and the star players were:
Clement Attlee, the new prime minister. Looked like a bank manager from Croydon. Churchill called him ‘A sheep in sheep’s clothing’, but Attlee proved a lot tougher than he looked.
Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, the fiery Welsh minister with the job of bringing in a free health service for all. He enjoyed a fight, and Britain’s doctors were going to make sure he got one.
Ernest Bevin, a bull-faced trade unionist who, to everyone’s surprise - including his own - became Foreign Secretary and proved no friend of the Russians. ‘My foreign policy,’ he once said, ‘is to be able to buy a ticket at Victoria Station and go wherever I damn well please.’
Power for the people
Attlee and the Labour Party believed that instead of leaving everything to private companies - the system that had failed so spectacularly in the thirties (see Chapter 21 for details on what had gone wrong) the State should run the really big basic industries, like coal and steel and the railways, and that the State should provide benefits for everyone. This policy marked a really radical departure from past practice.
Nationalisation
Attlee took coal, steel, electricity, and the railways away from private companies so that they could be run ‘on behalf of the people’. The new National Coal Board got off to a bad start when it was hit by the big freeze in its first month and couldn’t cope. Nationalising the railways got off to a better start, but running all those pretty little local lines proved far too expensive, and in 1962 British Rail’s Richard Beeching axed hundreds of them. Some people in Britain still haven’t forgiven him.
Welfare State
Attlee said there’d be no return to the bad old days when, if you were too poor, you just starved. From now on the State would look after people properly, from the cradle to the grave. Free health care and free education would be provided, schoolchildren would get free milk to make them healthy, and state benefits - payments - would exist for mothers or for those not working. Sounded good - if this system could be carried through.
The National Health Service
You know the scene: Poor Victorian family weeps over sick child, but they haven't got the money to fetch a doctor. This image is the stuff of bad drama, and Labour wanted to make sure that was where it stayed. Health care - doctors, dentists, hospitals, false teeth, and specs - was to be free for everyone. The doctors were up in arms about it; it would threaten their livelihoods and they'd have to treat poor people. Nye Bevan (the Welsh minister charged with reforming the country's healthcare system) faced them down and brought in the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948. The NHS was so successful that demand outstripped supply. People wanted to get their money's worth, so they used the NHS so much ithad to expand much more quickly than anyone had anticipated. Soon the government had to start charging for prescriptions, and Bevan resigned in protest. As healthy people lived longer, they ended up using the NHS even more as they grew older. So it got bigger and bigger and more and more expensive, and by the end of the century, NHS funding had become one of the biggest problems facing British governments.
You may have Won the War, but you can't have any sweets
When the war ended, every man who’d served in the armed forces got a civilian demob (demobilisation from the armed services) suit, free-of-charge, to help get him back into civilian life. But if people thought peacetime was going to be one big party, they were in for a shock. You don’t recover from six years of total war overnight, and the Brits had to get used to even tougher restrictions on everyday life than they had experienced during the war:
● National Service continued. Young men were still called up to serve in the armed forces until 1960. Plenty of wars and conflicts still occurred requiring a British military presence and soldiering helped keep the unemployment figures down.
● Rationing got worse. Less butter and margarine was available than in the war, and they even rationed bread. Everything was in short supply - meat, eggs, sweets, chocolate. Clothing coupons were still necessary and no fancy fashions, either: You had to make do with sensible ‘Utility’ styles. And Utility styles were very, very boring.
● The big freeze came. The winter of 1947 was one of the coldest on record: Just the time to have a national coal shortage. The trains couldn’t get the coal supplies through the snow. And when the snow melted huge floods occurred.
The Labour government called all this rationing and tightening of belts austerity. Translation? No money’s in the pot, so you can’t have any fun. But some bright spots did lighten this period. The nation had a party when Princess Elizabeth married the Duke of Edinburgh, and everyone got madly excited when the first bananas arrived - thanks to the war most children in Britain had never seen one. But on the whole, the Brits had had enough of this austerity lark, and when Christian Dior launched his ‘New Look’ for women, with broad skirts and hour-glass figures, women went for it and to hell with the clothing coupons.
Discovery and recovery
The 1948 Olympic Games - the first ones since Hitler snubbed Jesse Owen in Berlin in 1936 - were held in London. The event wasn’t quite as lavish as Hitler’s had been, but who cared about that?
