Porter’s Pensées

For anyone who missed the recent BBC dramatization of Joseph Conrad’s novel, I’d urge you to catch up on it. It’s on DVD. I’ve just finished watching a recording of it that I made when I was away. This is an area of particular interest to me, of course, as a bit of an expert not on Conrad particularly, but on the history of the early London Metropolitan Police Special Branch, which was originally founded to counter anarchist and Irish terrorism in Britain at the end of the 19^th century, and which is featured (under another name) here. (See my The Origins of the Vigilant State, 1987.) I’ve also researched the real-life ‘Greenwich Park’ bomb plot (1894), which is the central event of the book.

Conrad may have got that wrong. The original Greenwich bombers, it’s believed now, weren’t intending to target the Observatory, but were on their way to the Greenwich docks, whence they planned to ship the bomb to Russia. Nor is there any evidence that they were set up by the Russian secret police (the Okhrana). Or that they ran a pornographic postcard shop. (I think.)

But in general Conrad, and now the BBC drama series, got it absolutely right. Those shops did exist. The bomber did blow himself up (there’s a contemporary drawing of the horrible scene reproduced in my book). The Okhrana did employ spies and agents provocateurs in Britain, with the purpose – highlighted here – of persuading Britain to tighten her liberal laws on refugees, asylum and ‘political’ policing: in vain, as it happened. It all rings true. As do the superb, atmospheric settings.

And the acting; in particular Toby Jones as Verloc – a masterly performance – and Stephen Graham as Chief Inspector Heat. I recognise the latter from my studies of the Special Branch’s personnel; especially his ultimate decency. This in fact is one of the great virtues of Conrad’s characterisations: that all of them – except perhaps the Russian attaché, a cliché baddy, and the bomb-making ‘Professor’, a stereotypical mad anarchist – are complicated people. So are their relations with one another. The choices Verloc is confronted with are not simple, practically or ethically. Above all, as suggested by the plot line (‘agent-provocateuring’), the relations between the Anarchists, the police, the British government and foreign governments, are subtle and complex. Conrad is good at that. It is what – to my mind – makes him the greatest of English political novelists.

Are there any present-day lessons to be drawn from this? I’ve always been reluctant to make precise and practical comparisons between ‘now’ and ‘then’. In this case, the main comparison is obvious – terrorism – but overshadowed by a huge contrast: between late Victorian innocence, or naivité if you like, though it was not foolishly naive at that time; and Britain’s present-day ‘surveillance state’. I’ve blogged on this before (https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/the-snoopers-charter/). But there are no automatic or easy conclusions that follow from this. We are a very different people from our turn-of-the-20^th century forebears, living in different times. We can envy the late Victorians for their liberalism in this regard. But then we need to remember how oppressive those times were in other ways. Perhaps it’s lesson enough to be shown how different things can be.

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Incidentally (and irrelevantly): the current TLS carries a long review of my last two books. Not a rave, but flattering on the whole, and engaging intelligently with my argument, which is better.

I’m a ‘professor emeritus’. Gosh, that sounds good, doesn’t it? The word ‘merit’ embedded there, in the fancy Latin, must denote something special, more than a mere ‘professor’? (Those are two a penny nowadays.)

Actually, no. All it means is that I’m retired. To those in the know it denotes that I’m old, past it, out to grass. I no longer have to work at professing. The ‘emeritus’ thing is bestowed, I think, on all professors on leaving their final jobs. The title looks more distinguished than it is.