Then some bright spark pointed out that 1951 would be the centenary of the 1851 Great Exhibition (see Chapter 18 to find out about this), and people thought, ‘Why not have another Great Exhibition, and this time make it fun as well?’ They called this event the Festival of Britain. A big bombsite on London’s South Bank was cleared to create a Discovery theme park. In the Dome of Discovery, you could find all the latest advances in science and technology; then you could come outside and marvel at the Skylon, which shot up into the sky without visible means of support. When your mind had finished boggling, you could go down to Battersea funfair and discover the dodgems.
These seemed exciting times. In 1953 thousands of Britons watched the new Queen Elizabeth’s coronation on a relatively new invention called The Television. On the same day, news arrived that Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Norgay Tensing had climbed Everest - okay, Hillary was a New Zealander and Tensing was Nepalese but the expedition was British. 1953 was also when James Watson and Francis Crick worked out the structure of DNA at Cambridge, and the next year Roger Bannister ran the world’s first four-minute mile at Oxford.
End of Empire
The Victorians liked to say that the sun never set on the British Empire because it was always shining on some part of the globe that was British. Of course, they also liked to think that the Empire would go on forever, but empires don’t do that, and the British one was no exception.
The British began to talk less about the Empire and more about the Commonwealth. No one was too sure quite what the Commonwealth was - people talked of a ‘family’ of nations who’d all been part of the British Empire, and the queen was Head of the Commonwealth, which meant that at least you got a good lunch at Commonwealth summits. On the whole the British tend to like the Commonwealth, if only because the Commonwealth Games are the only way they can get a decent haul of sporting medals.
Who was the Third Man?
Carol Reed's film The Third Man is set in Vienna just after the war, but in 1951 Britain got its own 'Third Man' drama when two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, suddenly did a bunk and turned up a few days later in Moscow. They were revealed to be spying for Stalin, and the police were just going to haul them in when they got a tip off. But who was the Third Man, the one who tipped them off? This person turned out to be another diplomat, Kim Philby, who'd known Burgess and Maclean at Cambridge University. The Russian secret service reckoned all these English spies - there were others - were some of the best agents they ever had.
Sunset in the east . . . and the Middle East
Churchill hated the idea of ‘giving up’ India, but Gandhi had been campaigning for the British to quit India ever since the Amritsar Massacre back in 1919 (see Chapter 21 for the details on this appalling incident). During the Second World War Gandhi launched a full-scale campaign to force the British out. Result? The British locked him up, and all the other Indian nationalist leaders they could get their hands on. Some Indians even went over to the Japanese side and fought with them against the British. By the time the war ended in 1945, India was fast sliding out of control - riots and demonstrations took place and the British seemed incapable of restoring order. The Viceroy of India, Lord Wavell, bowed to the inevitable and took India’s nationalist leaders out of prison and into government.
Meanwhile, back in Britain Attlee’s Labour government had decided the time had come for the British to go home. But a problem existed. Gandhi wanted a single India, with both Hindus and Muslims, but the Muslims wanted a separate country to be called Pakistan. If they got this separate country, where was its border to be? And what about the people who would now be on the ‘wrong’ side of it? Attlee sent Lord Mountbatten out to India to replace Wavell as Viceroy, with orders to sort things out. Should Britain partition India or not? Mountbatten decided ‘Yes, and fast’ - he announced that partition would take place in August 1947, a year ahead of schedule. About seven million people had to up sticks and move from one state to another. Trouble was bound to occur, and it did. Almost half a million people were killed in riots against partition, and in 1950 an anti-partition Hindu shot Gandhi for agreeing to it.
The British left many legacies to India - democracy, railways, the English language, and the strange custom of lawyers wearing pinstripe suits under a tropical sun - but they hadn’t expected to bequeath a bitter border dispute in Kashmir. India’s princes and maharajahs had to choose whether to join India or Pakistan. States along the border normally went with the wishes of the majority, but the Maharajah of Kashmir, in northern India, which had a mostly Muslim population, declared that he was handing his kingdom over to India and not to Pakistan, which is what his people wanted. The Kashmiri Muslims protested, Pakistan invaded, and the result was one of the world’s longest-running, and most dangerous, border disputes.