That said, it’s also indicative of something else. That ‘something’ is what used to be called ‘collegiality’. The idea probably derives from the older English universities, where a ‘college’ (their basic building blocks) was regarded as a community of scholars, from the highest (the ‘Master’) to the lowest (freshman undergraduates), and including all those who had formally ‘retired’. Very often the last were still given rooms in college long after their teaching functions had expired. Even outside Oxbridge a retired member of staff could be expected to be given an office somewhere on the campus, if he or she was still engaged in research, to keep their books in and to write from. They were always given free access to the university library and all its facilities, secretarial assistance, and – in modern times – allowed to keep their university email addresses. They stayed on circulation lists for university events, and for departmental seminars, which – again – embraced all parts of the ‘community’, and where retirees, or emeriti, could keep in regular touch. They always turned up – those who still lived locally – to the great pleasure and the intellectual profit of those who remained in harness, as well as of themselves. They weren’t just abandoned, cut off from what had always been more than a ‘job’, but was also a society and an essential aspect of their identity, to which they could contribute mightily even after the formal economic tie – pay in return for teaching – had been broken.

In Britain this ideal doesn’t seem to have broken down yet, though I’ve been away from the university scene there too long to know for sure. I still have library rights, and am invited to events and seminars, at most of the universities I’ve taught at, both in England and abroad. I still feel a part of those communities, and I like to think they accept me as part of them too. There has been no drastic break between us. Collegiality lives on; despite the effects of Thatcherite utilitarianism, and the new and by now notorious breed of university managers’ attempts to undermine collegiality on other fronts.

From what I understand, this isn’t the situation everywhere in the world. A friend of mine (who is retirement age) has just been told that she’s no longer wanted at Stockholm University, an institution she’s served with distinction, and with the enthusiasm both of herself and of her students, for thirty years; told to clear her ‘stuff’ from her room within five days – in insulting terms: the administrator who wrote to her was apparently offended by dog hairs there, and demanded she clean them up herself; had her email address discontinued, without even any automatic forwarding facility; and may have her staff library card taken away.

This is all part of a more ‘managerial’ and ‘top-down’ way of running the university that has apparently crept in recently, with staff treated as mere employees, like in a factory or office, with nothing more than what Carlyle (and after him Marx) called the ‘cash nexus’ to bind them together; no sense of community or collegiality; no appreciation, therefore, of the real and essential quality of academic activity and life. One is surprised to find these things happening in co-operative, consensual and social democratic Sweden. Perhaps it could have done with an Oxford and Cambridge too, in order to root the ‘collegial’ ideal more historically and firmly in its academic mores. (But without Oxbridge’s egregious flaws.)

My original hope for the EU, though it wasn’t an altogether confident one, was that it might act as a barrier to the relentless global spread of free market capitalism, which is, after all, the dominant trend in the world today, and in my opinion a deeply problematical one. One of my reasons for thinking this derived from history: the fact that Britain and America had invented, or at least were the original crucibles for, the free market system and the ideology behind it, and were the keenest zealots for it today, whereas most of continental Europe had always been more ‘statist’, and so had taken to this system and the assumptions behind it rather less enthusiastically: until the behemoth had started to bite into even its most social-democratic economies, like Sweden’s, from the 1990s-on. With Continental allies like these, I thought, we Leftists in Britain might stand a chance of pushing the monster back; which was the main reason also why I feared Britain’s exit from Europe, which would enable the Brexiteers to push Britain, liberated from – for example – the EU’s Social Chapter, even further in a ‘new liberal’ direction. At the time that I voted for ‘Remain’, I have to say that I wondered whether I wasn’t entirely fooling myself here. Europe seemed to be capitulating to the enemy in almost every way, climaxing in the Eurozone’s near destruction of Greece for essentially free marketist reasons. The battle was hopeless.

This last week, however, two things have happened to revive my hopes. The first is yesterday’s EU’s ruling on Apple’s tax arrangements, and Ireland’s tax regime, which has been met, predictably, with howls of rage from Apple itself, the government of Ireland and in America; all of whom clearly believe that capitalists have no social responsibilities to the countries they do most of their business in (how many i-Pads are made or sold in Knocknaheeny, its base for taxation purposes?), which of course is the ‘free’ trade way. That’s huge – if it survives the inevitable well-funded appeals – and should do a little to restore the balance between big business and the voter, or capitalism and democracy, which globalisation has so skewed in recent years. The second ray of light is the clutch of reports coming out recently that TTIP – another attempt to assert the primacy of business methods and profit over the will of the people – is struggling to find acceptance among EU nations, with the opposition this time led by France. Apparently TTIP may, against all expectations, never come about. In both these matters it’s the collective power of the EU that has had these effects.

So-called ‘independent’ nations would never have this clout. Which leaves Britain much weakened: more able and willing, in her economically straightened condition, to supplant Ireland as a ‘tax refuge’ (in effect); and much more likely to accept a TTIP-type treaty on her own. Certainly our present leaders don’t appear ideologically averse to this – they’ve supported TTIP far more enthusiastically than most governments, and are presently expressing their dissent from the Apple ruling; and they might be forced into it, if only to save Britain’s bacon if the European single market spurns her. And then will follow all the other natural concomitants of free marketist fundamentalism: the rich getting richer (in finance), the poor growing poorer (in what is left of industry), controls on the exploitation of labour lifted, more privatizations… and all the rest.

If only we were back in the EU… On the other hand, if we were, the EU might not have been able to be so radical, held back as it might be by our free market zeal. Has Brexit liberated it, at the same time as subjecting us to the behemoth?

Has Ed Balls ever specified what it is about Jeremy Corbyn’s programme for government which makes it ‘a leftist utopian fantasy devoid of connection to the reality of people’s lives’? I’ve followed the debate pretty closely (even from Sweden) and not spotted anything in what he’s said that can’t be defended as reasonable and practical, and which indeed has been implemented successfully elsewhere in the world (some of it in Scandinavia), and once used to be mainstream Labour policy, before the irrational faith in ‘market’ solutions began to dominate the public discourse, and to infect Labour. Precisely which of Corbyn’s policies are utopian, fantastical, and irrelevant to ordinary people? I’d like to know.

But of course if you attack Corbyn you don’t have to be specific; merely to smear him with words which are thought to resonate negatively with people, and leave it at that. That’s the way political debate is carried on these days. There’s no longer any rational argument – from the anti-Corbyn side, at least. It’s assumed that people can’t cope with evidence, or with joined-up thinking any more. I imagine that the rise of advertising, and of the techniques of propaganda and ‘public relations’, reacting on short-term attention spans, has a lot to do with that. People are won over by ‘impressions’, which can be manipulated by headlines and even pictures. Not everyone is fooled; but enough are for the approach to work.

Corbyn isn’t an ideal leader of the Labour Party. I’ve given it as my opinion before (https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2016/07/06/2710/) that I’d like him replaced eventually, but only after his new policies and approach to politics – fair, polite, rational – have permeated the party deeply enough for people to appreciate their superiority over the old PR ways. Ideally I would have liked Labour MPs to stick with him until that task was complete. Those who have rebelled against him have done the party an immense disservice. After his ideas had bedded down, they could have replaced him – with a more convincing leader, I hope, than his present rival. Maybe a better quality of Labour MP would have emerged by then. But I imagine that’s unlikely now. Perhaps that’s what Balls means by ‘utopian’.

In the meantime I’ve cast my vote for Jeremy; not only because I agree with almost all he says and how he says it, and because of his courage and strength in soldiering on in the face of his appalling traducers; but also because he represents a style of political discourse and debate – calm, reasonable, joined-up, rejecting ad hominem (or feminem) point-scoring – which any scholar and academic, which I’m afraid I am, should support. I’m told he never went to university. But his way of presenting and discussing issues accords far more closely with what we university teachers try to instill in our students, than the Machiavelli-like ways that some of his Oxford-educated opponents appear to have picked up at their university. Corbyn ought to be the academic’s natural choice.

While in Sweden my website let me down. It wouldn’t let me post or edit. But my son-in-law Richard has fixed it – it involved switching from Safari to a thing called Google Chrome – and so, if this post works, I shall be able to resume my activity soon. Once I’ve shaken the democratic dust of Sweden from my shoes.