Emergency in Malaya
The British had rather more success in Malaya than in India. They reorganised the region as a federation in 1948 in preparation for pulling out and going home, but just then a major communist rising started. However, the communists weren’t Malays; they were Chinese. The native Malays wanted nothing to do with them and certainly didn’t want their country to become a Chinese-dominated communist state. So the British stayed on and fought a highly successful counter-insurgency campaign against the communists, grouping the population in fortified villages and denying the guerrillas access to food or supplies. By 1957 the rising was sufficiently under control for Britain to grant independence to Malaya and pull out.
The war in Malaya is always termed the ‘Malayan Emergency’. Why? Because the British rubber planters’ insurance policies didn’t cover war damage but did cover emergencies. You could say they stretched a point.
The British success against communist guerrillas in Malaya seemed to contrast with the later American failure against communist Viet Cong guerrillas in Vietnam, and some people have argued that the Americans should have studied the British tactics more closely. But in fact the two situations were very different; crucially the Malay people were against the communist guerrillas whereas many Vietnamese supported the Viet Cong. (If you want to know why, see The Vietnam War For Dummies.)
Palestine: Another fine mess
Britain was given Palestine to look after by the League of Nations after the First World War (see Chapter 21 for more on Britain’s curiously inept entry into the complex politics of the Middle East). Since then the British had been trying to allow controlled Jewish immigration while at the same time reassuring the Palestinians that they weren’t about to be swamped. After the war, many thousands of Jews wanted to turn their backs on Europe and make a new life in Palestine, but that alarmed the Palestinians still more, so the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, said no more Jews could enter Palestine at all. Those who tried were locked up in barbed wire camps.
But these people had survived the Nazi death camps, and they weren’t going to be so easily dissuaded. Jewish terrorist groups, Irgun and the Stern Gang, started killing British soldiers. In 1946 they blew up the King David Hotel, which housed the British administrative headquarters: ninety-one people were killed. The British had enough problems without trying to solve the entire Middle East, so they pulled out and handed the whole situation over to the United Nations. The UN set up the State of Israel. And found they couldn’t solve the problem either. (To find out more, see The Middle East For Dummies.)
Wind of change in Africa
The British developed quite a taste for all these midnight independence ceremonies, with lots of officials in silly hats nobly hauling down the flag to the tune of The Last Post. The first African country to gain its independence was Ghana; one of the VIP visitors at its independence ceremony in 1957 was Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. By 1968 one African colony after another had gained its independence - Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, Gambia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Tanzania.
Mountbatten
Historians still argue furiously about Mountbatten's role in Indian independence. The debate was not helped by Mountbatten's own version of events, which was essentially, 'All the best ideas were mine, and all my decisions were right, and everyone else was wrong, but once they realised how right I was we all became firm friends.' Mountbatten was a genuine royal - Queen Victoria was his great grandmother - and a charismatic naval commander in the Second World War, which was just as well because his ship sank. He was Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia, overseeing operations against the Japanese and he accepted their surrender at Singapore in 1945. Attlee thought that Mountbatten had just the right sort of authority to pull off the British withdrawal from India.
Mountbatten got on very well with Gandhi and Nehru (according to rumour his wife went one better and had an affair with Nehru, though the evidence for it is slim); however, he found Jinnah, the Muslim leader, much harder to fathom. His critics say he rushed India into partition before people were prepared for the idea, and that therefore he was to blame for the violence. That accusation's probably going too far - plenty of communal violence occurred before he arrived and partition was bound to provoke trouble whenever it was done - but it is true that the border had to be drawn and all the practical arrangements made against a hopelessly inadequate timescale. Even his harshest critics cannot have wished Mountbatten's ultimate fate on him - in 1979 he was blown up by the IRA.
Trouble brews in Kenya
In Kenya nationalist guerrillas from the Kikuyu tribe, called Mau Mau, staged a rising against the British. The British responded savagely, arresting thousands; it has been alleged that the British used torture. Mau Mau also killed fellow Africans - in 1953 they massacred ninety-seven Africans in the village of Lari - and gradually lost the support of ordinary Kenyans. In 1963 Britain pulled out of Kenya and handed power over to Jomo Kenyatta, who’d only recently come out of jail. But by then you couldn’t call yourself a true nationalist leader unless the British had locked you up at some point.