There was a huge crowd to hear Jeremy Corbyn in Queen’s Gardens yesterday; the biggest gathering any of us had ever seen in Hull. All sorts of people: young, old, men, women, ‘workers’, professionals, white, black, a few Trotskyites (of course), but mainly people like you and me. A fine speech by Corbyn, after an entertaining supporting programme: a Billy Bragg-like singer, and contributions (one a real rabble-rouser!) by some locals. It was on regional TV news briefly last night, and got a mention in today’s Observer; but in a report concentrating on a (false) charge that Corbyn was refusing to debate directly with his challenger (Owen something?), and nowhere mentioning the sheer size and enthusiasm of the meeting. Otherwise it was the usual curled-lip press sniping. You’ll know whom I’m going to vote for in the Labour leadership election.

When I was eight years old I was sent – alone – to a residential school for children with serious chest complaints, mainly TB and asthma, in Ventnor, Isle of Wight. It was the most miserable three months of my young life. It was run by Anglican nuns, all dressed in black, looking I thought like ravens, and strict to the point of cruelty. Brought up a Methodist, I had never seen nuns before. Parents weren’t supposed to visit. We could write home to them weekly, but only letters copied from the blackboard, telling them how happy we were. We knew these were vetted before posting. I devised a cunning code to counter this, which eventually worked; after those three months my father came to rescue me.

I had blotted this whole experience from my mind, until very recently, when I discovered some of my letters home in my late mother’s effects, and looked up the place – ‘St Catherine’s Open-Air School’ – via Google, where I found a number of reminiscences that sadly mirrored my own. One told of an ‘escape’ attempt by a group of older boys; ‘two of us reached the mainland’. Echoes of Colditz! So it wasn’t ‘just me’.

I’ve never wanted to revisit the Isle of Wight since, or even allowed myself to think of it: a psychological safety-mechanism, no doubt. Last week, however, Kajsa and I went there, as part of our South Coast tour, and looked up St Catherine’s. A kind school secretary showed us around. It has obviously changed enormously since the late ’40s. It now caters for children with other kinds of disabilities, and seems bright and friendly. And we didn’t spot a single nun there. I’m glad I went. It exorcised a ghost.

The episode did nothing at the time for my chronic asthma, which I continued to be afflicted with for years afterwards. I suppose I should be grateful – after all that has been revealed recently – that I wasn’t sexually abused there; unless the nuns’ ‘slippering’ of us on our bare bottoms gave them some erotic satisfaction. If so they were welcome to it. It must be awful being a nun.

And I really don’t think the experience had any lasting psychological effect on me. Unless it was to feed into two of my later prejudices: firstly against Public boarding schools; and secondly against the Catholic and ‘High’ Anglican churches. Those nuns! I still shiver when I see a nun in the street. Or a Muslim woman in full burkah, which reminds me of them. Which is not to say that either prejudice is unreasonable in itself. Just that in my case, they’re personal, too.

MI5 has a record of targeting left-wing MPs and parties in Britain, sometimes via retired agents and third parties. The best known examples are the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ affair of 1924, and the ‘Wilson plot’ (that is, the anti-Wilson plot) of 1974-6. (See my Plots and Paranoia, 1989.) So I wouldn’t reject Len McCluskey’s suspicions out of hand.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/22/intelligence-services-using-dark-practices-against-jeremy-corbyn.

What usually happens in these cases is that the charges are dismissed by the authorities at the time as the crazed ravings of ‘conspiracy theorists’. No-one wants to be labelled a conspiracy theorist – and there are, in truth, some real nutters among them, especially on the web – so respectable people are reluctant to countenance such claims. Then, thirty years later, when the archives are opened, the suspicions are shown to have been pretty well justified; by which time, of course, it’s too late.

Just saying.

I doubt if I’ll be blogging much over the next month – everything is too depressing politically, especially vis-à-vis the Labour Party here and the Republicans over the pond, and I can think of no new historical parallels to draw. (I see that as the main purpose of this blog.) The obvious one – the 1930s – has already been flogged to death. Likewise jihadism and terrorism in the past; though it’s worth mentioning the atmospheric new BBC serialisation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which brings many of the historical resonances out. (I’ve written about the real anarchist plot it was based on: see my Origins of the Vigilant State.)

It’s difficult to think of a precedent for Boris Johnson, in British history at any rate. I’ve seen Caligula’s horse suggested, but I have to admit that Bojo seemed quite sensible, even diplomatic, in his contributions to his joint press conference as our new Foreign Minister with Secretary of State John Kerry this afternoon. That was even when journalists brought up his past insults to Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton, which he met with his by now trademark flaffing about. He was obviously pleased with himself for getting through it without any obvious pratfalls. You could see him grinning inanely as Kerry spoke. Someone should tell him to stop that. It brings memories of the old clown back.

We’re off to seek refuge from all this, in a better past – the Bloomsbury Group’s house in Sussex; and a saner place – the Stockholm Archipelago. Any new posts over the next four weeks will be few and far between, and probably about Sweden. I can’t wait to get there. My application for citizenship has been acknowledged, so I may have to be careful in what I write. (If Migrationsverket is reading this, I promise I’ll be really, really loyal.)

Getting away from the dreadful events in France and Turkey, and from the clown at the FO, this is a reminder of how things used to be. It’s a version of a review article I wrote for the LRB, but which I don’t think they’re going to publish now. It’s based on two recent books: Francis Beckett and Tony Russell, 1956. The Year That Changed Britain; and Simon Hall, 1956. The World in Revolt. Happy days?

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‘There’s a dreadfully misplaced nostalgia for the ’50s,’ write Beckett and Russell at the start of their book,

mostly to be found among expensively educated children of Thatcherism. They see the ’50s as a glorious Indian summer, before free love and protest and egalitarianism, and 1956 and then 1968, came along to ruin it. Sometimes Thatcher’s children sound as though they want to take us back to it – but they have never been there. If they had, they’d know better.

Well, I was there, and I have to say that I found the 1950s rather exciting. Reading this book, with its accounts of the horrors of the age – snobbery, smog, bigotry, National Service, beatings in schools, awful food, gloomy Sundays, stifling sexual attitudes: all quite true – I started to wonder why. Of course I’m only one person, and a pretty lucky one at that. I’m not a woman, for a start. People of my generation were also unaware then of the joys to come – Chinese takeaways, reality TV, seven-day shopping, the LRB – which make the 1950s seem duller in retrospect. But this isn’t the only reason. That is hinted at in these books, both of them centred on the events of 1956, or thereabouts. (Beckett and Russell cover just Britain, Hall ranges more widely.) There’s a good case to be made that it was then – far more than in 1968, for example – that many things began to change quite fundamentally. And the start of a period of change is always more exhilarating than its – usually disappointing – end.