Kenya had had an unusually large white population of farmers getting up to all sorts of hanky panky in the White Highlands, or ‘Happy Valley’ as it was known. When independence came most of them packed their bags and headed home to Britain, but the whites of Rhodesia and South Africa had very different ideas. They enjoyed lording it over the black Africans and they weren’t going to give their position up without a struggle.
Apartheid appears in South Africa
The white South Africans had come up with an idea called apartheid, which said that whites should have all the best land, schools, houses, jobs, and so on, and blacks had to keep out unless they came in as labourers for the whites. In 1960 the British Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan went to Cape Town and told the white South Africans that they could not resist black majority rule for ever: A ‘Wind of change’ was sweeping through the continent. The whites hated it.
A few months after Macmillan’s ‘Wind of change’ speech, the South African police opened fire on an unarmed crowd of black Africans at Sharpeville and killed sixty-seven people, most of them shot in the back as they were running away. Britain’s anger over the incident was so great that South Africa decided to declare independence and left the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth responded by imposing sanctions on South Africa - no trade and we’re not going to play you at cricket either, so there. Officially the British government supported this line; unofficially, many British firms and banks, and not a few cricketers, ignored it.
White rebellion in Rhodesia
The whites of Rhodesia decided they wanted to be independent, too. Britain said they could only be independent if they agreed to black majority rule.
Or, to put the idea another way, democracy. The white Rhodesians weren’t having that situation, so they went ahead and in 1965 declared UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) to defend their right of superiority over black people. Britain said UDI was illegal, and spent the next fifteen years imposing sanctions on white Rhodesia (or rather, imposing them and then turning a blind eye to British companies breaking them). Rhodesia finally got black majority rule in 1980 and changed its name to Zimbabwe, and even then the whites still owned all the best land in the country.
Losing an Empire, Finding a Role
‘Great Britain,’ said American statesman Dean Acheson in 1962, ‘has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.’ He had a point. Without her Empire, Britain could be one of three things:
A world power, with the atom bomb and a veto at the United Nations
A leading player in Europe, rather than the whole world
A small nation which no one took seriously. (Don’t laugh, this situation had happened before. Austria and Spain had both been Great Powers, and have both declined.)
So, which option was it to be? The following sections consider these possibilities.
A World power or just in de-Nile?
In 1956 the ruler of a large, poor developing country took charge of his country’s only major economic asset. The country was Egypt, the ruler was Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the asset, which had been run by the British and French, was the Suez Canal.
London went ballistic. Conservative Prime Minister Anthony Eden had stood up to Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s (well okay, he resigned from Chamberlain’s cabinet) and he wasn’t afraid to stand up to Nasser. Some people thought Eden was right; others thought he’d gone mad.
Eden hatched a plot with the French and the Israelis. Israel would invade Egypt and then Britain and France would send troops in to, er, keep the peace while ‘accidentally on purpose’ taking control of the Suez Canal. The British and French went in on 31 October 1956, and initially events seemed to be going Eden’s way - but things aren’t always as clear cut as they seem. Huge protests broke out in Britain, the United Nations told everyone to pull out of Egypt, and US President Eisenhower refused to help the British and French. Investors were all pulling their money out of London, and Britain desperately needed a billion-dollar loan from America. Eisenhower’s answer was simple: One (financial) loan for one (military) withdrawal. So Eden pulled out. Result: Total humiliation for the Brits (and French). Britain doesn’t sound much like a World Power, does she?
Into Europe?
The British had been fooling themselves for years that they didn’t need Europe. True, Churchill helped set up the Council of Europe in 1949, but the Council couldn’t actually do anything. Meanwhile the French and Germans had set up a Common Market with Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and Luxembourg. Should the British join this market, too? They hummed and they hawed and they even set up their own rival, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) with six other countries they didn’t actually trade with much. Finally, in 1962 Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan decided to bite the bullet and apply to join the Common Market. Except he couldn’t because the French vetoed Britain’s entry. President de Gaulle thought that Britain was only a stalking horse for the Americans, and he wasn’t having that situation in ‘his’ Europe.
Finally, in 1973, Prime Minister Edward Heath managed to drag Britain kicking and screaming into the European Economic Community (EEC), which was the posh name for the Common Market, and even then the British held a referendum two years later to see if they really wanted to be in it. They voted ‘Well-now-we’re-in-it-we-might-as-well-stay’, which roughly translates as ‘Yes’.