On the international front 1956 really was momentous. In Britain it is mainly remembered for the Suez Crisis, often taken as the defining moment in the fall of her empire; but overall the most significant event was probably Khrushchev’s supposedly ‘secret’ speech to the 20^th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow in the early hours of 25 February, criticising in retrospect the ‘cult of personality’ that had grown up in the party recently, and in particular the personality of the late Josef Stalin. That, when it got out, released an ‘orgy of public criticism’ of the Soviet Union in her oppressed eastern European satellites, beginning in Poland, and of genuine hope that things might change for them: not, it should be noted, away from communism, but towards a more liberal and – the optimists claimed – ‘genuine’ kind. There were huge demonstrations in Poland and Hungary, prompting Tony Benn to write in his Diary: ‘Everyone in the world is breathless with hope that this may lead to a rebirth of freedom throughout the whole of Eastern Europe.’ But not their Soviet masters, who regarded them as having got out of hand: ‘it begins with a demand for freedom of the press’, claimed the Czech deputy premier, ‘and ends with freedom for capitalism’. This turned out to be prescient, of course, to the regret, no doubt, of those of the original brave dissidents who survived until 1989. The Soviets were also nervous of their satellites’ leaving the Warsaw pact; and suspicious of ‘foreign imperialist agents’ and indigenous Fascists: neither of which fear was entirely paranoid, Hall maintains, in the light of ‘Radio Free Europe’, and the strong showing of Hungary’s explicitly fascist Arrow Cross Party in the 1940s. Anyway, the Soviets weren’t having any of it, and brutally crushed both uprisings in the course of the year. ‘All youth is rising and being mowed down’, wrote Violet Bonham Cater. She blamed Eden’s ‘folly’ – the Suez aggression – for having ‘distracted the attention of the world from this tragedy. I cannot forgive it.’ One happy result, for Britain, was the asylum she gave to 21,000 Hungarian refugees in the aftermath, greeted with enormous goodwill by their hosts, and repaying the country handsomely. Apparently it wasn’t quite so happy for the refugees, who were ‘dreadfully disappointed to find a poorer and dingier nation than the one they had left.’ And that, write Beckett & Russell, ‘was before they had tasted the food.’

One way or another these events affected all the other ‘big’ happenings of that year. The Soviet Union, and by association communism itself, of whatever type, were largely discredited almost everywhere as automatic foci for left-wingers, leaving young British idealists, Beckett and Russell suggest, without a natural ‘home’ ever after: only a sterile choice between the squabbling splinters that remained, of which the CPGB was now only one. ‘The Hungarians,’ proclaimed the New York Times in November, ‘have put a brand upon communism as a philosophy of life and government from which it can never recover.’ From now on the main vigour of dissident youth was channelled instead into single-issue politics, like CND (founded the following year) and later the Vietnam movement, with the less vigorous opting for John Osborne-like cynicism – ‘there are no good causes left to die for’ – or for the new musical culture – ‘rock’n’roll’ – as a diversion. In America it obviously stiffened the resolve of Red-baiters – Senator McCarthy had only very recently been dethroned – some of whom saw a communist conspiracy lurking behind the Civil Rights movement of the period, which was peaking just then with the Montgomery bus boycott; but also of liberals aware that racial segregation in the South was making it difficult for the USA to occupy the moral high ground in response to events in eastern Europe. Martin Luther King was canny here, with impeccable anti-Communist credentials and his insistence that desegregation was the patriotic American thing to do. The Cold War and this recent alarming ratcheting up of it hung over almost everything.

To a great extent the crisis was inter-generational. Both these books emphasize this. It was the young (preponderantly) reacting against the conventions of the past: bureaucratic communist in the east, capitalist and racist in America, aristocratic in Britain, imperialist in northern Africa, killjoy everywhere; all of which were supposed by the mid-fifties to have outlived their relevance, especially so long after the end of the war which had seemed to – as is the usual pattern with great wars in history – shake things up. In Eastern Europe the specific targets were shortages and Russian tyranny; in the USA Jim Crow; in Britain the hold that the Old Etonians still exerted over their supposedly democratic country; and in Egypt and other colonies or partial colonies a system of rule – formal imperialism – which most enlightened people could plainly see was already on its last legs. Beckett and Russell have coined a choice expression for those who could not read the signs: ‘the harrumph tendency’, they call them; which, ridiculous as these people seem in retrospect – and were made to appear even at the time, for example in the character of ‘Major Bloodnok’ on The Goon Show – could be frustratingly effective in blocking, even if it was only for a while, the abolition of hanging and homosexual law reform. Both of these reforms were seriously mooted in Britain in 1956, with abolition of the death penalty passed in the House of Commons but then rejected in the Lords, at that time ‘composed of hitherto unknown rustics, who thought, perhaps, that abolition was in some way a threat to blood sports.’ (This is one of Beckett & Russell’s best jokes.) Eden’s quite mad Suez adventure was also kept going by these men and women. Without them, and their fellow old reactionaries and procrastinators in Washington and Moscow, the modern age might have come sooner than it did.

On the other hand that still left – pace Osborne – plenty of ‘good causes’ to fight for, or at the very least bad causes to fight against, which is what made it such a stimulating time for many young men (or, in my case, boys) of that generation. Less so, I have to admit, for young women, who scarcely feature in these books, apart from Hall’s short chapter on the women’s march on Pretoria in August 1956 to protest against the extension to them of the hated pass laws. Feminism seems to have been slumbering then, though I may be wrong. For us young and progressive males, however, the Day appeared to have arrived. (Actually I wasn’t at all progressive at that time, supporting Eden over Suez, I remember; but I was only 15. And we had just switched from the good old News Chronicle to the Daily Telegraph at home.) We had our welfare state well set up; the new National Health Service was ‘in its best shape in its history’, according to Beckett and Russell; there was full employment (an astonishing 98.8% in 1955, though one imagines the relative lack of women in the labour market partly accounted for that); decolonization nicely on track, with two more colonies (Sudan and Ghana) liberated that year, though there was still much to be done on that front (Cyprus, for a start); and a pretty healthy Labour party, with some heroic recent achievements behind it, for non-doctrinal socialists to become enthusiastic about and active in. The abolition of the death penalty, easier divorce and the legalization of homosexuality were there for the grabbing.

Resistance to ‘progress’ was crumbling, but still vociferous enough to be worth taking on. Simon Hall makes much of the savage backlash against school integration in the American South, by whites worried that ‘the social fabric of our community’ was about to ‘be destroyed by a group of Negro radicals who have split asunder the fine relationships which have existed between the Negro and white people for generations’ (sic). Even President Eisenhower could understand white parents’ concern ‘to see that their sweet little white girls are not required to sit… alongside some big overgrown Negroes’. In Britain there was the noisy but ridiculous League of Empire Loyalists, who enjoyed a brief notoriety at this time. There was resistance too in North Africa (the violently intransigent pieds noirs), Cyprus (EOKA), South Africa, and of course by the Soviet puppet rulers and their secret police forces in eastern Europe. But all these causes seemed to be good and winnable, which made the struggle worthwhile; while simultaneously providing the protesters with a rich seam of satirical comedy (like Major Bloodnock, and five years later Private Eye) to cheer them on. The marching and demonstrating were fun as well: out of doors, social, serious. (I got into that a couple of years later, with CND.) ‘Progress’ seemed to be the dominant and irreversible trend of the time. Martin Luther King spoke encouragingly of ‘the rushing waters of historical necessity’. Hence all the harrumphing; a desperate, defensive cry if ever there was one, like a dying elephant.

The music was fun too. 1956 was the year when Bill Haley and His Comets and Elvis Presley first made it into the British charts with Rock around the Clock and Hound Dog respectively, competing rather powerfully with How Much is that Doggie in the Window, sung by Patti Page; and Liberace, or ‘the biggest sentimental vomit of all time’, as ‘Cassandra’ of the Daily Mirror described him, for which Liberace sued the Mirror – and won. It’s a sign of the times – the present time, that is, rather than the 1950s – that so much is made of this in these books, especially Beckett’s and Russell’s. By contrast, there’s not a word in either of them about the ‘classical’ music being composed then – Britten, Shostakovich, Martinu, Messiaen, Vaughan Williams, Bernstein, Poulenc, Kabalevsky’s Song of the Party Membership Card…. – which surely merits a footnote at least.