Angry young men
A small living room on a Sunday night. A youngish guy is sitting with no trousers on - his wife is ironing them. 'I suppose,' he says, 'people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer . . .There aren't any good, brave causes left.' This scene is from John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, the in-your-face new drama that hit the Royal Court Theatre in 1956 just in time for the Suez Crisis (see 'A world power or just in de-Nile?'). Osborne was one of a number of 'Angry Young Men' who took a look at the drab, bankrupted Country Which Had Won The War and said 'Is that it?' If you like plays about sad, disappointed people with no ideals or illusions left, then you could have a ball in the late fifties. In due course, the Angry Young Men became the Grumpy Old Men of today.
Whatever new role the British found for themselves, ‘Leaders of Europe’ wasn’t it.
Black and British - and brown, and yellow
Black people have been in Britain since Tudor times but people usually put the starting point for really big-scale immigration into Britain at 1948, when the SS Empire Windrush brought the first batch of post-war immigrants over from Jamaica.
These people came because they had British passports and because Britain had invited them. British companies advertised in the Caribbean and Indian press for people to come to Britain to do the sort of menial jobs that the white British didn’t want to do. So they came.
Some British people were scared the new immigrants would ‘take their jobs’. In fact, the new arrivals kept coming up against a ‘colour bar’, which meant they often couldn’t get work or lodgings. Many immigrants had to start up small corner shops or Chinese and Indian restaurants and takeaways. Serious racial fighting occurred in London’s Notting Hill in 1958 and race riots at Toxteth (Liverpool) and Brixton (South London) in 1981. In 1993 a black teenager called Stephen Lawrence was murdered in London, and the police investigation was so badly handled that an inquiry was held, which found that the Metropolitan Police was ‘institutionally racist’.
That is the bad side of immigration. On the plus side, Parliament passed a Race Relations Act in 1965, which outlawed racist speech and behaviour. Right-wing groups like the National Front or the British National Party have never won more than the occasional seat on a local council. Finding mosques in city centres is now quite normal and some of the biggest Hindu and Sikh temples outside the Indian subcontinent are in London. Being complacent about these issues is stupid, but on the whole the immigrant communities have integrated into Britain much more easily than anyone in 1948 could have predicted.
Yeah yeah, baby - groovy
Just think: Without Britain in the sixties, we’d never have encountered Austin Powers. Suddenly in the sixties Britain, and especially London, became the hip place to be seen - if you were young, that is. Britain’s new-found popularity started with The Beatles, and soon you could rock to the Rolling Stones, shout with Lulu, or even ask Cliff Richard exactly where he got his walkin’ talkin’ livin’ doll. The BBC was a bit sniffy at first about this new fangled ‘pop’ music and tried to keep it off the airwaves, so disc jockeys had to operate from Radio Luxembourg or from ‘pirate’ stations on ships at sea, like the famous Radio Caroline. But in 1967 the BBC decided to get down with these groovy young people and launched Radio One, Britain’s first non-commercial pop station.
British designers seemed to rule the world, whether it was Mary Quant’s fashions or the curved corners of the Mini Minor, everyone’s favourite car. No wonder one of the most successful British films of the sixties was The Italian Job, which ends with a high-speed car chase involving three mini minors coloured - of course - red, white, and blue. While American students were burning the Stars and Stripes in protest at Vietnam - including on one occasion in front of the US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square - the British were wearing the Union Jack on everything from t-shirts to bikinis. When a group of secretaries from Surbiton decided to do their bit for the economy by working an extra half hour a day for no pay they started a patriotic confidence campaign with badges saying ‘I’m Backing Britain!’ printed on the Union Jack. You could even back Britain with a Union Jack miniskirt. Oh behave.
Rivers of blood
Enoch Powell was a maverick Conservative MP and classical scholar. In 1968 he made one of the most outrageous speeches about immigration ever heard in Britain. If they didn't stop coloured people coming in, he said there would be death, destruction, and civil war. 'Like the Roman,' he said, 'I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.' The speech went down a storm with racist bigots, few of whom understood the classical allusions. The Conservatives sacked him, so he went and joined the Ulster Unionists. The Thames hasn't foamed with blood yet.