What popular culture’s relationship to the other developments taking place in 1956 was, however, is not explored here, apart from the obvious: that it expressed a vague spirit of revolt. The Montgomery bus boycott that started in December 1955 and the Budapest Rising of October 1956 were also expressions of revolt, but the connections between the music and the political activism here are not clear. These were very rarely ‘protest songs’. Likewise there were few if any explicitly ‘political’ novels or plays in 1956, at any rate in Britain; the critic DJ Taylor surmised that this was because ‘young writers seemed too committed to a sceptical and empirical attitude to be roused by political causes.’ (Again, I stand to be corrected on this.) But of course politics doesn’t need to be explicit. Just as contemporary American rednecks liked to claim that rock’n’roll was a cunning communist plot to demoralize American youth, ready for the Soviet tanks to move in, so Peter Fleming, elder brother of Ian, and a terrific harrumpher, thought he espied a Soviet ‘sixth column’ behind the trivialization of popular culture generally in his day. (This was in a novel published in 1952. The plot’s main agent was a figure spookily reminiscent of the late Terry Wogan, although the latter wasn’t to come on to our TV screens until the 1970s.) The Soviet gerontocracy harboured similar suspicions – this time with the capitalists as the plotters – about jazz and rock’n’roll. Fears like this may have lain behind the more strictly musical criticisms of this genre that were voiced in the 1950s: Frank Sinatra’s characterization of it, for example, as ‘phony’ music, ‘sung, played and written for the most part by cretins (There was a lot of this.) But it required a very conspiratorial frame of mind to believe that subverting the moral fabric of the nation was the deliberate motive behind rock’n’roll. Still, that could have been a side effect. More likely, however, is that it was a means of escape for the young from the world the oldies had imposed on them. There’s probably little more serious to say about it than that. (PS. I’ve nothing against it. I was hooked on it too.)

Beckett and Russell, in a nice conceit, begin their book by imagining ‘a tourist from the twenty-first century’ visiting 1950s Britain, and the shocks that he or she would encounter there. I guess that the greatest shocks would be for the women: essentially unliberated in 1956, second-class citizens, objectified, bound to the home, the only carers of small children, excluded from most responsible public jobs, demeaned in so many ways (if not idealized soppily), liable to be beaten and raped within marriage with little recourse except to hit back, as Ruth Ellis did – and she had just (in July 1955) been hanged for it: all in all not something I imagine most modern women would want to go back to. On the other hand, for Beryl Hinde of Enfield – born in 1933, so hardly one of ‘Thatcher’s children’ – ‘the ’50s were wonderful years. There was plenty of work and plenty of employment. People were happy.’ I couldn’t imagine being unemployed after school, either. And there were other compensations. One that Beckett and Russell lay great emphasis on is ‘the erosion of automatic respect for politicians, for ministers of religion or teachers, [and] for those who are richer or older than we are’ that was a feature of the mid-fifties. Yes, that was probably an important legacy, certainly in the field of popular culture, although it is worth mentioning that this was a charge that had been leveled against ‘the young’ periodically for centuries past. Another legacy, of Suez in particular, was the confirmation that Britain’s imperial time was up, though few of us outside the League of Empire Loyalists and the Daily Mail (just as choleric then as it is today: our twenty-first century tourist would not notice much difference there) bothered much about that; and the realization that we could no longer do anything as a nation if America didn’t want us to, which of course was the reason Eden had to pull out of Suez. That has bugged us ever since.

For me, however, the big thing about 1956 is the survival – from wartime – of a sense of hope, at least for men; of the idea that things could and probably would get better, for us individually, as a society, and as a world, if we went on as we were doing then: knitting the country together, becoming more social-liberal, and conceding to our colonies the freedoms we claimed for ourselves. Harold Macmillan, who succeeded Eden after the latter’s well-deserved fall after Suez (despite his own pro-Suez stance), proved expert in directing this, managing, as Beckett and Russell put it, ‘to make great change at headlong pace feel like a gentle amble over a grouse moor.’ That was the main thing distinguishing their world from ours, and feeding my emphatically non-Thatcherite nostalgia. There hasn’t been much hope around since her.