Horror on the moor
The sixties weren't all about young people having fun and free love. In 1966 the country was stunned by a horrific murder case in the north of England. An arrogant young psychopath called Ian Brady, together with his girlfriend Myra Hindley, had enticed a string of children into their car and taken them out to a stretch of lonely moorland where they abused and murdered them. In court the prosecution played a tape the pair had made of one of their victims screaming for mercy as they tortured her. They were both jailed for life and remained national figures of revulsion for the rest of their lives.
What ARE those politicians up to?
Churchill became prime minister again in 1951, but he was too old and ill to achieve anything much. Anthony Eden (prime minister 1955-7) was just itching to take over and show everyone what he could do, which turned out to be very little. Lordly Harold Macmillan (prime minister 1957-63) was more upbeat.
‘You’ve never had it so good!’ he declared, and his War Minister (no namby-pamby ‘Defence Minister’ in those days), John Profumo, took him at his word. In 1963 it transpired that Profumo had been having it good with a nude model called Christine Keeler, who’d also been sleeping with a military attache at the Soviet Embassy. Profumo hadn’t actually been whispering any state secrets over the pillow, but he did lie about the affair to the House of Commons, so he had to go. Mind you, if everyone who told a bit less than the truth in Parliament had to resign we’d be left with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the cleaners.
1966 and all that
In 1966 England won the World Cup. At Wembley. In front of the queen. And they beat West Germany to do so. The Scots, Welsh, and Irish understandably get rather tired of constantly being reminded of this particular English victory, especially as English newspapers and television mention it so often you could be forgiven for thinking the match has only just happened, but it was a significant event even so.
This victory happened only twenty years after the end of the war and it seemed like a reaffirmation of the verdict of the war, especially as West Germany appeared to have recovered rather better than Britain. Mind you, Germans - and many Scots, Welsh, and Irish - argue that Geoff Hurst's winning goal was offside anyway and shouldn't have been allowed.
Labour pains
The Conservatives had been in power since 1951, and they didn’t seem to have much to show for it. ‘Thirteen wasted years’ taunted Labour as the nation went to the polls in 1964, and the country seemed to agree - just. Labour was back in with a majority of four. The new prime minister was Harold Wilson (prime minister 1964-70; 1974-6), who wore raincoats, smoked a pipe, and spoke with a strong Yorkshire accent. No more toffs appeared in Downing Street during his leadership.
Harold Wilson gave honours to The Beatles, and launched comprehensive schools for all and a visionary Open University, using all the latest technology of television and records so that everyone could get higher education. He was even in office when England won the World Cup (see the sidebar, ‘1966 and all that’), which he reckoned won him the 1966 election. But in other ways, Wilson didn’t do so well. Unemployment kept going up, and so did prices, so that in 1967 Wilson had to devalue the pound. ‘This will not affect the pound in your pocket!’ he declared, but no one believed him - and they were right.
Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath (prime minister 1970-4) changed the pound even more by making it decimal in 1971. A miners’ strike and a war in the Middle East forced Heath to cut the working week to three days. Sounds good, until you realise you’re only being paid for three days as well. Labour didn’t fare any better. In 1976 Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan (prime minister 1976-9) even had to apply to the International Monetary Fund for a £2.3 billion loan. In 1979 the whole country seemed to grind to a halt when the public service workers all came out on strike in the Winter of Discontent - that strike meant picket lines at hospitals, no rubbish collections (so it all piled up in the street), and even a strike at the cemeteries so you couldn’t even have a grave to turn in. Callaghan faced a vote of No Confidence in the Commons, and he lost it. That defeat meant he had to call a General Election, and he lost that, too. So Conservative leader Mrs Margaret Thatcher moved into 10 Downing Street, and the country held its breath. Breathe out by reading Chapter 23, which gives the low-down on Margaret Thatcher’s leadership and plenty more strikes.
Watching the telly
Everyone started buying TV sets after the Coronation was broadcast in 1953. Initially, you had to make do with the BBC, where they spoke posh and always knew what was good for you. Independent Television (ITV) arrived in 1954; this channel was less posh and it even carried adverts. Harold Wilson was probably the first politician to realise the power of television: He even appeared on Morecambe and Wise. When TV cameras were finally allowed into Parliament, politicians stopped making eloquent speeches - and sense - and started coming up with snappy soundbites just to get on the telly. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime - and tough on the viewers.